Sociology Lens

The two professors sat in front of me, making conversation before the talk. The speaker’s title slide already projected on the wall ahead: “What (if anything) are undergraduates learning during college?” The professors laughed at just how apt they thought the title was: “Isn’t that right?” “Yes, anything, please!” And then the more senior faculty member, a female, returned with a comment that made her junior colleague bristle: “Especially the boys. Some of those boys just try to get by with the minimum possible.” The junior colleague sat silent, and then spoke with sharpness spiking into the buoyant mood of moments before: “Well that was me in high school. But the thing is, I was just bored to tears.” His senior colleague stopped chuckling to nod, knowingly.

The slides belonged to Josipa Roksa, a co-author of the 2011 sociology/media sensation Academically Adrift (with Richard Arum) and of its 2012 follow-up report, “Documenting Uncertain Times: Post-graduate Transitions of the Academically Adrift Cohort.” The premise of the talk, as the premise of the book and the premise of its sequel, was that undergraduate students are not improving their critical thinking skills in college, that this claim is sustained by the failure of a putatively representative sample of 2,362 students at 24 four-year institutions to increase their average score on standardized tests of critical thinking, and that this failure in critical thinking is affecting them negatively in the labor market and in civil society (as indicated by the percentage with full time employment or graduate or professional school status, and by self-reported newspaper-reading habits).

The primary instrument with which Arum and Roksa document students’ drift away from critical thinking is the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), a self-described “authentic assessment” or “test worth teaching to” developed by the Council for Aid to Education, non-profit organization created by a group of “enlightened business leaders” for the purpose of

…promot[ing] a better understanding of the substantial contribution which higher education makes to the effectiveness, skill, growth, and success of American business, and to the development of the country.

CLA claims to present test-takers with “real-life” scenarios, to which students respond in writing rather than multiple choice. Arum and Roksa (2011: 21-22) share an example: “You” are an assistant to the president of “Dynatech,” a company that wants to purchase a plane. But the model of plane Dynatech President Pat Williams wants to purchase was recently involved in a crash. “You” are charged with the assignment of writing a memo using news articles, consumer report data, and reports about the sorts of accidents it has encountered. You are to advise Pat Williams whether or not Dynatech should purchase the plane.

This “real-life” scenario begs the question for whom is this real-life? This is not a rhetorical question. The ways in which I make meaning of the scenario and my response to it are likely to be shaped by how I relate to “Dynatech”: am I really an employee, as the scenario dictates? Can I imagine a future as an employee? Can I imagine a future somewhere similar? Am I imagining a future somewhere else, concerned with quite different decisions? Or am I, like that junior faculty member sitting in front of me at the Research I institution where Roksa gave her talk, “bored to tears” by this test? And if so, is this instrument an adequate measure of the way I think and an adequate provider of feedback to the people – the faculty – who are supposed to be supporting me as I develop my thinking?

Engaging thinking means engaging people – their identities, their experiences, their imagined futures. Indeed, Arum and Roksa are correct that an ability to perform the sorts of tasks the CLA asks students to do is a necessity and an asset in what education scholar Lisa Delpit calls the culture of power. Equity in education, Delpit argues, calls for equipping students for success in the culture of power – while valuing and building on the cultural identities and resources they bring with them to school, especially when those identities and resources may be ignored, or even derogated by the culture of power. What happens when schools and teachers are asked – demanded, even – to focus solely on the culture of power without coming to know, and to draw in, and engage and develop, the resources students carry with them?

In documenting the “uncertain times” of the college graduates that Arum and Roksa identify as “academically adrift,” the authors observe that the students with stagnant CLA scores during college are more likely to be the young adults living at home after college, or not reading newspapers, or not finding full time jobs. What the authors do not observe is the extent to which their results speak to patterns of social reproduction – in which those whose home cultures are deeply tied to the culture of power are also those who perform best on the “real-life” abstractions of the CLA and are those for whom reading a newspaper constitutes a more legitimate form of civic engagement than reading a blog or a Twitter stream. Yet coverage of the murder of high school student Trayvon Martin did not trickle into the print of major newspapers until after weeks of deeply, civically engaged blogging and tweeting and talking and petitioning.

