3.
A Relationship to Place
Having established some footing on which to express and explore the teaching self, I now hope to address a few other important themes found in the relational sphere. As my reflection on the teaching self began with an inquiry and trip back to the beginning of my teaching journey, here too, I hope to use another inquiry and recollection to initiate my thinking.
During that notoriously hot LA summer, with most of the world cowering and sheltered, I purchased a punching bag that I crammed into the trunk of my Toyota Camry, which I then slung over my shoulder and hung from a tree at the park. Between sessions on the bag, masked trips to the grocery store, and loaves of homemade coconut bread, I started applying for teaching positions. Most of my students at the international boarding school where I formerly taught fled back to China, bidding Trump a mighty middle finger on their way home. It seemed like a good time to find something new.
I can still picture the brown hardwood floors of my tiny apartment, as I sat on my couch for an early phone interview with EPS, a glamorous school, in some even more remote corner of the country. At some point, I shared an element of my teaching philosophy which contained traces or hints no doubt of a Freirean leaning. In response to my philosophical position, one of my interviewers, posed a question that now hovers with the other ghosts of my teacher past and teacher future. They asked, in a paraphrase, “If you hold these (radical) beliefs, why not go teach somewhere in an impoverished community?”
In effect, this question implies, perhaps accurately, that these two projects, two approaches to education—the functional and the transformative—are mutually exclusive. When I reflect on my relationship to the institution, I can’t help but remember that question, the only real thing I remember from my interview.
As a consequence, rather than argue for evidence of my role as a “school ambassador,” I reflect on the uneasiness and dissonance between a teaching philosophy or a vision of education, in all its complexity, and an institution, in its own vastness. That is, where the institution questions my effectiveness in acting as a “strong and positive ambassador for EPS,” instead, I ask—how effectively the institution aligns with, honors, nurtures, supports, and cultivates my beliefs, values, and goals as an educator.
So, in scrambling for ground on which to consider my relationship to/position within the institution, bursts of geometric color, twisted and turning, encircle me. Perhaps some other hand turns the wheel of my Kaleidoscope.
On Visibility and Participation within the Institution: The Conch
One of the other measures in the pale-yellow sphere, “participates visibly in the daily life of the school,” contains two important ideas that I would now like to consider: participation and visibility.
In Golding’s classic Lord of the Flies, upon gathering themselves from the scattered places on their forgotten island, the children answer the call of a strange, bellowing sound—summoned by the guttural howl of the conch. At the initial meeting, the children almost immediately reproduce the structures of power they have internalized from their experiences as students. In their best estimation at democracy, they conceive the conch as a symbol for the distribution of power, a symbol for the right to voice, to speak. In his first foray into chiefdom or leadership, Ralph proclaims,
“And another thing. We can’t have everybody talking at once. We’ll have to have ‘Hands up’ like at school. I’ll give the conch to the next person to speak. He can hold it when he’s speaking” (33).
Even children, stripped of all the familiar gestures of society, must first attend to language, voice, and who carries the power of speech, who holds the conch.
When I consider the pillars of the pale-yellow sphere, participation and visibility, I consider the conch. In thinking about participation, obviously, our division meetings offer the closest approximation to those meetings on the beach, contending with the uncertainty of the unknown landscapes of the school year, assessment, AI, or whatever other shipwreck besets us.
To me, from the time I have been hired, one symbol has remained utterly foreign and enigmatic but seems to carry unmistakable importance in the chain of signifiers in our school community: the microphone. When I think about how visibly I participate in the community, I wonder at who holds the conch, to what end.
A field notes from after a discipline meeting towards the end of the fall trimester speak somewhat to issues of the conch (10-25-23):
Burnout again. Just off the heels of a miserable little class on Emerson. I don’t know what’s more disheartening, the lack of intellectual curiosity or the inability for students to be stirred, moved, genuinely engaged by even the most inciting American voice, our national subversive, the call to anti-conformity.
Or maybe I am overly sensitive teaching against the background noise of the recent missive now inexplicably linked in my mind to that awful dance and the song “Celebrate,” with its mournful, melancholy—played always unironically at the end of some sad celebration in the bowels of a forgotten, beige community center, strewn with gaudy tensile, cheap finger foods, and a patch of dancefloor with middle-aged people moving awkwardly to long-gone days of Clinton-era prosperity.
And now we are encouraged in a shameless plug for Bing to write with AI, “Look, kids. No hands.” But I’ve been here before, feeling used and cheap like a musty motel room that never loses the stale stench of cigarettes and itchy furniture, various shades of maroon and navy, an old television limping in a corner.
