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Ain’t Nobody Never Muted No Gadget BEFORE No Class!
The cyber-lure and lull in class.
The solutions are simple, though the problem is grand and manifests in many micro ways; it’s so common that it’s difficult to see. Digital distraction looms over classrooms like a heavy fog.
You see them ensnared by invisible threads, blocking hallways and doorways, halted as they stand, transfixed and feverishly glued to their phones. Many arrive with restless fingers tapping away on these small screens. Others make a beeline for the nearest socket upon entering the classroom, clutching chargers and cables like lifelines. Some arrive engrossed in video calls – often on speakers – their faces illuminated by the glow of their screens. Still, others refuse to dislodge and stash their earbuds; perhaps they are simply unaware or incapable? Few arrive untethered from the grasp of cyberspace, their connection to reality tenuous at best. Throughout the session, the anxious behaviours rarely subside, as I witness them struggling to break free from the digital embrace clearly holding them captive.
Upon arrival, most students sit and place their phone right on the desk in front of them, ready to escape into cyberspace at a moment’s notice. Then, come the laptops and tablets. Most have two gadgets or more – including smartwatches – anything to shield them from being here, and anchor them there in cyberspace. A larger part of the educator’s role now is to reach: S T R E T C H into cyberspace and teach students how to anchor themselves here IRL.
Ain’t nobody never muted no gadget BEFORE no class!
Arriving in class, they are poised and prepped by social media for distraction, and entertainingly so. Through hours of rehearsal, they get to pay attention to whatever they want with a mere swipe. This applies to messaging, social media and news, dating family and group chats, spam emails and university announcements. The F2F classroom environment is competing with all this lure of the cyberworld. In spite of this daily evidence, folks still feel we’re in charge of the focus of our own attention, according to psychologist Prof Sherry Turkle. Worse, all this constant craving and distraction is diminishing our capacity for empathy.
Once distracted, UNESCO reports that “it can take students up to 20 minutes to refocus on what they were learning” according to one study. Subsequent studies have confirmed the attention lull, as have bans on phones in schools. A 2018 study found “More frequent use of digital media may be associated with development of ADHD symptoms.” When students arrive at university classrooms, it’s a blur.
Despite our initial hopes, the pull of the wholistic virtual environment has ultimately pushed away F2F dialogue. What’s more, the passive attention paid to social media creates a deficit in our conversation skills. We easily get caught up in the loop of reporting and responding to ‘what google said.’ In Teaching Critical Thinking, bell hooks says smashingly: “we are living in a culture in which many people lack the basic skills of communication because they spend most of their time being passive consumers of information” (44). Like a group of friends out for a night using google reviews to dictate every step, too often conversation in the classroom is reduced to trading ‘what google said’. Little attention is given to who said what and, why. Or, less so, what one thinks.
A low tech class.
While there are endless Apps, and gadgets to get students involved in learning, the few hours spent in any face-to-face session can be a respite from such hyper-cyber-immersion.
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When will these issues be addressed?
In the realm of education, inclusivity and accessibility should be the foundation of any society aspiring for progress. However, in the case of special education schools in the United Kingdom, there exists a troubling narrative of systemic failings. Despite efforts to provide tailored education for students with diverse needs, the British educational system’s shortcomings in special education have cast a shadow over the pursuit of equal opportunities for all.
One of the main challenges facing special education schools in the UK is inadequate funding. These institutions often struggle with limited resources, hindering their ability to provide the necessary support for students with special educational needs. Insufficient funding results in larger class sizes, fewer specialized staff, and a lack of essential resources, all of which are detrimental to the quality of education these schools can offer. Furthermore, the heavy reliance on the UKs crumbling social care services and the overstretched NHS within special education settings exasperate poor outcomes for children and young people.
Special education students require a range of support services tailored to their individual needs. However, the inconsistency in the provision of support services across different regions of the UK is a glaring issue. Disparities in access to speech therapists, occupational therapists, and other essential services create an uneven educational landscape, leaving some students without the critical support they require to thrive.
Effective collaboration and communication between educators, parents, and support professionals are vital for the success of any special education school. Unfortunately, there is often a lack of seamless coordination. The lack of collaboration can and has result in fragmented support for the students, hindering their overall development and thus making it difficult to implement cohesive and effective educational plans.
