Sharing experiences during this new reality
By Ben Pack – October 19, 2020
When I think about experiential learning, my mind typically still goes to pre-Covid times; I imagine myself and students working in the field with community partners – leading creative writing workshops, helping high school students write college essays, etc. While I want the pandemic to end and return to in-person learning just like everyone else, I also think this nostalgia is short-sighted. Being locked behind a computer screen on Zoom, stretched across the globe – this is an experience! This is something we can learn about it! However, that doesn’t mean everyone’s experience is the same, and indeed, we can begin to embrace this new lived reality and think about ways to bring it into our classrooms. Guest speakers can be an effective mechanism to do just that.
The best part of a guest speaker (at least in my opinion) is hearing about other people’s experiences. In my community engagement and experiential learning course, we recently finished community partner trainings and have begun working with our partners over Zoom. During one training, Paul, a former prisoner and now house manager at our partner Francisco Homes, described what it’s been like to be released during Covid and what he and the other residents do to communicate and form community. Kevin, the founder of Miracle Messages (another partner), talked about his uncle who had been homeless for years and the deep love he felt for him, and how that led into him founding the organization he runs today – one that has evolved from Kevin going out on the street to interview people as an individual, to one where hundreds of volunteers now offer social support to their homeless neighbors being housed in hotels because of Covid. These are perspectives that can really only be learned from the people who experience them now because they speak to our present moment. There is no text I can assign to offer these perspectives. Those texts are not yet written.
As instructors, we don’t need special connections or long-term community partners to bring an effective guest speaker into the class (although I suppose it doesn’t hurt). A way to bring diversity and diversity of thought into our classrooms is to invite each other. Something I appreciate about working in community partnerships is that my students get to meet my colleagues who work with the same partners, and they get to hear their perspectives too. I think it’s important for students to realize that my take on the course material isn’t the only opinion, or the “right” opinion. One of the lessons I’m planning this semester is a classroom exchange with a colleague where I teach one of her sections, and she teaches one of mine. That’s exciting to me, because we both get to show up with our unique perspectives and deepen the collective knowledge of our students just by being who we are and teaching material we care about.
Finally, bringing in guest speakers is a way to address some of the holes we might have in our pedagogies. Given rapid changes in world events – from the contemporary civil rights movement, to a reckoning of gender and race dynamics in our fields, to our fractured politics and the upcoming election – my inner critic sometimes feels as if I’m not up to the task of having all these conversations; it’s not because I don’t want to, but because I’m fearful I will not do them justice, and perhaps that I will even make things worse by shoving my foot in my mouth. I err on the side of doing the work to have those conversations anyway, but guest speakers provide another avenue. Sharing our classrooms with new voices is therefore not just a way for our students to learn, but for us to learn as well.