A Justice Site
Mirror Sites:
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 25, 2001
jeannecurran@habermas.org
Copyright: Jeanne Curran, November 2001.
"Fair use" encouraged.
So I found myself all alone in a big department. No "standards." Not socially acceptable. Not academically acceptable. Well, at least they didn't tell me I wasn't acceptable as a person. That came later.
I would have been despondent, but there really wasn't time. I would have loved to be whatever they wanted of me. I knew it must be wonderful to be included. To not be "unacceptably different." But I didn't have time to figure out how. We had real stuff to do. Like run the center and figure out how to get a fair shot at the jobs, and how to get our kids through school and around the barriers we had known.
They were absolutely right. My students couldn't do statistics like theirs. They could manage to run a cross tabs on SPSS, and they knew what that meant. They understood the tables. But that wasn't the same as doing "word problems" on a statistics test. The nearest academic fit to what we were doing was methods and statistics. Since they'd hired me to teach methods and statistics that did seem reasonable. When they started all this "standards" stuff, what they really meant was that I wasn't giving methods and statistics exams. But I had never claimed to do that. We were funded as a Student Social Research Center. Research is not statistics and methods classes. Research is praxis. And to people who had been denied formal education, praxis made a lot of sense.
But they were telling the truth. I wasn't giving stat and methods exams. And Slubberdegullion and Taradiddle insisted I was undermining the department's academic standards in my failure. Maybe Aging Wolf could figure out how to "raise" our standards and still get the research done which was building the community network and getting our kids jobs. That was it! Aging Wolf would come to our rescue. Ribbit liked Aging Wolf. They were good friends. If Aging Wolf worked out our "standards" then Ribbit would accept as "serious" and all would be well.
Aging Wolf liked us! He saw that we were good, and he joined us. He sat around our central table and we discussed our work happily. We proffered coffee and cookies, and he gladly accepted.
By then Sue Kirsch had come to join us. Our HEW grant afforded her. She kept our files, our records, and was incredibly efficient. So when Aging Wolf arrived, the studies were all in order, our network was functioning, and we were managing to cope with students coming and going at all hours of each day. It would have been nice to have had scheduled workshops, but most of us could't make it. There were too many conflicts with each of the different agency schedules, work commitments, and other classes. So we gathered together two or three of us whenever we could and crammed in the things we needed to cover then.
But now we had Aging Wolf to add to our prestige. Patterns began to develop. Mine was the learning theory specialty. I knew how to teach statistics to people who were terrified of math. I knew how to make tables understandable. I took the workshops, whenever and wherever I could gather us together. Aging Wolf took the "A" students. They sat together and discussed, well, whatever they discussed, and I tried getting across the basic ideas of questionnaire schedules, and probes, and coding, and analysis.
Needless to say, all this going on in one big room led to continual activity, noise, but lots of fun. Elizabeth, a wonderful retired lady from Santa Rosita, brought us a refrigerator, and kept it stocked with cold drinks and bits of food. I bought us a coffee maker. We moved all my texts into book cases, so we had our own minimal library. We had Sue, and we had Aging Wolf. These WERE the good old days. There was an energy and excitement that just couldn't be suppressed.
This was what I had hoped would draw our colleagues in, a sandbox in which to do research and learn together. But that isn't what happened. We just began to live downstairs in our "family room" and grew into an offspring of the department. I was always sure that others would come, especially now that Aging Wolf was there. But there were some other some other transactions afoot. Chicken shit, again. You just gotta keep your eye on those chickens.
Hierarchical patterns began to surface. One day I found a message from the campus administrative office. They wanted information on personnel funds from our grant. The only one who knew that was Sue Kirsch. I asked her to give them the information. Three days later they finally insisted on talking to me. So I found five free minutes and returned their call.
"We need the figures on personnel for the month of October."
"Sue Kirsch keeps those records. You'll have to talk to her."
"May we speak to her, please."
Hey, guys, you've been refusing to speak to her for three days. That might just be your problem. But Sue already had the phone and was quietly dispensing the information they had refused to accept from her for three days. And Duncan Kennedy, you thought it was bad at Harvard. But you wanted your students to reject the puffed up bullfrog hierarchy. I don't think that will work. We need to break the hierarchical hold ourselves. We have the theoretical background to understand it, and we have the power of collegial status to back it.
Well, now you see my problem. I have collegial status. I even have early tenure and promotion. But I'm still vulnerable to the puffed up bullfrog comments on "standards." Yeah, I know. Whose standards? But "there's the rub." The most devastating thing that Slubberdegullion ever said to me was "Yes, I read your handout on the issue. I just didn't understand it." The clear implication was not that he couldn't understand it. It was that I didn't rise to his expectations of academic presentation of my argument. Now, if your "standards" are "the standards" and mine don't count, then you can judge me by whatever standards you choose, usually on a sliding scale to fit normative expectations for inclusion.
