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CSUDH - Habermas - UWP

California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Soka University Japan, Transcend Art and Peace
Created: November 13, 2001
Latest Update: November 24, 2001
jeannecurran@habermas.org

Now I don't mean to cast aspersions on wolves, but they are the ones who spawned the guy who ate Little Red Riding Hood. So of course they play a big role in my story, especially when I'm taking on the role of Little Red Riding Hood. For those of you not familiar with the role, she's a blonde who figures you get further in this world by pretending to be a dumb blonde and appealing to the male's wolf instincts. One thing I quickly discovered about the dumb blonde role was that no matter how many degrees in how many "male" fields you have, all you have to do is shake your blonde curls and absolutely everybody buys into the "dumb blonde" routine. Well, everybody except my husband, who has his own award-winning dumb blond routine, for which I invariably fall.

Ribbit, sometimes affectionately known as "Meat and Potatoes," was the classic hierarchical puffed up bullfrog. He had elite schooling. He was accomplished. He was long-winded. Ooh, was he ever long-winded! I was always in trouble for interrupting him. He was deep. And he was "right." He was a good friend of Aging Fox.

Both of them were men. That helped of course. It's much easier to fit into the male hierarchy when you are male. I think I read that somewhere. But most of all, they were both white. Now, I know, you think I'm going to howl about white privilege. About how they managed to deny that there were any special privileges at all with which they were blessed. No. I "know" they got where they were because they worked hard and earned it. I read that somewhere, too. I think maybe I read that during the Anita Hill hearings when Clarence Thomas was accusing her of trying to "lynch" him.

Ribbit was an ethnomethodologist. "Ethnomethodology basically refers to understanding the meaning systems and procedures people use in doing what they do." (From On ethnomethodology.) Now, I guess that's a pretty good definition. But the one that's always stuck in my head is Taradiddle's:

"Well, let's see. Ethnomethodology is kind of like taking a truck full of chickens out on the highway. Then you stop right smack in the middle of the highway, and you let the chickens out, and you go over to the side of the road to see how the chickens and the people are gonna handle this.

After about fifteen minutes you check out the results. "Man, look at all that chicken shit!"

You know, the odd thing is that the idea rather appeals to me. It's very close to what we were doing here at Ambassador. Let's just do it. And then see what happens. And for a few years, it worked. They left us alone, in peace, with our chickens and our freeways and all that chicken stuff. Where I went to school they called this grounded theory, going into the field to check things out before you set up any hypotheses to test. (Barney G. Glaser and Anselm L Strauss on Grounded Theory.)

But then we proliferated approaches with ethnomethodology and phenomenology ("20th-century philosophical movement dedicated to describing the structures of experience as they present themselves to consciousness, without recourse to theory, deduction, or assumptions from other disciplines such as the natural sciences." phenomenology) Whatever, they're all qualitative approaches. That means we wanted to look more deeply into what happens and just watch and listen in good faith for a while before we decided that we "knew" better than the chickens.

Well, true, we should have known that when we opened up that truck on the freeway that there was going to be some excitement as cars and chickens discovered one another. I have a feeling the Rights of Subjects committees would complain of our lack of concern for the health and welfare of the chickens, never mind the cars. I mean, some of us brake for chickens. But aside from sticky wicket issues like that, most of us were genuinely interested in a field approach, in waiting to see what would happen, in trying to describe what happened as best we could, and then in trying to understand what the chickens were telling us. I always figured the chickens in Taradiddle's story were telling us that better part of valor is to get the hell out of there, and that you're probably going to be pretty scared while doing so.

That would seem to be one valid interpretation. I'm not sure it was the most useful bit of social information we could have come up with, but I really think Taradiddle used it just to make his point. Which would have been: first see what happens, then try to explain it. Don't go romping into the field to explain what your imagination tells you "should" happen. Mainly because we tend to see what we're looking for, and not to see what we never thought to look for. Well, at least that was Anselm Strauss' and Barry Glazer's point.

My point is that most of us weren't into quantitative positivist sociology. It didn't fit with our commitment to social change and justice for the poor and downtrodden. What was the point to measuring how many Chicanos had difficulty in getting through engineering studies?

We presented one of our papers on the difficulties of teaching theory and critical thinking and writing. We didn't have all the answers, but we had lots of narratives, and lots of field observations. No one was interested in our work. They were all interested in the model of Chicano difficulty in traditional disciplines, like engineering. They interviewed Chicano students and ascertained from these interviews that the students had difficulty finding help to navigate the traditional curriculum. Surprise, surprise! We could have told them that without all the interviews. But half the session was replicating the model and adding up their quantitative results to prove that Chicano students have difficulty in engineering school. Oh, and getting their results published, of course.

