05. Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)
Alternative higher ed, study groups, and communal learning.
Hellooo and welcome to the continuation of my recent thoughts on education! At this point I’m drowning in a million open internet tabs, podcast episodes, and books and feel really overwhelmed with all the information that I’ve been consuming. At the same time, I realize that I’m just barely scratching the surface of information about education. One resource leads to at least five more resources and so on and so on forever.
I also want to say thank you to those of you who responded and shared your thoughts and experiences with teaching/learning/grad school! I’d love to keep the conversation going with anyone who’s interested.
So, I ended Part 1 wondering if it’s possible to receive a professional education and teach outside of any kind of traditional, institutional structure. I still don’t have any solid answers, but here are some ideas.
1. 2020 Changes Everything… Including Education!
As I was trying to fit together my thoughts on education, coronavirus arrived, abruptly closing schools across the world, followed by weeks long (and ongoing) protests in support of Black lives and against white supremacy. Calls to abolish the police and the prison industrial complex have (finally) reached the mainstream, and they’ve been accompanied by calls to abolish all institutions and systems that uphold white supremacy. Not only is coronavirus forcing us to rethink education at all levels, but an increased understanding and acknowledgment of the insidiousness of white supremacy in basically all institutions and systems across the country is another critical lens through which we can imagine alternatives to our current educational systems (and through which many people, particularly BIPOC, have been imagining alternatives and reforms for decades).
Education at all levels has been in crisis for a while now, slowly making it’s way to a boiling point: 2020. Before this year, many K-12 schools were already dealing with crowded classrooms, insufficient resources, pathetic salaries and care for teachers, and extreme inequities and segregation, just to name a few issues. Universities have been putting hundreds of thousands of students in debt while adjunct professors have to work multiple jobs to survive and the upper management makes six or sometimes seven figure salaries. Anyway, the problems pre-covid were endless and the pandemic has only exacerbated them and added new problems. I think we can all agree that these systems don’t work for the majority of students, teachers, staff, etc.
While I’m very interested in working with kids and teens and imagining different ways they can learn, I’m going to focus this issue on higher education. I keep thinking about whether or not I should go to grad school and I keep wanting there to be alternatives, so that’s what’s driving this line of inquiry.
2. The Good University
The past couple weeks I’ve been reading The Good University by Raewyn Connell, which has helped me understand the way most universities operate these days and why I’ve been hesitant to commit to grad school. In the book, Connell outlines how knowledge is formed through research, the importance of teachers and teaching, what conditions students need to learn, the interwoven way that universities used to operate with knowledgeable, long-term staff, the effects of neoliberalism on the university, and some alternatives to the traditional system.
Connell writes:
“Learning at [the university] level is usually uncertain and slow. We do not get ‘one-trial learning’ at university. Advanced intellectual work constantly involves re-examining, criticizing and modifying existing structures of knowledge. The process cannot be condensed without being damaged… One reason it takes time is that being a student involves complex sequences of emotion. Interest, boredom, puzzlement, shock, discouragement, excitement—all in turn are woven through the intellectual processes of learning… But higher learning should also give joy, and plenty of it. There should be joy in encounter, in creation, in overcoming difficulties, in acquiring insight, even artistic pleasure in the intellectual structures we are learning about.”
This description is the kind of thing that makes me excited about grad school—like, hell yeah, I’m filling out the application right now! But then Connell outlines the way universities have transformed over the past few decades as a result of neoliberalism, privatization, and outsourcing, and I begin to lose enthusiasm:
“Education in itself is not a commodity. Education happens in human encounters that depend on care, trust, responsibility and truth, and such encounters cannot be packaged and sold. So what have universities been selling, as students have been transformed into customers? Basically, access to privileges: to the courses themselves; to the reputation of the institution; to swank buildings and grounds; to favourable teacher/student ratios; to English-language courses; to safe accommodation; and in the background, to qualifications and future advantage in the job market… The selling of access gradually reshapes the educational process. It places the student in a fundamentally passive role, as consumer of a service, rather than requiring student and teacher to co-create an educational relationship. It also erodes the creativity of teaching. Offering a priced service on the market, university managers are concerned with cost, standardization, and quality control; they want predictable performance and no scandal. The erratic flame of an inspired teacher is not wanted here.”
This analysis doesn’t even take into account the fact that the threads of the colonial, racist, sexist origins of many universities still exist and need to be cut. Part of me does believe that you can go to school and create the educational experience that you need and desire in such a way that these structural issues can be surpassed. There are many creative students and professors who work around or against university problems. Still, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that higher education is a huge financial investment and cause of debt, it can be very damaging to mental health, bureaucracy is unavoidable, students/professors/staff of color and people with disabilities often feel very alienated and unsupported due to racism/ableism and various inequities, and at the end of it all, no one is guaranteed a job (which students are banking on to pay off loans).
I guess the best case scenario these days is that we go into any higher education experience aware of and ready to fight against all of these issues: against racism, colonialism, classism, ableism, low staff wages, precarity, privatization, campus policing, lack of accountability for sexual assault, the list goes on. The reality is that we only have so much time and energy, and when we’re in school, so much of that is spent constantly trying to stay on top of class work. That’s the reason we’re there, right?
3. Learning in Community, Learning in Action
A few weeks ago I was listening to a 2019 episode of the Intersectionality Matters! podcast about the fifty year anniversary of the Stonewall uprising. Kimberlé Crenshaw is in conversation with Barbara Smith, and Kimberlé asks Barbara, “As someone who’s been in the struggle for a long time, what advice do you give to younger queer activists, younger Black feminists, younger radicals?” And I was really interested in Barbara’s answer:
“My major suggestion is that we can bring back the study group and that we read work together and discuss it, and as I said, that can be articles and that can be books.”