The success of special education programs relies heavily on well-trained and empathetic educators. Unfortunately, the British educational system falls short in providing comprehensive training for teachers, working in special education schools. Many teachers express a lack of preparation to address the unique challenges posed by students with diverse needs, leading to a gap in understanding and effective teaching strategies. It is also important to note that many staff members that work within special education settings are not trained teachers, although they have been given the title of teachers. This further leads to inadequate education for children and young people. Moreover, post-covid has seen a high staff turnover within these settings. There have been many reports that have alluded to the notion that British schools are failing our children, but it seems that children from special education provisions are ignored, and families are dismissed when concerns are raised about the lack of education and preparation for the ‘real world’.
I am also critical of the overreliance of labelling students with specific disabilities. While categorization can be useful for designing targeted interventions, it can also lead to a narrow understanding of a student’s capabilities and potential. This labelling approach inadvertently contributes to stereotypes and stigmas, limiting the opportunities available to students with special needs….. There tends to be a focus on the troubling history of the way people with disabilities in the UK have been treated, but what I find interesting is there is a sense of disregard for the issues that are occurring in the here and now.
There is also a lack of special education provisions in the UK. This has led to many children with additional needs without a school place. And while a specific figure of the number of children being excluded from education has not been disclosed, West Northamptonshire, has awarded families over £49,000 over special education failings in 2023 (ITV, 2023). Furthermore, Education health care plan recommendations (EHCP) have not been followed within schools. These are legally binding documents that have been continuously dismissed which has led to further legal action against West Northants council in recent years (Local Government and Care Ombudsman, 2023).
The failings in special education schools have repercussions that extend beyond the classroom. Many students who leave these schools face challenges in transitioning to higher education, entering the workforce or living independently. The lack of adequately tailored support for post-education opportunities leaves these individuals at a disadvantage, perpetuating a cycle of limited prospects, which inevitably pull people with disabilities into a cycle of poor health and poverty (Scope, 2023). The disability employment gap in the UK is 29% and the average disabled household faces a £975 a month in extra costs (Scope, 2023) access to employment and financial independence is out of reach for disabled people due to failings within education because lack of preparation for life beyond school.
There needs to be reform in British schools from mainstream to special education. There are failings across the board. Adequate funding, improved teacher training, consistent support services, enhanced collaboration, and a shift away from overreliance on labelling are all crucial steps toward creating an inclusive educational environment. It is difficult to draw on optimism when the UK government continues to ignore age old concerns. This blog entry is to bring awareness to an issue, that may not be on your radar, but will hopefully get you to reflect on the copious barriers that people with disabilities face. Childhood should be a time when there is a fence built to protect children is schools. As we get older and face the challenges of the wider world, we should be equipped with some skills. Special education schools should not be used as a holding place until a child comes of age. There should be provisions put in place to give all young people an equitable chance.
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Welcome to class. What’s your name?
Often when I ask my newest students to introduce themselves in class – to say and hear their names called out loud – I am reminded that this part of the classroom experience is a fresh opening-up of the classroom as a learning space. I share my full name and invite students to address me as they please. First-year university students often arrive with the weight of their own names – and identities – from their school days. There are often unseen wounds, perhaps unknown. They often arrive in “our” classrooms primed to refashion their own professional personae. A great introduction is their most important networking tool.
On the first day of second grade at my new school, our teacher said my name was so complicated that she nicknamed me by my initials, D.K., which I was called until I decided otherwise. That happened precisely, and abruptly, in the summer between middle and high school, culminating in September 1989. I remember begging my aunt to take me to the music store so I could buy the new Rhythm Nation 1814 cassette.
By then, most of us had attended this same, small school the whole time, so we all knew one another well. I decided to return as a high schooler, and asked folks to call me Diepiriye, no longer D.K. All did, seamlessly.
What’s more, when we’d have a substitute teacher, several of my classmates would yell out my name when they stumbled in taking the roster. They’d always stumble. I’d memorised the roster early on in elementary school; I knew I came between J. King and M. Love. I’d wait.
Caldwell, Cannon, Cummings, Dunbar, Eubanks, Friedman, Gage, Howard (getting closer). While waiting for my name, I’d even write sentences in my mind’s eye using the last names of the kids sandwiching mine – King, Kuku, Love. I could see our names lined-up on the printed page, put together in this order – for years – by the hands of fate. I’d manoeuvre the words around in space, hear how they fit together differently, or in phrases. Stevie Wonder would have a field day with these three words.