Standards are rules, folks. Made up by someone, usually he who has the power to do so. So if you get to make up the rules, you can bully anyone you want to. That, Duncan, is why our students respond to the bullies, sometimes rank them higher than their non-bullying teachers, and follow their lead into the corporate market. It's called dominant discourse and it means bullying through the power of institutionalized rules. And cognitive dissonance says that if we bully them long enough they'll come to accept it to rationalize the high cost they've paid in putting up with it. No magic. No disloyalty on our students' part. Just simple attitude change and persuasion theory.
Everybody respected Aging Wolf's standards. Aging Wolf spent his days with us, sharing in our activities. Didn't that raise our worth in their perspective of "standards."
Well, no. It seems that "standards" are measured individually. Aging Wolf still followed traditional tests, texts, and grading curves in his classes. He only tolerated praxis during praxis time. So that meant he had standards and we didn't. Now wait a minute, if our standards are good enough to get our graduate students into prestigious schools like Berkeley and UCLA, then we must have "standards." Oh, I see, they got in because of our colleagues' standards. Alice seems to have just met the Wolf. Oh, I'm sorry, that was Little Red Riding Hood, wasn't it?
"Sometimes I just sits and thinks. And sometimes I just sits." I think this is one of those times for just sitting. Something is amiss here. Maybe, if I just had another of those teacakes I could grow enough to understand it. And so I sat and nibbled and sat and nibbled, and just sat.
Still not quite sure of how I got into this crazy Wonderland in the first place, I dashed in one day to find Elizabeth, desperate, frustrated, struggling to write a grant proposal. You remember Elizabeth, the retired lady from Santa Rosita who mothered us all. I found "mother" writing a grant proposal. Surely it was obscene.
"Elizabeth, what on earth are you doing that for?"
"Aging Wolf and Barbara said I have to. Everyone has to know how to write a grant proposal."
"Yes, but Elizabeth, we write them in teams. Where is the rest of your team? Where are Aging Wolf and Barbara?"
"Oh, they had to go to a meeting in Jalalabad."
"I see. And the focus of this grant proposal?"
"They said I should come up with something."
"Something? Which agency has requested the work?"
"Oh, no one. This is for the workshop on proposals."
There was coding to be done, and information to be checked, some phone calls to be made, and we managed to distract Elizabeth to a more reasonable pursuit. Once, I figured it was a desperate accident. The second time I found Elizabeth tackling a grant proposal, I glanced about for chickens. By the third time it happened I went looking for the truck and the highway.
"Well, we didn't know what else to give her to do." Came the ready explanation.
Elizabeth had been coming in early, while I was off in a class. From somewhere had come a new "standard," that one should do something one might have done in a formal class, whether there was a formal class or not. Well, that is one good way to set up failure, confusion, and "busy work." Ask a returning student who has never engaged in research beyond our center experience to write a research proposal. Sure.
Time to just sit and think. Elizabeth really counted in the center. She "mothered" us. She listened to our distress, she parted us when we squabbled over deadlines we were struggling to meet. She provided considerable socio-emotional support. And she made pretty good decisions. She de-escalated interpersonal crises. She was essential to our interpersonal functioning in this new kind of research-center with a new kind of student population.
OK, Alice. What's going on here? I had profound respect for Elizabeth's common sense and interest in our goals to improve the delivery in the community of social services. To redefine her in terms of formal academic objectives was to disrespect her. She wasn't going to become a Ph.D. in charge of evaluation services for agencies. She was going to find some place like ours to aid in the delivery of needed services. The education she was receiving with us was applied. Not training, applied sociology. By understanding the importance of needs assessment, by seeing how such assessment fit into the agency's requests for funds, and by lending her support to the tasks that were involved, she was learning skills her community needed. In the meanwhile, as she was learning, she was already contributing to those needs and learning to respect herself as a professional. Now how did any of that lead to writing a grant proposal for heaven's sake?
16016 . . . How did the writing of a grant proposal in any way measure the real learning that was going on?
Maybe this was just a single case. Maybe the problem was that college professors weren't used to retired students with agendas of self respect and professionalism quite apart from traditional training in the discipline. That must be it. I must not impose my standards of knowledgeability of learning theory on those who were sociologists, not learning theorists. Hmmm . . .said Alice and chomped on another mushroom.
Word Count:
1854 words. Former word count: 14162. Total word count: xxxx 14162 + 1854 + 94 = 16100