Against Student Success? No, I'm Not a Monster

Because I love my students, I am against student success. 

When I told a friend recently that I hated when I'm asked to do something in the name of "student success," she looked at me like I had just said the most blasphemous thing, and asked me, "but isn't that what we're all here for? Student success?" 

Let me explain. Of COURSE I'm a professor because I like students and I like to think that the work I do helps them succeed. OBVIOUSLY. It goes without saying. 

But I worry that institutions use "student success" to justify the demands they put on everybody who works for them. I worry they are taking advantage of the love we all feel for students. 

Work loads creep further and further into all the corners of our lives. I know too many colleagues who work upwards of 80 hours a week, and are just crumbling under the pressure. They love their students. When asked to do more, they are convinced that it supports student success, so they can't say no. 

Student success is hard to say no to. Who wouldn't want it? It can make all kinds of sacrifices seem worthwhile. "Student success" is used as the reason we are asked to increase our class size, take on more advisees, learn a new software for early-alerts, make ourselves compliant with loads of new pedagogical best practices, learn a new software for assessing student success, measure success better, do more, and more, and more... you get the idea.

Uwe Poersken, a Polish philosopher, describes "plastic words" as those that "silence" because they signal "science." That is, they are hard to say no to because they seem to be morally air-tight, unassailable, inherently good and right. Plastic words are "malleable" and have an "uncanny way" of  being "used to fit every circumstance. Like plastic Lego blocks, they are combinable and interchangeable."* 

In the context of my own work on a CSU campus, "student success" has become like "development" or "sustainability," a plastic word. It gets rolled out at administrative meetings and extolled as the justification for every decision, even ones that seem to undermine student success. Like, "In support of student success, we will need to go ahead and defund a great resource called the Institute for Student Success, which inspires the entire staff, faculty, and administrators to come together once a year to collaborate and get pumped up to start another year of teaching. Too bad it was working so well for you!" Or, "For Student Success (because that's all we care about), we will need to get rid of half our janitors."**  

"Student success" seems to be used for all kinds of purposes that have either nothing to do with student success (although most students I talk to really do feel that clean toilets are essential to their feeling of belonging on a campus, and can you blame them?), or they seem to even undermine it.

It raises the question, "who's defining 'success' here?" Like all plastic words, success is subjective, and without really clear, concrete, and narrow definitions, it can just swallow everybody up.

I hope it's clear that I'm not against actual student success in theory and as a worthwhile goal. I think people who pick it up as the beacon to guide all our budget cuts and programmatic decisions are genuinely trying to turn the university's focus toward students, in protest of the ways some universities have become about other things, like making money or building big (corporately-funded) research centers. 

I appreciate that very much. Yes, please! Let's get back to why we're all here: students! How democratic and grassroots. How... refreshing. I wish this is the honest motive. For the most part, I think most administrators who cut student success initiatives in the name of student success, as crazy as it seems, genuinely think they're doing the right thing. But you can see the plasticity here, no?

What I am against is how the term student success is used as a bludgeon to exploit my relationships with students to make me do more for an institution that keeps cutting resources. I am also against the fact that it seems like nobody sees how this is happening. 

It feels uncannily like... home.

The reason student success is so hard to say no to is the same reason I have a hard time saying no to my kids. If I love them, I will do all the things they ask from me in order to prove it. This assumption about maternal love is at the root of patriarchy. Exploiting maternal guilt is how the world goes round. Just like moms in the arena of domestic labor and "care work" don't keep score about how much work they do to care for their kids (they'd seem selfish and heartless if they did), so too are teachers and staff at my university expected to go the extra mile without protest, for love of their students. Why ever would they not? Don't they want success for their students? Tisk tisk. 

And, just like it is hard at home for me to say no to my family's requests for more mom, for fear they will not feel loved, it is hard for me to say no to any request made of me in the name of my students' wellbeing, happiness, good grades, full stomachs, feeling of being safe, access to educational resources, opportunities for mentorship, real-world applications of their education, fellowship, fun, clean toilets, and whatever else gets snuck under the plastic banner of "student success." 

There's an analysis of power here that I'm trying to offer up. Those in power use emotional appeals to extract labor. Such appeals distract us from the structural sources of the problem. 

I worry about being gaslighted for not caring about my students when there's an untenable structural arrangement that keeps pushing work onto the fewer and fewer people left standing after budget cuts. 

It's like we're in a boat. Somebody (I won't name names. No need to get nasty. It's complicated anyway) poked holes in this boat. Then, those same people started asking us to plug the holes with the tool they know we will be unable to resist supplying in these moments of "crisis"-- our loyalty to students. Meanwhile, the boat is made of straw and there's a huge storm going on. No amount of love for our students will plug these holes, so please stop talking about how plugging the holes is going to do the trick.

As much as I wish it did, loving my students (or my kids) doesn't magically produce more time or energy in my life. Pressuring people with guilt is a classic move by people in power. 

At some point, all of us who love students are going to get so burned out by the extraction of our care labor that we may start to ironically direct our resentment toward the very people "student success" is supposed to serve-- the students themselves. I, for one, confess to having started down this path more than a few times. Then, like I do at home when I get overloaded, I remind myself of the analysis of power: I don't have to sacrifice myself to prove my love of anybody. I cannot just love everybody's way out of these problems.

Maybe it's only the people who don't constantly battle internalized guilt about parenting who feel it's perfectly reasonable to weaponize love and guilt in work places. That's the only way I can explain why they think it's acceptable. When I hear the kinds of arguments at work that I hear at home to get me to do more stuff, I can't help but think there's something fishy going on.

