Crossroads Community College

I met Greg ten months ago and have sustained a dialogue with him more than any other student since I began teaching at my community college. The question I had since I began teaching was to understand the students who find themselves here, in my developmental education reading and writing classes: How do my students experience the world outside school? and How do I see myself in her story?  As the work took shape, this study with and about one student was not meant to answer my question. It was meant to engage more deeply in the question and be open to new ways of knowing and being with my students. What became and is becoming is what I imagined it could be, a study that speaks to what story I want to make as an educator and what developmental education is and perhaps has always been, a struggle, a crossroads where people try “to become somebody,” as my research-participant Greg states directly, but is fraught with challenges that I should know and feel, not from articles, books, or statistical reports. Known in ways that “we”, broadly speaking to include stakeholders in our higher education system, really have not. Those who affect policy should know these stories because changes on the political horizon will impact the paths students can or cannot take in post-secondary education. 

 

In one sense, this study was very modest: one teacher, one student. Now talk. A feature of the experience could be described as a long in-depth interview with Greg. I continually sought to know him from as many directions as I could and in as many ways he was willing to share in different places and times, always the past and the present and future contexts moving, rubbing against one another, always influencing Greg’s story and the role I might play.

 

Up to this point in my ten-year career as a college teacher, my relationship with students could be characterized as aerodynamically professional, completely framed around syllabus outcomes: friendly, flexible, open to change, playful, and still demanding. I knew what I wanted students to be able to do literacy-wise. Ten weeks are packed with activities that focused on our outcomes: sentence to paragraph to essay work. To do this, I know that the practice together has to be supported with examples and frequent feedback as well as socially-oriented activities. None of this work, I found, meant that I learn more about who my students are beyond where they measure up in the assessments. Of course, I learn from what they share in class about their lives and what they write about. I observe them, look to interpret non-verbal language, what they say, and what they write in course evaluations. But the pace of our work together, the limited time of each class meeting, and the 10-week quarter system makes opportunities to experience and understand students’ lives difficult. In this context, “aerodynamically professional” comes to mean a “no-stick” surface. While I develop my own curriculum tools and continue to tweak them, design new writing assignments, incorporate new technology tools, what I learn about why students withdraw, drop out, disappear, and fail seems just as vague and amorphous as ever. When I examine student success, those who succeed seem a lot like me at their ages. The more middle class, white, high school graduates with parents with some college background the more successful these students are in my classroom. This is unacceptable and suggests a blindness that needs explored.

 

A study of classroom practice certainly was and still is a good option. I have read about a teacher who was not aware that she was washing her hands every time she touched a student who was unlike herself in the same ways I mentioned. I observe myself, particularly have taken note of what students I maintain eye contact with and notice I speak more to those who I feel are receptive to my teaching. I am a good teacher who can teach poorly to some students. Video-recording myself in class, writing reflections about interactions in class and my feelings toward students, and interviewing students about their experiences would likely reveal behaviors that I could change or improve. I could apply findings from the work of behavioral psychologists who analyze social-perspective-taking strategies to measure gestures, eye contact, and tone to improve these and other modalities of communication. This strikes me as valuable but also as a bit superficial and temporary. What really makes teachers change or adults more broadly speaking? And is it really possible knowing that change in adults is rare (Pajares, 1992)? And does stating that one wants change necessarily mean one will actually accept, embrace, and hold to a change, especially one that holds to the promise of improving the understanding and practice of working with others?

 

            Before I began this study, I planned to learn more about who people are in the developmental classroom. I believed that by practicing a methodology that approached the work as relational, hermeneutically-influenced narrative inquiry that a strong relationship would evolve. What did happen is that I care a lot about Greg. As I listened to him talk, sat with him during his assignments, corresponded on email and text-messaging, and then retold his story in Crossroads, the story in its telling and retelling takes a shape inside of my own story. This story, sustained in conversation over many months, is kept as what I will consider to be a “touchstone text”, returned to, ready to use. I am sure there is a lot I do not know about Greg, but the irony is that I came to learn about myself in this process of listening to the perspective of another and seeing myself reflected therein. The idea that to explore a relationship on the border of school, indeed outside of the classroom, stretching into the past and the present, internal ideas and outside perceptions, as a way to be a better teacher, a more human human can seem removed to what it means to be a teacher. It is a bigger picture, actions and events that may resemble what Freire discussed with Horton in We Make the Road by Walking (1990) when he discusses what it means to reread the world, “confirming some already known knowledge and knowing something different . . . [a] going beyond” (Horton, p. 86) to where change is possible.

 

The idea of change is an obstinate one at an individual level. It’s also difficult on a much grander scale when one considers the achievement gap, those yearly K-12 student test scores that often delineate gains in learning among groups and does not disappear when students come to college. As the numbers of students who pursue a higher education increases in pursuit of a national goal of being first in the world in graduation, community colleges are expected to shoulder much of the challenge, according to Bridging the Higher Education Divide (2013), a report that is sounding an alarm about the racial and economic stratification of students in higher education.  The report claims a demographic divide of students in two-year versus four-year schools is increasing, a divide that often mirrors the achievement gap.

