Tag: Agency

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On Talking to Students: Writing Centers, “Cop Shit,” and Sanctuary Spaces

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“Cop Shit Doesn’t Build Community”

In his keynote at Digitial Pedagogy Lab 2020, Jesse Stommel said:

There has been much talk over the last several months about maintaining ‘continuity’ of instruction and assessment, but less discussion about how we maintain the communities at the heart of our educational institutions.  That is the design challenge before us.

A few months ago, also using Stommel’s work, I set out to document some issues with schools and districts near-religious devotions to the LMS of their choice: the primary goal, the foundational entry point, seemed to be control and compliance—students turning in assignments—rather than anything related to their critical care.  Additionally, little attempt was made to build the LMS in a way that supported all of connective tissue of schools, which largely happen outside of strict structures, including the classroom itself.  When policing exceeds critical care and collaborative community building and sustenance as a core value, you get what Jeffrey Moro calls “cop shit,” which I was happy to see in Stommel’s keynote.  From Moro:

Cop shit undoubtedly reaches its sine qua non in the K-12 classroom, particularly given how such classrooms are even more militarized (actual cops, metal detectors, education premised on compliance, etc.) than higher ed. While I was getting my hair cut yesterday, my stylist told me about her daughter’s math teacher, who is currently punishing her daughter for falling behind on work due to a broken arm by assigning her upwards of fifteen pages of homework a night. The child is seven. This is pure, uncut cop shit.

Before we say that this story is an exception to the rule, there was a recent Twitter thread that attempted to grapple with the excitement many teachers felt now that “accountability” was coming back this fall: grades, synchronous class time, attendance.  “Cop shit” is one thing that we can count on trickling down.  It’s hard to see some colleagues rely on these measures in their teaching; they need control—bodily control—of their students to be able to engage them in learning.  The “online learning doesn’t work” choruses have roots here: if learning is directly mediated by an adult presence enforcing rules, then it’s not really learning.  This spring, some folks found out that their classroom communities were really just loose confederations held together by rules that kids were too scared to break or say anything about out of fear.  Those loose confederations certainly weren’t co-created with students, especially those students pushed to the margins of our schools.

Long story short: it’s only a matter of time until etiquette “tutorials” like the one below are all over the socials setting up systems to hurt those who are already marginalized and vulnerable.

There’s also reason to be worried that a hyperfocus on content, especially given the narrative that “kids are falling behind,” will cause us to rush in and leave the work of critical care behind: there will still be time for teaching students to write a claim or assess rhetoric or analyze evidence.  Manufactured crises, like the idea of “being behind,” takes our eyes off the really, really important work of cultivating hope and providing safety.  I’m seeing this happen in the writing center sphere where there are webinars about synchronous and asynchronous tutoring or developing online tutor training and almost nothing about how we’re prioritizing care and helping our students build sanctuary spaces, as students continue to navigate a global health crisis, ongoing racism and state violence, ICE deportations, anti-Semitism, and mounting economic losses.  If your writing center is worried about being online but hasn’t yet addressed the multiple threats to the most vulnerable students, I’d argue that you’re thinking in reverse.  I’d also say that I don’t necessarily care about the former until we address the latter.  Here’s Sean Michael Morris’ take:

Rather than connectedness, administrators and instructors (and those supporting their work) have focused on connectivity, worrying more about the technology they use than the human being they are trying to reach.

He later writes:

But it goes without saying that sustaining a classroom community is an essential act during a time of crisis. It is in crisis that we most immediately front with our human capacity to intervene, to grasp our agency—to be learners. When we are faced with feeling there is nothing we can do, we can ask: what has been done, what could have been done… which leads us to ask what can I do, and what will I do?

We’re so worried about the how—we’re desperately looking for the model or that tech trick—that we’re forgetting the who.  This doesn’t necessarily come from a bad place, but the end results of this thinking can be dangerous for those who are already in danger.

So, back to Stommel’s keynote and, arguably, his best piece of advice:

Stop looking for models and begin by talking to students.

On Sanctuary: Writing Centers and a Pedagogy of Critical Care

I’ve been thinking about the idea of sanctuary for a long time, although not always in those terms, but I knew it was important for any kind of learning environment.  I first started attaching the word sanctuary to how and what I was feeling after reading Be Oakley’s “Radical Softness is Boundless Form of Resistance:”

I look to the sanctuary that are built within each of our communities that provide a certain aspect of comfort for the people directly involved with them.

