Taking action begins with understanding what others have to say
By Ben Pack – April 1, 2020
When teaching students about academic discourse, I often compare writing an essay to entering a conversation – you don’t just rush up to a group of people and start spouting off random facts or grievances. People would think that was weird. Also rude. Instead, we begin by listening. Before adding our voice, it’s worth reflecting on what others have said, and we should be able to repeat their words in our own because “I agree” or “I disagree” has to be grounded first in “I understand.”
In making plans (and remaking them) for the experiential learning course I teach, my instinct has often been to rush in to try and do everything at once: make new lessons, modify every community partner project, become digitally and emotionally available to my students 24/7. Taking action feels productive, but without first listening to understand, it usually achieves the opposite. Indeed, listening has been a touchstone for the community engagement and experiential learning course I teach – my class can’t just show up in USC’s neighborhood and start telling our partners what to do. That’d be rude. (Never-mind that universities have a bad track record of doing just this: our plans to “make things better” can come with little interrogation over who they’re better for. Researchers going into communities to “study problems,” all too frequently fail to report back on what they find, turning neighbors into objects for observation. But I digress.)
Truthfully, I often struggle with listening. When I don’t have the time and when I’m desperate to find a solution, listening feels like a luxury. In normal circumstances, I can spread my tasks over weeks or months with mini-deadlines. I can make the time to really hear, process and decide later. Living through Covid-19, I feel the pressure to do all things all at once, and on top of that there’s this overwhelming decision fatigue – what’s the right choice? Am I doing this well? Do I look like an idiot? And the humbling realization that most of the time I don’t know.
When students get stuck in the writing process and don’t know what to do, I tell them that the problem isn’t typically in the step they’re working on, but the step before it. Writer’s block while drafting? That’s usually an issue with an under-developed plan, because how can you know what to write next if you haven’t laid it out? Struggles or resistance to making a plan? It’s often due to a lack of brainstorming, because how can you structure ideas if you don’t know what they are? For me, there have been many times in the past three weeks when I’ve struggled with what action to take, but the real problem is in understanding what I need to do (and indeed, can do). Those struggles to understand – that’s actually a problem in listening.
So, for example, how do I teach some lessons asynchronously and why should I bother to care? That’s not a lesson plan problem, it’s a problem in understanding the needs of my students and how to help them learn. How do I understand what those needs are? Well, I started by making a survey, and asking my students about some asynchronous options – would they like to schedule peer-review for an upcoming essay whenever they wanted as opposed to having it take place in our scheduled class? Most did. Did they want to shift our in-class discussions to an online blog? Most didn’t, but a few did, so I made a blog on blackboard anyway. Now those students can participate there if they want instead of fighting bad internet connections and broken audio during our regularly scheduled class. Instead of ignoring the emails in my inbox (an electronic pig sty) I started inspecting the messages from my colleagues, focusing on the ones that proposed ideas, and I found some great resources: special thanks to Dana Milstein for forwarding the site Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities, where a link led me to a site on First Generation Digital Storytelling, which gave me new ideas on how to collaborate with my class’s community partner 826LA and the first generation students they serve in USC’s neighborhood.
Soon, I was coming up with ideas on my own again: maybe I could have the students read their essays aloud and send me the recordings, or they could cut up their papers to rearrange paragraphs, experiment with new structures and then send me the photos. These activities are easy to explain, and they are things I frequently do in my writing, but they’ve always been challenging to practice in a physical classroom. Chaos occurred the one time I asked all my students to read their work simultaneously aloud.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not pretending that listening is a panacea to all my professional problems, but it’s been a good place to start, and so far, way more productive than spouting off my grievances or the random facts I find about Covid. And whenever I do spin into those places, well thankfully I have family and friends who are willing to listen and understand.