I’m an old broke-down typewriter, churning out letters of rec about a dying discipline, the soft curriculum—midwife to the more urgent business, the more real demands of whatever it is that people value.
Today as I made my way back across the tracks, outside my apartment building, the sitting area was splayed with various garments of military fatigue and a combat boot notched atop a signpost like some urban Colonel Kurtz (the horror), or a cryptic junkie totem.
For years now, I’ve poured creative energy into trying to excite, interest, and legitimize for students the magic of language, the power of story, and tried to model a different way of being in the world through a relationship with literature and writing.
But today I feel like Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard, descending staccato, frozen in the lights of that stairwell, one final monologue of delusion, hands gesturing odd conjurings as if to cast herself finally beneath the powers of her own spell.
I used to quiet these episodes with some self-satisfied moral superiority, a life lived in more immediate connection to vitality, the river, the body, an untamed joy, but now I wonder if these are not simply misapplied delusions, the little lies the working poor tell themselves to excuse their economic mediocrity. What now without the balm of my own deluded platitudes? Macbeth shall sleep no more.
Admittedly, the melodrama of this ‘note’ contains a strange amalgam of images and feelings. But beyond the overwritten depiction of motel rooms and sad, beige community centers—the announcement in question—to encourage students to use Bing in their writing—came after an hours-long English Discipline meeting discussion about the role of AI in the classroom in which we came to a completely opposite conclusion. I am reminded of Piggy, trying desperately for the ideal of democracy and how he is silenced: “The conch doesn’t count on top of the mountain… ‘so you shut up’” (p. 42).
Does that make TMAC-205 the top of the mountain? If so, maybe democracy, participation, and visibility still exist back on the beaches of the English discipline, the Harkness room, a giant table meant to embody the spirit of shared voices, an equal distribution of the conch.
Then I recall the one time I dared to take the conch during discipline time. After desperately seeking support in trying to make pedagogical and moral sense of teaching Beloved, teaching rape, and sadism, and the horrors of slavery and white supremacy, a colleague remarked, “It sounds like you need a break.” And so, maybe I do.
In the past week, in sitting with some of these dark nights of the soul in the teaching life, I think of David Fierce, my very own Kurtz, who in the mythology of my impression, did actually retreat into the wilderness of the Olympic Peninsula, driven, like Kurtz, by some greater purpose. I would like to speak with him, to travel into that Heart of Darkness of the Olympic Peninsula to better understand why he finally abandoned teaching.
In this now unwieldy conch framework, I only recall a single character who stands outside of the influence of the conch, Simon, who travels mysteriously to confront the Beastie. Does Simon ever take the conch? What is his relationship to the symbols of power?
A Look at Collaboration
As a final reflection on the relational sphere of the PDP model, I would like to examine some of my experiences and beliefs around collaboration. From what I recall, during my interviewing and onboarding process, collaboration seemed like an important rally cry for the school, a selling point of collegiality and interdisciplinary course development. I felt excited at the prospect of drawing on the experience of like-minded colleagues, to perhaps lighten the load of curriculum development.
When I arrived, however, the world had taken a necessary but decidedly anti-collaborative turn. During this period, physical separation compounded with immense gulfs of personal anxieties, fears, and the overall difficulty of trying to survive a year of remote schooling. The once fertile soils of collaboration, hardened and dried under the strain of lean times. Connecting, understanding, and patience became immeasurably difficult.
When the dust settled, and we re-emerged on campus, my one year-long course assignment had been annexed, literally, circumscribed to a small building down the street, a sort of American Studies outpost, that also doubled as a student parking lot.
My recollection of that year remains veiled with the strangeness of re-engaging with humanity, placing our bodies, once again, in proximity, in the classroom, while sometimes also still teaching hybrid, giant faces projected like a great and powerful Oz. That year, I felt incredibly dissatisfied and at odds with my American Literature class. That cold, dark classroom, partitioned awkwardly with vertical steel support beams, and that perpetually damp, soggy parking lot, seemed somehow hostile.
We began with Gatsby that year, I remember. Gatsby and that damn green light. The American Dream. The American question. I also want to begin my thinking on collaboration with the American question or the American studies question. Rather than attempt to include survey results that might somehow testify to my ability to collaborate (or not) with colleagues, I would like to unearth both the challenges and maybe triumphs of collaboration by looking at the 11th grade American Literature course as a case study.
For data in this section, I conducted three semi-structured interviews with colleagues who I formerly or currently collaborated with in the American Literature course. I have selected this course and decided on the case-study approach to focus to illuminate the difficulty and complexity of trying to theorize, plan, and execute even a single class.
