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Building Neighborhoods in the Classroom

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Heidi Burgiel: Welcome back to the teaching and Learning at Lasell podcast with Matt and Heidi from the TLC.

Matt Boyle: In this episode, we sat down with Dr James Lincoln, who will be joining us on Wednesday, June 15 for Lasell's Teaching and Learning Camp. We discuss vulnerability in the classroom neighborhood. What kinds of vulnerability students and instructors bring to the classroom, both consciously and unconsciously? And how to make these both mentionable and manageable to help ensure students get both the learning and the care that they need to succeed.

Heidi: Welcome. We're here today with Dr. James Lincoln. Welcome, Dr. Lincoln.

Matt: Welcome, James.

James: Hi, thanks for having me.

Surplus and Agency-Affirming Vulnerabilities

Heidi: James, your abstract claims that vulnerabilities create walls between students and our lessons. Can you share an example of that?

James: Yeah, sure. So. I think it's really hard as a philosopher to talk about examples without getting involved in the higher conceptual frameworks to approach the answers. Right? But I think the quickest way to do that would be to think about vulnerabilities of two different types.

I think there are vulnerabilities that students take into the class with them. We might call these, in the work that I do when trying to process this stuff, Surplus vulnerabilities; they're vulnerabilities that are unnecessary for living. Ones that society creates, you know, students who are outside the classroom and inside, the vulnerability follows them from context to context. They're things like students experiences of systemic racism or sexism, or, you know, students dealing with heteronormativity, you know, having to constantly go through the coming out process to communities or LGBTQ+ students and even students who are experiencing things like food insecurity or housing insecurity.

And these kind of things, these kind of experiences that prohibit a student from being present in the classroom because in one sense, these types of vulnerabilities are consuming of the human spirit. They can cause students to become disempowered in their own learning process because of disenfranchisement or alienation from themselves, but also what I call the community of practice in the classroom. So students come into the classroom and they start a learning process, they learn together, they share notes. They engage in conversations with the practice of learning. These surplus vulnerabilities alienate students from that, either because they can't get involved in it or they don't feel welcome.

The second type of vulnerability, which I think is the type of vulnerability we want to encourage students to embrace and grapple with, I've landed on something like "agency affirming" types of vulnerabilities or "economy affirming" types of vulnerabilities. These are the types of things that are like taking a risk and answering a question you're not quite sure about because you feel like you can contribute to that discussion, or opening yourself to being connected with the instructor or with a peer, building those relationships. Navigating really hard, existentially challenging ideas that could have identity shaping and reshaping moments in their lives and then working through those intellectual barriers.

We want to encourage that, but it's not possible and a lot of ways for students to do that if they're dealing with surplus vulnerabilities at the same time, at least in the classroom space. So when I say that vulnerabilities create walls between students and our lessons, I think we want the students to process and absorb information. We want them to work and play with that information, and we want them to do it in the context of being a member of a community of practice in the classroom. But they can't do that when certain things prevent their membership or fail to allow them to be vulnerable in a kind of agency focused way.

So the real goal there would then be done to make vulnerabilities mentionable and manageable in the classroom space.

Creating Neighborhoods of Practice

James: That was a lot, :)

Matt: No, it's fine. It gets to it pretty well, :)

So I'll just go into the next question about creating those neighborhoods. What you mean by creating neighborhoods in the classrooms?

James: Yeah, I mean, to a certain extent, one of the biggest examples that comes up for students feeling as if they're a member of that community of practice, that neighborhood of practice has to do with -- I mean, this was really prompted, Heidi, by the questions we exchanged back and forth via email. When you ask what students are experiencing surplus vulnerabilities and what students are able to -- you might even have the privilege of engaging in -- the kind of agency affirming vulnerability.

There's the example of -- so when we talk about what it's like to be a black woman in the workforce -- that's going to have different manifestations of vulnerability for the students in the room. For the white student, the white, cisgender male entity, agent, they might feel a sense of discomfort talking about that because they feel ill equipped to talk about it with a sense of tact, right? To acknowledge and validate that experience, but not dominate the conversation or speak from a social position which they don't inhabit.

