20140718.0730

I wrote yesterday of working to catch up on my journal reading (among other things). I continued to work at it after making the blog post (in and among writing pieces for online distribution, of which one is here; yes, I engage in shameless pluggery). As I did so, I read Chris M. Anson's 2013 CCCC Chair's Address, "Climate Change," in CCC 65.2 (December 2013): 324-44. (How much catching up I have yet to do should be obvious.) Despite what the title connotes, the piece is not about meteorological concerns; instead, it treats the climate of higher education. While it does invoke the doomsday metaphors associated with the emergence and explosion of online learning (such as are invoked here), it does not stop at them as so many other pieces do. Rather, it offers through a pleasant, quiet narrative a palliative for them; Anson calls upon the reader (and the earlier listener, since the piece as printed is taken from a convention address) to emphasize in the classroom what cannot be gotten anywhere except the classroom. The raw information many introductory classes provide is available elsewhere. Conversations, deep and engaging multi-party conversations, can be had online. But what cannot be had outside the classroom are the hands-on things required of work in many of the sciences or of the arts; what cannot be had outside the classroom are the immersion in the learning environment, the consideration of learning as learning, the immediacy of feedback verbal and otherwise. In reminding the reader of such things and suggesting that they can be emphasized, Anson offers hope, and that is of remarkable value when job sites speak of the doom of schools and senators call the humanities wasteful.

There is the problem, though, that it is not only the teacher who is responsible for making the classroom a place where such things can happen. Yes, the teacher does have to provide a space in which inquiry can happen, a time in which students can work through things in their heads and in collaboration. But the students have to be willing to make the engagement. They have to be willing to ask questions and to voice ideas that may end up not working well. And they are sometimes not. I have had classes in which students sat and stared blankly at me when I asked them for comment; on occasion, one or two would tell me that they wanted me to lecture at them. (I have worked to forestall the desire by labeling the practice an "infodump," as if what I offer them is the digested remains of what I have learned, squeezed out into an insufficiently critical receptacle and flushed away at the earliest opportunity. Metaphors matter.) When I have refused to "give the answers," students have complained, and I have found myself chastised by my institutional hierarchs for the complaint. When I have given them what they "want," they have not really learned, and I have reinforced the very problems that typify my working conditions. Such students view my class as a hurdle, concordant with Anson's assertion, and in the fifteen weeks I see them, the forty-five hours their faces and mine point at one another, there is not much I can do to correct more than a decade of carefully inculcated instrumentalist views. I continue to work at it, certainly, because there are always students who are willing to engage, but I only have so much of myself to give in the classroom; there are other claims upon me that supersede those my students make.

I do what I can. I can only hope it will be enough.