When I first started out teaching and leading a writing center, I thought that I was responsible for setting up a sanctuary, and no doubt that my voice and presence matter, but I realized that unless students co-created the environments with me, I wasn’t really creating a sanctuary, I was creating my idea of what I thought a sanctuary should be.  That’s some cop shit; I’m not at the center of the classroom or the writing center, and the faster I realized that, the better off everyone would be, particularly those that don’t share in all of my privileged identities.  Here’s Oakley:

I don’t feel that any space marked ‘safe’ by a white person, even if they have the best intentions, can ever be truly safe for those who are not white.

Oakley goes on to say that this doesn’t mean white people don’t have a gigantic role to play in making spaces safer, but that we should ask those most impacted what sanctuary looks like, feels like, and is to them.  As Press Press’ sanctuary manifesto says:

Sanctuary is different for different people.  Whatever version of sanctuary we create needs to be malleable and accommodating of those different versions.  Many versions of sanctuary can exist simultaneously.

I read this to mean that our role, before we can even think about pedagogical models or the latest LMS hack or our digital tutoring methods, is to talk with our students and have our students talk with each other about what sanctuary looks like for them and find ways to meaningfully link those visions together, which means embracing tension.  If our students aren’t co-creating the space, virtual or physical, with us, then we’re just reinforcing the cop shit because, as Moro says, we’re setting up a necessarily adversarial relationship with and between our students rather than a generative one.

Avoiding the reproduction of the things we seek to avoid requires a heaping helping of imagination and critical care.  In her OLC Innovate keynote, Maha Bali argues for:

Reimagining [professional] development as ‘fostering imagination’ around central values, not just offering tools and strategies.

The professional and the community development we need most urgently is to talk with students about what they need and want and find ways to collectively imagine how those diverse wants and needs fit together into a coherent whole.  There’s no technology, no system, no model—no cop shit—that will do this for us, even if the rhetoric, the sales pitches, the educelebrities and brands, and some of our instincts tell us otherwise.  This is why focusing development and conversation around uses of strategies means that our work is necessarily incomplete.  Let’s return to Press Press’ manifesto:

We can protect sanctuary by creating a pluralistic social contract of values and ideas to which we all agree. We can protect sanctuary by sharing responsibility to sustain the things we value.

Skyline Writing Center’s Summer Circles

This summer, the Skyline Writing Center has held a series of “Summer Circles,” modeled from the critical care practices that we use during our in-person meetings to build community and talk about issues that are important and figure out how we, in our space, can address them while also becoming comfortable with tension and discomfort both generally and within our group, which is remarkably diverse in all facets, especially since the likelihood of a virtual fall start were always high.  This necessitated asking some big questions—and being asked some big questions of me and the institution—to start:

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These discussions have been interesting and iterative, and they’ve covered a ton of ground, ground that I didn’t think we’d necessarily cover.  But with a group of students, some writing center veterans and some newcomers, and an open conversation, we’ve been able to imaginatively co-plan large parts of the year together, most notably how to meaningfully care for and stay connected and engaged while apart.  Truthfully, we haven’t even talked about numbers or training or pedagogy or the LMS, and those conversations seem far off still. My concern isn’t whether we’ll do 1 session or 1,000 sessions.

I never expected 15, even 20, students to show up during their summer break to talk about writing center, but you never know until you create the conditions.  And, really, that’s the point: as a white, cishet, neurotypical, able-bodied male, I can’t create the sanctuary for my students anymore than I can liberate my students, but I can remove the barriers, help create the conditions, and be a co-equal part of the discussion that helps us ensure a safe, comforting, responsive environment for each student, whatever that means for them.

There’s no magic here, really, but a reminder: create a space, let students talk, listen, and use their experiences to build an environment and community that works for each person in the community.

 

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Promoting Agency + Creating Engagement in Student-Centered Spaces

I’ve written before that writing centers, particularly in secondary schools, tend to be difficult to quantify, as they don’t look at all like traditional learning environments: there’s no teacher delivering a lesson in front of a whiteboard or a screen, the “lesson plan,” which never involves worksheets, varies from day-to-day depending on the institutional ecology in which the writing center is situated, and, most of all, students have agency to determine how they will use their time and the space in any given context. In trust-poor industrial educational models, which tend to rely on Foucauldian surveillance and student self-regulation, students learn to cede their autonomy to an authority in a social negotiation that earns them rewards, including, often, being left alone by hovering adults, which was one of my goals as a high school student.

1024px-Panopticon.jpgWriting centers have to be trust-rich environments or they tend not to function very well, as they are constructed to be student-led and student-centered. However, when students move the trust-poor environments that dot most school spaces to the trust-rich environment of the writing center, there’s a kind of social anomie that sets in. This isn’t to say that writing centers become Lord of the Flies, but students often struggle with navigating an environment without the presence of an authority figure (or at least the threat of a presence); they lack a kind of self-intentionality that helps them manage their time, fulfill community expectations, and create the learning environment that they need. As Glen Cochrane contends in Hybrid Pedagogy, “Moving into, around, and back and forth between learning environments built by physical space and learning environments built by hidden ones and zeros requires transitioning.” Students who have tended to be under the thumb of trust-poor compliance regimes often have the most difficult transition into writing center. Indeed, here’s a sample of a recent reflection from a tutor:

Honestly I wish there was a little better one on one communication between the leaders or “teacher” of writing center and tutors, recently I’m not as sure what the expectation is of what we’re supposed to do when there are no students.