And so for that student, what they're really dealing with is wrestling with a, an agency affirming or a autonomy affirming form of vulnerability. They don't feel like something that they can share, and the discomfort they have with understanding is mentionable or manageable. So they have to hide that, and they either have to be quiet or they -- in some cases, they take up really problematic positions. They try to virtue signal or something like that. So that's one -- that's not a surplus vulnerability for that student -- but for the students in the room that are black or black female students in the room, then these students need to see in the curriculum and in the way that the discussion is centered in the conversation in the classroom, that the experience is taken seriously and validated, right?

So when we talk about what it means to create a neighborhood in the classroom, that really boils down in this example to how you do that in a way that's accessible to a variety of different ways that vulnerability will manifest from student to student because that will be different for everyone in a lot of ways, with some similarities, but I think that could be different for a lot of people. Is that helpful for thinking about what it would mean to create that classroom?

Matt: I think so. If you have a surplus vulnerability, it will be some kind of societal challenge that is chasing you. And these external forces that are affecting individuals and are making it hard to engage with the objectives and content of the class because you always have your bandwidth filled up with this or you don't feel welcome, whereas other ones, in your example of the young man who feels like he can't speak because he's going to say the wrong thing and therefore is going to internalize negative interpretations of things, out of anger that he didn't feel like he could speak because of a perception of political correctness or something along those lines. Yeah. It would be a different kind of vulnerability.

Classroom Neighborhoods as a Space for Inclusive Learning

James: Yeah, that's right. And I mean, it really -- if you created a three-sentence way of thinking about this, It would go, you know, a community of practice is a collective of people who share a concern or a passion for doing something. And they, in the process of doing it, learn how to do it better as they interact regularly. Right.

So students coming into a class, whether it's a math classroom, a science classroom, a philosophy classroom, the history classroom, they're coming into that classroom with a concern to do what that discipline would ask them as students in that classroom; some might have passions as well as a concern, but that's what they're working on together. Right? A neighborhood. One way to think about neighborhoods is -- because communities can be good or bad; neighborhoods I think are...it's a moral concept, an ethical concept -- they are good. Right? Because neighborhoods are going to be communities where people feel at home. They feel a sense of homecoming when they arrive.

And they do that because their membership of that neighborhood takes care of you when you're going through times of strife, in times of really intense suffering. They also celebrate with you during moments of triumph and joy. And for all of that, the neighborhood itself is operating as a space where one's inner life, their push and pull of their feelings, their concern, their dreams, their hopes, that inner life becomes a welcome part of the public space. Right. So when you take a classroom as a community of practice and you want to infuse that, you're essentially adopting the goal of building inclusive classrooms by taking on a normative objective, which is to transform that classroom into a neighborhood of student practice, where students celebrate when someone gets something, where they are helping their peers and working with the established peer support units, to make it through argumentatively complex pieces of work.

Research has shown that peer support units ambitious student expectations. When you put those together, what you end up having are building blocks for students through meaningful learning strategies. Find their footing together to create an environment where students are motivated to succeed because they feel challenged, right? Because as the instructor, you're saying, you can do this and it's going to be difficult because the work is hard, but I know you can do this. So in that sense, you're saying you are worth more than me making this easy for you because you're smart and you can do this, you can get this and I'm going to be here to help you. And so as everyone in this room. So then the burden of difficult feels less overwhelming, right?

So these environments motivate students to succeed. Students can start experiencing progress from either their peers and say, “Oh, you got this? High five. We did this together. It's amazing. We're getting through it.” Instructors reinforcing that as well through cumulative and developmental feedback. And then what really cements all of this and gives it a foundation of that practice is the collective sense of academic purpose. The building into the culture of the classroom, the belief that there is something valuable to learn together in my membership in this neighborhood of academic practice gets me access to that.

So if the entire idea of that three sentence structure, I know a community of practice is this I know one neighborhood is this and I want that in my classroom at what neighborhoods in my classroom building in the possibility of making vulnerabilities mentionable advantage for and then coupling that with peer support units and high expectations means that students can celebrate and support each other on a regular basis.

I think that's being a member of that community as an instructor is a privilege in that way.

Power Differentials; Instructor Roles in the Neighborhood

The last thing I mention about that is that there is an essential asymmetrical relationship between the student and the instructor in order to practice this approach. One has to be sensitive to where they are as an instructor along that spectrum of power. Right? So I, as a white male, I identify that I often hold the credibility, surplus and virtue of my identity and privilege.