What Arum and Roksa count as “critical thinking” matters, no doubt. But it seems that the inequities in college learning about which they claim concern persist because they are so often relegated to the spaces akin to those that Arum and Roksa do not count, spaces of lived experience and meaning making through which one man can understand his being “bored to tears” as a sign of academic worthiness, and through which another might feel he’d be better off drifting out of academia. Again, engaging thinking means engaging people. So when it comes to assessing thinking, I say we need relationships before we need measurements, and when we measure, we need to do so in dialogue with those real, human relationships. But I hope you’ll share with me: what do you think?

“I don’t know if I should be saying this right now,” sophomore Allie stated, her eyes making a cautionary sweep of the room, even though except for us it was empty, and the door had long been shut. White and well-off, she held a prestigious academic scholarship and took many of her courses through a selective honors program. But not this course: “[The professor] was a nice lady, but she felt like she had to tie every single thing she said into like, diversity. And it felt extremely forced. And the class was largely, it was a diverse class, more so than any other class that I had taken … Don’t get me wrong I love the diversity at this school, but it just felt so forced…Like it wasn’t even related to our topic, and it just felt almost like someone was forcing it in there… [It] wasn’t in the course description at all. It didn’t count as a diversity requirement or anything.”

The course was an introduction to Public Health. Public Health is the work of protecting and improving the health of communities through education, research, and communication. Sociologists, demographers, and legal scholars, as well as public health scholars and clinical care providers, have documented myriad ways in which race and ethnicity shape communities and their health – influencing at the very least where people live and thus the schools and jobs they have access to, the distances they have to travel to get to their jobs and schools, and the means by which they travel there. Race and ethnicity are fundamental to the study of the health of communities. But somehow Allie didn’t see the connection.

Allie had the transcript of a superstar. She’d aced every course she’d taken in college and most every course prior to it. And many of those courses explicitly stated as a primary course objective that students would improve their critical thinking capacities. Allie’s grades would suggest that she’d unequivocally excelled at this; her comments indicate something more ambiguous about her success. They indicate to me that the “critical thinking” valued by the institutions in which a White, privileged student like Allie had excelled might be leaving students to flounder when it comes to thinking critically about race, ethnicity, and the ways in which privileges and oppressions have been – and continue to be – systematically linked to race and ethnicity. For Allie, this lack of support led to a vicious loop: she saw race and ethnicity as having nothing to do with her (Whiteness apparently did not count as race or ethnicity); as mattering only when fulfilling some institutional requirement; and as unworthy of her learning energies unless she was fulfilling such requirements, upon completion of which, she could return to not thinking of race and ethnicity at all.

Sociologists like Eduardo Bonilla Silva see students like Allie the norm among college students who are White and economically well-off: they’ve learned, even been encouraged, to minimize – and deny – the ways in which race shapes social relationships, and the ways in which the blatant racism of the past relates to deeply embedded and ongoing injustices in the present. Such dangerous misunderstandings are evident now in Tucson, Arizona, where the Tucson Unified School District has moved to eliminate its Mexican American studies curriculum and to ban books the discuss the history of the Americas from the perspective of the peoples who have lived on the land prior to European and European-American conquests. Arizona School Superintendent John Huppenthal argues that this ban was a necessary move because the program “promotes resentment.” But what about the resentment of White, privileged students like Allie – the resentment of having to think about, talk about, reflect on systemic inequities by which they have benefited? Allie’s “mainstream” course of study promoted her resentment of her public health course. So do we ban Allie’s honors program, then? Do we ban the high-level honors curricula she followed in high school?

Education scholar and educator Ernest Morrell has described critical thinking as thought and/or inquiry that fosters individual or social transformation (2009:29). A ban transforms nothing, relying instead on binary oppositional terms and explanations. Dangerous and unjust as a ban may be, however, it makes the binary oppositional logic on which it operates apparent. In Allie’s case, her mainstream curriculum allowed that thinking to operate silently. So if institutions like Allie’s really want to “honor” students, shouldn’t they support – actively and explicitly and thoroughly – the voices and perspectives that students need to engage them in the conversations that foster critical thinking?