 

The Power of the Educational Deficit & Blame Games

Logsdon-Billings (2006) has offered a view of education as a deficit, rather than a gap, that has essentially been culturally sanctioned through systems of justice, economics, and education over the course of this country’s history, a complementary movement that has privileged opportunity and success for some and constrained it for others. Through such a deficit, she argues that taking corrective action in any one or all areas of society is enormously challenging and would take years. No simple solution, no law, no new educational approach can somehow solve the compounding nature of any one-year gap in learning measured in test scores. Teachers play a role in this system. From Hull (1991) to Higbee (2005), a historical blame game in K-16 levels has been noted, placing deficit notions upon students’ flawed characters, biological developments, and cultural differences and communication styles.  Well-trained teachers are not immune, as “resistance is often inchoate just as oppression is not deliberately intended” (Erickson, 1987, p. 352). Classroom discourse analysis can illuminate subtle shifts in a teacher’s holding to a student’s lack of exposure with a task and then slide into blaming a student’s cognitive ability. Such a shift turns a difference into deficit and speaks to “the lasting power of deficit notions in our society” and can subvert “forward-looking notions about language and cognition” (Hull, 1991, p. 313).

[Hegemonic practices] permeate and frame the school experience of students who are members of stigmatized social groups. These practices are enacted by particular social actors. . . . routinely in concert with the cultural assumptions and interests of the dominant group, existing power relationships can be maintained, as it were, by an invisible hand. (Erickson, 1987, p. 352)

 

This “invisible hand” can be associated closely with the “bundled arrangements that pre-determine sayings, doings and relatings” (Kemmis & Smith, 2008, p. 268). From the perspective of the learner, these influences can be seen as “learning architectures” (Lave & Wenger, 1991) and from the teacher’s as “practice architecture” that are

always-already pre-structured, shaping what people think and say, what they do, and how they relate to one another. In this sense, the settings, as sites for practice, are collectively ‘designed’ through traditions and expectations, in ways that shape how people will act when they enter and engage in practice. (Kemmis and Smith, 2008, p. 269)

 

While this architecture influences events, relationships, and results in the classroom, as noted by aforementioned scholars, the tradition is shaped by the broader context of time and place. Therefore, it is useful to look, as Crossroads community college: Flying solo reveals, “into the local community and the broader social order . . . to identify the roots of educational failure or success, trust or mistrust, assent or dissent” (Erickson, 1987, p. 345).

 

This heeds Higbee’s (2005) call for more qualitative research on community college student experience that teachers themselves should be participating in and learning from. This need for participating in the experience of students is Shaughnessy’s (1977) widely recognized “sounding the depths”, where a teacher-researcher opens to the difficulties and incipient excellence of a student (p. 239). Condon (2012) clarifies:

We need to learn to read, to engage with one another’s stories, not as voyeurs but as players, in a dramatic sense, within them, and as actors who may be changed not only by the telling of our own stories, but also by the practices of listening, attending, acknowledging, and honoring the stories of our students . . . (p. 32).

 

In this way, a practice Condon (2012) refers to as “leaning in”, I suggest a kind of engagement with the life of students is an inquiry that has the capacity to improve relations between teachers and students and help sustain both in a hermeneutic sense of opening the self up for further experience. This is not the work that leads to transcendent stories Condon (2012) warns about, those stories that provide a false sense of rising above but entering into the fray. Such study depends on the teacher researcher and participants building or at least claiming agency through their voices and a trust between them that has the potential to rearrange the “architecture of a classroom,” if at least make it more visible.

 

Touchstone Texts in the Making

Neilsen (1998) discusses literacy in a way that explains how adolescents and adults develop critical awareness and agency in one’s own life and how texts become real and incorporated into lived experience or inserted into their social world. In her analysis the potential for stories takes an indelible shape in the lives of those who witness, share, and take up their re-telling. Those texts that become real enter the social space and factor into an on-going dialogue. As Neilsen observed, her son’s and his friend’s on-going dialogue about one of their favorite movies. These young people repeat lines and re-hash moments of the story’s plot in various contexts of their lives. They continue to relive and retell the story, thinking of it in different ways. Neilsen describes this experience as a “touchstone text” in such a way that I see the story not as a past experience but as one that grows in its usefulness, is ever-present, its images and events, ready to be called into play, changing but never forgotten.

 

For myself, I expect this text-in-the making to become real enough that the story Greg tells and that I retell becomes a touchstone text that will shape and influence my seeing and engaging of the “other” in and beyond the classroom and even have the potential to become a “touchstone text” for others who “read” the text might also be engaged to listen deeply, engage in meaning-making with it, and re-tell it.   To further explain this idea, I see this as an evolution of He and Phillion’s (2004) idea of literary imagination via printed text. This is text in the making.

