2/28/2018 0 Comments Go away and think and come back and give a shit about something: some thoughts on the Cyrene Chapel Mission, Black Jesii, and PedagogyOutside of Bulawayo is an old European, Christian mission. Just kidding. Outside of Bulawayo, there are several old European, Christian missions. One of these is the Cyrene Mission and Chapel, located off the Plumtree Road, or off a treacherous dirt road from the Matopos Road. It’s a large cluster of school buildings and homes scattered around a large compound. In the very center is a remarkable chapel. Colonialism is really problematic, let me get that out of the way. Deeply, really, truly problematic. Mission educations, missionaries, charities, religious outreach, conversion campaigns – all the spiritually material trappings of Western colonialism – began at its inception and continue today. Every day, I fight the Pentecostal pickup trucks on the streets of Bulawayo. I’ve angrily dodged hordes of enthusiastically pink southern Baptists in Nicaragua. I’ve marvelled at sweaty Americans making their way to Ghana to, I guess, convert the Christians to more Christianity. This guy, though. The headmaster of the Mission was conflicted about his role in mainstreaming and converting Africans; while he didn’t seem to doubt the relative value of his Word, he nevertheless wanted to imbue his students with the senses of wonder and awe toward art and achievement that supersedes ideology. According to the signage at the chapel, a devoted student explained his teacher’s pedagogy. Teacher told us to go away and think, and come back and paint our think.” As reductive or pandered-to as the faux-pidgin suggests, I want to hold this up as a model of ethical pedagogy. It trusts students to come to their own realizations and conclusions, requires them to apply intellectual labor to an image and a process. Our “think” is a very real product of our thinking. While our students implicitly know that thinking is labour – and often avoid it, accordingly; it’s hard work! – they have also come of age in a society that doesn’t prize thinking, or the appearance of thinking, or the apparent leisure associated with thinking. Because thinking requires “going away” – the privilege of being “in front of” an object or problem worthy of cognition, as well as being able to perceive it in its real absence. Being able to hold onto some object of perception like that is a signal human characteristic. “Going away” is also a way to remove the student from the institutional context. Even when or if the prompt for our students encourages maximal creativity and innovation, it is still delivered within an educational context that has hundreds of prescriptive implicit ideologies. “Go away” can mean, get your head out of this space into a more capacious space. It could mean “get out” of this context and into one that is more familiar or comfortable, or challenging or novel. It means to set aside what you think you know the teacher wants, and rely upon your own faculties instead. Without the “go away,” I can imagine a Chapel painted entirely with white Jesii. After all, it must have been what he would have wanted, hey? Luckily, the students understood that it meant that they were trusted, and so: black Adam, black Eve; black Jesii. I was recently entrusted to deliver opening “big idea” lectures on research and research methods. I talked to these budding journalists about ontology and epistemology, the values and natures of research, the various standpoints one can take toward the existence of the reality of the world. I’m no philosophy professor, but these sorts of lectures allow anyone to soar – to pull and tease and prod students into mindbending intellectual calisthenics. I told them that while in high school, of course they did plenty of thinking. They tried to understand concepts that were given to them. They worked to recall information they’d filed away. They read text in order to be able to answer factual questions about those texts. They learned rules and how to apply them, formulae and how to use them. But college, I tried to stress – college is different. Life, frankly, is different. It requires not just repetition or applications, but experimentation. It requires trial and error, and questions that aren’t easy to answer. It requires thinking, sure, but more than that, it requires that they think about their thinking. This second-level cognition, I tried to explain, is precisely what separates them as critical and engaged and active human beings from those who haven’t the energy, the inspiration, the space or impetus, to create and innovate and reflect. Thinking about their thinking allows them to understand their own beliefs and positions, their lines in the sand. Only those who think about their thinking can change their minds. At the Cyrene Chapel, all of the images are of Black Africans. There is a Black Adam and a Black Eve, shy but alluring; saints are depicted as Africans; Bible scenes are depicted as happening in traditional African villages, with traditional clothing and objects on display, local languages alongside English. It is a marvel of Afrocentricity. God never had to be white. God never had to be a man, either. Or a beardy fellah. Or thicc. Or aged. Projected onto God in Western traditions are the identity markers associated with power. It has always been a radical idea to wonder if God was a She, or if God were more humble, plain, ordinary, real, local than He might appear from the hierarchical, geographical, gendered, sexualized distribution of His Word. But in the beginning there was just the Word here. And the Word was fertile, and the Words, as such, suggested realities that diverged from expectation, gave rise to a black cosmology depicted in truly loving and lavish detail in every detail of the chapel – the pews are capped with carved wood scenes; the font by the front door a