It would be nearly impossible to imagine John Bader, a dean of Undergraduate Academic Affairs at Johns Hopkins University and author of Dean’s List: 11 Habits of Highly Successful College Students, ever uttering the lines of Larry Summers (fictional Larry Summers, that is, as represented in The Social Network). The Summers character, on the phone with his wife, glares up at two young men in his office and says: “I have to go, dear. Students are here. Undergraduates.” Those moments in the film represent an all-too-common phenomenon on many a college campus: the distance, both perceived and experienced, of so many administrators from their students (Nathan 2005; Moffatt 1989). Of course, a dean, as Bader is, is not the same thing as a President, as Summers was. And it is to Bader’s great credit that he provides incoming undergraduates with straightforward explanations of the difference – and of universities’ institutional structures, those structures’ corresponding roles, and those roles’ respective relationships to students (Habit Three, p. 52-96). Bader’s enthusiasm for students and his desire to help them “work the system by understanding the system” is evident throughout Dean’s List (p. 52). Yet much of the advice that Bader and his contributing colleagues from what he calls Hopkins’ “peer institutions” (or as the back of the book less diplomatically puts it, “top institutions”) assumes that college students are alike in privilege. Bader begins by affirming ideas of meritocracy and individualism:

Congratulations! You did it. You got into college! Maybe you’re going to Princeton, Michigan, Duke, Berkeley, Stanford, or another of the best research universities in the world. Or perhaps you’re bound for a great liberal arts college like Swarthmore, Davidson, Pomona, or Kenyon Maybe it’s a private college in New England or the flagship campus of your state university system. That is wonderful, and I’m sure, well deserved. You’ve worked hard the past few years, building an amazing record of academic achievements, community service, and activities that have kept you busy and challenged. You sweated through exams like the SAT, filled out countless applications and forms, and waited in agony to get word from your dream schools. And now you’re in. (p. 1)

Indeed these lines indicate how Bader envisions his readers: traditional college-aged students who will be residing on campus, and who have the resources to ensure that no matter what happens, “[they] will be fine” (p.137).
Bader breaks down the eleven habits he recommends, devoting a chapter for each. Six of the eleven habits –1, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 9—deal with courses of study and careers, generally encouraging students to decouple the former from the latter. Habit One, “Focus on Learning, Not on Grades,” urges students to place their GPA concerns on the backburner and strive instead to become a “learned person.” Bader cautions students that although their colleges have already taken steps to define what it means to be a “learned person” for them through core requirements, students must work to craft their own definitions (p. 26) and that in doing so, grades will become the “byproduct of their passion for learning” (p. 30). Habit Four, “Approach the Curriculum Like a Great Feast,” advises students to “sampl[e] [their] way to success” (p. 79), but pays little attention to dissonance this suggestion may bring to the many students who feel pressure to preserve tuition dollars for courses that will cultivate skills that translate into incomes for themselves and their families. In place of such discussion, Bader offers Habit Five, “Understand that Majors and Careers are not the Same Thing.” College students and their parents are prone to “invent the connection to better justify the expense and effort of going to college at all” (p. 97).
Habit Six proposes a distinction between working hard and working smart. Working smart, Bader suggests, entails understanding how teaching and learning are structured in college: lectures provide efficient delivery of material, and if students are to avoid being “court reporters” then they will need to take an active role in the lecture, putting the lecturer’s content into a conversation with their own thoughts (p. 125). Such private conversations will serve students well when they apply for admission to graduate or professional schools, as laid out in Habit Seven. Honesty and individuality, Bader argues, are the traits that facilitate the subject mastery and sense of self that graduate schools desire in their students (p. 140). Bader sticks to this idea of individualism in Habit Nine, “When You Are Failing, Understand Why.” He examines “four broad reasons for academic struggles”: lack of motivation, poor time management, weak study skills and talent, poor mental and physical health (p. 177). What Bader does not examine is a key commonality among these four reasons – that they are all problems attributable to individuals rather than issues stemming from systemic problems that students might experience as members of social groups (e.g. as first-generation college students, as children of working class parents, as students of color, etc.).
Habit Two, “Build an Adult Relationship with Your Parents,” makes evident many of the assumptions that are just as present, but perhaps not as explicit, through the rest of the book. Bader recounts difficulties students with “helicopter parents” – for instance, the parents who flew in from Hawaii to speak with him about their son’s progress twice in two weeks – but he does not recognize that many parents do not feel entitled to make such demands on faculty and administration, and that consequently their students might be less likely to have close contact with faculty and administrators. Furthermore, Bader does not consider the possibility that many students may already have “adult” relationships with their parents, having contributed to the family income and household management throughout their middle and high school years.
Much of Dean’s List presents college success from the perspective of privilege-as-norm. As few as one in four college students live on campus and study full time (Abramson 2011). When Bader advises students to “learn from diversity at home and abroad” (Habit 8), he does not consider the difficulties of studying abroad for students who have jobs outside of school. Indeed study abroad programs struggle to engage students of color, first generation college students, and students who have to work to pay their own tuition (e.g. Stuber 2011).While Bader and his colleagues offer important and helpful recommendations to students, they put the onus on students to conform to norms of privilege rather than opening up a conversation about success that really recognizes and appreciates where students are coming from.