 

Phillion and He (2004) introduce narrative imagination as a mode of inquiry to building empathy and understanding in teachers for students with whom they share little in the way of experience in the world.  This is a commonly accepted purpose, generally speaking, of literature. Close at hand to literary imagination, narrative inquiry involves researchers selecting narratives of their own or from other stakeholders and these stories take many shapes: personal narratives, autobiographies and biographies, life histories, and oral histories, to name a few.  This educational research “is one way of investigating theoretical and practical problems and illuminating human actions through the study of subjectivity, experience, and culture” (Schaafasma & Vinz, 2011, p. 29-30).

 

Texts of all kinds then can be used to build understandings. The hermeneutic experience that underpins narrative inquiry (Kinsella, 2006) provides inroads into a method in the making that holds rich possibilities for those who collaborate on such research, in my case, teacher and the student him- or herself.  This method in the making concerns itself with questions of what enables understanding beyond the will of the individual or a particular method while acknowledging human creativity (Smits, 1997) and the role of language and “active engagement in the construction of narratives” (Smits, 1997, p. 19).

To understand literary imagination as acquiring awareness by way of walking in another’s shoes and entering the world of the other, one becomes “an intelligent reader of that person’s story, and to understand the emotion and wishes and desires that someone so placed might have” (Naussbaum, pp. 10-11) as well as enabling one to “cross the empty spaces between ourselves and those we teachers have called ‘other’ over the years” (Green, 1995, p. 3). This clearly correlates to the aim of qualitative research to reveal and achieve greater understandings.

 

To help explain this entering into literary imagination, which I claim is at the center of making a touchstone text, Connell’s (2008) exploration of Rosenblatt’s reader-response theory is important. Here the experience of reading a text can be thought of as co-creating a new story with a research collaborator and its possible meanings in and around and through narrative inquiry. Rosenblatt’s ideas, which lean on Dewey’s pragmatic philosophy, involve a generative and transactional experience that can occur “during the interplay between particular signs and a particular reader at a particular time and place” (Rosenblatt, 2005, p. xxxiii).  This is the temporal context of narrative inquiry that shapes transactions by unique pasts, the shared present, and future potentialities. Rosenblatt emphasizes this deeply human transaction as certainly not objective nor does it resemble an economic exchange involving currency and, hence, a banking process of transferring information of which both modern and past educational practices have been accused, as well as modernist research.  Rather, what I consider a narrative-building experience, reading “highlights an active, reciprocal relation between reader[s or researchers] and text that brings together a complex mix of personal, textual, and contextual elements as the initial phase in a process of meaning making” (Connell, 2008, p. 104).  Connell clarifies this as a personal connection wherein readers engage in critical social processes of examining interests and meanings with other readers, and some elements of the personal aesthetic experience are brought into a realm of shared meanings. This is therefore a reader-plus-text perspective that recognizes

 

the organic relation between reader and text in a meaning-making process 

that considers continuity and social contexts is crucial to the transactional

perspective. These fundamental connections to Dewey’s notion of the

transactional nature of experience are important to understanding the

evolving balance between reader and text in Rosenblatt’s theory. (Connell,

2008, p. 106)

 

This balance, Connell holds, is found in a process of experimentation and inquiry that provided Rosenblatt with an epistemological foundation from Dewey: “what has been completely divided in philosophical discourse into man and world, inner and outer, self and not-self, subject and object, are in actuality parties in life-transactions” (Dewey and Bentley, 1940, p. 104) that are processed through readers, and in my endeavor, researcher’s personal, social, linguistic, and cultural history to create educational experience. This has the potential to go beyond literary imagination to one of relationship and empathy in “an ongoing continuum” of purposes for meaning-making among its participants. This ongoing continuum is the life of a touch-stone text.

 

This discussion of using theories of reading to expand understanding of touchstone texts connects to a discussion of experience and hermeneutics, especially as explained as “the art of understanding” such that it is a practice related to discourse and understanding, or verstehen (Gallagher, 1992, p. 3). Whereas hermeneutics has used text as the paradigm, the emphasis here is the interpretation and the broadening of focus to nontextual phenomena. Philosophers reconfigured hermeneutics as existential and phenomenological understanding, and Gadamer (1979) claimed that hermeneutics allows “what seems to be far and alienated . . . by the character of being distantiated by cultural or historical distances speak again” (p. 83).  This expansion of the concept of hermeneutics makes the world a text calling for interpretation and the same kind of processes of textual interpretation and engagement apply to understanding the world.

 

            Doing the work of hermeneutics, however, can make one vulnerable to his or her subjective-relativist references and images of self.  The experience makes visible, if not fractures, a pre-conception of self and world. Mayo (2004) contends that “a suspicion that one does not know as much as one thinks one knows allows one to remain more open to the possibility of difficult relations. Further, a suspicion about one's ignorance can be a motivation to form relations that keep one grappling with one's understanding of the world” (125-6). The transactional experience of reading and now interpreting involves grappling or wrestling with the meaning in an on-going continuum.

