Back then, I believe, I was heading toward a classroom pedagogy that treated teaching as a practice of freedom. In Teaching to transgress, bell hooks writes:

Education as the practice of freedom is not just about liberatory knowledge, it’s about a liberatory practice in the classroom. So may of us have critiqued the individual white male scholars who push critical pedagogy yet who do not alter their classroom practices, who assert race, class, and gender privilege without interrogating their conduct.

I don’t know if it’s possible to become a liberatory teacher without sustained research and interrogation of dominant pedagogical practices; that is to say that I don’t know if an adjunct instructor, working effectively in isolation from her teaching community, can engage in a sustained critique and reframing of what it means to learn and teach toward freedom instead of toward submission and repression.

Now I’m teaching again, this time at a Research I institution, in a department that wants its academics to value research over teaching. (While Colorado State University is also a Research I institution, I was not there to get a Research I education; I was learning how to write poetry in an MFA program.) This time around, I have career goals and a plan for myself; my plan includes sustaining enough Awesomeness to snag a job at a Research I institution once I finish up at Indiana University.

This institution does not emphasize teaching as the practice of freedom; in fact, it doesn’t particularly emphasize teaching as something that requires a whole lot of sustained interrogation or time or energy. Which is not to say that individual faculty members at my institution do not value teaching, do not strive to be excellent teachers; only to say that their efforts are the result of a personal desire to teach well, and are not supported by the institution.

You get tenure at a Research I institution by doing good research, not by doing good teaching.

So I’ve taken several steps backward in the movement toward teaching as the practice of freedom. I rely an awful lot on Powerpoint and the lecture; I ask students to rearrange the desks into a discussion circle sometimes, but I don’t insist that we use this structure for a whole lot of discussion. More than once this semester, I’ve asked my students why they do what I say: “Why do you agree to work in small groups when I tell you to?” and “What do you think would happen if you just refused to listen to my lecture today?” But I haven’t required them to speculate with me.

And to tell the truth, I haven’t really wanted my students to speculate with me on these things. I’ve wanted these challenges to be seen as thought experiments, not as real challenges to rethink how they approach learning.

My students are, for the most part, studying to be teachers. Some day, assuming we continue to value teaching and assuming the economy continues its turnaround, my students will be teachers themselves. If I believe in the importance of liberatory pedagogy, if I believe that teachers can and should do better, can and should foment revolution, then the only ethical way to proceed is to attempt to practice this pedagogy in my own classrooms.

Now begins the experiment. I’ll keep you posted.

Rose, M. (2004). The Mind at Work: Valuing the intelligence of the American worker. New York: Penguin.

Rose, M. (2012). Rethinking Remedial Education and the Academic-Vocational Divide. Mind, Culture, and Activity 19(1): 1-16.

I’ve been using The Mind at Work as an anchor text for an undergraduate educational psychology course, and I was just prepping to discuss chapter 4, “the vocabulary of carpentry” as I got distracted scrolling through the xmca listserv in which several members of the listserv were discussing Mike Rose’s article “Rethinking remedial education.

The article starts out with a bang:

What you see depends on where you sit, and for how long. You enter the classroom from the rear, wanting to be discrete on your first visit, and slip into the desk closest to the door. A few students 20 notice you, but most are walking around or leaning over to the person next to them talking. Except for one woman, the class is all men, 20s and 30s, a few White guys, the rest Black and Latino. Hoodies, baggy pants, loud profanity. The teacher is in front at a cloudy overhead projector. Three men are around him—each seems bigger than the next—and they are arguing.

The room is old and dingy, no windows, bare except for the irregular rows of desks, the table 25 with the projector, a cart holding pipes and metal bars, and in the corner a worn flag from the American Welding Society. You’re trying to take it all in when a sullen guy in an oversized T-shirt, a bandanna around his head, walks over to you and asks, “What are you doin’ here?”

Rose explains that “[t]his is an article about perception and ability, about the way beliefs about cognition blend with social characteristics—class, race, gender—to create both instructional responses and institutional structures that limit human development for people already behind the economic eight ball.” We read his opening paragraphs, we get a sense of what this classroom is like, what its students are all about. But, Rose explains, our first impressions are wrong: The surroundings, the foul language, the clothing choices–they belie an effort to develop serious vocational skills. They belie these students’ focus, sense of purpose, and intelligence.