References
Abramson, Larry. (2011). “In Tenn., A Possible Model for Higher Education.” National Public Radio. Retrieved from http://www.npr.org/2011/11/27/142759691/in-tenn-a-possible-model-for-higher-education
Moffatt, Michael. (1989). Coming of Age in New Jersey. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Nathan, Rebekah. (2005). My Freshman Year. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Stuber, Jenny. (2011). Inside the College Gates. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

“Oh, I hate that,” my colleague moaned, leaning on the hay- in “hate” with a weary sigh. The that in question was a grammatical construction I had not encountered in my previous TESOL experiences: from as a noun, linked to a country of origin on the other side of a being verb. My from is…Bolivia, El Salvador, Peru, Guatemala. “I don’t know where they get it from,” my colleague continued. “It’s not like they ever heard it from a native speaker.” And there our conversation ended. The native speakers had spoken, and they never did say My from is.

At the time, I was 24 years old. And I was then, and am still, White, middle class, and privileged with access to credentials, to a career I loved and identified with, and to a car to get me to and from it all. I stood in front of students, many of whom were decades my senior, many of whom worked multiple jobs, many of whom rode multiple buses to get to those jobs and even more buses to get to our class. Many of them communicated in multiple languages, including English, which they learned by listening to and engaging with people. What they needed from our class was support in, and practice with, the codes of the written English language.
As semesters went on, I cavalierly kept on asking the question that elicited the my-from-is answer – a question that was all too simple for me: Where are you from? And with the unwitting ease that comes from privilege, I would model the grammatical response: “I am from North Carolina.” But in the rest of my everyday life as a professional, credentialed native speaker, I could be from North Carolina, and all that that entails in terms of accent, word choice, rhythm. Many of my students had lived in the vicinity of our DC metro area school far longer than I had. They had families here—children, grandchildren – friends, co-workers, religious communities. They were of this place and of the places they had been before. And to say “my country is…” necessitated a choice between country of origin and country of residence – a choice that may have felt like a false one. Their “from” was something multiple and hybrid and complex – too personal to fit into a prepositional phrase. Grammar bends for identity.

I’m thinking about this now because this is the time of year when there never seems to be a shortage of declarations about what exactly has defined the past twelve months. For example, news blogs declare whose words count as the year’s “best essays“; linguists and other “assembled experts” hunt for a “word of the year.”

But whose words make it to these lists? And whose ideas and experiences represented within them? Whose creativity do they recognize, and whose do they pass over? I write these as real questions – questions that I hope  others might want to launch a conversation from…

When Harrisburg University in Harrisburg, PA attempted a week-long social media “blackout” in September 2010, national news media swarmed the campus. A “smartly dressed correspondent from NPR stalk[ed] the staircase,” the Chronicle of Higher Education reported, and as soon as the Chronicle itself spirited away some students for an exclusive interview, a reporter from the Associated Press came barging in. “Oh no—not another one,” one student cried out. Another, weary, explained with a sigh that he had just finished begging off the BBC.

In the end, the Chronicle headlined the outage as more of a “brownout” than a “blackout,” and NPR corroborated that conclusion with sound bites from students describing increased text messaging and some tenacious hacking. Even Jimmy Fallon jumped in on the analysis in his late-night comedy show, quipping: “Check this out: A college in Pennsylvania is blocking computer access to social-networking sites for an entire week, and then requiring the students to write an essay about the experience. Yep. The essay will be called, ‘We all have smart phones, dumb-ass.’” Nevertheless, campus officials declared the experiment a success with in-house surveys revealing that 33% of the private university’s 822 students reported feeling less stressed during the week of the outage and 21% stating they’d spent more time doing homework. These were happy fringe benefits, however, as the primary objective of the project had been somewhat more metaphysical—encouraging students to “push, prod, question and generally explore social media.” Or, as one speaker invited to campus during the week of the ban put it, to encourage dialogue around the question of:

“Why are we posting on Facebook? Why are we sharing, why are we disclosing in this way and for what purpose? Many people are already in the habit of, ‘I have to go post on Facebook, I have to go see what’s happening, I have to update my status.’ Why? You don’t have to…”

Last year I asked my Introductory Sociology students to approach this discussion from a different starting point—starting with how they actually used social media—and how they were using it to make and share meaning in their daily lives. For 24-hours, students recorded their social media interactions in written logs, describing what they did (texting, updating a status, sending a message, posting a photo, commenting on a photo, “liking” a comment, replying to a comment, tweeting, re-tweeting, and so on) and the context in which the action took place (home, dorm room, living room, classroom [alas!]), and reflecting briefly on what they felt about the interaction at the time (for example: “I hate that picture of me, so I untagged it”). I compiled the logs into a “data package” that they could read and reflect on before coming together in groups to discuss what they saw as emerging themes—meanings that they seemed to share about how they and their classmates were using social media in their daily lives.