 

Entering the Story, Finding Roles

            There is conflict or challenge taking place in the making of a touch-stone text. One is not on the sidelines caught up in the drama of the story, but a character in a real sense during the conduct of a narrative inquiry study. In the video-journal labeled “L. Phip’s Reflection 2.18” (appendix), I put myself on camera to do what Greg, my research participant, had been doing and would be doing for several months. The 16:06 video, viewable here: https://vimeo.com/73703494, shows me grappling, or even groping for understanding, after Greg had called to let me know he would not be able to come to school because his mom had the car. In the video I review our conversation on our way to school and also the conference we had after his class.  I struggle to position myself as a teacher and what role I have to play in supporting Greg. As an intensive advisor, I have to help my advisee build a connection to the college, navigate its bureaucracy and resources, and assist him with his developmental reading and writing coursework. Up to the point of making this video-journal, I had been meeting Greg once a week for a month for approximately three hours of face-to-face advising and Greg himself had logged 12 video-journals. My role in this study and in the advisor relationship had become fairly consistent at this point: I listened to him describe his work, I asked questions, and I monitored his place in class and directed his efforts. It was basically a support role. In this reflection I found myself confronting the boundaries of what my job was and assumptions I held about Greg. Here is an excerpt:

 

We talked about politics a little bit. I have the radio on and I was a little surprised by his . . . I got to learn something out, I don't know if I was surprised … I think I might've been. He says he gets his information from a couple sources I've never heard of, Russian TV, [and] sounded like a radio host out of Texas and have some criticisms of the current president of his politics and maneuverings so that kind of surprised me that a person who's Black and young who is suspicious of a black president, the first black president this country, not what I would hope but not necessarily something I would necessarily not suspect.

 

I probably have made assumptions and not thought about them though. I did offer and asked him if he had lunch and he said not really but he would be fine so I did not push that point. What else … I did share some of my views not really specific I didn't say I would favor the president on most issues as opposed to … against those who would oppose him.

 

I am in favor of Obama but not without criticism also. And he expressed a conspiracy theory. He believes that in 2016 the United States is going down, going down and by 2016 he said it might be gone. That was a surprise and the move to take guns from people is connected to China and that they will end up coming here and we won't have guns to defend ourselves. That's how I understood it anyway.

 

“Surprises” are where new perceptions confront assumptions about Greg and are clear here and continue to emerge over six months and can be isolated into themes:

• Greg is alone in school

• Greg is fiercely independent

• Greg’s views lean on conservative ideology

• Greg’s perspective of his earlier schooling history is unclear but obviously full of conflict

• Facing math is not only cognitive but seems psychological

• Financial issues frequently enter into and strain his position in college

• Sudden and regular shifts in economic, legal and social areas of his life send tremors into his educational experience

Such perceptions named themes are readings of pieces of his story he’s experiencing with me, as he sits across a table, in the doorway of my cubicle, in the passenger seat of my car. He shares in the transaction of his own story, and I myself over weeks and months of our meetings, make meaning as we both grapple with understanding the past and the present and what roles we play in this story. In an April 2 video-journal, Greg comments: “I be looking around and I be wondering. Everybody wanted him to be president so they could keep getting their welfare checks, their foodstamps. . . . We don’t need government. . . He wanted all of us Americans on foodstamps, be more dependent on government. Control over us.” And on April 11, in an interview, I raise a question about the nature of our relationship, specifically asking about trust. Greg veers into a broader discussion of people, particularly in school and math class in particular. “People are just so distant,” he says, and a few sentences later he comments: “First appearance people want to judge. Walk in the room people want to perceive me as a bad guy, like a gang banger. But in reality I’m not that person. The only way they have to try to get to know me. . .” (April 11 interview). He continues:

 

When I look at our culture, we have a trust issue. The way they perceive us automatically. When people get out here, smile in your face, pump you up, get you all comfortable, and then doing the complete opposite. Being in class and you’re the only black person, even though it’s not obvious, almost like a tension vibe. A secret level, somewhat of a little bit of race. Other races are usually against us, we kind of have this crazy messed up attitude, kind of rejecting that same thing and it shouldn’t be like that. But trust is something you have to slowly build because a lot of people be like that fake stuff, they falsify and it’s a hard thing to separate and grasp. . . It’s all about the thinking in the mindset. It has to start from that and build from that. (April 11 interview)

 

Kerdeman (2003) recalls Gaddamer’s concept of being pulled up short, which is relevant to this experience that increasingly grows in its complexity and its conflicts--emotional, social, legal, and academic. This involves “events we neither want nor foresee and to which we may believe we are immune interrupt our lives and challenge our self-understanding in ways we cannot imagine in advance of living through them” (p. 208). This idea of pulling up short also speaks to Mayo’s (2004) idea that education is not to become home, in the sense of making it a comfortable, accepting environment where conflict does not live. "The experience ought not to send them into a comfortable exchange of stories, but should push them into a painful, critical reexamination of their active ignorance about difference" (Mayo, p. 127).