Echoes in a Cacophony of Collaboration
In my four years at EPS, the American literature course has undergone continual upheavals in both personnel and course content. As the only year-long literature course and a foundational component of the overall humanities experience, the unsettledness of the course demands some attending, and perhaps the view of collaboration might offer additional texture and insight.
From the interview data, I have identified a few thematic entry points to capture my thinking. In that spirit, I hope to resist the tendency for collegiality and collaboration to linger and drift in the school ether as mystical qualities that somehow happen spontaneously and without care and attention. Instead, a more explicit, concrete, and qualitative examination of teachers in collaboration, can bridge that vast space between indefinite, vague institutional values and the actual demands of collaborative practice.
One of the first themes which emerged through my interviews is that each course, like an institution itself, carries a deep, tangled history. Each course, for example, bears the imprints of current, former, and even departed faculty. To enter into conversation with a single course, or with the current team of teachers, also means contending with the echoes of all the former voices in the class. Unfortunately, without taking the time to communicate these histories, echoes can devolve into an indecipherable cacophony.
I began my conversation with Ian Duncan first, in part, to identify some of the muffled echoes of the American Literature class. As a ten-year American Literature veteran, Ian offered a useful starting place in historical memory, recalling:
Duncan: Yeah, and I think it also gets tied up into just how dramatically different the history side of things started changing before you arrived. So it started with Olsen and Delaney way back in the day. So Olsen taught all American lit, Delaney taught all American history. So you have two people who were in like really well, I think really well designed synchronicity.
The fact that an original pair of teachers taught the course “Way back in the day” does not inherently trouble future collaborations, but it raises the question of how faithfully the original curricular intent remains. If the class continually gets reheated and remixed with every new configuration of literature and history teachers and yet still somehow remains beholden to the original cottage-school vision of an American Studies program, how can it retain its original ‘synchronicity’? How can a new teacher coming into the course assemble the masticated pieces of old assessments, text selections, or even philosophical intentions?
In one possible model, courses might go through a natural process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, each new member interjecting their favorite bits, placing their own thumbprint on the ever-evolving curriculum. Duncan described this de facto process as follows:
Duncan: Yeah, so I think Lerner Lewis was looking at this class and was like, well, I want to interject, you know, the way that I interjected on Olsen’s curriculum, he sort of interjected on my curriculum and really kind of… I mean, you didn’t teach college. You taught a boarding school. Okay, so they are both college professors, right? And so is Olsen, by the way. So I think they had the mentality of like, well, I’m going to teach how I know and what I know and who I am, which is a good thing. And this happens to be the one course that the school wants to make sure that everyone has a similar experience.
With each interjection, however, an echo remains. For his final departing interjection, for example, Larner-Lewis, the esteemed former college professor, wanted to bring in a course text dear to him or proximal to his PhD focus: Slylvia Plath’s Ariel. Yet, just after this interjection, Larner-Lewis departed from the school. Unfortunately, Plath remained. The following year, a student in my section of American Literature, completely removed from the echoes and the interjections of the course, read Plath’s poetry and fell into utter melancholy and became almost unable to complete the class.
In a private email, the student’s mother described the reaction to Plath and the impact of difficult themes as follows:
The Sylvia Plath erasure activity was especially difficult given it’s [sic] theme of suicide, and [student] told us it made [them] more depressed to work on it, yet [they] consistently tried. That assignment put [them] in a deep funk and [they] tried to complete it for about a month (putting [them] more behind on other assignments). In retrospect, I wish I had asked you to do what my friend told me her son’s teachers at Bush did in a similar situation – gave him a different text that did not contain material to further trigger his depression.
Thus, for better or worse, the decisions of former faculty in designing classes, the history of collaboration, moves with powerful inertia. Likewise, these decisions have lasting impacts for both the incoming faculty who must decipher and excavate these lost and buried artifacts of original intent and design, and for the students who step into the streams of these classes.
And so, the mandate to go forth and collaborate needs more careful parameters. Better still, the older styles of breakfast-table collaboration that worked well and maintained synchronicity during the grassroots days of the school need to be updated to reflect the increasing difficulty of an American Studies faculty that consists of six, ever-evolving faculty members.
Time, White Rabbits, and Wonderland
“Could it be that time in wonderland is something that is different from what time is at home?” (Lewis Carroll)
In the following section, I would like to interrogate the lack of allocated time to meet the demand and labor associated with mindful collaboration (here I draw a distinction between the gestures of collaboration, brief meetings with hurried consensus, and dwelling deeply in genuine collaboration that creates space and opportunity to breathe into the actual demands of relationship). Ironically, as I write, the minutes until my next teaching duty tick along in my consciousness. From the lived constraints of time scarcity in the daily rhythm of a school day, I am forced to abbreviate.