I wouldn’t understand this until decades later, but this is one of the typical sorts of imagination that comes along with dyslexia. It’s not just that we mix-up letters and words, rather, our imaginations are less fixed to any simple meaning like in neurotypical people’s minds. Love, King Kuku could have many deeper endings than last names, depending on how you see it. I’m depending on you to use your imagination, here, too. Depending on how you see it, the ship is free, or it is sinking.
McConnell, McGimsey, Montgomery, O’Neil, Palma, Palmer…Todd, Trimmer… Watkins, Welsch, Williams.
It seemed like all but I and one of my classmates’ last names were not English (or Anglicised). Not only that, both our two dads were actually from Nigeria, and our were mothers were best friends from college. Not only that, both our parents grew up on the east and west sides of their respective communities/countries. While I have a funny African name – according to kids – my friend had a Christian first name, and his last name is recognisably Yoruba.
Of course, there was never any civil war between the east and west ends of Louisville, Kentucky – both had black ghettos. Also, both our mothers had ‘desegregated’ every classroom they’d ever entered since elementary in that era’s culture wars. Kids were placed on the frontlines of that war, as author Toni Morrison was quick to remind us.
Both our dads had ended up in America on government scholarships at the University of Louisville, in the aftermath of the chaos of the Nigerian Civil War, albeit through radically differing paths. My dad was a Biafran child soldier. His mother rescued him from a camp, and whisked him out of the country. She named me.
Now, as an educator, I hold the roster. Today, in the UK, roster power is even tied to enforcing national borders. Also of critical value, students’ names will be called many times in class: Called upon to read or respond to text; comment on images; offer perspective or analysis; share lived experience; and crucially, pose critical questions to instructors and peers. The classroom is a busy place.
Call me by my Name.
Too often, in the business of running the classroom, we may overlook simply honouring one another by name, to make the effort to call, recall, and call upon one another in the learning space. As educators, we are called upon to continually demonstrate good practice, shows of good faith.
Everyone uses nicknames in the American South, and uniquely at my school, we called our teachers by their first names. This was one of many ways our ‘liberal’ school broke away from traditional power hierarchies. My second-grade teacher gave me a nickname as a way to shield myself, so I could enter and participate in the learning community untethered. I used this shield until I was strong enough to fly in my own right/light.
University students are in the unique position of fashioning their authentic professional selves. Our students need space to practice calling their names as they wish to be called, professionally. We can share our own curiosity with the stories of all our names, yes, even when we have to be reminded a million times. Yes, even when they have funny African names like Doctor Kuku. Yes, it’s also the proverbial ‘you’re a name not a number’. Sharing is the ethos of community… and crucially, learning. Call me by my Name.
It’s not just my ‘magination, but, we’ve all seen someone respond to an unfamiliar name with the ugly, squished-up face. No one should have their name responded to with what looks like disgust, let alone a child…let alone any student, at any level, in any learning community.
Calling students by name is an important first step in building trust. “Trust,” bell hooks reminds us in Conflict, the 15th the 32 short chapters of her Engaged Pedagogy guide, Teaching Critical Thinking, “must be cultivated in the classroom if there is to be open dialectical exchange and positive dissent.” Trust provides space for students to allow themselves to be known.
Trust also reifies mutual respect. In turn, mutual respect forms the needed basis for the rigorous inquiry, discussion, and crucially, dissent and debate which enlivens and enriches each collective learning experience.
As Badu says: I think y’ betta call Tyrone. Call him! And tell him c’mon … let his voice be heard in class. Call Keisha, Tasha, Joanne, Sian, and Jo, Joey, Joachim, Jane, Paul, Precious, Jean-Paul, Ali, Aliyah, Amadou, Kalliah and Khalil … all of “they and them,” too. And, teachers, let students know stories of your name, too. For example, I wasn’t born Dr. Kuku, but now you can certainly call me by my name!
Pictured here during my first year at college. A high school classmate & I honouring Lyman T. Johnson, a civil rights leader/educator we’d interviewed for our 12th grade oral history project.