 

When a Story Becomes Real: Facing the Self in the Other

Difference in this experience with Greg may largely be due to my assumptions of Greg that I brought into our relationship, assumptions influenced by stereotype or the architectures I have inherited from society. Palmer (1998) claims that teachers and students “are constantly engaged in a seamless exchange between whatever is ‘out there’ and whatever is ‘in here’, co-creating reality, for better or for worse” (p. 47). Over regular conversations and communications, the “out there” becomes “in here” in ways I had not experienced before in conversation with other students and in their writing. I cannot read or watch Greg’s video without questioning whether the years of hushed comments from colleagues who suspect some students in developmental classes are enrolled because of the “free” money they might get through federal financial assistance—had I allowed such negative views and others more subtle but no less detrimental in their power to limit our relationship to take up space in my lens of viewing students I work with?  Greg seems to be speaking directly to me as potentially one of those “people be like that fake stuff” (April 11 interview) and who judges others. I was completely unprepared to listen closely and act and therefore came to see my own finitude, or lack of ability to control the world, as he shared his. Such an acknowledgement, Gadamer (1981) claims, is an understanding that entails a loss or exposed weakness in myself. Kerdman (2003) helps explain:

 

While accepting this paradox is hard, doing so can free us from the despair that denying it arouses. In this way, being pulled up short can liberate us to become more fully human and 'present' in the world. . . . While this experience is painful, living through it can awaken us to choices we could not otherwise imagine. (p. 289)

 

 Working with students in developmental classes should offer routine opportunities to be “pulled up short”, an awakening in each present that lends itself to a feeling of loss and awareness of notions of deficit fed by grand narratives that have shaped identities of largely a white, middle-class teacher population. Pervasive, shared assumptions about ability and remediation that can influence teacher-student relations and assessment of a student is difficult to demonstrate (Hull, 1991), but in the course of this study which has taken the shape of a story, the transactions characterized by grappling and being pulled up short are on-going.

 

 I am suggesting a different narrative can be shaped with practitioner-researcher and student-participant research that is supported by sustained dialogue, which does not guarantee anything but a decentering. Condon (2012) insists that she question the sense of self as alone and not responsible for her subjectivities. To make learning possible, she inquires into the “depth and degree of my connectedness to those social and historical forces” that she enacts in her experience (p. 62). What can be experienced is the self as a stranger, or

. . . the miniature version of the self that can be seen by leaning in to see one’s own reflection in the eye of an Other. Decentering is like this. I try to shift the focus of the aperture of my mind’s eye, to open it wider, to let in more light. I need to see, to know differently. I try to move myself so that what I can see of the world changes. I need to see, to know the world differently. (p. 62)

 

Decentering, as being pulled up short, is epistemological and rhetorical practice, “a way of re-searching, and thus of producing new knowledge about the self-in-the world” (Condon, 2012, p. 63). This is the “leaning in”, which also leads to an unhinging from reasonability, that self one knows and is comfortable with, in order to “change the conditions of possibility for being differently and resistingly in that world” (p. 62). Along with my own decentering, I can hear evidence of not just confronting some of my assumptions but of my role as a teacher. I was in the role of “intensive advisor” but still saw myself as a teacher questioning what I have previously referred to as “no-stick” pedagogy and practice despite what I may have thought about my classes being based on social interactions and learning about one another. I also carry with me the title of developmental instructor that is often associated with the phrase “hand-holding”, a disparaging expression for what we are sometimes asked or offered to do for students.  In the same video-journal, I talk about the decision to offer and follow through with picking Greg up for school. I imagine what being in the world differently might look and feel like. A clear sense of risk comes to the surface as I examine what I consider reasonableness and unreasonableness:

 

Listening to the radio on the way back from lunch, after dropping Greg off, I was listening to Harry Belafonte give a speech, an acceptance speech, for an award he just accepted and he had talked about radical voice, the need for a radical voice and I'm thinking about my move, which was to go, my offer to go get Greg, may be considered radical and it's such an obvious thing that anybody would do for a friend, obviously a family member, but a professional a professional teacher to go get a student and bring them to school is breaking clearly a written or unwritten rule. It may be written someplace I don't know but at least it's . . . you are crossing a personal, uh, outside of school, space where people feel vulnerable in the established relationship of what, how we treat each other is confused and so that is a dangerous, if you want to consider it radical, if I'm trying to elevate my behavior to what Harry Belafonte might be suggesting about needing to talk the voice and I am thinking as a thought that, yes, that is a radical action. Could it be care if I want it to be or as an example, right, of my wanting to get to, talk about it on camera, even though I will claim I am not, would be doing this if I was not doing the research would I do that. I would think about it, I don't know if I would've acted on it. Who's to say, but the point here is, I think, the thought of do we need to question what it is to the relationship of teacher to student. Is it time to consider the broader context beyond the classroom walls as space where a teacher can, uh, be a human being with, toward, alongside, students in . . . a way that may or may not have been considered in a discussion of research. I'm not saying teachers haven't done this and do it, they're just not typically tasked with it and it's a scary thing. (2.18)