And that guy who wanted to know what you’re doing here? Well, it’s a legitimate question, isn’t it? And everything depends on how you answer it. When it was posed to me, I said I was here to study programs like this one because we need to know more about them to convince our politicians that we need more of them. The man’s features softened, and we moved out into the hallway. “We need programs like this,” he said. “People like us.” “It’s the teacher that really makes a difference,” he continued. “He treats us like we’re people.”

In the chapter from The mind at work that I’m prepping for today’s class, Rose writes: “What testing vocabulary do we have, for example, to discern the making of judgments from the feel of things, or the strategic use of tool and body, or the rhythmic spacing of tasks, or the coordination of effort and material toward the construction of a complex object?”

Certainly the purpose of this book, and of a lot of Mike Rose’s work, is not to show how skills developed through welding, for example, or waitressing or carpentry or what-have-you can help you advance beyond a given vocation. In fact, in the introduction to his excellent book, he gently criticizes a discourse that treats working-class activity as romantic because of its physicality. He writes:

How interesting it is…that our testaments to physical work are so often focused on the values such work exhibits rather than on the thought it requires. It is a subtle but pervasive omission. Yet there is a mind at work in dignity, and values are intimately related to thought and action.

I’ve also been interested to watch how Mike Rose and other scholars focusing on blue-collar work establish their orientation toward blue-collarness–primarily by establishing credibility by pointing to personal experience with blue-collar work. I do this all the time: I say that I grew up in a working-class household. I say that I am public school-educated all the way from kindergarten to graduate degree(s). I say that before I came to academia I was a groundskeeper, a cashier, a phone operator, blah blah blah. This is designed to, perhaps, “prove” I have access to the exotic world of the blue-collar worker, to “prove” I have cachet.

Yet if I were to tell Ray, the pseudonym for the aspiring welder in Mike Rose’s “rethinking remedial education” who asks Rose why he’s in the classroom, about my “working-class credibility,” what do you think he would do? Me, standing there, a white, well educated academic who can choose when to enter his classroom and when to leave, whose livelihood both does not depend on whether I can learn today’s math lesson and rests on the backs of those learners who are trying to do precisely that?

I think it’s far less common for researchers to use their personal backgrounds to “prove” they “understand” research participants who come from more privileged backgrounds–say, students in a gifted and talented program or students completing advanced graduate work. Perhaps researcher credibility does not need to be established in these cases; perhaps its existence is simply understood.

“I used to ______, but now I _________.” When we demonstrate our class-ness, when we offer our personal histories, we assume we’re confessing our relationship to the phenomena of interest. And certainly that’s part of it.

But when we say “I used to _______” or “before I came to academia I _______” are we attempting the opposite of “going native”? Are we actually simultaneously feigning distancing ourselves from academia while in fact embracing it fully? We have the best of intentions, but to what extent do our best intentions serve only to further stigmatize and Other our research participants without actually leaving us with any taint of Other?

In fact, the assumptions held by the instructor and students, nearly all of whom have some background in gender studies and/or queer theory, have enabled me to let my hackles settle down a little. A guy gets tired after a while of explaining once again that language both contains and reproduces gender- and sexuality-normative attitudes. A guy gets tired after a while of ignoring the eye rolling and the scoffing–more from the ladies in the room, would you believe it?! than from the gentledudes.

Now I’m reading various opinions about the body of the female academic in the university classroom. It is okay, Joanna Frueh assures me, to inhabit an erotic body. It is okay to wear perfume, fuchsia lipstick, to acknowledge attraction to students. It is even sometimes okay, she assures me, to act on that attraction.

Martin Jay agrees with Frueh that the female academic body is a performance site. Jay tells us that the female academic as performance artist exists in direct opposition to the philosophy that in scholarship, “perfect neutrality” must exist so that objectively “better” ideas can prevail:

The women academic performance artists have contributed to the subversion of this model in several different ways. At times, they have adopted a confessional mode, which seems to say let’s cut through all the crap and speak sincerely from the heart. No more closets, no more subterfuges, they defiantly assert; we’re big girls now with tenure, and we won’t knuckle under to your outmoded rules of civility. Even when you enter the public realm, they remind their audience, you don’t lose your gendered, desiring, ethnically marked bodies and become a disinterested mind.