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If we could empathize with all life, we… [fill in the blank]
In Honour of my two teachers’ passing (seen together here). Rest In Power, bell hooks (d. 15/12/21) and Thich Nhat Hanh (d. 22/01/22).
If we could empathize with all life, we…
… wouldn’t treat all animals as either food or fodder.
… wouldn’t develop nuclear technology into bombs.
…would never show an interest in making so many guns and ways of destroying life.
…would more genuinely aim to achieve mutual understanding between individuals.
…wouldn’t have so much intergenerational trauma within families, communities, nations.
…would be more neighborly in all our affairs.
…wouldn’t treat trade like a sport, a winner-takes-all competition over natural resources.
…would harness the power of the sun for it shines on all life collectively.
…would cultivate care, and be kinder as a general rule.
… would teach kindness in school, a required class on every campus.
…would not build entire ideologies, systems of government, religions, arts, and culture around patriarchy.
… would not be reduced to binaries, not just in gender, but ‘black or white’ in our overall thinking, because that’s where it came from: A false yet powerful and enduring dichotomy.
Binary thinking produced gender binaries, not the other way around. Knowing this is key to its undoing. Please know that capitalism produced racism, and greed crafted classism. A2 + B2 = C2, still. Racism is exponentially untamed greed; and patriarchy an inferiority complex run rampant and amok. Such cultures of greed can’t be conquered by competition; greed can’t be beat! We need a new dimension.
If we could empathize with all life, we would aspire to be far more fair.
If we could empathize with all life, we would love more.
Your turn.
Fill in the blank.
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@SchoolOnScreen #BlackenAsianWithLove
Corona is liminal, this crisis stage of the pandemic will pass. Corona upended so much of our lives. Humanism suggests that we will grow from this experience if we forge a solidarity and vigilance, like with HIV/AIDS, a pandemic that initially attacked, as diseases do, the vulnerable. Now with Covit, you have people in my ole Kentucky home, storming the state capitol with guns, to un-peacefully protest wearing masks. They act in solidarity with no one but themselves, a key cue to empathy erosion.
Along with several of my cousins, I am a teacher, and have been teaching online for over a year now. Whether online or face-to-face, I know that I need to demonstrate the sort of behaviour I expect students to bring to the class. I am fortunate to have learned this first hand, having had years of positive classroom experiences from a litany of mentor-teachers. Along with my family and religious/spiritual community, educators showed me the power of giving one’s full attention – it creates the conditions that cultivate compassion. Therefore, I am acutely aware that I need to ‘look’ at my students, and listen without prejudice. I want to; I want us all to connect. Yet, most refuse to turn on their cameras. I’m often looking at the green light above my screen.
iHumanize
Despite my urging, most students have not even bothered to upload a profile picture so that the icon sitting on the screen during class would at least display a human. Therefore, on the occasions when they do speak, their voices are visualized by a bland, neutral, grey-scale silhouette. This virtual space dehumanizes us. Sometimes it does feel like “Hanging on to hope, when there is no hope to speak of,” so I keep an uplifting musical playlist synced to every device.
In reflecting on several of her own dehumanizing experiences in the classroom, bell hooks asks readers: “Imagine what it is like to be taught by a teacher who does not believe you are fully human.” Like bell hooks, I have spent years “Listening to students talk about the myriad ways that they feel diminished when teachers refuse to acknowledge their presence or extend to them basic courtesy in the classroom” (hooks, TCC, 61). Further, we know that interfacing through screens lends itself to the old banking model of education, where “teachers present the material and students passively receive it” (hooks, TCC, 10). This, too, risks further dehumanization. I believe one purpose of my role as teacher/role-model is to treat students as human, some arriving so wounded that this all feels brand new.
I believe that turning on my camera signals that I am actively engaged and focused on the matter at hand. It’s even been fed back to me through co-teachers that students appreciate that I take the first few minutes of each session to chit-chat. I call this time “mic check,” and simply inquire about their well-being and share my own. I then segue into each lesson by asking each mic-checker about their own experiences or thoughts related to the topic. I hardly think they’d actively participate if I began by lecturing from slides, thereby fixing them in the passenger seats.
