The Taskforce
What is it and where did it come from
In the final days of the fall semester of 2006, I came to my advisor with an idea. I wanted to do something different. I wanted to teach a class all by myself on something that I knew a lot about.
After having been a teaching assistant and discussion group leader for 3 courses, I felt that I was aptly prepared to embark on an independent pedagogic experience.
My idea, I told my advisor, was to hi-jack the service learning component of the Watauga College ‘Big Class’ and retool it ever so slightly. In conjunction with Appalachian Voices, an organization that I had done much work with in the past, I would create a service learning experience that went beyond the normal. Instead of simply showing up to an organization and being put to work doing whatever clerical work needed to be done, this class, I envisioned, would have a project their own.
While learning about Mountaintop removal coal mining in the classroom, the class would engage in work to stop the practice at Appalachian Voices office. Culminating in a trip to lobby congress in DC, the time spent each week would be devoted to learning about MTR, and becoming savy about how to talk about it to people. We would take a trip to the coalfields to see the devastation firsthand and more or less teach each other as we went along.
I called it the Watauga College Mountaintop Removal Taskforce, and somehow the administration let me do it.
Theoretically speaking,
Where in the matrix?
The Taskforce sits in the space between Service Learning, Critical and Radical Pedagogies, civic engagement, student empowerment and autonomy, and others. According to Gore, “pedagogy is, at some level, fundamentally about action (Gore, 273).” Critical and radical pedagogies are, respectively, about identifying power structures and their consequences and then acting to address these injustices through action-education.
One of the premises of Critical and Radical pedagogies especially that which is based on Freirian thought is that all education is political (Freire, 1976, p 70, Giroux, 1992; Simon, 1992, Mayo, 2000). This being the case, we can divide pedagogies along a continuum of if and to what extent they support the dominant cultural values, mores, etc.. That is to say, do they reinforce cultural hegemony or do challenge it?
At one end of this continuum, educational models which support existing hegemony can be labeled as traditional or conservative, while those that scrutinize or expose can be labeled as critical. Further down this continuum, away from conservative, lies radical or revolutionary pedagogy, which takes critical pedagogy to its logical conclusion through action.
“[Conservative] education is thus perceived as playing an important role in cementing the existing hegemony. It is crucial in securing consent for the ruling way of life, one which is supportive of and is supported by the prevailing mode of production (Mayo, 2000).” Suoranta, Tomperi and FitzSimmons (2005) place this conservative nature of education as a necessary component of a capitalist society, and claim that market forces and the growing business-like nature of educational institutions maintain and support this model. Somewhere* in this work, I will build on their claim that this trend of “corporatization of education” puts students into the role of an object-consumer. In sum, the traditional methods of education perpetuate the status quo, and thus serve those who benefit from the status quo.
Critical pedagogic frameworks ask of teachers to explicitly address issues of “power and privilege” as well as social justice, not just in course content but into pedagogic philosophies, programs and policies (Mezirow, 78). Scherr, (2005), tasks critical theories and praxis with preventing students from becoming the “objects of governments power, required to senselessly comply with social conditions (148).”
Thus, it is the job of those who claim to practice critical pedagogies to, in a sense, wake their students up, through methods best described as “epistemological cognition” to the socio-political structures that determine where groups of people fall within the stratification of wealth, class, privilege, power, knowledge, etc. (Mezirow, 83).
When held against conservative pedagogic models, it would be beneficial to the powerful to paint radical and revolutionary pedagogies as a violent and destructive. To the dismay of some, Suoranta, Tomperi and FitzSimmons claim that the word revolutionary in this context is synonymous with change and hope (2005). In fact, far from being a fringe component of the continuum described above, “radical discourses are normative (Gore, 271).”
According to Mayo (2000), radical discourses are born out of the foundations of critical pedagogies and build on this foundation through the commitment to a cause. Recognizing the political nature of education, radical and revolutionary pedagogues seek to use their institutional power to affect change. Gore (1997) summarizes:
“Put very crudely, the argument within much radical pedagogy discourse goes something like this: Schools produce and reproduce social differences. Much of this inequality happens at the site of the classroom, in the interchange between teacher(s) and students, given that this is where students spend the vast majority of there time in school. Classroom practices contribute to the production of social differences. Teachers can and should do things differently (Gore, 276).”