Of course, this subversion is okay by Martin Jay only insofar as the academic in question is not Camille Paglia, who apparently represents all that is reprehensible in the female academic, since

she betrays an almost clinical need for exhibitionism, which drives her to extremes of freakishness that seem too bad to be true. Combined with a take-no-prisoners willingness to belittle anyone or anything that stands in her way, her tawdry self-exposure has garnered her lots of easy publicity, but virtually no respect. Her pronouncements on such issues as feminism, French theory, or political correctness, for all their glittering packaging, often prove to be about as original and scintillating as those of Phyllis Schlafly. At least Madonna, who is Paglia’s explicit role model, knows how to sing and dance. Hurricane Camille, as she likes to call herself, turns out to be like the many destructive tropical storms: lots of sound and fury surrounding an empty center.

For Jay, then, the female-academic performance must be paired with a mind that is pretty close to the neutral/objective (masculine) ideal. And the mind, housed as it is inside of a female body, is still open for judgments and grand proclamations by men of its “quality” and “substance.” And for Frueh, performance is erotics, and erotics is defined by embrace of gender norms: The female professor has nipples, has breasts, wears perfume. The female professor who lifts weights may, in her embrace of certain traditionally masculine traits, threaten the self-satisfied place that male academics occupy–but only by claiming a female identity (she is sexy! and beautiful if you can learn to re-see!) with a masculine garnish.

What’s a genderqueer biologically female academic to do?

I sit here crocheting. I’m using up my leftover yarn balls to make a pile of winter hats for my friends. My friends are mostly queer. Some are genderqueer. Some are transgendered. Some are gender normative. All get cold in the winter. (This is one of many traits that all bodies share.)

I don’t want my students to stare at my breasts. That turns me into an object for their perusal and besides, I prefer my torso to occupy a genderqueer domain–not quite bound, certainly not shoved up and out in offering to others. “Genderqueer” means you need to rethink what you “know” about gender, about sexuality, about attraction. At the beginning of this academic year, I announced that I was thinking about asking people to start referring to me as “Jake” instead of “Jenna”–but I was utterly unprepared for the smirk around the eyes of some of my classmates. I was utterly unprepared for the way my chosen name sounded dropping off some of my classmates’ tongues. I quickly “changed my mind” and took up “Jenna” again.

Not in my class about pedagogy, gender, and sexuality, though: In that class only, I have asked to be referred to as “Jake.” The only smirk I hear in that class is the echo I bring with me from elsewhere. Yet I wonder how the discussion of the assigned reading “the female academic as performance artist” will go: Am I a “female academic” as defined by Martin Jay, by Joanna Frueh, by others? Do biology and hormone dictate where a person falls in this respect?

Some of my friends have enormous melons–not melons as in breasts but as in heads. I’m trying to make my hats in a range of sizes so everyone can have a hat that fits. Last week for class we read a horribly self-satisfied and embarrassing “ethnography” by Loic Wacquant called Body and Soul: Notebooks of an apprentice boxer. And we watched the boxing film Million Dollar Baby, in which Hillary Swank’s character is forbidden access to formal boxing instruction because she is a girl. Am I a girl? If I express physically my body–in the classroom, at a paper presentation, here on my blog–will I be judged as incomplete, as not enough of a “female”? If I express my body in a way that feels authentic to me (no perfume, no lipstick, no pushup bra–a tie! a collared shirt buttoned all the way up!), will I be judged by Frueh and others as one of “that kind” of female academic–the kind who’s oblivious and happy to de-gender herself in order to align with the masculine norms?

The female academic gets it from both sides–from other female academics and from male academics as well. The female-bodied genderqueer academic gets it…from four sides? Because suddenly not only is sexuality front and center, but so is gender itself–a category that so far in my readings feels taken for granted, overassumed and underexplored. When bell hooks writes about her cluelessness about what to do the first time her teacher’s body had to use the restroom during class, well…at least she knew which restroom she was supposed to use.

