Joyful Tidings #20 Conversational Synergy

Classroom Teaching, Equity, Joyful Tidings, Musings

While we could debate what aspects of and approaches to teaching and learning we wish to discuss as a community of teachers and learners, I hope we can all agree that the conversations themselves are essential.

Talking to each other about our teaching and learning opens us to ideas, relationships, and inspiration we can miss as we focus on our day to day work at the college. (It took me three hours to write that sentence without using the phrase “hunkered down in our silos,” which just shows how educational jargon has corrupted my very soul!).

I want to share an experience I have had with this kind of conversational synergy over the past few days.

Empathy

Just this weekend, our VP of Instruction Diane Dieckmeyer sent me this email:

Hi Jim,
I’m at an Equity Summit listening to an English professor talk about empathy being the key to true efforts in equity. I thought you might find this quote of interest.
Best,
Diane
And here is the quote Diane sent in an image that looks like she took it from her cell phone”

 

A Pedagogy of Love

This quote about empathy and its importance to our work sparked a connection to something my sociology colleague Alicia Lopez shared during a flex week second year faculty retreat on pedagogy: Antonia Darder’s “Teaching as an Act of Love: Freire in the Classroom” (a chapter, by the way, in a recently reissued cornucopia of pedagogical inspiration: Reinventing Paulo Freire).

Over the past few weeks, I have been working my way through that chapter Alicia pointed me to again and again. Not surprisingly then, Diane’s email about empathy sent me back to Alicia’s suggested read one more time. As I reviewed my kindle reader color coded highlights looking for that connection point between empathy and love  lurking somewhere in the back of my murky and overloaded brain, I found this:

“…a student enters the classroom as a whole person and should be respected and treated as such. However, the degree to which this is possible is directly linked to a teacher’s willingness and ability to be fully present and in possession of the capacity to enter into dialogical relationships of solidarity with students…and colleagues”
Darder, Antonia. Reinventing Paulo Freire: A Pedagogy of Love (Kindle Locations 2259-2262). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.

 

Undoubtedly the Darder / Freire concept of “dialogical relationships” and Buber’s idea of “a genuine meeting” are not exactly the same thing (experts in either or both could, I am sure, limn out important distinctions. But my point here is that an idea shared by one colleague sent me to a reading recommended by another, and the connection between the two ignited some thinking for me about how I teach, why I teach, and how I think about our students and my relationship to them. Thanks to the intersections of the ideas shared with me by two very different colleagues, the next time I enter a classroom, or work on a learning activity, or read an email from a student looking for help finding a carpool to campus, I am going to be thinking in new ways (or perhaps even old forgotten ways!) about my teaching and learning.

The Real World Is Right Here!

The very next sentences in the Darder chapter Alicia sent me to connected me to yet another idea from yet another colleague. 
“As is likely evident, this view of the student-teacher relationship goes hand in hand with obliterating the myth that the classroom isn’t “the real world.” For teachers who aspire to a revolutionary practice, anywhere where human beings are congregated and engaged in relations of power (as they are in schools) constitutes a real-world experience.”

Darder, Antonia. Reinventing Paulo Freire: A Pedagogy of Love (Kindle Locations 2262-2265). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.

Since last spring, my colleague Tony Burman has been lamenting how our culture ropes off college as an artificial space. Tony has been thinking about how faculty and students could partner in “real world” projects here at the college. His premise is that if we recognize that MiraCosta is the “real world,” we can discover all sorts of practical applications and connections right here where we are already gathered. These faculty/student team practicum possibilities could spin myriad webs of engagement and collaboration:

  • communications, English, and business students and faculty might work with the PIO office on designing promotional  materials for the college;
  • nurses and students and faculty in health related fields might work with student services to develop wellness programs and activities on campus;
  • business students and faculty  might run a coffee cart on campus;
  • art students and faculty might work together to create a Chicano Park style teaching and learning mural on  the walls of and in the stairwell leading up to our new C3 Teaching and Learning Center.Practicum
  • students and faculty in psychology, sociology, and education related disciplines might work together to create dynamic and interactive guidance and intake tools, programs, and resources to support our Guided Pathways initiative.

Don’t Let Me Hold You Back

I think I am four or five commutes into Oceanside from Temecula away from sorting out all lines of inquiry this series of connections has opened up for me, but I feel energized by these conversations and their intersections as my mind generates all sorts of new neural pathways.

But maybe the connections I am making here are not as intriguing to you as they are to me. Perhaps you are not interested  in the relationship between empathy, love, reality and teaching :).  Maybe something else lights your pedagogical fire.

If that is the case, then stop wasting your time on this email and go have the conversations that take you and your colleagues to the intersections from which your teaching and learning can mine new energy.

And, if  you don’t mind, please send me a note describing your passions, connections, and experiences related to teaching.

I would love to extend the filaments of connection by including your conversational synergies with our friends and colleagues across the campus.

Thanks,

Prepostero

 
PS. One last connection, this one to a quote from Leslie Jameson’s Empathy Exams while researching for this message:
“Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us – a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain – it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It’s made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse. Sometimes we care for another because we know we should, or because it’s asked for, but this doesn’t make our caring hollow. This confession of effort chafes against the notion that empathy should always rise unbidden, that genuine means the same thing as unwilled, that intentionality is the enemy of love. But I believe in intention and I believe in work. I believe in waking up in the middle of the night and packing our bags and leaving our worst selves for our better ones.”

One thought on “Joyful Tidings #20 Conversational Synergy”

  1. Paulo Freire! I have all his books. I am going to get Reinventing… ASAP!

    When I went to Brazil, every mango tree I saw remind me of him. I was very young when I learned that he taught poor adults how to read under a mango tree. Freire said that “everybody can learn under a mango tree; all we need is it’s shade”.
    Jim, to me you represent Freire in real life: democracy; freedom; empathy and love for teaching.
    Congratulations! and thank you for the blog to Lisa too!

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