The problem isn't the students. Just like we shouldn't hate our kids for having needs, we ought to look at the structural conditions that make it hard to meet all of our students' needs. Why are we losing so many forms of support for them, and for all of us? We also need to challenge the myths we carry around in our minds that cloud our awareness of how those in power manipulate our emotions. Let's wake up to our own exploitation. 

To be really for student success, we needn't just become obedient when the word is waved around at meetings. Instead, we can:

1. Define what student success means in our own work and lives. Seriously, write it down! Even better, model student success and ask your students to define their own success for you. That'll blow everybody's minds.
2. Hold yourself accountable to your own definition, not to the top-down terms laid out as some amorphous plastic concept that can encompass any and all policy decisions made by the powers that be to put smoke and mirrors up around unsavory budget goals.
3. Take care of yourself so you can keep being there for students and not burn out or resent them. 
4. Work to protect and create, if not demand, structural forms of support for students and for us.

If the ship is sinking, it may not be the holes that need plugging.

*Thanks to Clare Follman for letting me know about plastic words. See her Evergreen State College Master's thesis, "The Art of Arguing Science".

** Examples are fictional.

Teaching, Climate Change, and Eco-Grief: Recent Talks

I have been excited, nervous, and honored to give a few talks this past year on eco-grief, climate change, and teaching undergrads in the Anthropocene.  I thought I'd collect links to them in one place.

• December 2017 University of Washington. Thanks to the Interdisciplinary Anthropocene Cluster for inviting me. The talk is available on You Tube, here.

• February, 2018. "My Favorite Lecture" series, Plaza Grill, Arcata, CA.  Thanks so much to Mike Dronkers for the incredible editing and organizing work to make this sound so good. Available as podcast here.

• March 2018, Swarthmore College (my alma mater). Thanks to one of my idols, Giovanna Di Chiro, who I'm so grateful to for inviting me there. It was lovely to catch up with my religious studies professors from my time as an undergrad, Mark Wallace and Steve Hopkins. The audio and transcription are available here.

• June, 2018, University of California Santa Barbara. Thanks to John Foran for inviting me to join the Environmental Justice/Climate Justice working group for inviting me.  

A new book coming out Fall 2018, Affective Ecocriticism, edited by Jennifer Ladino and Kyle Bladow, features the only published article-length version of this work, but I'm currently developing these ideas into a book project. 

Can R-1s Do Better to Prepare PhDs for Teaching Jobs?

I'm in the process of hiring a tenure-line faculty for the program I lead at a teaching institution.

When I was getting a PhD at an Research-1 institution (R1), I was trained to think of my research profile as the most important quality I could offer an employer, and was even discouraged from getting accolades as a good teacher, as it might detract from my profile as a serious researcher.

I think my institution thought they would lose some face if they produced anything but the "best" scholars, scholars who would ideally obtain positions at other R1s.  And I think they thought there would be no harm in us having a dossier that was "good enough" for an R1, because teaching schools would gratefully pick up the dregs of us that didn't hit the mark of the R1 holy grail job.

I have obtained two tenure-track positions at teaching institutions since I graduated in 2009, and find I am profoundly disappointed by the way I was conditioned to think about the value of an R1, the value of the scholar, and the value of teaching undergraduates.  But it's not just about undergrads and the glory of teaching; it's about the current state of American cultural politics, anti-intellectualism, and the value of higher ed to a functioning democracy.

Since I've been at teaching institutions, I have thought a lot about what my PhD institution failed to train me for, though, in full disclosure, I loved my time at grad school and I loved my advisors.

As I review dozens of applications for a teaching job, many from R1s (because PhDs are mostly at R1s), I am struck by a prevailing inability of these scholars to articulate, much less imagine, how their very refined, specialized area of study might ignite student interest and success.

If, for example, you study some obscure event that happened in 1982 in a galaxy far far away, on a speck of dirt on some planet, it's not inherently exciting in itself, even though you have convinced yourself that it is.

An R1 says "hey, that's really, really unique, and its uniqueness is enough for us. You're contributing something really new, and we know it's really new because we know everything about this field."

A teaching institution says "how will this translate in the classroom?"  If an application for a tenure-line job at a teaching institution fails to SHOW the answer to this question really clearly, then the candidate has been poorly trained for the job market.

And in case it needs saying, most jobs these days are at teaching institutions, not R1s.




I confess that I was fortunate; my heavy-duty R1 degree was enough to land me a tenure-track job.  For the second round, four years later, I really have no idea how I landed yet another tenure-line job, other than the publication of my dissertation as a book made me look serious.  Nowadays, this wouldn't be enough for a teaching job.  A narrowly-focused book that makes a unique contribution to a narrow field is just not very valuable to a teaching institution. And why would it be?

Nowadays, an application that makes a person's obscure research or creative life come alive in the classroom will blow the competition out of the water.

If a person's research or creative life is inherently accessible to students --such as having to do with stuff college students are already thinking about, even just a little-- even better.  Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying you need to tailor your research agenda to the whims of iGen. Quite the contrary; that's horrific. Don't do that.

I'm saying that R1s could do a better job training their graduates to frame their work in ways that is accessible, not just to hiring committees across the land, but to undergrads (who will be their main audience henceforth, much to the chagrin of the R1s), and also to (gasp!) the public.

The assumption that audiences will do the hard work we need to do to understand and value our research is just arrogant. Academia has been doing this successfully for a long time.  At a public institution like where I teach, the sham is up.

