The danger of planning for students who fit our ideals, while neglecting the students who are real
By Ben Pack – April 23, 2020
As I prepare to teach over the summer online, and into the fall with uncertainty, I’ve been returning to a reading that I assign my students from Tania D. Mitchell and David M. Donahue. In their chapter “Ideal and Real in Service Learning” from The Cambridge Handbook of Service Learning and Community Engagement, they write that “service learning calls on the ideals of many” and “there are expectations that service learning and community engagement experiences respond effectively to community needs.” But while “ideas and idealism are seen as unambiguously good and inspiring…abstract ideals can be shallow” – a kind of norm – and those norms can hurt students who don’t (or won’t) conform (458, emphasis mine).
As a white, male, upper-middle class professor, able-bodied and without kids, there’s a real danger to envisioning my students as people like me. Some are, but many are not. For example, for students who grew up in South Central (or similar neighborhoods across the country), engaging with USC’s surrounding community isn’t a new learning opportunity, but a return to home. An outsider’s “revelation” that stigmas attached to South Central are false isn’t going to be revelatory to the person born and raised there; indeed, it may be demoralizing to discover how widespread those stigmas are among classmates, professors and administrators. An hour of direct service will not feel impactful. It may actually feel futile, because what’s one hour in a life? As my community engagement course has evolved, my colleagues and I who teach the class continue to adjust and iterate, reconsidering what engagement should look like with our partners and how the course should reflect the needs and histories of all our students. Rather than planning for the students who conform to our ideals, we want to consider the students who are real.
Now that I’m planning online courses, a new “ideal” student is emerging and he’s just as dangerous, just as much a chimera as the “ideal” student in service learning. He has good Wi-Fi and his own room to study in; he can ignore family and other obligations for hours at a time, every day; he can prioritize school, and set his own deadlines; he’s bored and class feels like a welcome reprieve because it’s something different to do. This student is dangerous to me because he requires so little of me as an instructor. He won’t need catching up for the months of school he missed, so my course content can stay the same. He won’t make me resentful at the extra work-load of creating asynchronous assignments, because he’ll come to the Zoom lectures every time, participate, and turn his work in without delay. He’ll be pleasant and good humored. Without a doubt, he will be in some of my classes too (he almost always is), and we will probably get along. But designing the course towards him alone will come at the expense of other students who share bedrooms or sleep on couches, or can’t escape the obligations of family, caring for siblings, or working jobs to fill lost income. For this real student who is losing her grip on a college education, the ideal student is not a peer: he is the millstone I’ve placed on her back as she tries to carry on.
So I am taking a hard look at the classes I teach and the practices that I’ve developed, especially those that evolved over time as opposed to purpose. I’ve signed up for the accelerated training through CET and I’m going back to some basics there: what are my course objectives – not my aspirations, not my projections, not the tasks I will assign – what are the concrete things a student will know and be able to do better after a semester in my class? How will I know they have achieved those goals? How will I know I am assessing the skills of my course, and not a student’s Wi-Fi, or their family structure, or the fact that they can only study from 11pm to 3am? When I think about community engagement, experiential learning and the shift to online spaces, how will I make room for the real students who are undertaking service for their families on the ground, but don’t have the time or technology for whatever digital engagement I dream up? And when I’m resistant to considering these students and incorporating them in my plans, if I break down and take action on the thought that “some students may just have to suck it up,” what does that say about me as an instructor and my pedagogy? What does it say about my commitment to teaching, as opposed to my commitment to power, to a lifestyle, to my own comfort?
These are not questions I can run away from, although I will admit that part of me longs for a return to normal – to come back in the fall semester to full classrooms and the energy of campus. However, that’s an ideal that lives more in my mind than it ever did in reality. If there’s a silver lining to redesigning my courses, it’s that I have the opportunity to correct the old norms that harmed students, and re-focus on the real goals of my teaching and the needs of the real students I meet in the semesters ahead.