Keeping the Band Together

In Thursday's class, we discussed social-epistemic rhetoric inside the classroom, as well as inside the academic institution. It all comes down to communication and respect, I suppose. Students need to respect students and teachers, teachers need to respect students and fellow teachers, the administration needs to respect students and teachers, and students and teachers need to respect the administration. Unfortunately, we also need to stay on the defensive--after all, teachers give out the grades, students dish out the teacher evaluations, and the all-mighty administration makes the rules of everything from class size to tenure. We want to be civil, and we want to be kind, but we also want to watch our own backs.

Students hate group work when they are the ones doing all the work (or of there is that one student that seems to hold them back). Teachers get frustrated when students don't have enough respect to pay attention to instructions. I'm not sure about the administration, because I've never been an administrator, and, as far as I'm concerned, they are the Man. And nobody loves the Man.

The last English department I taught in, we used to say that the campus was like Narnia in the wintertime, and even the trees had eyes and ears. Teachers weren't safe to voice their opinions, and one bad student review could result in major consequences for even the most weathered professor. Teachers turned against other teachers, and divisions between departments made faculty meetings full of scowls and tightly folded arms. The crazy thing about it all was that these people were some of the finest people I had known as an undergraduate. It was astounding to see how quickly a tight-knit department could become prickly and offended as soon as the administration started suggesting that they knew more about how their classroom should look than the teachers themselves.

I've started to see how this can happen in our classes, too. As we've talk about ideologies in the classroom, I've started to realize how I have a tendency of not only pushing my own ideologies on my students, but I question their current ideology and suggest that I know more about how they should run their lives than they do.

For example, I think students should read. I think they are cheating themselves if they don't. I think students should know current events. I think students should take their homework seriously.

But there are different ways of expressing these ideas without making my students scowl and tightly fold their arms. I think social-epistemic rhetoric helps keep the band together, because it isn't silencing anyone's current worldviews or value hierarchies. Instead, it invites everyone to bring ideas to the table in a safe environment where everyone, including the teacher or the administration, agrees to think dialectically. Maybe it's okay if not everyone stays absolutely current on the daily news. In fact, David Quammen wrote an essay on Darwin and earthworms that suggests that it can be dangerous for everyone to be tuned in to the same news anchors, and that, perhaps, studying something seemingly unimportant could be just as ethical and rewarding.

I'm not sure how this all works, or how I'll implement it in this next Monday's class, but I do know that John needed to be nicer to Paul, Paul needed to be nicer to John, George needed to speak up a little more, and everyone could have listened to Ringo better. Nevertheless, the White Album still kicked ass.