So it is essential for me in the classroom to deflate the surplus power that I might have and therefore level that playing field out a different way. I don't know, because I haven't lived that experience what that would be for others. So I know in philosophy, for example, women experience a credibility deficit. By their students at a really high rate. Right. So my suggestion in the feminist literature on vulnerability by authors like Bill Books, Pablo Larrain and it has been suggested to me that this idea of leveling power into a productive and functional form is possible when that vulnerability becomes much more manageable. Right. So when the students realize I might not be giving this person the credibility they deserve, and that's for a variety of reasons.

Part of how privilege functions in me as a students and how domination and oppression in society is functioning to define the relationship between myself and this, this instructor who comes from a marginalized background, historically underrepresented background that met in a better way becomes a mentionable in the classroom with this process. So that's how I've seen play out that way.

How Did you Start with this Practice?

Heidi: Thank you, James. So how did you come to be doing this work in your classroom?

James: It's a really it's a really good question because my experiences in the classroom, I'm a first gen public school kid with like a really wide and varied set of experiences in the classroom. When I was in public school, I spent most of my time. In speech therapy, I can't get confirmation from any of my parents, but I want to say toys was probably about high school like, like 10^th grade is when I stopped my speech therapy through the public school system and I expect -- because I know over the years I go to counseling just as a mental health practice -- Right now, my counselors and I have come to believe that. I probably could've been formally diagnosed with high functioning autism.

And if more formal communications disorder diagnosis for expressive and receptive delays, when I was younger, if I was going to school in 2020 and not kindergarten of 1989, 1990, I like that tools are different now than they were then.

So as a first gen college student from a working class background with the communication staff that I work with or through, there's a lot of hidden curriculum. That's the common phrase stuff in the classroom, in higher education that just like. Beating my head against the wall, I was like, why am I not getting this like working through these things have to reread things that seemed like a thousand times more than my peers, just feeling alone and scared of a lot of stuff in the works and understand what was going on around me half the time. Or if I thought I did, I always felt that I was wrong.

So I think the reason I came to be doing this in the classroom and the reason I love philosophy so much because to me, it's about working through all of these things.

So in some implicit way, I was always trying to find a space to make stuff. I was struggling with mentionable so that I could figure it out and make it manageable. That's what philosophy has offered me. It has taken a really scared kid and given him a sense of belonging to the people around him and to the world, and that's a pretty big thing, and that all happened in classrooms that were just accidentally doing the thing that we're talking about.

So when I entered the classroom as instructor, I began to notice students would often experience alienation from the learning process, identify something. “Oh, I see that; I do that for a variety of reasons.” And you know, they could be. There could be a skills deficit on the part of the student. Like my reading, writing is really bad for a long time. It's still really rough. So I'm going to work through some stuff. So they mean they're just not they don't have the skills needed to succeed. That's one reason why they might feel alienated from that community or practice that neighborhood of practice in the classroom. There's a lot of personal hardship going on. Those are all those surplus vulnerabilities coming out.

They lack access or awareness of certain academic or personal support systems like I know, and I'm constantly reminding students that listen to this, the counseling center, when they feel like they need someone to talk to or see the AAC, they need tutoring help to contact me for help with work like they need to know that they're not alone. That's a way of being part of this neighborhood that we might call Lasell.

And then they might also just simply lack motivation for the topic at hand because they want other activities, they're prioritizing other activities. Right? And that's self-alienating. So creating certain assignments and stuff in the classroom helps overcome these things by getting students involved in the peer support group in the classroom.

And that moment of getting students into that can be a practice. They don't have to love the thing that we're studying. Like, I'm not asking students to love philosophy would be great. If they did, a lot of them end up doing it for him. But I got into this because I wanted my students to see, and I saw both in the research and the philosophical research literature and in my own life that every moment of success is peace, preceded by a moment of pure, genuine recognition as a member of the community doing the work of the community of practice, and that itself required a neighborhood. How could I how could you not do that kind of thing when it lays the foundation for so much for?

Matt: Well, I think that makes a lot of sense. This idea that there's a hidden curriculum. There's what you are saying as a teacher, but there's also what's being said on your behalf by virtue of what you decided to allow people to say or what the neighborhood has decided to allow on your behalf.

And if you don't intentionally do that work, the conversation stops happening about the things that people need to have it happen. Or at least it seems that way.