 

It’s an acute example of being pulled up short, as I watch myself squirm and essentially say that being a teacher does not allow one to behave as a human being sometimes: The role of teacher has a professional ethos that can essentially constrain a human response, such as leaving to give a student a ride. In this moment I cross physically onto the path of the experience I am researching. It’s a moment where I suggest that I enter the story as a clear actor and the consequences of this role may affect my relationship with Greg and perhaps my school. I question the motives behind my behavior, calling out the possibility of wanting to perform a transcendent act, a heroic role. I dismiss this as “ridiculous.” I also raise the question of my own maturity, testing the experience to see if it holds up against a past experience. I wander eventually into this notion of teacher behavior that can be “radical” and whether the time is right to ignore what I believed were safe roles. This story now had me inside of it and it was messy and unclear. Greg was also experiencing his own challenges in his experience as a college student as he stared down his past and complicated his present place as a student.

 

The Past as a Character in the Present Story

            Since I began teaching college developmental education classes, I have wanted to understand prior experiences of students’ educational backgrounds. The last page of the syllabus can be torn off and turned in. It asks students to respond briefly to biographical questions, one of which asks them to write a past school experience.  I anticipated students’ childhoods, broadly speaking, and specifically school, were not always easy for students in my classes. References to troubled pasts have not been uncommon, but the stories I thought would help me see what they bring with them were few and with little detail, and what I heard or read have not stuck with me, inform my understanding. In my study with Greg, he not only talks about his prior schooling, but he physically revisits the front doors of some of his prior schools, turns on the camera and talks. In interviews, he also draws on these experiences. The main impression he leaves from his reflections are not positive.  On February 6, parked in front of an elementary school, Greg’s faces grows dark with a scowl as he revisits this time:

 

This school I had a lot of bad memories for my school career. This is the back end of clinton. Things just wasn’t as chopped up to be. It’s just one of the bad experiences I That’s prob one of the reasons I have a difficult time in school now. Kind of why I don’t branch out, be asking for help and things like that. Like going to that school over there, I just felt like I was always, uh,  rejected. You know what I’m saying, I asked for help, I could never get it. Teachers used to put their hands on me. Like I go report things. It was just a whole mess. I don’t know. Once I got to different schools I guess it was a little different. Not too much. They still had it planned out and plotted like you know what I’m saying, like what I was going to become. You know. I gues it was just one of those things, right? (February 6, Driving)

 

One week later, sitting at a picnic table, Greg again returns to the topic of his educational experiences through his high school education. He summarizes: “K through 12 was a very bad experience. I was kind of abused when I went through elementary school. In middle school I started to rebel. In high school, they didn’t take the time to show me anything. Already had me labeled as some type of thug or in prison before I was 25” (February 15, Picnic Table).  At times like these, Greg sounds victimized, then he will claim a role in what was happening, saying he was by no means an easy student to be around. He clarifies that he had attention deficity/hyperactive disorder (ADHD) and problems controlling his anger. “I had abandonment issues growing up.  So I guess that played a role. Some people don’t know how to handle something like that when it’s standing right in front of them. Yeah, so those were some rough years” (Driving, February 6). More than two months after beginning the study, Greg, in a March 13 interview behind shelves in the college library, recalled being a “hostile student” who would “blow a gasget and like I would try to clear out the whole library, I was just that type of person.” As he continued he took a more reflective turn, one using what sounds like a tone and distance of someone who has gained wisdom:

But now growing up, looking back, seeing all my mistakes and things like that, seeing how far I’ve came, it just . . . I’m hungry for that change and I know I have changed a lot over the years since high school, but there’s always room for more change. And coming here it just fills me up more. I don’t know, I guess that’s kinda why I figure I’m going to register for another class or something . . . I just feel like I need to make a correction from the bad experiences I did have in school . . . I just want to be able to turn all that around. School is a good thing. It’s not all chopped up and critical like everyone says. I just want to have something good to talk about. Like, I don’t know. Just . . . I just want to show a big positive throughout this whole experience. That anybody can do it.  (3/13 interview)

 