What counts as valuable research here-- the kind of research that gets you tenure-- is not what you think it is.  It's collaborative (with students, with community members, with others outside academia), it's radical (challenges dominant knowledge claims), it's about new forms of knowledge production (like, students bring knowledge and aren't just there to receive it), etc....  If you publish articles along these lines, we love you!  Being a superstar, solo scholar in some obscure area just doesn't work always.  But if this DOES describe you, how fun would it be if you could figure out a way to make students think your work is awesome, and make them want to do similar work?  Evidence that you can bridge research and teaching in these ways really blows our minds.

Which brings me to the subtle point I was making earlier about the current state of this democracy and anti-intellectualism.  Could R1s make their candidates' more attractive to teaching institutions? YES, and let me count the ways.*  Could they also make the research they produce more meaningful to the public?  YES.

And by doing so, could they engage in a much broader mutual, reciprocal form of knowledge co-production with people outside the academy?

We can only hope.

PhD students, ask more from your advisors and programs.

This historical moment demands more from us than to reproduce ourselves and narrow our audiences.
We would really like you to make your work exciting and accessible to us, to undergrads, and to non-specialists.   This might be a good thing for, oh, democracy, and, oh, America.

If your current advisors aren't telling you this, ask them to. Get a group of grad students together to think more about this.  Resist the temptation to deem yourself too awesome for a teaching job.

Consider the challenge I lay out here as a call for you to make your work meaningful in the world, useful in breaking down the shitty divisions in society, and dispelling the notion that the life of the mind is frivolous.

Just because we teach a lot here doesn't mean we don't value the life of the mind.  We're just way, way more accountable to showing others that the life of the mind is valuable.

*ways you can make your application more fitting for a teaching institution:

1. In your teaching statement, avoid the "deficit model" approach to diversity.
2. In your cover letter, SHOW, don't just tell, how much you love teaching.
3. Wherever you discuss teaching, don't just cite theorists about how important student-centered teaching is; tell us how you make your research interesting to students.
4. Don't just wax on about how much you love teaching. Loving teaching can kill you, and we want somebody who can survive a lifetime of teaching.  Saying that you have an "open-door" policy, for example, smacks of privilege.  Cultural taxation for faculty of color (and women faculty) is a major issue; how do you protect yourself? How do you leverage your teaching to support your other loves? Give us something more than just "teaching will save the world."
5. Don't tell us that your way of doing student-centered teaching is to use the Socratic method and conduct discussion.  And for the love of the goddess, don't say that you mostly use lecture, and that you bring a variety of media into the classroom, such as videos and Power Point slides.  That doesn't say "student-centered"; that says "lazy."
6. You're better off including challenges or critiques of your teaching that you've tried to overcome than quotes from students who love you.
7. If you really want to be at an R1, but you're just desperate for a job, don't apply for this job.
8. If #7 applies to you, and you manage to get to a campus interview, don't whine about whether we'll give you enough resources to do your ever-so-important research.  This will chafe on us like nobody's business.  Try to imagine that we all feel the same way about our research, and that just because we're at a teaching institution doesn't mean our research is worthless.

In sum, SHOW, don't tell why you belong here. And make your research applicable to college students in some way.

Burnout, Part 1

So much of the teaching part of my job turns out to be about getting students into a positive psychological headspace.  Just attending class is often a struggle.  And I'm not even talking about their hunger, homelessness, or various other forms of vulnerability. It's real, folks, for them. So don't get me wrong; I'm not annoyed by THEM; a bunch of things are failing them, and here's what it looks like. On my cynical days, I confess, I wish I could just plug-n-play the most relevant mantra for their issue, and assure them that I've heard it all before, and to just get on with it as best they can. No need to conjure up the whole song-and-dance about it; I, too, have to move on to other duties.

The problem isn't them. It's that I'm burning out. Mustering up the energy to lovingly guide students from their excuses and the crazy myths they have about college has made me decide it'd be cathartic to write a "shit students say" list.  I am fully aware that there are just as many idiotic excuses that I make as a professor and academic, so I list these in full acknowledgment that a) it's not always their fault, for sure, and b) the stuff coming out of my own mouth is often just as ridiculous.

Apologies for the cynical undertones in what follows. Rest assured that I truly believe that the kids are awesome. They give me hope in the future, and I do cry almost every time I think about how honored I feel to have this job. My students' beautiful souls make all the other crap worth it.

But again, I'm burning out. It's not them, it's me. Or rather, it's the systems that leverage too much love out of faculty and too much debt and doubt out of students. Fuck those systems!

If you're a student of mine and you ever said any of these things to me, I promise I love you. I said many of these things too, when I was a student.  Once, on the last day of my Chinese Literature and Thought class, I played frisbee on the grass--outside the very classroom I was supposed to be in!-- because it was sunny, and I figured it was within the philosophy of Taoism to follow one's bliss rather than do work.  I told the professor I was "following the 'way'."

For another class on Buddhism, I wrote a 2-page final paper about how I couldn't write the required 7-10 pages about the topic because it would be against Buddhist teachings to try to understand it through reasoned writing.

I've done it all too, so I'm not on my high horse here. But as a result of hearing all these excuses so many times, I have come up with some mantra I find myself saying multiple times a day in response to these things students say to me, which I also list, below.

First, however, I hope you enjoy some of these doozies, which, again, I list here as a form of catharsis for myself, not as a criticism of my students:

Shit Students Say, Bless Their Beautiful Souls

1. "Professor, do you have a stapler?  Is it OK if I just fold over the corners?"
Read: I need permission every time I forget to keep my pieces of paper from separating from each other, and want your reassurance that it's not annoying to have to keep them all together as you grade my work.

