Crossroads Community College

Phip Ross

Teacher-Researcher

I have been teaching for about 17 years, 7 in the high school classroom in rural Nebraska and Wyoming. Before that, I was a small-town newspaper guy.  The last ten years I have been at Southeast Community College where I teach mostly what is commonly referred to as developmental education, particularly reading and writing.

 

For the last several years I have been involved in three "big" experiences. First, I went back to school to study education. I wanted to learn more about learning, the theory and practice. I wanted to engage with others in this pursuit, wherever each one of us was on our personal and professional paths. So, it was intellectual and social. I wanted the intellectual "shock & awe" while also accompanying that--both good and bad--with others. Second, I became quasi-administrative as I coordinated a TAA Grant from U.S. Department of Labor. I was charged with changing developmental education. And for number three, the experience was just uttering a sentence: I don't know anything when I enter the classroom. I mean, can you believe I said that. This wasn't a scolding I give myself in front of a mirror with toothpaste running down my chin. This was actually in a classroom. Guess which of three responses happened in this evening graduate-level course where I was a student:  I was rejected openly as a doofus; I was hoisted upon the shoulders of classmates for breaking some kind of "insight" barrier; I was completely ignored.  Perhaps the answer was all three, plus maybe even a fourth: Incomprehension. 

 

 

Aspects of education that I've come to learn, or notice more intensely, are a couple things about being a teacher:

 

1. The well-being of a teacher matters. And it's always difficult on many fronts, but mainly because of policies that are often handed down on us that turns our work into a technical, mechanistic experience. You know the quote by E.B. White: "I arise in the morning torn between the desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day." Well, it's hard to do either for teachers these days. 

 

2. The well-being of each student matters more. But the former has an impact on the latter and vice versa. You get it. The two--teacher & student--are reciprocal, relational. We share a space. It's compromised by the "furniture" of the school and its history.  

 

There is humility in teaching. Accepting that I do not know the answers to all of the questions in my classroom hits me every day because I have to understand who is asking the questions. Teachers learn to do this and relearn this. Otherwise, the "good" teacher is a bad teacher, particularly to those students who need to learn the most formal education. Policymakers need to learn this too. The answers are not always in the numbers. The variables in one learning interaction often stretch back into time, the historical, the cultural, the economic sense of time. 

 

Engaging in narrative inquiry helps situate one in a space where glimpses of experience in the past influence the future, see the landscape beyond the classroom walls and into the community. Greg teaches me about this. Being present to what is happening in a student's life can be painful, as one comes face-to-face with assumptions about the human being working with you. 

 

As the coordinator of the grant, I gathered all kinds of quantitative data with my team, but we also sought out students' experience, recorded them speaking, allowing their faces and body language do the communicating. It helps one understand the work educators do is personal.  Crossroads Community College is not a project. It's a retelling of a story that continues today, calls me to work with Greg and others in ways I had not imagined. Not that I know any better, have become a sage, just that I want to listen more and learn.

 

I have shared some quantitative data on this website about developmental education. At the same time I am sharing some of Greg's story. How should one story influence the larger debate or should it play a role beyond what one teacher learns? Those who study decision making know that one anecdote can overpower the logic of studies. For example, if a Consumer Report claims that in a study of 1,000 Hyundai Elantras over the course of driving at least 50,000 miles, the car had a high dependability rating. Yet, if I have a neighbor who tells me his brother had one and it was a real lemon, an undue emphasis is often placed on the anecdote. The story becomes a heuristic, a mental shortcut. One may claim that that's what my study is suggesting. I claim that it's intention is to make complicated the work of teaching, particularly in developmental education at a community college. 

 

In a real sense, this work is selfish. I did it for me. I need to know better who my students are. I am starting by learning to see one over six months, building a relationship in the process that I'd not experienced before. I believe more teachers should be do this and be sharing the experience with one another as well as other stakeholders, like policymakers.