What follows—with many thanks to my students!—is one approach to that oft-repeated wail of “WHY! Why are students posting/ tweeting/ texting status updating?” But social media use doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens in a social context. Structures, disciplinary practices, cultural understandings, and interpersonal relationships shape interactions in any context. For these students, the classroom stood out as one particular context that created a need for social media use. In my own research, I argue that this is because power relationships shaping the classroom have informed students’ understandings of the classroom as a private place, a place where individuals need to “take in” information, but don’t necessarily get to connect to their own experiences, interests, and concerns while they are there. This social environment facilitates a sense of boredom among students.

Social media use during class was one of the most commonly observed themes from the data I collected (over 20,000 words of logs—and approximately 30 groups of students over the course of 3 semesters!). In the examples cited below, this theme is presented and described by students Christi G., Ellen N., Clare B., and Robby B. Particularly, these students point to the connection between their use of social media and boredom in the classroom.

Boredom During Class
(by Christi G., Clare B., Ellen N., and Robby B.; SOCY100 Spring 2011)

Often times, people get bored during class, but there are many different reasons for this. One of the more common reasons is because the professor lectures in a very quiet and monotone voice, which puts people to sleep. Another cause of boredom is general lack of interest in the class, such as someone taking a core elective that they aren’t actually interested in. Social media is sometimes seen as the answer to boredom in class, but could also be the problem. Social media is seen as a good answer to boredom, because it can be a small time commitment or an activity for the whole class period. People can talk with their friends rather than listening to lectures. Lectures are isolating because you sit and try to write everything down, and social media lets people connect with other people. Also, in large lecture halls, there is probably someone nearby on Facebook doing something potentially distracting. The person on Facebook is probably using it because they are bored with the class and looking for something to do. Another reason for being on Facebook during class would be that there’s some kind of very exciting event or conversation taking place that you want to take part in.

Example 1:
11:42am – Trying to focus in Econ but I can’t. Text other roommate telling her how boring econ is

Example 2:
12:15pm – Hopped on Facebook because I was bored in class.

Example 3:
12:00pm – I was in biology class. This class just gets boring almost every day, so I pulled out my cell phone to check if someone texted me. No text message, so I initiated a text conversation with a guy friend.

Example 4:
BBMing [Blackberry Messaging] my friend “Chris” because I am bored in [the library].

Example 5:
10:00 AM- playing wordmole on my blackberry during a very boring STAT [statistics] class.

Example 6:
12:15 am: Hopped on Facebook because I was bored in class.

12:30 am: Checked my Twitter for any mentions and @ replies from the Party tweets I put up earlier on the weekend.

12:43 am: Mentioned my roommate in a tweet that fried him up for putting up so many tweets in like 5 min. when u needs to be studying. I put it up on twitter and facebook so that everyone else would notice and fry up my roommate also.

12:45 am: My roommate replied back to be asking where am I at because Twitter can be used as a person to person communication medium.

12:48 am: I reply back with a [Tweet] “at class bored” because no one uses direct messages in college.

Example 7:
10:00 am class starts and I wish I had my laptop to keep me entertained

Example 8:
2:24 pm I hear my phone buzz but am doing a group project and don’t want to be rude so I ignore it

2:40 pm class is almost over and another member of the group checked his phone so I check mine. My cousin, A, texted me about her college visit to Ohio State and how she is jealous of our warm weather since it’s not as nice there. I have another text from C saying she fell asleep outside where I left her but is feeling better

Example 9:
8:01 PM- Bored in Physics class so I end up playing games on my phone

Example 10:
1:02pm: I texted my boyfriend during class because it was extremely boring and I needed something to occupy my brain. (Don’t worry…it wasn’t SOCY!) We texted for the rest of class and I don’t remember anything from lecture.

