How should I position myself in public debate?
A visiting scholar teaches my students, and me, a "dinner party" approach that clarifies my vision.
My favorite memes look something like this:
Because I was in graduate school at a university recently – Spring of 2019 – I generally don’t feel too clueless about what freshman year of college really looks like. It helps that many of the students at the school where I teach attend colleges like the one where I worked and studied. I reentered school with an awareness of fields like Digital Humanities, Public and Engaged Humanities, and other interdisciplinary fields that broadened and reshaped the kinds of learning tasks I ask my students to take on.
Teachers usually think about authentic tasks, which are tasks that students can demonstrably see as realistic ones that are relevant to their future and present lives “out in the world.” Those authentic tasks tend to be more motivating than others. Authenticity is why, in math classes, teachers might incorporate lessons on writing checks or social statistics – though these applications of a task, added because the research shows that they enhance student motivation and engagement, are now apparently unacceptable in the classroom. For example, the analytical essays that students write for me after they read The Scarlet Letter don’t feel very authentic to students, and so it’s easy for most students to see that they’re pointless in the long term. That’s why I go to great lengths to break down the skills students employ in those assignments and connect them to the other disciplines, practices, and challenges where they come in handy.
Another kind of authentic task, in my mind, is the “college task” – what students need to know to thrive in college. Most teachers are, if we’re really honest, shooting darts when we design college preparatory tasks. Who knows how many students will need significant research skills when they arrive in college? Which teachers have truly stayed abreast of current discussions of Victorian literature in the field of Digital Humanities – especially if Victorian literature isn’t of particular, special interest to them?
That’s why I love this kind of meme, which pokes fun at people like me who tell students what they will and won’t need all the time: we don’t actually know. We can’t predict the future, especially a higher education future that changes more quickly than anyone can track it.
For the past two years, I’ve had the gift to work with Dr. Naomi Extra, who’s worked closely with my school as a Scholar-in-Residence. This winter, my department asked her: what do you feel like the undergraduates who you teach really need to know but feel uncomfortable with? She had a clear answer – a clear answer that underlines the importance of, and has helped me to think through new levels of, several of the core questions I’ve asked in this newsletter.
Dr. Extra told us: what my students really struggle with is understanding rigorous academic literature and positioning themselves in relationship to it.
What Dr. Extra is describing is a skill that I didn’t really nail down until graduate school, at which point I realized how much I wish I’d learned it sooner. We decided to invite Dr. Extra into our senior capstone classes, where she led a short, simple lesson which, to me, illustrated both why this authentic, transferable task is so important and how simple it could actually be.
She began with a picture of a dinner party. “Imagine you’re sitting around a table with friends,” she began, “and everyone has an opinion. The conversation isn’t exciting if you all agree; rather, in a good conversation, people will have overlap and opposition. You want to imagine academic work, or really any writing about a particular issue, in the same way.”
What Dr. Extra established first, here, is the idea that critical and thoughtful conversations are conversations just like the ones that we hold socially. This matters because in serious, professional discussions, those with whom we speak deserve the kind of respect and good will that we would extend to our friends. That idea is both groundbreaking – contemporary discourse generally lacks that ill will – and surprisingly comforting, because it allows students to think of themselves as part of a lower-stakes, more open conversation. They get to assume that they’re invited to the party, so long as they listen thoughtfully as much as they speak.
A scholarly or intellectual debate, Dr. Extra explained, is just like any other debate. She let the students pick the debate they wanted to use as an example, and they chose to debate how a person should eat their pizza – a debate that all New York City kids know well.
From there, she said, you have to pick the part of the debate you want to focus on, because it’s a huge conversation. Do you want to debate how people should eat their pizza? Whether pineapple should be on pizza? One vocal student shouted “pineapple,” and the rest was history. Dr. Extra had the students listen to one another and then record where they stood. Though one kid said that she “refused to engage with people who hadn’t tried pineapple on pizza,” Dr. Extra challenged that student – yes, that peer lacks information that you think is key, and that’s shaping their bias. We should still engage with people who are operating with different information – in fact, if we never do, then our experience and knowledge base will never come into contact.
This part of Dr. Extra’s exercise, she explained, was just like the process of researching a particular issue or field of scholarship. If you only find sources that agree with one another and with you, you haven’t yet captured the conversation. If you present others’ opinions as only wrong, rather than treating them in rigorous, complex ways, then you haven’t done your job of illustrating full understanding and listening. A scholar can’t position herself without demonstrating awareness of the conversation she’s in. No one wants that person at their dinner party. These are the skills of listening that I teach to thirteen-year-olds: it’s embarassing to be a person who repeats or ignores what someone else said, the equivalent of a social faux pas.
It’s in the work of positioning oneself, Dr. Extra said, that “you might identify your own biases or those of other people.” A thinker need not seek out flaws or shortcomings in others’ arguments as if they’re going to be tools in war; rather, those nuances and disagreements are the natural byproduct of the process of positioning oneself, which is never “picking a side” but rather “articulating where you stand.” What fun is a dinner party if it’s all about picking sides? Isn’t it all better if we’re all adding new layers, nuances, and questions to the discussion?
By now, the extension between the dinner party metaphor and the world more broadly should be clear. Even though Dr. Extra was aiming to prepare our students for a specific college task, that task was really a life task: the ability to be open and responsive to a variety of positions in the world around them, but not, as Dr. Extra urged my students, “to get lost in them.” I often struggle with that final part, the work of positioning myself in relation to the opinions of others who have more expertise than I, but that intention does matter, if only to help me see my own biases, test how well I’ve been listening, and ensure that I’m really as active in my mind as I think I am. I’m already sitting in the party – how can I participate?