The Hidden Curriculum

James: I think that's right, and I think the curriculum you build into it is is more than just what the community seems to feel, how it what seem to be allowing, but how representation is set up in that space. The type of topics that are covered in that space. So if your syllabi and this is a part of the curricular developmental process workshop, but if you're syllabi is pretty well centered in the Western European tradition American tradition, but lacks appreciation for the larger world dialog on the subject you're covering, then you're privileging “the West,” if you will, over advancements of the mathematics that are Arabic for Middle Eastern or Chinese. Or, you know, these kind of things are big deals without representation works itself suddenly into a student's understanding of a topic or of an idea. Right. If I'm only presenting ethics through German tradition that says autonomy is the really important thing, and I'm only doing that with white male European scholars. Then one of the hidden curriculum that's being communicated there is that males are better at reasoning.

That's a big leap to go from what I'm talking about there, because no one's saying that out loud. But if we're not also talking about traditional feminist critiques of that. So one example might be the role of affect of embodied physical, emotional, embodied responses to certain things. Then we'd lose an entire part of the conversation about what is of being. A moral person when it comes to feeling a certain way, when you do a certain thing, right? That's problematic. So I think part of that hidden curriculum issue has as much to do with what explicitly is being said, what is implicitly being not said in how the material is being presented.

How has your experience of teaching changed since you started this practice?

James: So when I first started teaching about 10, 11 years ago in the college classroom, I think I was just interrupting some sort of banking model for education where I was just like you to know this stuff is a pop quiz. It was really hard for me to connect with students in that way. I mean, I would even go as far as just passing around a sign in sheet because I was so afraid of mispronouncing names, right? Because I just wanted to come in and make sure I was giving the information to the students that I was being told it was a necessity. So it was a lot of lack of critical thinking on my part. I think because I was still learning, you know,

I just entered a master's program as I was so young just 20 years ago wasn't I still wasn't young 20 years ago, but if I was still new. And over time, I started to adopt this desire to build a neighborhood of practice of a classroom. And it wasn't an aha moment. I don't think it exists as much as people think they do. I think it's a misrepresented part of hidden curriculum. We don't -- geniuses don't have a handle on it.

It's a lot of work, a lot of processes, a lot of development. So we don't even need to represent development as a process that makes it human, right? I think over time, I began to understand the learning process. I began to understand my students. I began to realize that I was a part of this very community, too, as the instructor. So the community of practice includes students, too, and the work includes a lot of background stuff in the subject of discipline that you're trying to teach. But it also included me.

COVID Exposing the Vulnerabilities of Teaching and Learning

COVID has done a lot of things. But one of the things that's done is it's laid bare the deficits that exist in our current educational systems for students that are experiencing surplus over those. But also students who need to experience kind of a courageous moment of vulnerability to want to learn something because they're so afraid of not knowing and they're so afraid of being vulnerable in the classroom. And I think the same goes for faculty. Right, there has been a few articles the past few days and the Chronicle of Higher Ed, I think a couple on the inside, higher ED as well, which talked to a couple of things the types of vulnerabilities faculty have been experiencing as they've been constantly told that we have to make accommodations for students, the amount of work that that requires and the amount of extra effort it is in one of the parts of that extra effort, the emotional labor of working with students on their own terms to find out where they are.

It was a lie to think that the classroom space, or perhaps a self-deception, maybe I think that the classroom space could be a sterilized place of learning that didn't have people bring their vulnerabilities with them. Like, you don't leave your problems at the door if that doesn't happen. The problems are on your back, right? And you can't walk very far when you're overburdened, right? The same thing for a pedagogical process. And I think the faculty who are very stressed a lot of the times in terms of research and pedagogical development and student prep, the second thing that's been there's been a few articles on has been the disproportionate distribution of emotional labor in the faculty base.

Typically, the way the article framed it was that if you were a privileged faculty member as a white male, you didn't do a lot of emotional labor and you were like, Just do what you got to do student to do fine. And that left the emotional labor to every other faculty. No women faculty members who who are already in precarious positions in higher education anyway. So I think one of the things that I have realized in adopting this neighborhood of practice mentality is that the need to make vulnerabilities manageable and mentionable and manageable. Means that we need to define some expectations around what kind of emotional labor is expected of unsuspecting members and what an equitable distribution of that labor would look like.