2.  "Can we talk?  Can I close the door?"
Read: I'm about to unload some heavy shit.  This will take at least an hour.

3.  "Wait, so, everything I learned in high school was wrong?"
Read: I had no idea that K-12 education was a hoax. Is all education a hoax? What am I doing here?

4.  "Why doesn't your syllabus state that, by the end of the course, the planet will be saved, the 2016 election reversed, and that you're available for one-on-one hour-long sessions of existential crisis therapy?"
Read: I can't figure out how to take the gift of critical tools where I find them.

5.  "Professor, you work too hard. You should relax more."
Read: give more time to one-on-one hour-long therapy sessions, but do less of the other ridiculous stuff your job requires.  Also, being a professor must really suck.

6.  "I didn't want to submit an assignment that doesn't reflect my best work, so can I have an extension?"
Read: I didn't prioritize doing the work, but I want you to think it's because I care TOO much.

7.  "Why can't you teach me how to overturn capitalism in 15 weeks?"
Read: What good is this class in the world?

8.  "Why don't your classes solve more problems directly, with like, direct action and real-world, immediate change?"
Read: I have swallowed the anti-intellectual pill and don't think that learning how to think is valuable to real change.

9.  "Can I leave class early?  I have a thing I have to do."
Read: I'm special. All the other students who stay in class the whole time aren't as important as I am, and the things you have planned for my time here are not important to me.

10.  "This material is really depressing.  I can't come to class because the material you're teaching me is causing me anxiety."
Read: I thought I was supposed to only do things that make me happy.  Why are you asking me to be unhappy?

11.  "You mean, the world didn't begin the day I was born?"
Read: As an Anglo-American, I have no history. I'm told to believe that I'm the center of the universe, rather than a moment within a long arc of time.  I don't believe there's anything worthwhile to learn from anybody who's lived longer than I have, or who came before me.

12.  "You look tired."
Read: If I make you feel insecure, you'll go easy on me.  OR, depending on the context: I really care about you as a human being.

13.  "I can't write this paper because I don't know what I think."
Read: Tell me what to think.  And then write the paper for me.

14.  "I am lost. I can't do that thing you're asking of me. Pump my ego up by telling me that I'm great, and tell me what I think and what I should do."
Read: Imposter syndrome.

15.  "Nothing any scholar has ever said has any relevance to me.  Scholarship is created by academia, which is bought out by capitalism, so the only worthwhile thoughts in the world are the ones in my head right now, and maybe the thoughts in my favorite singer's head."
Read: I've swallowed the anti-intellectual pill and don't want to spend the time it would take to read all those articles and books.

16.  "Sorry I was absent. What did I miss?"
Read: I want you to think I care about what I've missed.

17.  "I don't have the rough draft done, so I won't be in class for the peer review."
Read: I procrastinated and am embarrassed that I don't have much to show.

18.  "Could we meet sometime to talk about this amazing idea I have?"
Read: I think the job of a professor is to wait for each individual student to have an amazing idea and to carry it through to its conclusion with them.

19.  "Needing to write a clear sentence is a form of oppression, so no, I will not fix all these fragments and run-ons, or choose precise words that say what I really mean, or get rid of all the "really"s and "very"s and "totally"s." 
Read: I'm too lazy to care about it.

20.  "I need to drop out of college because I need to do something more radical."
Read: You have nothing to teach me. Hanging out here is a waste of my time.

My Mantras/Responses:

Get that Shit Done.

Just Write.

It's in the Syllabus.

Sure, whatever you need to do.

Fake It 'Til You Make It.

Get that Shit Done.

You Got This.

Just showing up is 90% of the battle.

Get that Shit Done.

Did I mention, JUST GET THAT SHIT DONE.

"Are You Tired? You Look Tired!"; Or, "Why Aren't You Acting Like My Mom?"

If you read any of my posts, you know that I am thinking a lot about how to balance my love of teaching and the slippery slope that love falls into when I lose myself in their demands.  I'm sensitive to their feedback, worry about each of them, and do, in many ways, feel like their mom. And, as I noted in my last "rant" post, I do this willingly, and the payback is that teaching truly fuels me.

However, this past year's wealth of disasters--natural, political, and otherwise--has worn me (and many of you, and many of my students) very thin.  We're all keeping our heads just above (sometimes below) water, just treading, trying to anticipate when we'll have to take a deep breath to survive the next wave.  I can't help but feel obliged to help all my students do the same, and that sense of obligation is what's really going to drown me.

So, I've started taking some self-protection measures.  Dear reader, do not be mistaken that these are signs that I don't continue to absolutely adore my students and teaching.  I just want to be sure I can keep doing this for the long haul.  Ok, here it goes.  Some confessions:

1. Make it a goal to get worse student evaluations.  Did I just hear you gasp?  It's not that I could actually handle it if they were worse.  It would be like a sword in my heart, to be sure!  But it's a trick I play on myself to release myself of some of the minutae of the worries I have about them.  Being a hair less beholden to those evaluations in my approach to daily teaching life is probably healthy, right?