detailed granite sculpture depicting people and animals in rosy relief; all of the walls are covered with bright, well-preserved paint. Black Adam, Black Eve. Because when you square divinity and mankind, why should Eden be in Israel? Why not where man as such became Man, in the cradle of Mankind, in Africa? Why should it have been in the “cradle of civilization,” the Middle East, that Man arose? Civilization gives us hierarchy, difference, privilege and deprivation. When Marx writes of the better impulses of Man, he speaks of species-being – of the sense of self that inheres in Man as animal that precedes the abstractions and classifications that devolve from the structure of civilization as such. “Go away and think,” the teacher said. Go away from here, these plaster buildings and thatched school buildings. Go be, go be on your own, go be by yourself, go be with yourself. Communion, that cornerstone of Catholic spiritual practice, is more than just a dry paper wafer given out in the symbolism of the death and eternal life of Christ. It is also a virtue in and of itself – communion with others, with nature, with Man and with animals, with God, and with the self. Communion is about being-with: being with your feelings and beliefs and thoughts. When you’re able to think about your thinking, you’re able to change your mind. There’s nothing wrong with changing your mind. In this contemporary American culture, we shout for inflexibility, and prize it, defining swaths of experience as nonnegotiables; those who stick to their guns in spite of all evidence to the contrary – and here I mean it in the literal, and metaphorical senses of the phrase – are celebrated, as if inflexibility signalled immutable virtue. We understand the terrifying plasticity of young minds, their ability to flex to accommodate new ideas and reshape their worldview. But we tend to believe that that plasticity is lost in the aged, in part because we rely on biophysiological and biochemical ideas of brain functionality to pretend that there aren’t as yet wonders in consciousness that we don’t yet know. As if, as it were, it becomes impossible to change your mind after a certain age. There are plenty of things, I think, worth not changing my mind for. These are the fundamental things: the value of human life and human attempts to live; the idiosyncrasy and wonder of individual humanity that beggars admiration rather than condemnation; our ability to learn to do better, if not good, but also simultaneously the utter lack of the inevitability of progress; our significant and real mutual responsibility and interdependence. There are second-order ideas that lay over these; socialism; feminism; other progressive and radical political ideas. It is the value of an education in the arts and the humanities that these questions and ideas are given space to breathe, to articulate themselves, to remind people that no matter how unproductive these questions may seem, they are infinitely productive of everything that we believe we believe in. In other words, we have answers to these questions, even when our answers may simply be that we don’t know. Knowing that we don’t know is only one thing; choosing to correct that lack of knowledge is another, and so such knowledge of ignorance is itself a position. In my lecturing on research, I fleshed out the bullet points given to me by the syllabus; I feel just enough out of my depth teaching in Journalism that I hewed closely to the plan. One of these was “distinguish between basic and applied research.” It is an easy enough distinction – basic research asks the big questions to produce knowledge without necessary or immediate applications to social, technical, scientific, or technological problems. Applied research seeks to develop application, is performed to answer specific questions with “real” consequences. In a way, this distinction demarcates the difference between the natural sciences and engineering. But it also encapsulates the rich ideological stew of the contemporary moment. All of the sources I combed to make this distinction clear in my lecture expressed an altruistic belief in the power of applied research to solve social ills, and expressed vague regret that “basic” research was less valued these days. All of this is evident in the twining develpments in American higher education – the growth of the cult of STEM; the huge cost and great social faith in Business Schools and degrees; the increasing demand for practical applicability in the workplace; the rhetorical and political devaluation of the humanities and the arts; the increased yoking of social responsibility to higher education; the degradation of teaching to exams and tests; and the real social and economic devaluation of educational labour. In other words, we’re looking to do away with the university. Basic research, the restless quest for answers to fundamental problems and issues, is not in fashion. We are asking students merely to think, not to think about their thinking. We are asking them to perform, even when we try to cultivate environments of safety and encouragement. Go away and think, and come back and paint your think feels almost like a radical manifesto for reinvigorating teaching. I’m lucky to have gone to school with some really spectacular thinkers and teachers. There’s Carrie, who’s built a queer resource center and library on campus to encourage self-exploration and built a database of testimonials from humanities grads that they’ve found a range of lives that are consonant with the beliefs they discovered they had in college. There are a half dozen or more colleagues who took positions at community colleges consciously because they valued the lives and difficulties of the students labouring thereat, including Helena, who returned to teach at the community college in Seattle that she herself attended and was deeply developed by.
