The Student "Experience"

Those of us of a certain age can all remember professors who handed out a 2 page type written syllabus that was really just a list of readings for class dates. The same professors who showed up, lectured, left. Who you probably never saw outside of class unless you overcame your feel to attend office hours AND were able to find their office in a warren of buildings on campus. With only an office phone for contact. Even once professors started having email some refused to use it. Hell, I remember an older PhD student asking me a few years ago why they couldn't refuse to answer emails, that if their students wanted to speak to them they could come see them during office hours.

When I was in undergrad 25 years ago the norm was that most students attended school full time. Few worked, and the people who did have to work to stay in school were easily marked as lower class, often first generation. The experience and knowledge students had of college created a divide, between those that felt comfortable enough to ask for help, speak to professors, navigate a college world, and those who had no clue. Thinking back now, I think one of the reasons I ended up in theatre and not history was because in the theatre department the professors were "normal" folks, accessible, not pretentious, okay, well no more pretentious than other theatre people.

A lot gets made of the student "experience" these days whether it's coverage of a water park or redesigning library spaces there's been a focus on schools knowing, anticipating, catering to what students want form their student "experience." Most educators will point out that very little of what gets mentioned about the experience has to do with learning. These arguments have a lot in common with the more recent debates on who knows best about what gets taught and how. When I was a student I totally would have liked a non-closet dorm, a tricked out suite, although I never could have afforded it. I'm sure I would have loved a water park. Or a tricked out library that wasn't really a library. But none of these things would have given me a better education. They would not have taught me how to read and interact with texts. They would not have taught me how to evaluate information, or take a convincing stance, or write with clarity. 

There is a fine and often debated line about who gets to be the authority in a classroom. Students come into our classrooms with a variety of experiences, expertise, and knowledge that we, as professors, should make space for, acknowledge, and build on. We should also build our classrooms so our students have the space to choose topics that interest them, engage them, a place to explore and expand their interests. Where I always diverge from some education experts though is that while I believe in all that, and build my classes around these concepts, I am also an expert in my field, in teaching, in designing classes. This doesn't mean that I am the end all be all, but it does mean that my experience and knowledge makes me qualified to make pedagogical decisions about class design, class readings, to build a class that guides students to the above, to know the resources and readings that I can suggest to my students for further exploration. 

One thing that has long been known, but perhaps only recently revealed to the public at large, is how many students have not been successful, happy in current educational structures, specifically in K-12 institutions and how many of these students have thrived in the odd, awkward, pivots of the last couple of years. Children of Color, LGBTQIA children, neurodivergent children, have done better at home without judgment, bullying, racism, prejudice, from other students and teachers and administrations. These students are safer, less anxious, less stressed in these environments. It remains to be seen whether education at large will learn from these lessons, but sadly, it does not seem like they will based on the last couple of years.

Parents of these children have been told for years, decades, what is best for their children, often at the expense of their children, often in the service of a "canon" and an Anglo centered system. Schools do not listen to their communities, their stakeholders enough. Never have. The past few decades have seen community schools closed, changed, gentrified, neglected, and the communities have suffered. School systems would be better if they revitalized their community schools, listened to and worked with their communities, formed partnerships, hired local teachers, create conditions where they stayed, made lifelong contributions.

It's a both/and situation.

All of the above can be true AND we should all be terrified that ignorant, petty, racist, white supremacists, motivated, funded, and directed by larger groups, are storming school board meetings, banning books that feature and celebrate Children of Color, LGBTQIA, and neurodivergent children. That these hateful, ignorant people are enacting laws that punish, sometimes with legal action, teachers and professors who teach truth. People who hold workshops for students on how to entrap and record teachers and professors in order to get them fired at best and legally prosecuted and worst. It is a terrifying time to be an educator. There seems to be little concern for this growing wave of hate, ignorance, and what kind of "experience" this makes for our students.

There are lots of resources and pieces written about how this is a reflection of the neoliberal university, how education in the United States has been devalued and defunded for decades, how education is still very much a gendered professor, and its majority female workforce makes it easy to dismiss labor issues, and concerns.

All of this is the context for the world we inhabit, the world we're trying to teach in, the world our students are attending college in. 

Not all my students are first year students, but a lot of them are. Many of the students in my first year composition class are 18, 19. This means that until recently, they have never lived in a world without war. Never lived in a world that did not create politically convenient bogeymen, constructing entire religions as threats to personal safety. Their only memory of politics is one of extremes, starting with elections decided by the Supreme Court, built on politicians lying to enable their war mongering, doing what's right made into radicalism, standing up for principles labelled as fringe. Mediocrity presented as the only sensible compromise. They are a generation of No Child Left Behind. Taught to take tests, answer prompts, not used to being asked what they think and why. Not a digital generation, because that's garbage and too dependent on privilege and access but a generation impacted by how technology has forever twisted and altered how we perceive facts, access information, determine truth. 