Given that I’m often teaching while students are tutoring, tutors are forced to navigate the Writing Center’s learning environment on their own; tutors need to project a world rather than wait for one to projected for them. We have instituted a detailed syllabus, a tiered peer-to-peer mentoring system, weekly reflections, and “circle time” based in the principles of restorative practices to mitigate some of our tutors’ disorientation, getting tutors to seize their agency really requires making some of the invisible rules, guidelines, and norms visible and sustained, intentional social-emotional confidence building. Indeed, Cochrane writers, “If educators want to take education beyond simply rebelling against a centralized past, the challenge then comes in helping learners realize the need for the ability to construe their own environment, and then helping learners acquire these skills.” In a dialogue hosted by the Eastern Michigan University Office of Campus and Community Writing and 826michigan earlier this month, a few Skyline tutors were able to engage in an interesting dialogue with other tutors about what it means to be a student-led, student-centered space and what their responsibilities are in that environment. This year, our tutor-leaders have taken on the responsibility of further creating a student-led, student-centered space, but helping other tutors acquire the skills to make and remake their space in the next step in a slow process to undo the very real behavioral modifications of centralized education, as evidenced by the portion of the tutor reflection shared above.

In teacher-centered spaces, all relationships are in the context of the adult; peer-to-peer relationships, to the extent they exist, are often performative: a teacher asks a question, a student responds, the teacher responds to the student before calling on someone else who responds back to the teacher. This looks interactive, but, really, the teacher retains the locus of control by not letting the conversation organically develop among students. Developing meaningful, authentic peer-to-peer relationships is one of the biggest challenges in student-centered spaces, and it can be a significant part of the anomie I discussed earlier, as there isn’t an authority figure ever-present to mitigate and manage. Indeed, new tutors often struggle with the balance between the personal, making the learning space relevant to them, and the communal, working toward a shared goal within a shared values framework. Cochrane writes, “The division between personal and community clarifies the decisions learners face between working towards their own learning goals and working under community standards towards a common goal—cooperation and collaboration, respectively.” In some sense, it’s easy for students to embrace the idea of the freedom of student-centered spaces, but it’s far more difficult to imbue them with a sense that there remains a learning community with shared values and expectations.  Teaching students how to be and the importance of being reflective practitioners to improve their own practice and improve our tutoring community is a good example of this challenge.  Tutors need to “self-coach” for their own benefit, but for the benefit of the writing center, but they aren’t often asked to this kind of work in other spaces.

DTTYlh2XcAElZvPIn a secondary school writing center, my role isn’t to back out completely, but, instead, to find ways to help build the frameworks and structures that can support a blend of personal autonomy with collective responsibility to meet the needs of our program and our school, especially since our goal to help close achievement and opportunity gaps are urgent and vital. Getting students to embrace personal autonomy while building a communal ethos is an imperfect, bumpy process, but it starts with us, as authority figures, putting trust in students to make important decisions, and it continues with us encouraging students to trust one another as they work to solve problems and achieve common ends, even when the conditions aren’t perfect or everything doesn’t go according to our best laid plans. As a leader and a coach, this has also meant ensuring that my tutor leaders take the long view, which can be difficult because the “life cycle” of tutors in our institution is only one or two years. One of the ways I encourage the long view is by reminding them that our mission and our vision exist already; we don’t have to reinvent fire each time we need to light the way. At our core, we know what we believe in, and we know why we believe in it—we’ve had the conversations, we’ve done the research, and we’ve aligned each belief to action-oriented values.

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How students navigate writing center—and what their social, emotional, personal, and academic outcomes are—will certainly vary based on any number of complex factors, but, ultimately, it is incumbent upon tutors to draw a map, explore, revise the map, and explore again. Like Cochrane writes, “The process of acting as your own center of learning demands assembly and maintenance— the onus is on the learner to create an ecology.” Getting students to believe that we want them to do this work, that they can do this work, and that they don’t need to do this work alone represent the significant work of educators and leaders in student-led, student-centered spaces; trying, failing, and trying again are the significant work of students in student-led, student-centered spaces. For both parties, this means working against entrenched systems of control and surveillance that have modified behavior toward compliance with punishment and reward.

This is hard work, but it’s the right work.