Crocheting is about using one’s hands, but typically the hands are used to craft something for the body to wear. I like making hats because they work up fast and take little concentration. And I want there to be some connection I can draw between my crocheting and my struggle to understand and articulate: One is largely intellectual, the other is largely craft. But nothing in my life seems to tie itself up neatly these days. The loose ends just hang there, waiting for someone to weave them in.

Also in 2006, I stood opposed to new technologies. I refused to get a cellphone. A friend gave me an iPod as a holiday gift and I worried about whether I would use it. In fact, I worried about whether even owning an iPod would degrade my life. Out of the mouths of babes, right?

That year, I required all of my students to read a NYTimes opinion piece bemoaning humanity’s move toward constant technological stimulation. The piece, called Feet and minds need a chance to wander, argues that creativity, powerful ideas, and genius of all sorts require silence, time for daydreaming, and an unplugged mind. The author, Clyde Haberman, offers the insights of several MacArthur Genius Fellowship winners:

If you ask MacArthur fellows about creativity, you find near-unanimity on the importance of staying unwired.

It is not always easy to do so, said Dorothy Q. Thomas, a human-rights consultant in New York and a 1998 winner. Work requires her to be on her cellphone ”even while walking, even while eating.” She accomplishes a great deal that way. But no doubt, Ms. Thomas said, it ”drains a lot away from reflection.”

Christopher Chyba, an astrophysicist and a 2001 fellow, recalled a light-bulb moment that came some years ago while he was taking a walk. The thought struck him that water from comets played a role in creating the earth’s oceans. ”It is probably true,” Mr. Chyba said, ”that if I had been listening to music or to Books on Tape, it wouldn’t have occurred to me.”

”The thing that is so precious, which becomes so hard to get, is uninterrupted time,” he said.

AND cellphones are, if nothing else, time thieves.

”Nonconnectivity becomes a commodity, something to cherish,” said Jonathan Lethem, a Brooklyn novelist and a new MacArthur fellow. ”You won’t hear different, particularly from novelists. You need so much ruminative time to build these elaborate alternate realities. Every novelist is running away from the telephone. Has been for 100 years.”

It troubles Majora Carter, another 2005 winner and founder of a group called Sustainable South Bronx, that many young people are wired all the time. ”They don’t have the ability anymore to create things in their own head, to create fantasies, to create dreams for themselves,” she said.

For that matter, young or old, people seem also to have lost the ability to whistle melodically. When was the last time that you heard someone whistling sweetly on the street?

In 2006, I agreed wholeheartedly with Haberman and his MacArthur Geniuses that feet and minds need a chance to wander.

By 2009, I had changed my tune.

I had acquired my first cellphone, then my second: a smartphone with unlimited data and messaging to best accommodate my mobile technology needs. I was on my third laptop, for which I purchased extra memory and two external hard drives–necessary for holding the videos, music, and creative work I was generating. I was on my second iPod, one with more memory (but that still was unable to hold all of the media content I wanted to carry with me). You get the idea, right?

Now it’s 2012. My awesome mom gave me a Kindle Fire for Christmas and I immediately purchased insurance for my Kindle because I carry all my technology with me all the time, and I’m so hard on my stuff that I bust basically all of it. I’m reorganizing my house this week, partially around my need for a charging station near my desk, partially around the chaotic nest of plugs and chargers and cords that stretch around every seat in my apartment.

And recently, I talked to my pal Nick, a doctoral candidate who’s serious about finishing up his dissertation right nao, about his productivity strategies. He purchased the software tool Freedom, which blocks your laptop’s connectivity for a time period that you set. The only way to disable Freedom once you turn it on, he said, is to restart your computer–”which is just humiliating.”

When Nick sits down to write, he turns on Freedom and puts his cellphone in a closet on the other side of his apartment. In 2006 I would have admired him for his self-discipline. In 2009 I would have scoffed at him for hiding from his technology. And now, in 2012, I admire him for his self-discipline.

Here’s a NYTimes article I ran into this morning: The joy of quiet. The author, Pico Iyer, explains that

[i]n barely one generation we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them — often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight.

It’s a new year, and I want nothing more this year than to rein myself in. I want to shed my distractions and up my productivity. I want to find ways to separate my professional and personal lives, intertwined primarily because of my constant connectivity.