They are a traumatized generation. Traumatized by the stress and anxiety of constant testing, yearly reports on how they measure up (or not), where attendance and seat time are privileged over mental and physical health. How county, city, state, benchmarks are prioritized over learning and growth. They are traumatized by decades of active shooter drills. They are traumatized by the day to day grind of wathcing the world burn and none of the individual people or institutions that they've been told work for their best interests doing a fucking thing about it. 

They are students who finished high school during hte pandemic, not served and often harmed by the educational and governmental systems that should have supported them, listened, softened the blows and impacts. They started their college careers in uncertainty- of loss, sickness, modality of learning, how people would judge them, support them, react. How they would cope. Not just unclear on whether and how they'll get through tomorrow but what the world even looks like tomorrow. 

We're still in the middle of cascading failures of every single institution that should have helped. Education. Government. Healthcare. Not a single one has helped up, done what they should have, made things better. Add the burning world and social injustices, the exposed rot, I don't know if students have anything to believe in. I worry that we collectively have broken any trust our students might have. Students have watched professors continue to punish them for absences, require copies of death certificates, dump more work on them, not listen, not explained. Decisions have been made based on profit not safety, and no one is fooled by the platitudes and statements of "we're all in this together" and "we're all family." 

In the middle of all of this I understand that the idea, the promise, that we can return to normal, is tempting, easier to believe, but it's a mirage. It's not based in reality. I would love to cram my students around circled seminar classes again. I would love to see my students' faces. I would love to throw out, or better yet, burn in effigy, every fucking mask I own. I would love to not be terrified every time I shop for groceries. I would love to stop thinking the majority of the population is evil because they refuse to mask, choose shopping at Target and going out to eat over people's lives. I would love the chance to stop, pause, rest, grieve, recover. Because people have chosen their selfish wants over collective good, because institutions have abdicated responsibility, and corporations have chosen profits over people, we're actually going backwards.

This winter cases are higher, test positivity rates are higher, than last year before the vaccine. Yet the mask mandates, the social distancing, the encouragement to stay home if you can, the financial help, eviction moritoriums, that helped some people get through that winter, are all gone. Things are WORSE and yet because people want to believe the fiction, want to not feel bad about doing what they want, want certain "experiences" they are unwilling to do what is best for the greater good. It's a selfishness and evil I don't know if I will ever recover from. And I don't know how our students will feel about these institutions and individuals that enabled all this, told them this, in the future. I don't know what effect this has on their voting, their involvement in their communities, their activism, their contributions to these systems. 

Even if the pandemic ended today, *poof* gone, there is so much loss, grief, death, debt, hurt, distrust, I don't know when or if we as a society ever recover.

So what is the student "experience" our students have to look forward to this semester in our classrooms? Will they be taught, or rather not taught, our racist, rotten history or will they be taught a literally whitewashed version? Will they be centered in practice, cared for, listened to, accommodated or will they be held to a set of standards that was cruel before the pandemic and exponentially so now? Will we make space for them to be human, build in grace into our classrooms for this humanity, or will we actively harm them in our quest to ignore reality and "return to normal."

I worry about the trauma that is being inflicted on our students from all sides, all institutions, with no respite, no break. I wonder how long they can take all of this before we're broken them beyond all repair. I wonder what our institutions that to a great extent depend on the belief in them, look like if everyone stops having any faith in them, contibuting to them, in large part because they believe they're putting in for the greater good.

What happens to these institutions, to education, to healthcare, when there is no one to work?

What "experiences" can we consciously build for our students? What do we value? How can we show it? At what point do we realize that our individual actions cannot overcome the institutional and structural failures? If we've already realized that what do we do with that knowledge? What is life like, our experiences when every awful thing circling us falls down on our heads at once, never ending, forever?

I remember in elementary and middle school thinking that the world was going end in the fiery mushroom cloud we kept seeing in movies. A brief, white flash and then done. We were still taught ridiculous versions of "duck and cover." Taught that hiding in gyms would somehow protect us. About as much as telling six year olds to grab textbooks as weapons to fight an active shooter. It turns out the apocalypse is the boiling frog. I just never thought we'd KNOW we were the boiling frog and not care.

I have no answers for these huge, almost inconceivable in scope, impossible to affect, problems. I keep coming back again and again to my classroom. It is all I can control, and even that only in limited ways. I can reflect, and read, and listen, and try to build an environment that does not actively harm my students. I can try to create a small pocket of an experience where they are cared for, supported, listened to. It's not enough. It cannot counter all the awful darknesses edging closer every day. And I don't have an answer for that. I've tried, as the pandemic has dragged on, as people have actively chosen not to care, to act, I've tried to rationalize, understand, think of things to do. I come back to Contact, as I often do when teaching, thinking about what I want education to be, know it could be, and is not. 

"Small moves, Ellie. Small moves."