iEmpathize
I have worked in the classroom since the 90’s, through the early days of social media and concurrent normalization of smartphone addiction. In this time, many have grown accustomed to phubbing- snubbing people IRL for the sake of the phone, which dramatically screws up kids. I have also observed a variety of negative implications from students’ own reliance on technology, e.g. anxiety and depression fueled by the fear of missing out (FOMO), poor impulse control, attention deficit, eroded self- esteem and awareness. This first led me back to Engaged Pedagogy (hooks’ teaching Trilogy), then further research on empathy erosion (Baron Cohen’s Zero Degrees of Empathy), and ultimately the role of technology therein. That led me to MIT Professor Sherry Turkle, who has been using her interdisciplinary research for years to sound the alarm around our growing individual disconnectedness, alongside our growing mass tech-addiction.“Empathy cannot be performed,” she’s consistently said. Empathy can, however, be cultivated.
Commenting on a year of online education, Sherry Turkle recently appeared on one of the radio talk-shows I’ve been able to closely follow during Corona’s solitude. She reflects: “To make my students feel that I’m…making eye-contact, I have to look at the little green light at the top of the computer, which means I’m not looking at anything at all. So, in order to give the illusion of connection, I have to basically look at nothing…and that doesn’t give me a feeling of empathy, I’m performing. That’s a very empathy draining thing to be doing.”
It is draining. I continually try a range of tactics to get students to share in creating an engaging and worthwhile classroom, and periodically receive positive feedback from both colleagues and students. I urge them to see the power in more fully cultivating the human connection, in spite of this virtual reality. I also remind students that I don’t do lectures, but facilitate classroom discussions around appropriate, well-curated materials. Every so often, there are students who are easily attuned to this new working rhythm. Most struggle.
Reality. Virtuality. Fictionality.
Notably, our students here in Vietnam more easily cooperate with using their cameras and, perhaps subsequently, more actively engaging. My husband – who is teaching Vietnamese students online at this very moment – has suggested that this comes from the local cultural significance, and subsequent authority teachers hold here as compared to the west. He also believes that students here are more willing to be vulnerable. Turkle also affirms that: “We become accustomed to enjoying that lack of vulnerability by doing so much of our personal business and our business business hidden behind a screen.” The grey-silhouette is a like a superhero’s mask that displays invulnerability within that virtual world.
“You have reasons to not like Zoom,” Turkle continues, “… the better you are at Zoom, the less of a real connection you’re making.” In the face of much resistance, I try my best to hold steady to the idea that learning is social. While it remains true that facts can be studied, remembered and regurgitated on command – even met with great accolade – true understanding relies on the ability to think critically. “Thinking critically is at the heart of anybody transforming their life,” hooks says emphatically. Critical thinking relies on empathy. Empathy relies on human connection. In order to take best advantage of the virtual classroom, we must be about the business of creating the conditions and expectations for real human connectedness.
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Happiness is, happiness ain’t. #BlackenAsiaWithLove
Outside of ecumenical discussions, far too little is said about the subject of happiness. This is a drawback of western secularism, as discussed below. In the world of work, Occupational Health and Leadership have taken up this mantle, yet still only manage to approximate happiness through measurable factors that contribute to increasing satisfaction and decreasing dissatisfaction (i.e. Herzberg’s 2-Factor Theory). Taking Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs into greater account, that understanding eventually incorporated terms such as wellbeing. Yet, again, outside of ‘continuing professional development’ aimed at improving workplace efficiency and effectiveness, far too few resources seem devoted to higher needs such as belonging, esteem and self-actualisation.
Those management terms all circle back to mindfulness, to personal empathy and the ability of both the individual and environment to foster dialogue in order to transform conflict. Be it conflicts or differences in needs/wants between co-workers – or across the bargaining table – the ability to communicate and find common ground is increasingly the skill that distinguishes human talents from Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Now, at least, there is a greater focus on developing so-called ‘soft skills’. This trend responds to our failure to contend with an increasing reliance on, and addiction to technology. What’s more, still, as technology increasingly supplants entire portfolios of routine management duties, how will future workplaces valorise empathy within known matrices?
How do we teach students the value of happiness, the practice of compassion and the skills for effective communication, negotiation and conflict resolution? In so far as leading culturally diverse workforces, the research is as clear as a prayer bell: Innovation requires dialogue – actual talk between equals. Innovation is therefore built on collaboration. Collaboration requires cooperation. Cooperation requires commitment. Commitment cultivates inclusion. Inclusion fosters commitment. Commitment depends on trust-building. Trust-building requires dialogue. Cooperation must be practiced and rehearsed, in addition to celebrated and applauded. We are effectively teaching how to work within a community. Those tools must play the greater part of management toolkit, over and well-over more punitive means of enforcing compliance to rules.