As I revisit the shared experience of sitting with Greg when he says this and the video-journals at the picnic table and outside of one of his elementary schools, I get the sense that he is “confirming some already known knowledge and knowing something different . . . [a] going beyond” (Horton, p. 86) to where change is possible for him. At the same time, I get to participate in some of the conversation where this is taking place, and in so doing, the complexity of the past and the clarity of the present helps me see the difficulty of expressing just a story of your past school experience, especially to a stranger who is also connected to a school. Many threads of story that Greg visits share this complexity. One way to see them is that Greg is victim of a story, a narrative of school abusing him, planning his future. Another view is that Greg begins writing his own story, claiming his role in his past and authoring his own story of his future, as he himself returns to several times when he considers taking on the “myth of school,” whether it really does matter, that a person isn’t anything without an education. But he knows this is no easy happily ever after story. School, he has found, is a place where he can find some success; it’s also a place that’s “tough and it’s really intimidating” and the demeaning sense of stereotyping is debilitating (May 8, Math interview). At the same time, he expresses fear that outside of class he is “about to get railroaded” in court and lose his license, claiming responsibility for some of his traffic citations but is being treated unfairly at the same time.

 

Responding in a New Story

            The reality of what is fair for some and unfair for others is a challenge to society and teachers in particular. Can school be a myth for some and a reality for others, as Greg says, speaking generally and at once aiming it at his own situation. This prompts me to look broadly at our shared landscape and ask myself, at the immediate point of contact, within the conversation, am I holding up my end of the bargain as someone who is expected to help improve the situation. With Greg, I scribbled down a math plan for him: where to go (Multi-Academic Center), when, and how often. We set short-term goals for using resources he will not follow. I am mostly mute when he hits what I consider a bottoming out point and says, “What a helluva life. Lincoln’s sucking me dry. One way or another. It’s rough. It’s rough. You can tell me if I sound crazy” and shakes his head. I stumble. I grope for words. I hesitate and stammer, “I don’t. . . . You have a lot on your plate, that’s for sure. . . I know one thing, that school should be a bright place . . .”

            “I love coming to school,” he jumps in. “Every day, even though I don’t go to math class. I like the environment. . . . And when you do something good and get recognized for it it makes you feel good. Like an addiction” (May 8, Math interview).

            Yes, bright spots. But difficulties, to say the least. In the May 18 interview, Greg contemplates running from his problems. “It ain’t all new to me. It just gets old after a while. You just get drained,” he says. Without notice to me, Greg, failing math but passing his English 1010/Composition I class, takes a job that takes him out of town and stops coming to class. Then, he texts me and this exchange occurs:

 

 

I do not fully understand Greg’s financial situation. I have never been in his situation before, I do understand. I email his English teacher and let him know I am working with Greg and explain the situation. Other than that, Greg drops in and shows me two of his compositions that I give him a few pointers on. Before the end of the term, Greg quits the job and attends the last few class sessions and manages a passing grade.  I recall a part of a February 20 blog from the previous developmental English class: “There is always room to grow and learn new things or brush up on new things. I just have to slow down and take the time to understand how and what I need to do in order to understand these things that im writing.” His awareness of his learning processes struck me. The manner in which he presented events in his final Composition I essay “The Waitress Has Gone Mad” indicated that he was taking his time, going slow in his descriptions of an unpleasant breakfast experience at the Village Inn near my house. When the waitress, the source of behavior I can hardly imagine, handed Greg and his two friends their checks, she asked about her tip, and the young men indicated that the service had been unreasonably poor. “She responded with ‘No Tip then No Grip’ and snatched the piece of toast out of my mouth. I couldn’t help but choke and give her this crazy look with a smirk on my face in disbelief. My friends started to laugh as she slammed dishes into the bucket and pushed the cart away.” Greg’s tone in the essay was not one of hurt or humiliation or bitterness, emotions I imagine I would feel. He had crafted a story of an event that he and his friends now recall, Greg concludes, with laughter.

            Greg seems to accept certain conditions in the landscape of his life, many of them, as he would say, are “hectic” and “ferocious.” He just rolls with many of them. When I connected him with a friend who offered free legal service, Greg shrugged it off. I wanted to fight the citations that put his dream of becoming a heavy equipment operator in jeopardy. The legal system can be flexible for some people, I know, just as I believe educators can be flexible with students in unique circumstances.  When Greg text-messaged to ask to meet, I was relieved that he was reaching out. It felt right assisting in the communication with his instructor and meeting on that Sunday at my house to go over his assignments. The story of a touchstone text in the making connected to other conceptions of curriculum and learning.

Running the Course: Currere and Bildung

            Pinar (2011) explains the conception of curriculum as a verb (currere) -- a lived experience, a running of the course “wherein the curriculum is experienced, enacted, and reconstructed. . . . through conversation, not only classroom discourse” but among students and teachers and within oneself (p. 2). Equally important is the educational concept of Bildung, the cultivation of the “inner life,” such as the soul, the mind, the person and his or her humanity (Biesta 2003). These concepts emphasize curriculum as experience and privileges the individual through “constant self-education” in “an open-ended process without set goals, except for each individual striving to perfect himself” (Mosse, 2000, 184). Bildung suggests an ideal and currere helps direct the process through academic subjects with conversation with others who are different, and therefore complicated, and reflection. “The fact that conversation is, then, complicated is not only a pedagogical problem but also an educational opportunity to understand difference within resemblance, and not only across our species but also within life on earth, as well as within our own individuality, as subjectivity itself is an ongoing conversation,” Pinar (2011, p. 6) explains.