And there’s Caroline, who leads students into the community to listen to and discuss local environmental issues, who gets her hands dirty in salmon runs and rhapsodizes about dam removals and community impacts. She writes enthusiastically and passionately and tirelessly, understanding the deep and inextricable weave of research and teaching and living. (And there are many more.) On all our syllabi, in this Neoliberal Era, we are required to write learning objective and desired outcomes. What are we being held responsible for communicating to our students, and what particular skills do we believe they should have at the end. We’ve all sat through countless meetings about these standards and measures, and most of us have probably vacillated between believing that they’re not the total worst and that they are, in fact, the worst. Plenty of times, I, most of us, have succumbed to putting in placeholders: “Learns to apply a range of methodologies to research materials.” “Can articulate arguments clearly and with logical supporting evidence.” On Caroline’s syllabi, though, she’s got something quite radical: Learning Outcome: Give a shit about something. In my somewhat conservative employment situation, I can imagine that the language might offend. In the conservative political climate I work in, I can imagine that a State Senator would foolishly point to such a statement as proof of indoctrination. In the current weird-ass political circus of America, it would serve as proof of educational overreach: we are meant to educate, not inflict or impose or cultivate concern. But I’m going to do it, I think. The statement retains the ambivalence that I prize in “go away and think, and come back and paint your think.” Give a shit about something, it says, explicitly. Of course I want you to give a shit about the lives of women from my British Women Writers class. And of course that’s the hopeful, likely outcome. But it might not be, either. It isn’t my failure if I haven’t motivated you as a student in that particular direction, but if I have failed to communicate to you your responsibility to have beliefs and ideas of your own, then I have failed. Of your own. Not my own. Education isn’t indoctrination, but teaching students to think about their thinking, to go away and think and come back and paint their think, to go away and come back and give a shit about something – that seems like a pretty good definition of education. Maria Bellacasa de la Puig argues that there is a danger to cultivating an indiscriminate ethos of “caring.” It should be important, she says, what we care about, and how we care for it. I think she’s quite right, of course; and I think that one of the unsung labours of conscientious education is that we endeavour to cultivate an ethos of care around care: that we seek to teach students about value and harm and Good and truth, that we teach students about consequences and motivations, decisions and indecision. One of the desired teaching outcomes for me, is to teach you how to give a shit about something. I understand that the performance of my real passion for the material I engage with is a rehearsal for students of an adult who is actively engaged with the meaning of the world around him, and the making of the meaning thereof. I believe that apathy is dishonest and lazy; ambivalence is productive. If I can succeed in showing you how to give a shit about something, I hope I can also teach you how to live in the space of ambivalence about something, too. Giving a shit about something doesn’t necessitate making your mind up about it, but rather accepting the idea in its complexity and contingency, and accepting that the struggle with the idea – the thinking about thinking – is the value of the process itself, not arriving at some hard and fast conclusion about it. thanks also to the failing New York Times for their recent takedown of neoliberal learning outcomes: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/23/opinion/sunday/colleges-measure-learning-outcomes.html
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AuthorFulbright Core Teaching/Research Fellowship to Zimbabwe, 2017-2018. Will teach at the National University of Science and Technology in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, and conduct research on the city's literary history, its cultural infrastructure, and its outlets for creative writing. Archives
February 2018
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