“I’m not here to be your friend.”
Those are words I hope no one would ever hear neither in the classroom from educators, nor in the workplace from managers. It implies the speaker’s inability to distinguish friendliness from being friends. It is indeed a thin line. Social media interactions with colleagues have virtually erased that line – at least re-drawn it. Irregardless – as we say in Kentucky for emphasis – kindness matters! I genuinely pity those who have not learned kindness at home or school; it’s traumatic.
In order to collaborate, to genuinely work together, requires some level of friendliness, beyond cordiality. It is irrational to lead through control and project the image of being in control through distant, dispassionate unfriendliness. BTW, the notion of dispassionate rationality and objectivity have been historically valorized academia even when it was clear.
I would not be the first university student to observe (though lacking the skills to explain): “The professors who prided themselves on their capacity to be objective were most often those who were directly affirmed in their caste, class, or status position” (hooks, 2003: 128). Their inability to connect, acknowledge and come to peace with their own emotionality and spirituality. “At times objectivism in academic settings is a smokescreen, masking disassociation (ibid: 129). Objectivity is a crutch:
“Denying the emotional presence and wholeness of students may help professors who are unable to connect focus more on the task of sharing information, facts, data, their interpretations, with no regard for listening to and hearing from students. (ibid: 129).”
The smoke and mirrors masks a pain so cutting so deep that skilled educators carve it out of their work, and further discourage it in peers and students. Sadly, I believe that managers have been taught to operate under the same logic. Hurt people hurt people.
Hurt people hurt people.
Today, we’re better able to acknowledge the maturity needed to reveal both one’s strengths and weaknesses – including with subordinates. The key skill is emotional flexibility and consequentially, the ability to seek and offer support. Failing to do so reduces opportunities for team members’ whole-hearted contributions of knowledge and skills. While it is still professional to keep some amount of distance between one’s private and personal lives, social media is a typical example of how those norms no longer apply. Yeah, it’s weird if you’re not Facebook friends with at least some of your colleagues.
What are responsible ways to use one’s public image that aligns with our own personal ambitions and goals? This was simply NOT an area of thinking in the classroom prior to social media. Yet, ‘bullying’ is a relatively modern concept brought to light by the LGBTQ community response to the suicide of a university student as a result of cyber-bullying because he was gay.
In 2010, Tyler Clementi, a first-year university student in America, was secretly filmed being intimate with another man by his roommate and a mutual friend, (or so he believed). The two colluded to threaten to out Clementi in what they all knew as a homophobic (university) environment. This resulted in Clementi’s suicide. Imagine such blackmail, bullying and harassment at work! What skills should the educational environments have provided Tyler and his roommates?
The response from the queer community was clear: Hope. For example, activist/journalist Dan Savage launched an internet campaign that encouraged LGBTQ+ youth, which was picked up by mainstream media outlets and entertainment. The #ItGetsBetter campaign quickly amasses hundreds of posts by celebrities of all flavors to combat anti-gay bullying. Things did get better. We put bullying on the map! Be it work or school, bullying is no longer tolerated…at least formally.
Yet, what of genuine happiness, not just survival? While I can’t speak for every faith, the notion of happiness if central to Buddhist philosophy. “The gratification of desire is not happiness,” writes Buddhist teacher Daisaku Ikeda in his 2017 essay collection, Hope is a Decision. What’s more, individual happiness is tied to our interconnectivity. The Soka Gaikkai, a global Buddhist organisation mentored by Ikeda, operates under the slogan “World peace through individual happiness” to acknowledge the interconnectivity of both humanity as a whole, and the place of happiness with the broader objective of peace.
Seen one way, happiness is neatly balanced at the tip of the pyramid of needs, and its inverse: wants and desires. For clarity: While adults may scoff when a teenager says they “need” the latest iPhone or they’ll ‘die’ we responsibly know that those youthful aches and pains are as real to them as any physical trauma one might suffer. We know that showing up at school with the latest cool gadget has as much to do with the higher-order needs for them as we may wish them to perceive their basic needs such as food, shelter and security. Hence, the parenting task becomes one of teaching skills to contextualise such desires and value delayed gratification.