Now it is my turn, Traditional pedagogies reinforce the status quo, critical pedgogies expose the power relations within the status quo, and radical and revolutionary pedagogies seek to change the status quo.
Engagement
Components of the idea for the Taskforce came out of a growing conversation about student engagement and participation in the classroom that I call “Consumer Education.” This conception has its roots in the Freirian model of “banking” (CITATION) , students as passive receptors, or consumers of pre-packaged knowledge packets- books, courses, etc. Put simply by Wiemer, consumer education “ is something done unto them. (Weimer, 23)”.
Among critical and radical commentators, there is a growing agreement, that like nearly all aspects of American Society, education too has become business-like and therefore, like the commoditization of everything else is something to be consumed.
Suoranta, Tomperi and FitzSimmons situate this model of consumer education within the context of capitalism and globalization: “Schools are now taking on a corporate persona which, according to Rinne, requires schools to function as enterprises (186).” If schools are being forced to fall into this trend of corporatization, it must be expected that students will be treated less and less as students and more like customers, who pay for a product.
There has been a degree of alarm raised over this developing phenomenon. “The current calls to restructure public schooling systems according to the demands of corporate sectors and the market presents one of the most threatening assaults to the possibilities of schools of contribution to the creation and sustainment of more democratic solutions to the current worldwide problems of illiteracy, poverty , inequity, and oppression (Gustavo and McLaren, 343).”
According to these writers, the time when public education served as an integral segment in the preparation of citizens for a functioning democracy may have already come to an end.
Critical pedagogues see the prevalence of schools as private enterprise as threatening to equality and diversity. “Schools therefore act as vital supports for and developers of, the class relations, the violent capital-labor relation that is at the core of capitalist society and development (Gustavo and McLaren 350).”
By explicitly setting out to empower students, by setting them up to talk to congress, the Taskforce is an act of disobedience to the shroud of hegemony which hovers over too much of the American academy today.
public schooling has been reduced to a sub sector of the economy, as cost-benefit analysis and the maximization of profits have emerged as the major components for the manufacturing of education “excellence” according to the needs of the triumphant society. Gustavo and McLaren 344
Mayo speaks of the role of the critical educator: “Their task is to facilitate processes whereby educators and educatees are to learn together. The task of the facilitator is to promote learning through dialogue. This processes is contrary to the notion of the teacher as the sole dispenser of knowledge and is intended to render the learners active participants in the process of their own learning, to render them “subject.” (Mayo, 264).”
Power
According to Freire, education is a political act (CITATION)
The set up
Making it Happen; Coordination:
My official title in this project is the “Taskforce Coordinator”. I like it because it implies that things are getting done. In the initial set-up I did a good deal of coordinating between
AV
Having worked with Appalachian Voices for over two years, I was sure that there wouldn’t be any problem with them hooking on the my idea. The coordination in this regard came in the form of simply figuring out meeting days and times and thoroughly explaining what it was that I was doing. After the first meeting, there were more ideas out there than could possibly be done in one semester, which was a good thing. How many?
Watauga
The coordination with Watauga was a bit more tricky, naturally. Because Watauga is nestled in a state-run bueracracy, I had to be a bit more intentional and persuasive in the manner I approached this. For example, since I was hijacking a service learning component that was to be integrated into a course on human rights, privilege and class, I needed to prove that the issues the students would be encountering would be congruent with what they would be dealing with in the Big Class. This wasn’t too difficult to do. The story of resource extraction is long and dirty, ripe with exploitation, stratification and issues surround justice, or the lack there of.
Once this was adequately proven, which only took a conversation, the tasks became largely clerical in nature: setting up a course number, figuring out how to assign grades, getting a classroom reserved. I think that over the years I had accumulated enough capital to get a decent credit line of trust on this and the people at Watauga were pleasant and helpful. At any point the could have shot this idea down and that they had enough trust to let me see this through is telling of the boldness that emanates from those hallowed halls.