Guess we have to call our work a model if we want to discuss serious ways of teaching. But we didn't like models. They tended to miss the important stuff, like the chicken shit.

In the mid seventies we had a large grant from HEW to make real changes in the work and careers of our students. We had set up an undergraduate research center. We didn't invent it, we didn't think it up. We didn't design it as a controlled experiment. We began to understand that our students were working in social work kinds of jobs, and they were discovering that Public Administration people were coming in and getting appointed as their supervisors! Our people were perfectly capable of supervising their work with the community. But we had created a new "discipline" for training: public administration.

My background was physics, math, french, philosophy and learning theory. I didn't know diddly squat about business and public administration. But, hey, it couldn't be that hard to learn. Slubberdegullion, I think, was very well versed in organizational sociology. But he was off to TR Young's Red Feather Institute and writing the next great Marxist doctrine. I wasn't so sure about Marx. But I did know that having someone else come along with a fancy certificate and take your job promotion away wasn't too cool. That was especially so because most of us were women, and that had been happening to us for far too long anyway.

Now we weren't "feminists." I mean, I had been rousted from that position quite as rudely as I'd been rousted from the marxists. And like the women I taught, I liked men. Welcomed them into our midst, dated them, included them in our projects, and depended on their help. If there was such a thing in those days, we were working class feminists. We didn't much care what you called us, or whether you held the door open for us, but we darned sure weren't gonna let you take our jobs and our promotions away from us.

So I promptly found the national public administration professional organization and joined it. No, I still didn't really know anything about it, but I paid my dues, and I dashed off a paper for their conference in Chicago. That meant registration. No one ever asked about my bona fides.

In Chicago I headed promptly to the Women's Division and was welcomed warmly. Gill was at USC then, and she was bright and detrmined to open up promotions to women. She helped. We began to attend public administration meetings in the county and the city, and to build a network of contacts.

All our work with agencies had been research on needs assessment, on collecting data they had no money for to prove the need for additional services in the community. There were a few radical left people who insisted that we should not do this work for them, for it deprived workers of their jobs. Here we go again with ideological debates. There weren't any workers doing these jobs. There was not sufficient money in the county and the city to buy such research. I came from a professional research center. Trust me, we wouldn't have touched this stuff. Nor would any other respectable research outfit.

But in the student-operated research center we could create what later came to be partnerships with agencies that would put student interns into their next grants, that we were helping to create the database for, and that would allow our students to have part-time jobs at the agency, instead of at a fast-food joint. That was a foot in the door to a real job, with a real benefits, and a career path if we planned it right.

Now, none of this was rocket science. Needs assessment isn't complicated unless you're paid to make it that way. We were in an unsophisticated community with enormous social needs, and poorly delivered services. The planning groups we made up with agency directors, the simple percentages we determined with our old SPSS programs made nice tables, and convincing grant proposals, but they weren't the stuff of high level social science. Sure, we could whip up our final reports into impressive reports, but this was hardly the stuff of the American Sociological Review.

In many elite colleges, this work could have destroyed my academic career. Actually, it did. But, wow, did it ever lead to another and different career. No publications, no textbooks to publish. Textbooks wouldn't, couldn't work in this environment. Textbooks made the presumption that our students had the prior experience of reading as a means of individual pursuit of knowledge, that they knew how to undertake a traditional review of literature, that they could write up the results of their work with no more than a petty gripe about the time involved.

These were people who had been barred from higher education by the entrance requirements for which their schools did not prepare them. They were bright enough to learn, but it was going to take years of practice and skills development. And many who came weren't the pampered children of loving parents determined to win an education for them. Most weren't quite sure what it was, this education. Mostly, they knew there was a degree at the end, and that was impressive - a college degree. And then there were supposed to be jobs at the end of that.

But the sociology of education was a pretty good place to start. We had lots to say on that. And this was something they new a lot about. It was lived experience. They also knew a lot about the need for social services. Most of them had been there, done that. And they'd been treated arrogantly and badly, and they knew about that. So working with the agencies to coordinate community services and improve both delivery and availability made lots of sense to all of us. We knew how to do that.

And I knew how to set it up as a needs assessment survey, and set up cross tabs and make out lovely tables to demonstrate the needs. But we needed me to do this with the students. Oh, there were brilliant ones, like Carol. She had the math and graphics down cold. But then we needed to place here with the county so she could make the money she needed to finish school. So we all gathered in the huge basement room I had liberated, opened up the curtains to invite the world in, and did it all together.

The HEW grant afforded us some typewriters; we were still using IBM cards i nthose days. But mostly it was just the huge classroom with a little office space in back. We hung out together, we worked together, we made deadlines together. And we made lots of friends in the community. When it was time for a report, we all worked on it. And then we rushed it to the campus printer. Those were good times. We were doing things that helped the community, the ordinary folks in the community, and that helped all of us. We were having fun. And we were all learning together.