I realized that the way I’ve always understood learning as an individual, solitary pursuit is a very white, Western, capitalist way of thinking about it, with an emphasis on competition, personal recognition, numbers (grades, GPA, test scores), and getting ahead of everyone else. I hated any form of group work when I was in school. But I was curious about these study groups that Barbara Smith mentioned. The interview sparked an awareness of the immense value of learning together, in community.
I did a little research and came across an article titled “Do-It-Yourself Strategies for Revolutionary Study Groups” by Mamos Rotnelli, in which he explains the origins of the study group as a way for people to gather together outside any formal academic context and study the practices of other revolutionaries throughout history. The article is his attempt to answer the following questions that he poses in the introduction:
“How do we study in ways that break from academic culture and invigorate fresh, non-dogmatic strategizing? What do we do when people in our collectives or affinity groups have a wide range of literacy skills and (mis)education? When some of us have had bad experiences with reading and writing based on alienated education in our high schools or colleges? What do we do when some of us have been to graduate school and some of us have not graduated from high school? When some of us have been trained to write books and others have never gotten meaningful, accurate feedback to improve our writing?”
At this point I recognize that if I want to be a librarian or a teacher, there’s no way I’ll be able to read a million books and articles on my own and be a good librarian/teacher. I mean, I could probably get a solid grasp of the technicalities of librarianship. But when it’s just me myself and I (and a few dozen books), there’s something missing—no one is challenging me, no one is offering encouragement, no one is showing me a resource I wouldn’t have come across on my own. So I love this idea of study groups, both as a tactic for revolutionary organizing as well as a tactic for learning in general.
It seems very possible, especially with the internet, to find people with similar interests and objectives with which to form a study group. In this group, everyone can be both teacher and student. Everyone brings different knowledge and experience to the table. Texts can be read and discussed at a pace and in a format that feels right for all. Remember how Raewyn Connell defines education as something that “happens in human encounters that depend on care, trust, responsibility and truth.” Human encounters! These qualities of care, trust, responsibility, and truth can be nurtured in a horizontal, self-determined, self-directed group more easily than in many university classrooms or lecture halls.
I also think it’s so important to learn by doing, so if I were to pair communal learning with anything else it would be practice, or action. It seems like there’s a constant tension between theory and practice, but aren’t they both necessary? Different situations call for different measures of theory/practice. Again, I could read all the books in the world about critical pedagogy, but I wouldn’t truly know how to be a teacher without doing it, and failing, and pivoting, and succeeding, and trying different strategies. I think there are many ways of being a teacher, and there are many ways of being a “librarian” (for example, the People’s Library of Occupy Wall Street), and there are so many ways these roles can overlap. We can learn how to be what we want to be together, in community, and for the community. Reading, learning, practicing, and doing can all happen at once.
I recognize that we’re still technically living in a world in which formal higher education is required for a lot of job positions (including teaching and library positions). Sometimes preparation for a field requires experience with different technology that can only be accessed at a university. When it comes to research, universities seem to have most of the resources. Obviously, my ideas for university alternatives do not involve formal theses or practicums or degrees, but are guided by my desire to escape from this world of traditional education and university-as-gatekeeper and into a world of community learning and practice. No grades, no tuition… NO FRATS! It can’t happen if we don’t begin by imagining it ;)
Here are a few university alternatives that have already been imagined and created, to varying degrees of success:
The origins and early history of Visva-Bharati University in West Bengal, India
Flying University in Warsaw
Civil Rights Movement Freedom Schools in the southern US
Freedom University Georgia for undocumented youth
RUIICAY — Red de Universidades Indígenas Interculturales y Comunitarias de Abya Yala (Abya Yala is an Indigenous name for the Americas)
4. Related Resources
PDF of The Good University by Raewyn Connell
Do-It-Yourself Strategies for Revolutionary Study Groups by Mamos Rotnelli (Rotnelli wrote a three part series in which DIY Strategies is Part 3, following Reading for Revolution, Parts 1 and 2)
The Undercommons by Harney and Moten / Undercommoning.org
Intersectionality Matters! Podcast: Stonewall 50: Whose Movement Is It Anyway? (the quoted conversation with Barbara Smith happens around 34:50)
5. Six Things
Pre-order Fariha Róisín’s novel Like A Bird, which comes out Sept 15! You can subscribe to her newsletter as well.
When and how to vote in all fifty states via Axios / FiveThirtyEight
I’ve recently discovered that Roanoke, VA has a rich queer history and a really cool project that documents it with oral histories, walking tours, exhibitions, a podcast, and more: Southwest Virginia LGBTQ+ History Project
Open Source Cookbook for quarantine during (endless?) pandemic times
Poem: River to River by Hai-Dang Phan
Richmond friends: check out Primordial Emanations, an exhibition at 1708 curated by Mahari Chabwera. Opening reception is August 27 from 2-7pm and the exhibition is on view through October 4!
6. A Tender Quarantine Drawing By Alina Perez
Alina Perez, Home, charcoal on paper, 18 x 24 inches
Thanks for following me on this winding (and long-winded) educational journey. Since issue 06 is scheduled for publication around the time I return to Virginia, I think I’ll use that space to reflect on my experience in Spain. As always, stay tuned :)
✿ Ava