Reaserch
My methodology, how I thought about this, and my goals were informed by my years of research and experience with action pedagogy and learning communities. I had been a part of several academic experiments of the sort, although always led by faculty, and this experience provided a good base on which to begin brainstorming how exactly I would go about the business of activating students via the Taskforce.
I knew that there had to be a good deal of student investment for the group to care enough to show up to a course that asked more than it gave in the form of credit. I knew that I would be walking a thin line between being a student and a teacher, and that this line had to be explicitly identified as early in the project as possible. I am talking about the line that says, “no, we can’t talk about how drunk you got last night in here and no, we can’t go get drunk together after class.” Another line that I felt needed to be addressed was where my contact with them came to an end. Experience (not personal) had shown me that it is very easy for an undergraduate teaching assistant to fall into intimate relations with another undergraduate student. I had seen this happen amongst my peers in other experiences and I had seen the awful effects it had had. So for me, this was an important line to draw.
I knew that students have to be a part of the conversation and I knew that students had to have some kind of reward.
Anyway.
Putting it together:
Syllabus
The first task I assigned myself was to create the best syllabus ever, a true contract that would spark inspiration in the kind of student I was looking for. When the best teachers sit down to write a syllabus, Bain tells us, they approach it as though they are inviting their students over for dinner, and the syllabus is the menu. I did my best to be as clear as possible about what I expected from the students and what I expected from myself.
One of the first articles on the menu was a list of expectations:
-Each participant brings valuable insights, experiences, knowledges and questions that are beneficial to the groups learning.
-These above mentioned qualities will be respected equally by all.
-There is an expert scholar within each student that is in a process of becoming.
-Participants have a desire to take their learning into their own hands and use this autonomy to engage in a meaningful learning experience.
I was experimenting with how much trust you actually can put in student initiative and desire to learn to make a class work. I wanted to be more of a guide than a lecturer and so it was critical to prove to the students that what they already knew, and what they would find out on their own exploration was worth something-more so than anything they would find out reading a book about MTR. It was the basic premise of the class- We’ll teach each other.
Recruitment
Participation in the Taskforce was open to anyone on a first come, first serve basis. I set up a table with the rest of the service organizations at a “Service Fair” and had a handout briefly describing the mission of the project. Students who thought they might be interested gave me their name and email address. I got about 30 names, three times the number that I was able to take, so I figured I did a good job there. The next day, I sent out an email to the list with another description of the Taskforce with a disclaimer that included an invitation and promise:
“Participation in this segment service learning will be more demanding than other opportunities; fortunately it promises to be much more rewarding. When considering participation please take a moment to ask yourself if you are willing to devote more than the required 15 hours to this endeavor. Participants should be interested in environmental justice and human rights issues, activism and grassroots organizing, as well as research and academic drudgery for a good cause. Upon completion of this endeavor, participants will emerge with a new sense of agency and hope in an unjust and corrupt world, a sophisticated understanding of how people organize including real skills for impacting (perhaps saving) the planet, and an appreciation for mountains, people, and energy of all kinds. I hope you choose to join us.”
Additionally, I asked that the student fill out a short application:
1) Do you love mountains? Feel free to state why.
On a scale of cold, mild, medium, hot, fire, inferno please rate:
2) Your eagerness to make a difference in a positive way
3) Your willingness to work hard for good reasons
4) The way you feel about ASU food services
5) The way you feel about being a part of a dynamic group empowered to take real action
I then sat back and waited for emails to come in. I took the first twelve people who emailed me back professing their love of mountains.
Selection
It is obvious to me now that I should have been more selective in who I allowed into the course. There are some students who, if they had had to fill out a more demanding application would probably have chosen not to do it. There are also some students who, now looking back, I should have seen would only be luke-warm in the levels of commitment they would bring.
I was looking for students who were in a place where they could devote themselves to going above and beyond what was expected of them. Several of these students are in the Taskforce. However, there are some who have “misunderstood” the level of commitment I was asking and on account of this, have not been as engaged as I would have liked.
Next time I set out to do something like this, I think will make it painfully clear what I expect. I think this is a big problem of life in general.