***
In short, when students examine their uses of social media sociologically, they reflect on their own identities, the social contexts in which those identities have developed, and the interactions that take place in those contexts. Through their reflections and dialogues via social media, they construct, share, and evaluate knowledge. These processes become particularly visible via social media. But when students reflect on their lived realities in their school work, sometimes they can become visible in the classroom too.

AJ shrugged when I asked him why he didn’t even mention the panel. He had been working on it since last semester. Yet during the class period when the very theme of his panel was central to the topic at hand in his upper-level Gender and Families seminar, AJ said nothing of his own work.

He spoke, of course. And as usual, his teacher and his classmates seemed engaged in what he said. They nodded; they looked at him when he was speaking. Some responded to his comments directly. At least one made reference to “what AJ was saying” when making a contribution later in the discussion.

AJ’s panel centered on experiences shaping Black male identities and the development of supportive relationships around those identities. The class discussion that day and the assigned readings for it were billed under the heading of Men and Masculinities. The instructor was White and female. Over half the students in the class appeared to be White. As in many of his college classrooms, AJ was the only African American male. And now, here he was, leaving class with me, a White, female graduate student and researcher with whom he’d consented to spend an inconveniently large number of hours. Here he was shrugging his shoulders as he searched for a verbal answer that might skirt any sensitivities I might have and still answer my question about why he had not discussed his own work where it seemed so relevant and so important to furthering the discussion at hand. Softly he critiqued that powerful discussion I (and perhaps also his professor, the college deans, and the University Viewbook for prospective students) were imagining as he shrugged his shoulders and said: “It’s not going to go as far as you want it to.”

I thought about this experience with AJ when I was reading through The Educational Experience of Young Men of Color, a report released Monday (20 June 2011) by the College Board’s Advocacy and Policy Center. The College Board report makes “six clear recommendations” toward addressing some of the issues that young men of color face, including teacher education for culturally responsive pedagogy in the college classroom and the strengthening of campus multicultural centers. Sounds great to me, but what about AJ’s classroom and countless other classrooms quite like it? What about those class discussions that hold so much potential, but that “don’t go as far as you want [them] to” because one student feels looked to, again and again, to represent a  provide a neat and tidy synopsis of the myriad perspectives and experiences of  myriad others who share his race and gender? What about those deliberations and disagreements and questions and shared experiences that students like AJ want to participate in but have learned not to look for in the classroom? What about the cultural and disciplinary messages students receive day after day, semester after semester, to channel their classroom energies and efforts have to go into preparing for tests of discrete skills rather than into dialogue and collaborative knowledge construction?

The College Board study finds that campuses with strong multicultural centers that reach out to students and families tend to have higher retention rates. Indeed many of the students in my study have indicated that the campus multicultural center at our University has been a key resource for academic advising, extracurricular activities, peer mentoring programs, and summer opportunities. I can’t help but think, though, about a comment from Chloe, another student in my study, a rising senior, who transferred last year from an HBCU (Historically Black College/University):

There’s just a lack of diversity [on this campus]. This is a predominantly white university. I think you can call it a PWI. I looked that up. And I don’t care any type of way, but the fact that there’s even a multicultural center, this one separate place, that says a lot about the lack of diversity.

The College Board’s six recommendations are indeed clear and worthwhile. But recommendations that suggest changes that can be made around the margins without reconstructing the center are, like AJ’s class discussion, “not going to go as far as you want it to.”

David Orr half-smiled at me from the pages of the New York Times Book Review this morning. In his dark blue button down shirt, head cocked sympathetically to the side, wire-rimmed glasses gracefully seated at the bottom of a long forehead, this man has clearly selected an author photo of himself that represents his belief in the power of ideas. His own, surely, and those of others so long as they are expressed in poetry. But Orr’s new book Beautiful and Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry bears a title that says volumes about how he sees those ideas. They’re “pointless.” They’re just pretty. Addictively pretty, apparently. Pretty enough to obsess over. Pretty enough to love, even if it never makes a  ”point.” Which begs the question: what the heck is a “point”? And who gets to decide when one is made?

Ideas for Orr apparently get to float around outside of everyday social practices. And because ideas are so detached, he figures, they must just be beautiful and pointless. Perhaps Orr should have engaged in discussions with poetry lovers whose experiences were different than his own. People whose experiences with poetry had nothing to do with luxuriating in the beautiful and the pointless.

Poetry is not a luxury. The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless-about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding.