Time emerged as an important theme in the following excerpt from my interview with Jen Oakes, where we discussed certain constraints of collaboration:
Jen: I think that the school talks about collaboration and the importance of it, but there’s no actual time carved out for it. And so that’s like a tacit de-prioritization of collaboration, right? And so, like when we have department meetings, it would be really valuable just to say people who teach in collaboration should go and that’s what we’re going to do today. We’re going to prep our classes in collaboration. Yeah. Something like that. Because without that time that ends up that ends up being an added lift from my point of view. Yeah. Because it means it’s time I can’t grade. It’s time I can’t prep. And so there’s just the added expectation that in addition to all the other things that other teachers do contractually, now we’re going to sit down and like mind meld with people with pretty distinctively different ideas. It’s really hard work. It’s really hard work and so it’s not, the collaboration isn’t difficult for me in working with other people, it’s just finding the time and then actually feeling like it’s a true priority when the practices that are in place don’t advocate for that.
I leave this comment unabridged for the way it succinctly identifies the fissures between an imagined view and actual practices of collaboration. As shown above, processes of authentic collaboration, curriculum development, and assessment design are immensely fraught, demanding consistent, concentrated blocks of time. And so, perhaps in the wonderland of EPS, or the wonderland of neoliberalism, in which time synchronizes to the procession of the market, the long march to college acceptance—time is something different than at home. Even in our coolest moments, perched in stillness like hookah-smoking caterpillars, deep down we churn relentless white rabbits—late, late, late.
Collaborating with Ghosts
As a next consideration, I have identified another feature/challenge of course development unique to the English discipline, what I have come to term collaborating with ghosts. When I began my teaching assignment, along with team-taught classes, I also taught three courses independently, where I was expected to either independently design the curriculum or regenerate a class from the remnants of old one note pages.
In most cases, being trusted, empowered, and freed to design and execute a course autonomously allows for a less complicated experience in course design. With one class, however, strange silences and a lack of institutional memory somehow unsettled and problematized the process of course design. While I have written extensively, both here and elsewhere, on the difficulty of teaching Beloved, I return now to Morrison’s metaphors of hauntings and ghosts for a different purpose.
At present, I invoke, or summon the ghosts of collaboration to make the point that in addition to the layers of personality, beliefs, and time constraints that trouble collaboration in the English discipline, course design also always demands an intimate and complicated collaboration with the material, with the voices of the authors and texts we read. In the case of Beloved, as I cast my net for answers, an eerie silence ensued. Instead, I set out on a difficult and demanding relationship with Morrison, her text, the world of ideas and the project of making the encounter with her work accessible, meaningful, and safe for students.
Here I want to explore a few student responses to the Beloved curriculum, which would be classified as a difficult history or a trauma narrative. I include student response to illustrate yet another layer in the views of collaboration, which is that along with the voices of colleagues, ourselves, and course texts, in the English discipline, in a truly student-centered approach, we also co-construct curriculum alongside students themselves. Their positionality enters the classroom with levels of intersection and complexity that are deeply interwoven. One extremely attentive student wrote the following response to a discussion post prompt that asked students to survey their own orientation towards the ghosts of our curriculum. They write:
On one hand, I do believe it’s important to see history through experiences and emotions rather than just facts and dates. History is more than just events, and ignoring the depth of human experience would both misrepresent the past but may also make us less compassionate and fail to see WHY these events were/are so meaningful. On the other hand, it does feel strange to have to continuously engage with upsetting themes and events simply because they happened in the past. Will there ever be a point when we won’t have to discuss these in so much depth, or will they forever be a part of our curriculums and conversations? It also may cause us to become desensitized or burnt out after a while, so it’s important to me that the engagements we do have are valuable and used well, and that we use this kind of teaching to actually create change instead of merely informing others. There is only so much power in “spreading awareness” so my hope is that reading with ghosts will create real movement towards equality.
Throughout the trimester, this student held the course skeptically, at arms-length. This discussion post marked a rare moment of candor where this student poses an important and justifiable question about the value and or danger of presenting “upsetting themes” in curriculum. Essentially, they ask, how long can we continue with windows and mirrors.
Another student wrote an equally impassioned response to the same post.
Dear Mr. [Teacher/author name],
I sincerely do not mean to come off as disrespectful or lazy, however, I do not believe I can complete the writing assignment due tomorrow while holding to academic principles that are important to me and (I believe) to you.