2. Ask for less feedback from students.  Is that another gasp?  I know, I'm totally losing my marbles.  I have always been one of those earnest professors that asks for feedback at every turn and then implements the feedback, and I have benefitted immensely from students participating in shaping the classes with me, and by them appreciating the transparency of my pedagogy.  I will still solicit feedback, not to worry.  But I am overwhelmed by it.  I'm frazzled, I'm losing my bandwidth to process all of the concerns. I feel like saying, "I'm doing the best I can. Give me a break." Sign of burnout? Yes.  I'll get back on the feedback wagon, but I'm just taking a short hiatus while I tread water.  Also, asking for feedback is weird: I'm getting all kinds of requests to do and solve problems that are not within my purview, and I worry I'm setting students up for expecting that I can solve these problems.  I'll fix this issue at some point, but I think I must have conveyed the message somewhere along the line that my teaching will resolve all their existential crises.  Maybe it's because my teaching seems to be causing all of their existential crises....  Oops.

3. Balance all the ways I identify as a teacher with realizing I'm also other things.  I love Rebecca Solnit's chapter in A Paradise Built in Hell, "Dorothy Day's Other Loves." It makes me cry. I have other loves besides this vocation, even though I love it.  I just have to spend some time remembering what those other loves are.  And I need to retreat into those loves-- just a little bit-- to remember how to breathe.

4. Get told I look tired by my students a lot more.  This one is a double-edged sword, and I can't say I set out with it as an explicit goal.  However, since I started taking some of these protective measures, I am spending less energy and time tripping over myself trying to perform my profound love for students.  When I see them, I don't just immediately light up and gush all over them like I used to.  I don't ask them, at every turn, like I used to, how they are and what's going on in their lives and how can I help?  I'm not acting like a customer service agent; I'm just sometimes thinking about other things like whether I have time to write, or what I want to make for dinner, or what to ask my kids about their day when I see them, or what I was doing on 9/11/01, or whether I should call my grandma, or whether "misplaced" is the right word to describe attention to climate change in the context of Harvey and Irma, or... This isn't about distraction, or denial.  I still love my students and get a lot of juice from them in return for this expenditure of brainpower on them.  But I am just slowing down, a la The Slow Professor, which means I'm just not bursting out of my seams all the time to please. I don't think this is tragic or that this is a sign that I am not absolutely in love with my students and profession anymore. On the contrary, I think it's something akin to sustaining this love.

But you're right, when I hear "you look tired, are you tired?", as I do more and more these days, what I'm really hearing is "why aren't you acting like my mother?"  Also, isn't there a rule that you're not supposed to comment on how a person looks?

Or maybe I really am just tired.

A Rant: Love, Quid Pro Quo, and Teaching

I love being at a teaching institution. I became a college professor because I am compelled to teach. When I was a kid, I'd pretend to be "sick" so I could be taken by my mom to her college and hang out on campus, just imbibing the whole college thing.  I'd watch her teach and scribble notes, pretending I was a student. I grew up thinking college was awesome and teaching was glorious.

When I went to grad school, people poo-pooed teaching.  I was at an R1 institution where "research" mattered more.  Teaching was to research as female was to male.  Get honored for teaching and lose respect among your colleagues, was a standard warning.  Yet I insisted that I wanted to teach, I wanted a teaching job at a school that valued teaching, like the place my mom taught and like the place I went for my own undergraduate degree.  I am sometimes sad for professors who want support in teaching but who are at research institutions, where their fabulous and liberatory innovations are ignored, or worse, actively discouraged.

I was shocked when I got my first job at a teaching institution that many curmudgeons would be annoyed when asked to learn to be better teachers.  Aren't you here to teach?, I thought.  Wouldn't you want training?  At R1s, training to teach is borderline taboo.  And here we are, at a teaching institution, proudly waving our love-for-teaching flags.  What was wrong with these old fogies who were insulted by the suggestion that they weren't already teaching well enough, allergic to "teaching and learning" professional development opportunities, and resistant to being evaluated for retention based on their effort to improve their teaching.  I just didn't get their issue.  I thought they were selfish sticks in the mud, that they didn't care about students, and that they were only interested in consolidating their own forms of tradition and power.

Then I got my second teaching job at HSU, where I have, over the past four years, loved teaching even more.  When I read bell hooks' writing on love for students, I cry.  Ask my students; I really love them.  I love teaching.  I feel it's a calling. I feel it is what I was put on the planet to do. I write an almost daily journal of things to improve and tweak.  I agonize at night over whether each and every student in my class is ok, whether my words are ever violent to any one of them, whether my white privileged ways of teaching made anybody feel silenced, whether there's anything more I can do to support them.  I go through a checklist of each student every day to make sure I think they're ok.  I feel like their mother.



I know this is wrong, and exploitative, and that the institution loves that I feel this way. I know that student evaluations expect this from me, and so I'm punished more by them if I'm off one day and can't provide that motherly love.  Even though I know these expectations are gendered and unfair, I still love loving teaching and I still love loving my students.  Sorry, that's what I'm here to do.

And I have spent years realizing that teaching is my own form of activism in a troubled world.  I agonize-- as many of you do-- over how I, as an American, middle-class academic, can contribute to assuaging the many evils my own presence on this planet has spawned.  I agonize over my relative lack of power: lawyers, engineers, politicians, movement leaders, media pundits-- they dictate the conversation and move worlds, not stuffy, jargon-prone, elitist academics, right?

I wrote a book that I thought was awesome when I wrote it, but have wondered ever since, despite the social-justice, strong politics of the argument, whether it will ever "make a difference."  Peer-reviewed humanistic social justice scholarship just collects dust and doesn't ever make it into public dialogue, in all reality, for the majority of us non-rock-star scholars, anyway.