I spent hours writing job descriptions with appropriate skills, but it was never that neat. The skills were a good start. They helped me think through what we needed to teach, and we set up workshops throughout the day and across the week, so people could come to them around the other demands of their lives. I tried to measure the skills gained as a means of grading. But often if I was dissatisfied with a student's demonstration of a skill, I was smart enough to know I hadn't taught it well enough.

We had one very bright guy, who'd come back to school to get his degree. He had actually been scared to come back, fearful that he couldn't cut it in school. It's absolutely how many people have been intimidated that way. He should never have worried. He was smart, disciplined, committed. And I was enormously pleased to have his help.

One day we had a huge amount of coding to get through quickly. And because ours was an academic program, not a training program, I insisted that everyone understand the whole process of coding our data. Bill worked with many of the students for whom coding was new. He carefully explained the concept of both the value of the code entered, and the importance of the address for that value.

A few days later I came in from a class to find Bill pounding the table and howling:

"You call that coding?"

Henry looked uncomfortably at me and murmured something about thinking he had it right.

Bill continued: "All you've done is put down a 3! What column will it go in? How did you think you were going to code it onto the card?

Now, that's what happens when you don't give a test. Imagine if we made up a test. It took just a few minutes with Henry and Bill to get Bill to calm down and remember there's just no one-trial learning in a research center. And Bill needed to be reminded that Henry had half of the concept right. He knew how to get the value to code. He knew that "married" had been coded as a "3." Now all he had to learn was which of the 80 columns the 3 was to be punched in. Henry got it together. Bill beamed. And I breathed a sigh of relief, hoping for more such peaceful ends to crises.

Bill became one of our best teaching assistants, and learned a great tolerance for the ambiguity of latent learning. Of course, he earned an A. And so did Henry. They weren't on the same knowledge level, but each was confronting learning situations patiently and developing the skills to handle them.

It might have been nice to have every workshop worked out in advance, and it might have been possible to teach students every skill we would need. But skills don't work like that. Henry's knowledge of coding today needs to be retaught patiently a week later when he returns from the flu. And knowing how to do it doesn't mean you get it right every time. We had to develop quality control, and double check our work, and learn patience with forgetting and retroactive interference.

And skills changed with each new study we did. They were real studies. Data collection real people needed for real services. So we had to punt and do whatever was needed as it came up. The people we were doing it for knew us and trusted us, and understood the importance we laid on the center as a teaching center. They visited us; they dove in and helped us; it was a good learning center.

And Ribbet should have known that. Perhaps if we hadn't grown so fast, perhaps if we'd been more collegial, he would have explained chicken shit to me a little better and come to show us new ways to analyze what we were doing. Maybe I interrupted him too often. I understand I get excited a lot, and that seems to annoy my male colleagues. Maybe that was what the problem was.

Whatever, there were soon rumors that I shouldn't be allowed to teach as I did. I was undermining the solid methodological background of our sociology students. Dear me. And I thought I was just getting them jobs and making a sure they had a fair chance at getting promoted.

It seems to have been Slubberdegullion I offended most. My teaching techniques were simply intolerable. Gee, they got us a major HEW grant. I should have thought that was good. They got me early tenure. I should think that meant I was doing a good job. But no. My students learned nothing, or so they said. Not to me of course. But I was pretty active all over the state. One hears. . . .

They were ashamed of me, for I had no standards. I didn't even give tests. And jobs, in social agencies. What did that have to do with SOCIOLOGY? All I did was silly little needs assessment studies. I certainly wasn't contributing anything of value scholastically. I was a disgrace to my department. A joke.

I was angry, hurt. But truth was, I was used to it. And there was little support from Ribbet. Actually it was Ribbet who seemed to convey to my students most often that I just was not a serious teacher of sociology, and they would be better off with some of my more solid colleagues. I know, I know. I interrupted him a lot. But basically he was sure that I should have gone to an elite school as he did. I had been often into praxis even with my dissertation. Nothing serious and theoretical, like his work.

And then Aging Wolf came home from sabbatical. Aging Wolf was from another elite school. He published regularly. He was the one who had put the new department together. He was the one I was hired to cover for while he was gone. And he had written a popular book in his field. Could I measure up to Aging Wolf's standards?

Narrator's Aside:

Wow! I didn't know I could write anything that corny! I'd take it out - BUT words count. Besides, it kind of shows the lengths to which one can stoop in looking for inclusion. After three years away writing his great new book, the MAN was coming back. And it WAS pretty scary. I'd never met him.

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Word Count:

3032 words. Former word count: 11,074. Total word count: xxxx 11,074 + 3032 = 14,106 +56 = 14,162