Trying to Defuse the Power Relations in My Course

My title is a bit odd so I want to note up front that this is not about trigger warnings or sexual harassment,  though my thought to defuse power in the classroom coincided with the revelations about Harvey Weinstein and the subsequent Me Too campaign.  The revelations so disturbed me that I became more sensitized to power relations in other contexts, my teaching in particular.   There the power issue manifests in students as sheep and instructor as shepherd. 

We have reached the midpoint of the semester.  In their weekly blogging, students were asked to write a review post, to read the posts they had written previously, identify themes that connected one post to another, and give some distillation based on that.  For each post I provide a prompt.  Students also have the freedom to write about something else of there own choosing, as long as they can tie that to course themes.  In the past few students have exercised this option.  This semester, nobody has done it so far.  As part of the review post, I asked students what they wanted to see in future prompts.  Many had interesting suggestions that way.  Nevertheless, they also explained why they wanted to write to the prompt rather than to venture onto a subject on their own.  It seemed to me they were well past the point where the training wheels should come off the bicycle, yet they still wanted the extra security that provided.

So I did something I've never done before in my teaching.  Last Tuesday in class, when we were discussing those review posts, I explicitly told them that I didn't want to have power over them and that they needed to exercise more control over their own learning.  This followed a return to our very first class session in August, where we examined our class as an organization.  (The course is on the Economics of Organizations and during the first two weeks we spent some time on examples of organizations that should be familiar to every student.)  During that session we asked some fundamental questions.  What is the purpose of the course?  The obvious answer - to produce learning.  We categorized learning the way economists would - production of human capital, also possibly providing a consumption benefit for students, and then making them better citizens, the public good benefit. We then asked, who owns the human capital?  The obvious answer to that one is that each student owns his or her own human capital.

As I said, we had already covered this on the very first day.  But some of the students in the class now hadn't yet added the course then and, more importantly, the message probably didn't get absorbed by those who were there.  In particular, the students didn't understand what ownership entailed, that owners aggressively maintain upkeep of their assets.  They don't wait around passively for good things to happen.  On Tuesday, we then spent some time discussing various things the students might do with their blog posts in the second half of the course to express their ownership and thus to get more out of the blogging.

We are now onto the next post after the review post and I've read through some of those.  It is evident that the students are under a great deal of stress and that contributes to them being sheep-like about their schooling.  One big stress, which probably exists for students even if their parents paid for college, is the high tuition.  For those who have had to take out loans the stress is obvious.  For the other students who are debt-free, there is an implied obligation to their parents, which is actually an enormous weight on them.  This, then, is coupled with that many don't know what they want to do after they graduate.  They don't know what they want, nor what they are capable of doing.

I was just this way when I was an undergrad, stumbling into going to graduate school in economics, with no planning about doing that until it became the thing to try.  So I can identify with the students now knowing what they want.  But these kids don't seem to want graduate school.  They want to have a job of some sort.  I think many are burnt out on school.  Being a sheep will do that to you.

And it is all a vicious cycle.  They worry about grades (which is one thing I really didn't do).  They worry a lot about that.  The instructor assigns the grades.  So the instructor has power over them, for that reason.  If they would let go some on the grades front, they might find they can exercise more control of their own learning and not have school feel like it is all jumping through hoops that are not of their own making.

It is probably too early to tell whether that little departure from the norm last Tuesday had any impact on the students.  And I am well aware that when I try something different I really want it to have an impact, so I will start to see effects whether those are really there or not.  That said, some of the students seemed to be more forthcoming in their most recent posts.  So I remain hopeful that it will produce some good consequence.

Let me close by speculating about that.  The power relations aren't just in my class.  And the stress the students are under is ever present.  Might the institution do something parallel to my little display in class that would have a more significant impact on the students' well being?  Yesterday I read a poignant essay in the New York Review of Books by Marilynne Robinson called What Are We Doing Here?  It intertwines the evident societal decline with the decline of the humanities in the academy.

It is clear that the way we do general education now, the humanities don't touch the students in a meaningful way and/or the students do want to study History or English or Philosophy but are so afraid about the career prospects from doing so that they shy away from the possibility.  Last year, after my course concluded, I wrote a post called Looking at Undergraduate Education through the Wrong End of the Binoculars.   Among the suggestions made in that post, one was that every course should be co-taught and offered in the WAC style. (WAC is short for Writing Across the Curriculum.)  One of the co-teachers would be a humanist who would help to infuse the humanities into whatever the subject of study.

Idealistically, I think this is not a bad idea nor a bad goal to pursue.  Realistically, it seems so far away as to be unreachable.  For a realistic change, we should be looking for leverage, something simple and therefore do-able yet which has big impact.  I don't know what that might be.  Looking for it seems the academic equivalent of the search for the holy grail.