And I just don't have any other kind of radical activist gene in me. I don't march the streets. I never called my congresspeople until 2017.  I have the luxury of being able to not pay attention to the news when I don't want to.  I'm not a movement solidarity type. Just not in my blood. But writing? YES. Teaching? HELL YES.  So, teaching is my activism.  I may love research and writing, but I don't delude myself that they are really making immediate, material changes in the world.  Teaching-- reaching, mentoring, challenging, learning from, and lighting fires with students-- is where it's all at for me.  Whenever I think, "I need to do more, I need to be more civically engaged, I should run for office, I gotta get out in the streets, I gotta donate more, I gotta be better and show up everywhere! AAAAAHHHH!!!", I remember, "Wait, I TEACH for God's sake."

So, that's how much I love and believe in teaching and in the mutual learning of being around college students. It transforms me, hopefully them, and ideally the real world.  No dust collecting here. Just passion and saving the world.



I'm never going to feel differently, but I'm getting really tired of being told that if I just loved my students a little more, if I just said hello with a bit more of a smile, if I made myself just a bit more available, if I responded to emails just a bit faster, if I held their hands as I take them to Counseling Services, if I help them move in to their dorms, if I make pancakes for those who can't go home on Thanksgiving, if I wipe their asses (you get the idea), we wouldn't have such an abominable retention rate.  (In case you're wondering, it's 11% that graduate. And that's over 6 years. Don't ask what we graduate in 4 years!)

Yes, there's evidence that suggests that students are going to stick around if they think a faculty member cares about them, gets to know them as people, respects them as whole individuals with problems, challenges, etc.... We are their ground zero, their daily interface with the campus, the pulse of student wellbeing.  That's an awesome responsibility and opportunity.  Each micro-interaction has the potential to make or break a student's career at college. It's not just statistically true; I see it in my evaluations too.

But can you ever do enough? No.  Sometimes I feel like I should hook a line up to my veins and just let the students drain the life out of me.  I'm sure my institution doesn't explicitly conspire to exploit my love of students, but it would undoubtedly benefit from its staff and faculty all to be like the fucking Giving Tree, never drawing a line in the sand to say, "I've given you all I have. How can you possibly want more?"

Let me be clear, this situation is not the students' fault, and that's the purpose of this post.  I resent being asked to be a Giving Tree while the institution cuts all kinds of supports for students, reduces staff support, enacts all kinds of "efficient" budget-cutting strategies, and leaves students without forms of support that they once had.  It seems there's all kinds of "creeping" here: faculty and staff (and even students) are being asked to provide supports where once the infrastructure did.  While student mental health issues rise across colleges students nationally, students are increasingly coming to college with all kinds of traumas (intergenerational, veteran, sexual, you name it).  Some call these students "underprepared," but it's really the institution that is underprepared for the new face of college student.



Don't ask me to solve budget problems with more love. It's pissing me off. Love isn't free, you patriarchal nincompoops.  Now I'm getting wise to the albeit probably unintended strategy.  Sharp as a tack, this feminist. Yup.

So, the institution is, understandably, going to take the path of least resistance.  Not maliciously, I know, it leverages my love for teaching and for students in hopes to increase retention and speed students across the finish line.  Cha-ching.  Guilting me into loving them more is easier and certainly cheaper than providing students basic needs, so they can come to class ready for our academic work.

(I'm increasingly shifting focus away from academic content and more to survival strategies for students, as a result. Anybody else?)

You can put a dollar sign on hiring more therapists, or adding another staff member in student affairs. So those can't be added to a cut budget. But you needn't bother counting "love."  Just keep the guilt trips coming, and all that great data on the transformative impacts of faculty love, and you'll keep extracting love from faculty.  After all, it's all we got.  It's what we do. It's our calling. It's our identity. It's the only way we can feel we matter in the world. We're suckers.  At least, I am.  After all, I'm a woman and a mother and so I can't resist a little trip on the guilt train of not loving enough.

As feminists have long argued, love is the most exploited of our labors.  Love is natural, free, unquantifiable, and selfless.  Right?  As a woman, I know love is expected more from female teachers, and I'm the worst culprit.  I do love my students, but that's not what's at issue here. What is at issue is how my institution leverages that love for its own ends while not supporting students in their psychological needs, housing, adjusting to being in a rural, predominately white town, etc.

Make no mistake, dear reader, this is about the politics of care.

Thank God she's smiling. I almost felt sorry for her! She must love this!

This brings me back to research. In my most resentful moments, I envy my research-oriented colleagues for being valued for their labors, for their institutions not pressuring them to love their students more (on the contrary, those colleagues' love of teaching is hidden in the R1 closet).  The gendered aspects of this current state are not lost on me. Research is valued work in those settings, while and teaching isn't, just as public is to private, or job is to housework, as male is to female.

But here, because HSU is a teaching institution, if you leave our "home" to do work outside-- e.g. research or professional service beyond the boundaries of this house-- you're abandoning the family.  I sometimes feel like doing research is to my HSU family the way working away from home is to my nuclear family.  Both make me feel guilty, that I'm not providing direct care, and so therefore I'm being selfish.

That is, I get the sense that my love of research may be perceived by colleagues in my institution as taboo; I'm not sacrificing enough to meet all the (students') needs on campus.  When I hole up with my computer to write, no matter how relevant or interesting that writing may be to students intellectually, I'm indulging.  If the work doesn't directly meet their material or emotional needs or can be tied in some measurable way to "student success," good luck getting any respect, support, or value for it.  If it doesn't result in the deliverable that the institution wants-- graduation, or other statistically measurable metrics of "student success", then it's superfluous.