These lessons are too often relegated to parenting due to the secularisation of schooling and workplaces in the west. Western secularism often fails to distinguish religion from spirituality, to the detriment of the latter since we remain staunchly Christian societies, especially to the extent of chauvinism when faced with an ‘other’. Any non-Christian in the west can see the secularism is superficial – even Stevie Wonder can see that. Echoing her own call for greater attention to spirituality in secular education bell hooks quotes HH Dalai Lama’s thoughts in the need for the distinction in the second installment of her seminal teaching trilogy:
Spirituality I take to be concerned with those qualities of the human spirit—such as love and compassion, patience, tolerance, forgiveness, contentment, a sense of responsibility, a sense of harmony—which brings happiness to both self and others. … (hooks, ‘Spirituality in Education’ in Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope, 2003 pg. 157-164)
Makes place in and around the classroom. As a lecturer, I am a coach, guide, mentor, leader and have even befriended students (particularly after their graduations). One primary aim and source of satisfaction in the classroom is facilitating values-based dialogue across differences in perspectives. My role is not just to dump selective parts of my knowledge into students’ heads, nor simply to train certain skills. Nay, we’re always teaching how to live in a diverse community.
To get more in-formation:
- hooks, bell. Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope. New York: Routledge, 2003. Print.
- Ikeda, Daisaku (2017). Hope Is a Decision: Selected Essays. Middleway Press. ISBN 978-0-9779245-8-5.
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100% of the emotional labour, 0% of the emotional reward: #BlackenAsiawithLove
Last night over dinner and drinks, I spoke about race in the classroom with two white, upper-middle-class gay educators. Neither seemed (able) to make any discernable effort to understand any perspective outside their own. I had to do 100% of the emotional labour, and got 0% of the emotional reward. It was very sad how they went on the attack, using both passive and active aggression, yet had the nerve to dismiss my words as ‘victimhood discourse’. This is exactly why folks write books, articles, and blogs like ‘Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race’.
Worse, they both had experienced homophobia in the classroom, at the hands of both students and parents. Nonetheless, they had no ability to contribute to the emotional labour taking place as we spoke about race. Even worse, the one in charge of other educators had only 24 hours earlier performed the classic micro-aggression against me: The brown blur. He walked right past me at our initial meeting as I extended my hand introducing myself while mentioning the mutual friend who’d connected us because, as he said, he was “expecting” to see a white face. He was the one to raise that incident, yet literally threw his hands in the air, nodding his head dismissively as he refused any responsibility for the potential harm caused.
“I’m an adult,” I pled, explaining the difference between me facing those sorts of aggressions, versus the young people we all educate. This all fell on deaf ears. Even worse still, he’d only moments earlier asked me to help him understand why the only Black kid in one of his classes called himself a “real nigger.” Before that, he had asked me to comment on removing the N-word from historical texts used in the classroom, similar to the 2011 debate about erasing the N-word and “injun” from Huckleberry Finn, first published in 1884. According to the Guardian, nigger is “surely the most inflammatory word in the English language,” and “appears 219 times in Twain’s book.”
Again, he rejected my explanations as “victimhood.” He even kept boasting about his own colorblindness – a true red flag! Why ask if you cannot be bothered to listen to the answer, I thought bafflingly? Even worse, rather than simply stay silent – which would have been bad enough – the other educator literally said to him “This is why I don’t get involved in such discussions with him.” They accused me of making race an issue with my students, insisting that their own learning environments were free of racism, sexism and homophobia.
They effectively closed ranks. They asserted the privilege of NOT doing any of the emotional labour of deep listening. Neither seemed capable of demonstrating understanding for the (potential) harm done when they dismiss the experiences of others, particularly given our differing corporealities. I thought of the “Get Out” scene in the eponymously named film.
“Do you have any Black teachers on your staff,” I asked knowing the answer. OK, I might have said that sarcastically. Yet, it was clear that there were no Black adults in his life with whom he could pose such questions; he was essentially calling upon me to answer his litany of ‘race’ questions.