Execution: Class by Class more or less
The first class, I showed a short video put together by Appalachian Voices on MTR. It was many of the students first introduction to the issue beyond what I had told them while recruiting. Most were shocked and had a new realization of the importance of the class. After the video, I asked “OK, what questions does this raise for you. What else would you need to know to talk to a politician about this issue?”
We spent some time tossing out questions, and the final list went on the board. Their first assignment was to research the answer to one of the questions for the next week and be prepared to teach the rest of everyone about it.
When that happened I played the role of quality control, adding important details, clarifying and correcting places where the students information was a bit faulty. Some students did as good a job as I could have done explaining concepts such as absentee ownership, others needed help. But I’m pretty sure every one learned something that second class.
The next few classes consisted of a combination of continued dialog about MTR and going down to the Appalachian Voices office for volunteering. During their volunteer time, most of the students did “phone banking” which consisted of calling people on the AV call list and telling them about the website www.ilovemountains.org and providing the opportunity to give more resources if wanted. This was a good way for the students to begin talking about MTR, in preparation for the eventual trip to lobby Congress.
VA trip
Fundraiser
DC trip
Who knows?!
Evaluation
The curse of the class was that I had as little authority over the enforcement of tasks as a teaching assistant. The course was pass/fail, ad so I couldn’t threat with grades if the students didn’t do what they were supposed to do, which by the end of the course began to happen quite often.
Week by Week
Reflections
To help me learn the most, I kept a regular journal of the goings on of the class. Before each meeting, I set goals, and outlined how I planed on getting them done. Afterwards, I would asses as to how/if theses goals were or weren’t met and why I thought that things went the way that they did. I would then go bring these refletions to my weekly meetings with Joe, my mentor on the project. We would go over what happened and why and share ideas about how to do things differently, and brainstorm new approaches.
Because Joe was doing a class which was very similar at the time, we had the unique opportunity to offer advice to one another on each others classes. It was a very empowering to be able to offer real advice based on experience teaching to someone who had been doing it 15 years more than me.
The journals gave me the perspective necessary to make sound judgements about course dicisions and were an integral part of the experience.
While at the same time
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Pedagogies of Engagement- educating citizen 135
One road that leads to the intersection where we find the Taskforce is the route known as ‘Pedagogies of Engagement’…(LINK)… “Many of these strategies represent models for teaching that if used well can support deep understanding, usable knowledge and skills, and personal connection and meaning (Colby, Ehrlich, Beaumont, Stephens, 134).” These strategies include service learning, experiential education, problem-based leraning, and collaborative learning, and according recent surveys are being used my more and more college teachers across the
In fact, according to Colby, Ehrlich, Beaumont and Stephens, the bredth of research on such so-called Pedagogies of Engagement is “extensive” and if “taken as a whole the research indicates that if used well, these student centered, or active, pedagogies can have positive impact on many dimensions of moral and civic learning as well as on other aspects of academic achievement (Colby, Ehrlich, Beaumont, Stephens, 134).”
If we are to believe this, then it is safe to claim that, broadly speaking, pedagogies of engagement and the components found therein are both normative and successful.
The taskforce is ripe with these strategies and thus constitutes my own experimentation with such pedagogies. As previously stated, the taskforce is made up of service learning, experiential education, action education, problem based learning, room for student empowerment, and moral and civic learning. What may not be normative, or successful by some standards of comparison is when an undergraduate takes it upon themselves to lead a gang of freshmen through an experience based on these principals. Truly, it must be laid straight that in no way am I claiming that the Taskforce is a master piece. Hah! It is, however, and this is wonderful, I think, the principals of pedagogies of engagement taken to their logical conclusion.
If teachers are to legitimately and honestly claim that they are empowering students to take authority and autonomy, they ought to be prepared to have some ambitious upper-level undergraduates come to them with bold, perhaps self-destructively bold, ideas. Will the faculty of IDS and
Colby, Ehrlich, Beaumont, and Stephens tell us that “experiential learning, including service learning, provide educational settings that are less artificial than the classroom and much more closer to the contexts in which students will later perform (139)”. I believe a story is due here. For nearly a month, the students in the Taskforce leraned about mountaintop removal through mediated experiences. They saw movies, did research, talked to people on the phone, met with people who had been working in the movement. This happened more or less in a classroom or at least in an office. Through this initial learning process, the students gained valuable perspectives and learned the basics on MTR. But it was until they were standing on top of a mountain that had been blown up, talking to people whose lives had been destroyed that they truly gained a real-live understanding of the facts of MTR.
