XplanaZine

I’ve been teaching classes for active-duty military for several years now, and over that time, my thinking has taken huge turns and I’ve had to confront the fact that my comfort zone ways of thinking are inadequate.

My son is in the desert right now. He’s a 20-year-old Lance Corporal of the U.S. Marine Corps and he arrived at 29 Palms, California, last week, to do a 5-week training (which used to be 8-week, but now shortened) to prepare him and others for deployment. I’m a nervous wreck.

In the meantime, I have yet another new perspective on life, and not one that I ever expected to have.

What do you do when you find out that your theories and approaches to life turn out to be a kind of dogma? Sure, it gains you admittance to a small, exclusive coterie of like-minded dogmatic thinkers, but on some level, you’ve cut yourself off.

When I was in graduate school, many of my favorite theories and critical approaches were, to put it mildly, cryptic. In order to be taken seriously, or even to be listened to at all, one had to demonstrate one’s fluency in the specialized language of one’s chosen sub-group or sub-discipline. There was something very heady and exhilarating about mastering the discourse - we could speak in the code of the initiates. The fact that no one else could understand us reinforced our sense of being special. We invented our own secret society - not Skull and Bones - but an approximation of that, at least in the sense of self-imbued instant elitism.

How did that prepare me to respond to students?

I have to say that it did not at all. Despite all the emphasis on inclusion, diversity, and the phenomenology of oppression, I was not prepared by the academy to be able to listen to or appreciate another person’s vocabulary. I was not prepared in any meaningful way to relate to students. This is not the fault of the courses I had in teaching. Those were actually very good. I’m talking about what existed outside my university - “The Academy” - an elitist, formless, faceless, normative body that exacted absolute conformity of anyone who dared aspire to its ranks. All the while, it denied it required absolute obeisance, a bended knee to the idea that anyone who might question us was, in a word, ignorant.

How did that attitude prepare me to approach online students?

It didn’t. What it did was to delude me into thinking that I was open-minded, and that an appropriate instructional goal or learning outcome was to bring students around to my way of thinking.

Somewhere along the line, I had to let go of some of the rigid notions I had. I had to think again.

• What constitutes critical thinking?
• When am I unconsciously pressuring individuals to simply spout dogma or an ideology?
• When is a student simply rephrasing and regurgitating some of the reading, and how can I make myself aware enough to tell?
• And, how to I come to accept that to require students to do that is toxic and potentially demeaning?

I need to find a good mirror.

I need to find a way to be aware of my own biases and prejudices - the most damaging of which are utterly invisible to me. The irony is that the moment I think I’ve made myself bias-free by immersing myself in the latest critical approach, in reality I’ve just blinded myself.

It’s scary.

When was the moment when I first became aware that I was a creature bred of ill-intentioned programming? When did I realize that I was built to be the way I am? The pathetic lie is that I think I’m open-minded, able to see all sides of an argument, that I’m fair, insightful, patient, and nurturing. The truth is, that’s what I’m conditioned to think I am. If something happens to challenge me in my little bubble world, I blame them. “Ah, poor fools. They ARE ignorant, aren’t they? They’ll turn around after a few years, though…”

I may be exaggerating. I’m not sure, though.

Read Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot. It can be seen as an extended metaphor of what happens to graduate students. Granted, he didn’t intend it as such. But it is there, all the same.

For years, I thought of myself as a constructivist-a social constructivist, not a radical constructivist. What this meant was that I enjoyed the notion that reality is a construction. It doesn’t exist except when and as social groups decide it does. Everything is political. Everything has its own economy.

This is well and good until you go face to face with some of the realities that some of your students are dealing with. These realities are hard. They are absolutely NOT socially driven or constructed. The are not socially mediated, nor are they socially mediatable (despite the language one can apply to situations, and the extreme euphemisms or “newspeak” that is invoked.

I cut my teeth on George Batailles’ Tears of Eros. I used Antonin Artaud’s The Theatre of Cruelty as a point of departure of countless essays and critical perspectives. Jose Ortega y Gasset’s The Dehumanization of Art found its way into almost everything I wrote.

Now I see the works as incredibly arrogant and insensitive - not the ideas, but the application of them. The best way to approach them is as extended metaphors.

So - I blithely invoke torture, dehumanization, and the spectacle of death as every day terms to express a kind of coded way to talk about how we try to reconnect emotion, body, and symbols (language).

Fine. But how does it play in Dubuque? Or at Bagram AFB in Afghanistan, or in Baghdad?

For the person who is or has been in harm’s way, the language and approach are painful, offensive, insensitive, or worse.

So, what happens when the professor’s habitual invocation of the most shocking of metaphors to illustrate very pedestrian concerns, hits the consciousness of the active-duty military student who spends days and weeks in medical evacuation helicopters, trying to keep gravely wounded 18-year-olds alive?

They tend to speak in understatement. Their language is terse, sometimes ribald, always to the point.

What we see is an automatic dysjunct - a disconnect that is amazingly painful and counterproductive.

How does one close the gap? My personal feeling is that the responsibility rests on the professor and his or her institution. They need to get on board and speak the same language, or at least develop listening skills that will be effective in both online and hybrid courses.

In my opinion, the shortest way to success is to reground the learning strategies in lived experience. This is a situated approach, and it brings the course objectives back in focus, rather than losing one’s way in the dark wood of one-sided instruction, activities, and learning approach.

It requires flexibility - but the first step on the way is to listen, and to respond to real (not invented) needs.