Audre Lorde, from Sister Outsider (1984)

Poetry is not a luxury, Audre Lorde writes, but how can someone like David Orr, whose economic and social access to “art supplies” (or at least to folks who recognize, either through his intellectual-looking picture or his publicly stated delight in “beautiful and pointless” ideas, that his creative work, his thought-work, is stuff of value) conceive of the real, material inequalities around whose knowledge “counts” that make poetry necessary. Not just the poetry that goes in great collections or chapbooks or  coffee-shop goers’ Moleskins, but the stuff through which real people who don’t have the luxury of Orr’s social position share the knowledge that they create.

As Lorde observes, poetry can be written on scraps of paper, in dark pantries, between double work shifts, or on the bus. It can emerge in conversation. It can be  spoken but never written, yet repeated again and again across contexts and across differences. Or spoken once, and never again, but the knowledge shared knowledge that shapes whole ways of knowing, ways of seeing the world. Poetry does not require reams of paper (like, say, a book defending poetry would). Nor does it require long leaves of absence from work and daily life in order to complete a manuscript for publication. Poetry is an art form that cuts across material inequalities and enables, encourages the very human and humanizing act of sharing knowledge.

And in just about one sentence, Audre Lord moves us beyond the whole problematic of another man whose author photos bear a striking similarity to Orr’s: here I’m thinking of Michel Foucault and his anxiety over the repressive power of “the gaze”. Lorde writes: “As we learn to bear the intimacy of scrutiny and to flourish within it, as we learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living, those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us” (1984: 36). Poetry is where those silences can be broken.

Bill Gates’ address to the National Governor’s Association last month was an ode to excellent teaching. Except that it wasn’t.

What we have to do, Gates chirped (to the tune of former DC Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee), is “measure, develop, and reward excellent teaching…We have to identify great teachers, find out what makes them so effective, and transfer those skills to others.”

But excellent teaching –as sociologists Lori Dance (2002) and Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot (1984) have shown through their research, and as engaged students and teachers everywhere have long known and felt–excellent teaching is about deeply human and humanizing relationships. Excellent teaching is about knowing students as people, knowing where they are when they enter the classroom.

In her classic The Good High School, Harvard Distinguished  Professor Lawrence-Lightfoot studies urban and suburban, public and private, privileged and underfunded high schools around the Northeast and Midwest and finds that the one recurrent quality of good teachers is that the good teacher knows his or her students and is engaged in an ongoing practice of reflecting on each student and the students’ needs and acting to try to meet those needs. The good teachers, Lawrence-Lightfoot finds, never stop asking self-critical, self-reflexive questions about their practices in the context of student needs.

Lori Dance’s Tough Fronts, an ethnographic study of Black adolescent boys from low-income communities articulates similar insights. The boys’ most frequent lament about school, Dance observes, is the short supply of teachers who believe in their ability to excel in school – and who show that belief through their willingness to act as mentors and friends, their constant show of (tough! not gushy) empathy and caring, their recognition of the pressures the boys face, and their ability to call students’ bluffs on “hard” postures. The students with whom Dance works are full of praise and ready to learn from and put forth effort for the teachers who are sensitive their needs both in school and out. In other words, the teachers who know students – and who show every day that they want to know students – are the teachers whom students acknowledge to have made a crucial difference in their lives.

Students’ understandings of themselves as students are inevitably shaped by the experiences that they have in school. If teachers and administrators relate to them as test scores, then their ideas about what they can achieve and how they can achieve it will be limited to achievement as pre-defined by the test. As a learning specialist at one “high-achieving” in education scholars’ Linda Valli and Robert Croninger’s (2009) study Test Driven confesses: “I don’t always know them by face, but I know them by data.” Compare that with findings the State of North Carolina and Duke University’s Project Bright Idea: treating every student as a “gifted” student makes students perform like gifted students. The good teachers are the ones who have taken the time to understand what it takes to help students want to share and develop their gifts in the classroom.

Gates has conflated measuring with understanding. And he’s not alone. Michelle Rhee gained fame for talking this talk and walking this walk. And the District of Columbia’s new Chancellor Kaya Henderson, is not entirely willing to concede the relationship between good teaching and the number of students with whom a teacher needs to work to develop relationships (aka “class size”). It would make measuring and transferring the skills of “effective” teachers so much easier if it didn’t.

