Writing Wednesday: The Crisis Classroom

I’m posting late today because I took some time this morning to prepare an article proposal to accompany a rather rambling abstract that I wrote last week. It is for a proposed  volume on “the campus crisis toolkit” and edited by Lisa Di Bartolomeo and Kevin Gannon. Today’s post will make more sense if you go back and read my post from last week.

The paper doesn’t have a title yet, but I envision it being some combination of words like “empowered,” “crisis,” “classroom,” and “engaged.” I enjoy alliteration whenever possible and once proudly published a book without a subtitle.

Paper Argument and Organization 

The thesis for my contribution is that teaching classes focused on both the long term sense of structural crisis in higher education and immediate crises as they arise provides students with the technical knowledge to participate more fully in conversations with various stakeholders of their institution.

The article will have six sections and be approximately 6000 words (with citations).

I. Introduction (500 words)

This frames the current sense of crisis in higher education as part of a complex network of political, economic, ideological, demographic, and health trends amplified by a bewildering (and continuous) stream of scholarly, technocratic, and popular literature. Engaging critically with both the myriad of particularly crises and more pervasive sense of crisis could easily represent a full time job (or even a career). Faculty and students alike rarely have the luxury or even desire for this kind of sustained engagement even at their own institution and in many cases we remain satisfied with “shooting the wolf closest to the sled.” This chapter reflects on an effort to create a structured opportunity for informed conversations about one particular crisis and how it succeeded and failed at creating a greater sense of empowerment. My hope is that this case study offers an adaptable model for teaching about a campus crisis during a campus crisis and finds a fit within a robust campus toolkit for informed and engaged campus debate.     

II. Teaching as Activism (1000 words)

This chapter will situate the class in relation to the long tradition of activist approaches to teaching with particular attention to work that recognized teaching itself as a form of empowerment, as the basis for liberation, and as broadly counter hegemonic practice. These techniques are not foreign to university teaching and formed the basis for the “teach-in” movement of the 1960s and 1970s, community and public outreach programs, and innumerable quieter projects that leverage the massive university undercommons (sensu Moten and Harney 2013). 

Some related verbiage:

Ira Shor begins his now classic work Empowering Education (1992) with an anecdote about the first day of a new semester teaching “English One” at a New York public college. The students were surly and unresponsive until Shor asked them bluntly what was going on. At that point, the class became surly and responsive and explained that they were angry about the English writing test required for all first year students. The class went on to explain to Shor that the test was unfair, and Shor leveraged their frustration both to build an empathetic relationship with the students and to encourage them to channel their anger into the goals of the course. He admitted that despite the students’ ability to articulate their views, they stoped short of wanting to become activists themselves. 

What Shor recognized, however, is that giving students space and time to voice their anger and frustration started a process where they worked together to articulate their concerns. He was also giving students the critical tools to express their ideas in more compelling ways. As scholars have long argued, perhaps nowhere more compellingly as in Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970 in English), teaching critical engagement with crises provides a basis for empowerment. While it goes without saying that largely middle-class honors students at a regional state university are a far cry from Freire’s Chilean peasants, the systems and structures that these students encountered on a daily basis, however, nevertheless relies upon the kind of hegemonic discourse that reproduces asymmetries of power across the institution.   

III. Background to the UND Budget Crisis (700 words)

This section provides a brief history of the institution and its 2018 budget crisis both to support the contention that there was indeed a sense of crisis at the University and to explain how this crisis took on a particular technocratic character. This technocratic character, in turn, reinforced the growing alienation of faculty and students from the workings of the university. 

IV. The UND Budget Class (1600 words)

This section will provide an overview of the class with an explanation of how we worked together both to close the technical gap between administrative (and at times faculty rhetoric) during the crisis and student concerns. It will also survey the final project produced by the class and explore where the class collectively succeeded and failed to gain a sufficient foundation for informed critique. 

V. The Wesley College Documentation Project (1400 words)

This section will consider the link between the class on the UND budget and its companion course that focused on the documentation of two recently abandoned historic buildings on campus slated for demolition. While a more detailed assessment of this class emphasizing its “mildly anarchic” character has already appeared, this project drew many students from the budget class and gave them another way to engage with and challenge the barriers between students, staff, and faculty. The final projects of this class, were more diverse than the focused work of the budget class, but continued the spirit of critical engagement in response to crisis.   

VI. Conclusion (500 words)

The conclusion will focus on the potential and pitfalls of using a class as a way to engage with a campus crisis. It will stress that this class didn’t solve the university’s budget problem nor did it set out to offer a “solutionalist” approach to the crisis. Instead, it showed how the crisis created opportunities for greater student engagement and empowerment in the spirit of Ira Shor’s formulation of empowered education.