So now I'm starting to empathize with those curmudgeons from my first job.  Perhaps it's not that they didn't love teaching.  Perhaps it was that they were sick of being asked to give, give, give without some giving on the part of the institution. Some quid pro quo.   And perhaps they wanted more recognition that the work that sustains them-- teaching, but also research and meditation, professional leadership and dancing (e.g. non-student-interfacing work)-- is just as important for so-called "student success."

It's one thing that an R1 might undervalue teaching. But my institution is a self-avowed teaching-centric place. So it's all the more egregious that the thing I love-- teaching-- gets undervalued here (not unlike housework, eh?).

Don't tell me that if I loved it, I'd do it for nothing.  Don't tell me to love students more, so our graduation rates can improve, which will get us more resources from the state, which will trickle down into some form of relief... somewhere down the line.

What evidence do I have to trust this promise?  Why should I keep sacrificing myself in the name of love for students when students keep losing various forms of structural support?  Why should the onus of providing these supports creep into my workload, just because I love my students?


Ok, enough complaining. Time to get constructive.

What would it feel like to be supported by (instead of resentful of) my institution in my love for my students?

Oh, let me count the ways.... Any combination of 2 or 3 of these would be an improvement:

1. adequate psychological and health services for students
2. adequate and nondiscriminatory housing for students of color
3. being asked, "what would you need to feel supported?", then see follow-through-- even if that follow-through is "sorry, here's why we can't do that."
4. explicit follow through on any number of the thoughtful suggestions outlined by several devoted faculty and staff in supporting minority and/or female students, faculty, and staff. (If you're interested, one is a letter with detailed suggestions written by concerned faculty after the tragic and race-motivated murder of one of our black students, Josiah Lawson, on April 15, 2017.  About a year earlier, our director of the African American Center for Academic Excellence, John Johnson, also compiled a list of brilliant requests from students in a document.  Despite detailed, concrete requests drafted by a major student-led movement in 2014/5 responding to the abrupt firing of a beloved Native American staff member, Jacqueline Bowman, very little has been done, to my knowledge. These impassioned and thoughtful letters serve as roadmaps for the administration, should it really choose to act in accordance with its stated mission. Argh.)
5. action on any number of the brilliant items under "diversity and inclusion" in our recent Strategic Plan.  It's a thing of beauty. I'm really proud that HSU has created such a beautiful ideal. I'm committed to working with HSU toward these ideals.
6. that the campus community at large feel that the administrative leadership hears and is following through on requests to support them better
7. professional development resources (e.g. how to address the fact that students' basic needs are encroaching into the classroom)
8. not ask faculty to do contradictory things (e.g. implementing a "writing across the curriculum" initiative while increasing class size, or work-creeping the jobs of recruitment, development, website management, course enrollment analysis, or alumni relations that used to be done by units/staff that no longer exist, while also asking us to learn new software and related forms of assessment, make us fill out multiple evaluations about everything that happens on campus, but never close the loop.... You get my frustration here.)
9. Provide somebody competent and full time in our college who can work on development, so we can make our own money to compensate for the ways that the state is cutting staff and other forms of student and faculty support
10. Provide a full time person who can manage the college's websites, so we're not asked to do so
11. Provide a full time person in the college to advise all our first years in the basics of understanding their degree audits
12. Hire upper administrators who aren't trying to glide through the last five years of their careers, and so actually care about accountability, faculty morale, and the community of the campus
13. improve vertical communication accountability; administrators shouldn't behave as if they're in a vacuum.  Student and faculty concerns should receive responses, even if nothing can be done about them. 
14. Don't get rid of things that really work, like our Institute for Student Success, and our Office of Diversity and Inclusion, and, and, and.... (WHY, oh why? And why didn't you tell us why?) You're killing me.
15. Take responsibility for structural reasons that students aren't succeeding, instead of telling me I need to love them more.  That really kills my morale. Can you tell? I'm a lover, people.

If any of these things are already happening, then I want to know, and I want to celebrate the awesomeness of my institution!   So WHERE IS THE TRANSPARENCY??? Why don't we know that the institution is doing such awesome work to fix these problems?  Maybe I missed the memo. Perfectly possible.  But we need university-wide morale lifting, and I think sharing these successes in about 20 memos wouldn't hurt.

(Update from a few days later: I learned that the HSU Strategic Plan folks have a great website to track progress.  That's fantastic, and I'm proud!!!  What I would like is also the sense of community narrative around this-- e.g. the "20 memos" concept-- that doesn't require we each individually bookmark the Strategic Plan webpage in order to know what's happening.)

(Update from an email from our President following her Fall 2017 Convocation: YAY! Look at the things the institution is doing!! I'm pleased that there's some progress, and even more pleased that this memo went out to all of us.  A break in the vacuum, perhaps? Let's hope!)

(Update from Fall 2017 convocation meetings: the institution is developing a Center for Teaching and Learning that will provide a lot of the kind of support I'm asking for here, I hope!  So far, no website to link yet, but I've already started getting my first emails about "teaching tips" etc..  I look forward to working with them to support the students and thereby all of us).

******

I'll never get so cynical that I stop loving.  bell hooks taught me that.  But for reals, peeps.

Any suggestions about how to keep on loving without losing yourself?

Grappling with Despair in the Classroom: An ASLE Roundtable

At the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment conference this year, I organized a roundtable on climate justice pedagogies, and brought together some powerful instructors and one student to talk about how to deal with the depressing effects of studying environmental crisis and injustice.  Told to "save the planet, kill yourself," and observing our leaders undermine environmental and social justice, how do we expect the next generation to find a reason to live?