I feel the need to quote a gentleman here who has never written a book. He has, however tought me a great deal about how to track and subsequently kill animals. More often than not, my forays into the woods would end in an empty stomach and a glimpse of the hind-end end of a whitetale (this means it is running away, a bad sign for a hunter). Just about every time we would embark into the brush, he would tell me, it’s all about who see’s who first- simple. It took years of experience, however, to understand this principle of hunting.
Anyway, he says: “There two ways to learn in this world. The easy way and the hard way.” The easy way being having someone tell you whatever it is you need to know, the hard way is going out and learning it by trial and error, in this case, seeing a bunch of deer asses.
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I believe that one of the most important lessons I have learned in regard to power and leadership is this:
As Margo Culley (1985) puts it: “The…feminist teacher…has power and must claim her power if her students are to claim their own (p.211).” I believe in my situation, in my experience, this is an issue of leadership. It was my task to be the leader of the Taskforce, and I expereimented with various different approaches to leadership. Here are some examples.
When we were setting up the benefit show, I wanted the students to take control of the situation and make it their own. Ideally, I thought that all I would have to do was to make the initial setup, help get tasks assigned and provide resources. After that, I hoped, all I would need to do was to sit back and watch progress happen.
Instead, what happened was consistent postmoment of progress, something known as procrastination. For example, it took twice as long for everying to happen than I thought it would. Somethings, like getting flyers put up didn’t really happen until a few days before.
This happened because I assumed that the students would a) find it self-evident why it was important to stay on top of or ahead of the game b) that they would then act on this understanding.
This was a poor assumption. I expected too much that the students would simply do the work they were supposed to do out of the goodness of their astuteness. Instead, I believe that I should have taken a more active role in seeing that they accomplished what it was they were supposed to do.
I think that there is a balance in this. Strong, empowering leadership is an active leadership, leadership cannot be passive. At the same time, the best leaders leave the least evidence of their leadership with empowering the most people.
Horton and Freire talk at length between the balance between authority and authoritarianism. “Authority is necessary to the freedom of the students and to my own. The teacher is absolutely necessary. What is bad, what is not necessary, is authoritarianism, but not authority” (Freire, in Horton and Freire, 1990, p.181). This has been cited as a result of the critique of empowerment in the early days of critical and radical pedagogy (Gore 274). As practitioners experiemented with the ideas of empowerment, they came to realize that it is too much to expect students who have been conditioned to be passive spectators to, overnight, take things into their own hands (Freire, Mayo, Gore).
In his survey of what makes the best college teachers, Bain claims that one fundamental characteristic is that their attitudes are geared with willingness and oiled with faith in students ability to “assume control of their own education” and that this trust in process is anchored in “mutual respect and agreement between students and teachers (Bain, 78-79).”
Clearly it is not so simply as just setting students on their own, otherwise we would find more teachers practicing the same. Gore warns us that “by relinquishing or disavowing authority, teachers limit their capacity to empower their students while simultaneously “dis-empowering” themselves (Gore, 274).” I found this to be true, at times. While it is important to leave space for students to rise up and claim autonomy and authority, this must be done in a supportive environment. Babies fall down plenty of times learning to walk, but they need somebody to help them back up and to hold on to from time to time.
Much the same, students who are for the first time understanding the implications of their own agency may be hesitant or fearful of going full throttle in taking control of situations. Guidelines, due dates, check ins, and even badgering cannot be fully cast by the wayside.
Like nearly everything, this is a situation where teachers, and students, must find a balance. Fortuneately and unfortunately this balance is constantly shifting as students and teachers grow. The good news is that we will, as long as we stay committed, always be in a process of becoming. The bad news is that once your on the bus, your on the bus.
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