Armed with mindfulness, I was able to get them both to express how their own corporeality impacts their classroom work. For example, one of the educators had come out to his middle-school students when confronted by their snickers when discussing a gay character in a textbook. “You have to come out,” I said, whereas I walk in the classroom Black.” Further still, they both fell silent when I pointed out that unlike either of them, my hips swing like a pendulum when I walk into the classroom. Many LGBTQ+ people are not ‘straight-acting’ i.e. appear heteronormative, as did these two. They lacked self-awareness of their own privilege and didn’t have any tools to comprehend intersectionality; this discussion clearly placed them on the defense.
I say, 100% of the emotional labour and none of the emotional reward, yet this is actually untrue. I bear the fruits of my own mindfulness readings. I see that I suffer less in those instances than previously. I rest in the comfort that though understanding didn’t come in that moment, future dialogue is still possible. As bell hooks says on the first page in the first chapter of her groundbreaking book Killing Rage: Ending Racism: “…the vast majority of black folks who are subjected daily to forms of racial harassment have accepted this as one of the social conditions of our life in white supremacist patriarchy that we cannot change. This acceptance is a form of complicity.” I accept that it was my decision to talk to these white people about race.
I reminded myself that I had foreseen the micro-aggression that he had committed the previous day when we first met. A mutual friend had hooked us up online upon his visit to this city in which we now live. I doubted that she’d mentioned my blackness. Nonetheless, I had taken the chance of being the first to greet our guest, realizing that I am in a much safer space both in terms of my own mindfulness, as well as the privilege I had asserted in coming to live here in Hanoi; I came here precisely because I face such aggression so irregularly in Vietnam that these incidents genuinely stand out.
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Works mentioned:
Eddo-Lodge, R. (2018). Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Hanh, T. (2013). The Art of Communicating. New York: HarperOne.
hooks, b. (1995). Killing rage: Ending racism. New York: Henry Holt and Company, Inc.
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“Στον πατέρα μου χρωστώ το ζην, στον δάσκαλό μου το ευ ζειν” To my father I owe living, to my teacher I owe my wellbeing (Alexander the Great)
I remember this phrase from school, among with other ones about the importance of education in life. Since then there have been several years but education is something that we carry with us and as such we take little memories of knowledge like pieces of a gigantic jigsaw that is our lives and put them together. Experience is that glue that makes each piece of knowledge to stick at the right time whenever you want to find the words or feelings to express the world around us. Education plays such an immense part in this process because it give us these words that explain our world a little more clearly, precisely, deeply
This phrase had great resonance with me as I have never known my father and therefore I had no obvious person to relate this to or to have a way to express gratitude for living to anyone (obviously from my paternal family branch). So for a very long time, I immerse myself in education. Teachers in and out of the classroom, living or dead, have left a trail of knowledge with me that defined me, shaped my thoughts and forge some intense memories that is now is my turn to share with my students.
Education has been my refuge, my friend and a place of great discovery. Knowledge has that power to subvert injustice and challenge ignorance. Arguably education comes in different guises and a formal school curriculum sometimes restricts the student into normatives of performance that relegates knowledge into bitesize information, easily digestible and reproduced. The question, of a fellow student of mine who asked, “sir, why do I need algebra?” could have only be met from the bemused teacher’s response…”for your education”! Maybe I am romanticizing my own education and potentially forget that formal compulsory education is always challenging and challenged because of the purpose it is called to play.
Maybe this is why, what I consider of value in education, I have always attributed to my own journey, things that I read without being in any curriculum, or discussions I had with my teachers that took us away from the strict requirements of a lesson plan. The greatest journey in education can start with one of the most basic of observations, situations, words that lead to an entire discussion on many complex ideas, theories and perspectives. These journeys were and are the most rewarding because you realise that behind a question is the accumulated human curiosity spanning the entire history of life.
One of the greatest places for anyone to quench this thirst for learning is the University. In and out of the classroom knowledge is there, ready to become part of a learners’ experience. It is not bestowed in the latest gadget or the most recent software and other gimmicky apparatus but in the willingness to dwell into knowledge, whether it is reading late in the library or having a conversation with fellow students or a tutor (under a tree as one of my students, once professed). Perhaps my trust in education is hyperbolic even obstinate but as I see it, those of us who have the choice, can choose to live or to live well. For the first, we can carry on existing, but for the latter the journey of knowledge is neither a short one nor one that comes easy but at least it will be rewarding.
Thoughts from the criminology team 