            These actions encompassed by ideas of Bildung and currere rebuff a rote learning concept of education and the codified nature of conversation that often characterizes school discourse. They also would be constrained within what Lave and Wenger (1991) call “learning architectures” and later what Kemmis and Smith (2008) call “practice architectures” where within particular settings there are bundled arrangements that pre-determine sayings, doings and relatings.

These architectures connect to what Doll calls the “ghost” in school curriculum as “control,” (in Pinar, 2011, p. x) which of course is more than a phantom; control has a role in these traditions that, while it can be defended, can constrain the individual. I directly raised the question of control to an elementary principal and friend: In what situation can you ignore or break a school rule for an individual? This question defies an easy answer without context. I believe teachers and administrators can and should be ready to break a rule, change a lesson’s direction, and ask and respond to unpredictable questions based on the broader idea of enacted and embodied curriculum referred to previously.

            To break with a rule, a plan, a behavior, or a belief requires the ability to act educationally, foregrounding the individual, not the system or some other guideline. Kemmis and Smith (2008) call for a praxis stance that supports the idea of currere and Bildung. That is, a praxis stance drives to build a practitioner’s capacity to act in the interests of each student, society, and communities that allows for prudent decisions in the “heat of the moment” as action is unfolding in order to serve the individual and the development of society and the community. “Enabling praxis, then, requires developing an enduring commitment to acting in ways that avoid doing harm, and that avoid injustice” (Kemmis and Smith, p. 265) to the individual and “requires a commitment to one’s own self-development, and one’s development in connection with others” (p. 271). Kemmis and Smith (2008) recall Hoyle’s (1974) “extended professional” who is given not just the technical skills and content to do their work, but “also the professional autonomy and responsibility to act in the interests of students, their communities and their societies” (p. 275).

            Some can say this sounds pretty good for a developmental education teacher, as someone who might’ve said at one time, “Pretty good, for a girl.” Scholarship that involves extended study of a student’s experience will perhaps benefit the teacher-researcher more than the researcher. It is a commitment to one’s own self-development, and one’s development in connection with others in pursuit of the good of all humankind (Kemmis & Smith, 2008). I contend this scholarship can and should contribute to larger policy issues, especially for and by developmental educator-researchers whose discipline faces a growing scrutiny by state and national interests. This scholarship should address academic and non-academic support questions in one’s own institution and the larger special interest policy initiatives which are currently shaping a national agenda for developmental education reform (Lu, 2013; Managan, 2012, 2013). Much of this agenda is predicated on a false interpretation of data regarding the influence of developmental education (Goudas & Boylan, 2012). Bahr (2011) bemoans the small fraction of total research on community college students and how little qualitative research exists to inform the much larger body of quantitative study. 

In the absence of such qualitative work, quantitative researchers are left to speculate about the reasons and causes of observed associations, and this speculation carries over into proposed interventions—to the detriment of the success of those interventions.

(p. 7)

Bahr (2011) argues for a shift in research that has been traditionally tied to simple analyses of pre- or early-college student characteristics and credential completion or drop-out outcomes.  Pathways students select while in college and relationships between decisions and student outcomes as well as why they make these decisions will provide “insight into students’ understanding of key decision points and the meanings that they attribute to their choices” (Bahr, 2011, p. 2).  Research with students, such as mine with Greg, provide insight into these decisions, some of which can be supported by the school, such as advising, tutoring, and navigating the college; others may not, such as legal and financial, and can inform different kinds of studies, perhaps larger qualitative ones. But I would be anxious to see a study with more individuals be as illuminating and create a stronger argument than Greg’s voice over six months. One viewer of Crossroads community college: Flying solo asked, now that Greg helped me with this research, what am I going to do for him and others. I agreed, but also turned the question inside out and asked myself, “What am I not willing to do for him?” This is not rhetorical. I shared earlier my reflection after picking Greg up for school and thought about a radical voice and a radical practice that moved into an enabling of praxis. But like this study, which looked beyond just the school, the teacher-researcher has to move beyond the school and advocate for the life of that story, which can expand understandings of enacting curriculum and the broader landscape of our educational system. The touch-stone text calls to be used particularly in how it resists reduction. I draw on it now, spoken to me in the midst of experience I shared:

Those are just the opportunities I’m try to steer away from because there are too many statistics out here people going to the pen, going to prison for things, dieing out here, doing stupid things. There’s too much of that going on out here. Just putting people as statistics in the books. I don’t want to be a statistic. If there really ain’t nothing out here to really be successful at other than working at Burger King or something else. So I need to find something that’s outside of what’s deterring me from all that. (Greg, interview, March 13)