You have previously expressed that you don’t like when students’ writing becomes performative. I find this quite reasonable and I, too, don’t enjoy writing when I have nothing to say.
With that being said, I don’t know what it means to read about trauma, violence, and Black death. I don’t think it is my place to speak on that subject. I am not black and have not had the experience of reading literature which portrays my life as expendable. I think anything I have to say would be at best regurgitated platitudes, and at worst deeply disrespectful and counterproductive.
I think both the Joubert article and Beloved are important to discussions of the questions you posed, but I am neither willing nor able to provide a defensible interpretation of either.
I would appreciate an alternative opportunity to demonstrate my learning and understanding of this subject, but I won’t be doing this assignment as it is currently formulated.
Thank you,
In this case, the dissatisfactions with windows and mirrors elicits student refusal. In both cases, the student-as-collaborator, finds themselves deeply troubled by Morrison’s ghosts. They demand more than disconnected gaze.
As a third response, I recall an episode of a student sobbing at the end of a class where the homework reading included a scene of sexual violence in Beloved. At the time, I connected the student to the school counseling services, but I received no additional communication about the resolution to this emotional upheaval or the possible connections between reading trauma in the classroom and the traumas of student’s lives.
At last, in this overly simplified summary of the process of collaborating with the ghosts of a text, which also means collaborating with students, and counseling services, and potentially school leadership, I want to emphasize the unique complexity and responsibility in text-selection as a form of collaboration.
Morrison speaks with a voice that the school has been unable or unwilling to effectively hear. To open spaces for genuine collaboration or more clearly understand the strange silences around teaching difficult histories, trauma, and unsettling themes in the English classroom, I prepared an anonymous survey that I sent out to the English discipline, school leadership, and EICL co-chairs:
- When, if ever, have you read Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved?
- To what extent, if any, do you think it would be useful to read or re-read Morrison’s novel in order to participate in a discussion about the complexities of presenting her work in the classroom?
- To what extent, if any, do you think it would be useful to read/re-read this novel instead of an assigned summary reading in order to participate in a collaborative discussion on curriculum development or the issues of teaching trauma and difficult history in the classroom?
- If not Toni Morrison, how would you feel about reading another discipline-specific text (novel, research text, etc.) for the compulsory faculty summer reading instead of the typical selections?
- Do you have any additional suggestions, comments, or concerns about using a shared, discipline-specific summer reading text to facilitate conversations about curriculum development, course proposals, or other discipline objectives?
I received four of sixteen responses to the survey—a reflection of both survey fatigue and perhaps a more diffuse institutional fatigue. Regardless, the survey above works as both a form of counter-surveillance, in which I am using my project of reflexivity to invite colleagues and administrators into their own reflexivity and a plug for the possibility of repurposing summer reading selections to serve as anchor texts in discipline-wide collaborative practice.
Final Thoughts on Relational Cultivation
In trying to decide how to end this section, to conclude, unsatisfactorily the pale-yellow sphere, I stumbled on a random remnant from an old PDP portfolio that somehow persisted into my one note. Someone named, “Hutch”, a former F&P director that I never met, posed the following question as a measure of “relational cultivation” to a former PDP candidate:
What strategic approach do you have for maintaining strong relationships in the various levels of the community? (regularly visiting other discipline events, cultivating relationships across academic disciplines and divisions)
What tactics do you use to cultivate those relationships? (lunch and breakfast, after-event drinks, etc.)
I include this note both to highlight the strangeness of the overly militaristic language of “strategic approaches” and “tactics” and “levels of community” to interrogate the entire project of quantifying relationships and relationship building. While it is unfair to extract the comment of one (former) school leader as a mouthpiece for the entirety of thinking on this domain, this comment illuminates important contradictions and problems with an overemphasis on the quantitative—or trying to submit that which is spontaneous, natural, and exists outside of the reaches of labor (relationships, caring, human connection) beneath the structure of a measurable domain of professionalism.
Here I would like to explore the possibility of how the PDP tool itself produces values, practices, and ways of being that do not allow for differentiation and diversity among faculty. Put simply, to measure relationship building (by event attendance or how effectively you strategize and use tactics to maneuver in ‘levels’ of community) inherently encloses that which is natural and spontaneous beneath a professional gaze. This creates a hidden curriculum which honors and rewards certain types of social behavior and conflates them with professional competence. As an alternative, I have done my best to capture some of the invisible ways in which I am deeply engaged in both ‘the life of the school,’ and my teaching life.