And for students who are experiencing surplus vulnerabilities, they require care, right? They don't require us to make learning material “easier.” They require care because I think we undersell or undermine our students confidence too much. When you say, “Oh, you can't do this, this is too hard for you.” Stop telling yourself this is too hard. That kind of stuff just doesn't work when you want students to succeed. But it also doesn't help faculty create environments of neighborhoods of care if they're were not recognized as members of that neighborhood of practice.

Because the faculty needs to be, have the space to be taken care of by the class when things are bad and the class used to celebrate with the faculty member when things are joyful and the faculty members needs need to be acknowledged as well. So by making these vulnerabilities manageable about and this is part of the workshop, the goal here is not to say how can I, as a faculty member, build more care into the curriculum for my students?

No, that's not what I'm trying to say here. What I think I'm essentially trying to say is that if we can do the work to identify practices that are neighborly in the classroom that can attend to that community of practice, then the consequence of that. Would be that the student feels like they can mention their problems and find resources to make them manageable. Can share their successes and be celebrated. And feel like their inner life is a welcome part of the public space and the fact they can also do that as well.

That's how it's changed for me. I feel like I can be in the classroom like me, like I can make dumb dad jokes about my kids. I can. In the process of building that community, I can talk about reading appropriately my students by saying, Look, this class has to be this. This is what it meant for me to go through this really hard communication stuff. My best writing is my rewriting. We're going to work through this together. My students, I think, and as far as like success story goes and where I've seen this come out, like I've seen students write comments on.

In my course evals I’ve had comments like, “I've never felt more seen in my class, I really feel I see issues for myself coming up in this curriculum. I really felt like I could go for Dr. Lincoln with issues that were not just class related so that I could be successful in class.” When I can be there and I can make the bar for being cool really low because I'm pretty dorky, pretty nerdy, then I think we can together find a way to feel at home.

That's not easy, it takes a little time. Not going to happen the first class, but takes time.

Summary

Matt: Sounds like an enormously valuable action to take. So thank you for joining us today, Dr Lincoln. It was wonderful to have you. We're going to be having soon the teaching and learning campus starting on June 13th, the 15th and James will be joining us on Wednesday, June 15 to talk more about vulnerability in a classroom neighborhood for a workshop beginning at 10 a.m. all the way to some hands-on practice in the afternoon. So please join us. Learn more about how you can make… you can't manage what you don't mention.

Join us to do something…I don't know, :)

James: I just want to point out, you just said, “Joining us to do something.” That is that is the most…that's a T-shirt.

Matt: Join us to do something; it's a workshop, :). You'll learn things.

Honestly though, it's a little bit unnerving as a teacher to consider the notion that you're making arguments that to realize you were making by virtue what you say or don't say or what you've assigned or having assigned or how you've presented yourself in the material. But it's also very liberating to know that you can't avoid this hidden curriculum by not mentioning it. Like, Oh, if I don't say that or if I don't mispronounce a person's name, it won't come across as having been insulting in some way because, you know, by virtue of not mentioning it, you've mentioned it in a much more negative light than you'd hope to.

James: Yeah, there's an article by Longstreet, I think, which talks about killing curriculums in the classroom and their negative effect on students engagement. The title of it is something like disciplining the discipline or disciplining in a discipline. So like when you teach math or when you teach philosophy and you do it in some sort of canonical fashion, you're also teaching people to expect that you're teaching people what the boundary is around discipline versus something else.

And it's the that practice. That's just one thing it does. But that practice is what makes Western philosophers so averse to engaging in, like Buddhist moral thinking or or Hindu or Daoist as a kind of real philosophy kind of quote unquote, because they take it to be outside of the bounds of this. Right, and the argumentative structure of discipline comes across these curriculums. I guess it's really like little kids, like kids, like looking at you and learning from your habits. Probably the best way to start. My girls do some stuff that I do just because they're watching.

And there are things that we don't realize that we're doing as teachers, but just comes out in our the way we set up our syllabus, the way we communicate, the kind of way we treat students.

Yeah. So it's I really appreciate that perspective on that because it is unnerving and liberating at the same time. You can't help but do it. You can't really get in front of it as much as you want.

Matt: So thanks very much for joining us. It was wonderful talking with you.

James: thank you both again. Heidi, Enjoy your 2:15.

Heidi: Thanks!

Matt: Thanks so much for listening to us, everybody. Faculty interested in learning more about teaching and learning here at Lasell can visit MyLasell at https://my.lasell.edu

Or you can send us an email at TLC@lasell.edu, or give us a call: 617.243.2001

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