And I’m considering buying Freedom, even though I could easily just turn off my internet connection. (Though if it was “easy,” wouldn’t I already have done it?) I’m considering leaving my technologies at home, docking my laptop to my desk. (Making it a desktop computer?) I often shut off my phone’s email app, and when I charge my phone at bedtime, I like to do it across the room from my bed to stop myself from checking it when I wake up during the night.

Nothing feels better than productivity. And there’s a lot that I’m willing to do to get the good feeling back.

Here’s how Thomas Sowell put it back in 2008:

To find anything comparable to crowds’ euphoric reactions to Obama, you would have to go back to old newsreels of German crowds in the 1930s, with their adulation of their fuehrer, Adolf Hitler. With hindsight, we can look back on those people with pity, knowing now how many of them would be led to their deaths by the man they idolized.

Now the Left is getting in on the act. This photo comes from the Facebook group 1 billion against indefinite detention without trial law:

Don’t mistake me for someone who favors this law, which would allow for indefinite detention of U.S. citizens and gives far too much power to our military at a time when our military has proven that it is not to be trusted. More than once.

But come on, dudes. The rhetoric of the Right is dangerous. It’s hate-mongering propaganda. And it’s a terribly unethical way to go about working for change. The Left is better than this. It must be better than this.

Relatedly, did you know that Obama is literally Hitler?

When I was 16, I got a job working as a bagger at my local Meijer store. I moved to cashiering at 18 and stuck with Meijer into my early twenties. A big piece of my current work ethic is a product of those Meijer years. Here’s what I learned:

1. Capitalism disproportionately hurts ethnic minorities. I worked at Meijer while I was in high school and college, never planning to stick around after that. Many of my coworkers had the same plan; and then there were the lifers: People who had worked at Meijer for years or decades and had no plans to leave. When I lived and studied in Grand Rapids, MI, most of the lifers were African-American or Latino. Meijer employees were also made up of a set of short-timers: Underskilled workers who would spend a few weeks or a few months working at Meijer before moving on to another short-term job. The short-timers were also largely African American or Latino. The employees who were killing time until they finished school: Almost exclusively white.

2. There’s always another way to say “no.” At least when I worked there, new Meijer employees went through a several-day training period. During mine, a low-level manager said something I haven’t forgotten: If the answer to a customer’s request is ‘no,’ find a way to answer that sounds more like “no, but….” The example she gave: “I can’t do that for you, but let me see if I can find someone who can.”

3. If someone asks “where do you keep the…” give them your best guess, then rush away in case you’re wrong. This way you’re at least sending them in the right general direction, and they’ll probably find an employee over there who knows more than you do. And if you’re totally wrong, at least you’re off the hook.

4. Showing up late gets you in trouble; conversely, no consequences means no reason to get there on time. At Meijer, employees who clocked in more than a few minutes late got “in trouble” for lateness–eventually, you would get “written up” and if you were late with a high enough frequency you might ultimately get fired. Boy, getting fired sure was the worst case scenario back then. So I learned that if there’s someone paying attention to the time clock, you need to get there on time; and if there’s nobody paying attention, there’s no reason for punctuality. I’m still trying to unlearn this lesson.

locations of Meijer, Inc., retail stores

5. Getting fired is the worst case scenario. Well, at least I thought it was back then. Really, the only true power an employer has over employees is to discontinue employment. If you need a job, or even if you don’t, most people will do whatever it takes to avoid getting fired. But then your employment is discontinued and all the power you believed your employer had over you…it disappears.

6. Unions are pretty good. Meijer employees are unionized, which really basically meant that I was making more money at my minimum-wage job than my friends were making at thei

rs. At the end of my time with Meijer in the late ’90s, I was earning around $7.85 an hour, which felt like a fortune at the time.

7. Huh. Meijer is anti-gay. Actually, I just learned this today, while looking for information on Meijer’s unionization. According to the Human Rights Campaign’s Buyer’s Guide for LGBTQ-friendly shopping, Meijer is a consistent offender for its refusal to offer benefits for partners of same-sex employees, for a complete lack of protections against harassment and discrimination of LGBTQ employees, and for a lack of diversity training to support LGBTQ employees. Meijer’s most recent rating of 20/100 is actually its best showing ever, since it started out with a rating of zero and hovered at around 8 for many years.

#RAWR