One of my students depicted his response to my class, ENST 295: Power, Privilege, and the Environment, with this fabulous Valentine's card: "This is your brain on ENST 295."

The roundtable extended a conversation prompted by SueEllen Campbell’s pre-conference ASLE workshop on teaching climate change at the 2015 conference in Moscow, ID, as well as LeMenager, Hall, and Siperstein’s new groundbreaking resource, Teaching Climate Change in the Environmental Humanities.  That superb volume doesn't outright engage affect theory, but every single piece speaks to the challenge of overcoming students' despair.  In my experience, students' affective response to the material I teach about structures of power and environmental injustice can become a barrier to learning.  I wanted to hear how my colleagues were addressing this challenge.

Covering experiences teaching in places from Georgia to Singapore, in a diversity of institutions from conservatory to land grant university to technical college, and to undergrads in majors ranging from music to engineering to composition, not to mention environmental studies, I gathered six participants who prepared talks responding to the following questions:

1. How are you dealing with students' eco-grief, environmental despair, and even nihilism when they learn about climate change & environmental justice? 
2. What is a justice-inflected pedagogy, and how might it add to climate change courses? 
3. What is an affect-focused pedagogy, and how might it add to environmental or climate change courses?
4. How does a climate justice pedagogy add to teaching climate change?
5. What do you do with "hope" in your classes?
6. How does the Trump era shape your pedagogy?

Other themes emerged, too, and I was glad to hear respondents talk about acknowledging that different students will respond to the material in different ways depending on their positionality.  In other words, students who have been experiencing environmental injustice in their lives are not shocked by the content.  I took note that I need to address this much better in my pedagogy.  

Jenn Ladino, an associate professor of English at the University of Idaho, opened the roundtable with some provocations and guiding questions. She asked, how can affect theory help explain emotions related to environmental change and loss, including new affects that are emerging in/with the Anthropocene? How is affect transmitted across scales, from individual to global and vice versa? What are the prospects for empathizing across species, and across temporal scales?  She argued that we need to attend to a wider range of affects in texts and classrooms, as well as some new ones that are emerging in the Anthropocene: climate grief, Anthropocene anxiety, solastalgia, even irreverence and humor, which I'm excited to learn more about in Nicole Seymour's book-in-progress, Bad Environmentalism.  

Jill Gatlin, faculty at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, argued that a justice-inflected pedagogy requires enabling students to understand their positionality and privilege vis-à-vis the unequal distribution of climate change consequences. However, emotional reactions to explorations of privilege may range from defensiveness to denial to guilt.  Jill described a course she taught that asked students to consider climate change's effects on a place that they are connected to, in order to make it more real to them.  As musicians, Jill's students also explored what "action" in response to climate change and injustice would mean. 

Robert Melchior Figueroa, an associate professor of philosophy at Oregon State University, argued that "academic cowardice" in this moment makes the assumption that students can't handle the truth.  He insisted that students can handle the emotional intensity of how terrible things are, and that a new vocabulary of affect is crucial for working through this with them: environmental guilt, environmental shame, environmental paralysis, environmental anger, environmental complacency, environmental complicity, and environmental honesty.  Importantly, Rob talked about the importance of exploring students' environmental identities and heritages for grappling with the doom-and-gloom with them.
 

Independent scholar Melissa Sexton provided a beautiful description of how she integrated this material "sideways" in composition courses with technical college students. She should run workshops on this. In contrast to Rob's provocation for us to get more honest, Melissa talked about the need to not alienate students.  She proposed that the concept of the Anthropocene is an easier one for students to engage without getting polarized into the tired old climate change sides.  She can get students to think critically about complicity, justice, technology, ethics, etc, with conversations about the Anthropocene, whereas climate change as a concept can shut down students' ability to think and learn.

Matthew Scheider-Mayerson, assistant professor at Yale-NUS Singapore, talked about the challenge of teaching climate change in that country.  In Singapore, a wealthy illiberal democracy with no recent tradition of social movements, he finds that the pedagogical path that had succeeded in the United States – guiding students from complacency to awareness to outrage and a desire for engaged citizenship and political action – was far less successful.  He argued that instructors model affective responses, intentionally or not, and vulnerability, grief, and honesty become important in the classroom. The typical posture of cautious optimism is not the ideal orientation, he argued.  Like others on this roundtable, he suggested that we sit with the grief with our students, even as we find ways for them to channel their desire to solve problems, act, etc.

 

Finally, a recent graduate of the Environmental Studies program I lead at Humboldt State, Carlrey Arroyo Delcastillo, spoke from her experience as a student of color in a predominately white institution.  It was this talk that really prompted me to think about the ways in which the affective journeys of the white students in my classes dominate my own design of the class.  Attending to white fragility, shock at their privileged complicity, apathy about whether they can/should really save the world as they had hoped, and tears over all the evil in the world, can be silencing to students who have different affective responses to the material.  Carlrey talked about her journey toward a social justice approach to environmental activism, and ended with something like, "it's ironic that I went into environmental studies because I hated humanity, and now my work is based on my love for it."  I'm pretty sure there wasn't a dry eye in the audience.  And what a way to end-- on love.

The room was packed. People were lined up against the walls.  It indicated to me that instructors of environmental and climate justice are desperate for pedagogical tools to help students grapple with this material.  My colleagues and I are worried about our students-- the next generation of people who are inheriting this mess.  

How do you deal with emotion in your classrooms?