Taking real humans and real human relationships out of a process is always going to crank out efficient, predictable, calculable, controlled “results” (see McDonalds). But alas teacher-student relationships are not efficient, predictable, calculable or controllable. They can’t be transferred from one technician to another because what makes those relationships “good” and “effective” is not a static, moveable quality. The goodness comes from a relationships sustained by on-going engagement, self-reflexive questioning, and willingness to be for and work with another. Another human being.

Efficiency, Predictability, Calculability, and Control: George Ritzer’s McDonaldization

In August 2010, The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), a self-described “independent, non-profit organization committed to academic freedom, excellence, and accountability at America’s colleges and universities” assigned letter grades A – F to universities nationwide. Johns Hopkins University received an F; St. John’s College of Annapolis, an A. The reasoning: Hopkins and many of its elite peers “don’t do a good job of providing their students with a coherent core,” ACTA President Anne Neal told The Washington Post. Students from St. Johns, on the other hand, “are perfectly capable of coming up to someone at a cocktail party and talking about their soul,” St. John’s senior faculty member Eva Brann gloated to the Post in response to her institution’s superior grade.

Hopkins fired  back at its ACTA grade: “Everything we teach constitutes essential human knowledge, but that’s a huge range of territory, and we encourage students to make some serious choices about what they specialize in.” This discourse represents the college classroom in two oppressively simplified ways: 1. The college classroom as a space for banking “essential human knowledge”; 2. The college classroom as preparation for stimulating conversation at a cocktail party.  And in doing so, this discourse fails to question its own assumptions of what constitutes this “essential human knowledge” – it wraps itself in what Henry Giroux calls “chauvinism dressed up in the lingo of Great Books” (2005: 19).  But perhaps even more significantly, it says little of how students might engage with this knowledge beyond receiving, like empty vessels, the knowledge that will fill them up and make them interesting enough for that cocktail party.

What do students make of the classroom thus-conceived? When Harvard University began to plan a major overhaul of its general education requirements in 2006, national news media paid attention. The NPR program Morning Edition began a report:

At Harvard, they’re known as the universe through a grain of sand courses, those classes that are extremely narrow and focused, and deep in detail, taught by scholars who’ve spent a career on something like Chinese imaginary space, the rise and fall of the samurai, or gladiatorial combat in ancient Roman games.

One student interviewed in the story—a freshman currently enrolled in the aforementioned ancient Roman games course in order to earn a history credit for his general education requirements—commented: “I mean like, I’m always going to tell my kids I took a class on gladiators, you know? I mean how cool is that? I can’t really tell you why, why this is important.” His classmate, however, responded somewhat less enthusiastically: “[I]t’s maybe actually really fascinating for the professor whose job is to research that particular thing, but it doesn’t necessarily have a relevancy to what the students will be doing in the future.” Or, in words heard many times a day on many a college campus: “When will I ever have to use this?”

For Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa (2011) this question is indicative of the “limited learning” of contemporary undergraduate students. Because college administrators and faculty members allow undergraduate education to slip below research and administrative priorities, academic rigor atrophies, and college students lose out on the support they need to develop skills of problem solving and critical thinking.  In their book  Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, sociologists Arum and Roksa argue that undergraduate students in fact seem to learn very little in college, and that moreover they (Arum and Roksa) can show just how much those undergraduates are learning by bringing their own quantitative data set Determinants of College Learning (DCL)—which surveys over 2,300 full time students at 24 four-year institutions on questions of family background, high school grades, and college experiences—together with scores from the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), a standardized test that analyzes “core outcomes espoused by all of higher education”: critical thinking, problem solving, and writing. These “objective measures” Arum and Roksa continue, will hold institutions accountable and will fight the enemy they have named “limited learning,” or more precisely, the “absence of growth in CLA performance” (122). Arum and Roksa call for testing practices that monitor learning in the college classroom akin to those practices in place for primary and secondary students (55).  But the students who arrive on college campuses have more than likely spent up to twelve years in those very classrooms that are being so thoroughly monitored. Thus college students’ learning experiences –and their ideas about classroom learning — cannot not have been shaped by these monitoring practices.

For sociologist Michael Burawoy, sociology cannot afford not to listen to that question. If sociologists, as educators, are to believe that we make a legitimate claim on students’ time and attention, we must commit ourselves to “relevance” (Burawoy 2004: 14). Understanding this “relevance”, I would argue, necessitates considering – and reconsidering, and discussing – how the classroom connects to students’ lives, and how students perceive those connections. What would you say?

American Council of Trustees Discusses Academically Adrift

Michael Burawoy, 2004 ASA Presidential Address