A rather innocuous PBS commercial for the network's online content got me thinking today. In the commercial, a teacher of social work says that she has many students who lived through Hurricane Katrina, and that these students possess "life experience" that requires that her material be "relevant." As a person who is currently undergoing the process of learning how to teach, I find the phrase "life experience" to be not only redundant and nearly meaningless but also quite dangerous for many college students.
One of the most shocking things that happens in my classroom is absolute silence. Even the brightest students will refuse to express an opinion on a topic, however interested they may be. They are seemingly very content with thinking absolutely nothing about any number of issues including race, poverty, gay marriage, and war. I work very hard to ask the right questions to get them to say anything one could construe as an actual opinion on these things.
I think this deafening silence--one of the cruelest of stabs in the pedagogical heart--is related to this "life experience" thing. "Life experience" (I've typed it three times now and it's like nails on a chalkboard in my internal monologue) means something like having gone through something tough, be it the challenges (and drudgery) of working a job for many years or the hardship and sufferings of a natural disaster or other calamity, personal or otherwise. The problem is that limiting "life experience" to this understanding--an understanding with which you can certainly argue but that I believe prevails not only on college campuses but in all kinds of business settings--is that it relieves privileged students of their responsibility as human beings to think about the world as a person who actually lives in it.
My fear is that most of my students assume that they do not have "life experience." What this blinds them to are the very cultural assumptions that they need to reflect upon in order to be critical thinkers. In a way, it exempts them from reflecting on their own "life experience," understood as simply being a human being who has a body and lives in the world. Their experiences may be banal, but they are experiences had during one's life, and they need to be recognized as formative. The danger is that students aren't able to see themselves as formed by dynamics of class, race, gender and more. They are able to float free, claiming a lack of "life experience" and succumbing to the silence of apathetic existence.
This is not a millennial problem. This is a cultural problem that runs deep in our collective anthropology. Before older folks go blaming those pesky kids for their apathy, they would do well to examine their categories for adulthood. We think we know what we mean by "real world" or "life experience." Perhaps we do. But perhaps that meaning is an insidious component of the deepest flaws in our view of what it means to be human.
One of the most shocking things that happens in my classroom is absolute silence. Even the brightest students will refuse to express an opinion on a topic, however interested they may be. They are seemingly very content with thinking absolutely nothing about any number of issues including race, poverty, gay marriage, and war. I work very hard to ask the right questions to get them to say anything one could construe as an actual opinion on these things.
I think this deafening silence--one of the cruelest of stabs in the pedagogical heart--is related to this "life experience" thing. "Life experience" (I've typed it three times now and it's like nails on a chalkboard in my internal monologue) means something like having gone through something tough, be it the challenges (and drudgery) of working a job for many years or the hardship and sufferings of a natural disaster or other calamity, personal or otherwise. The problem is that limiting "life experience" to this understanding--an understanding with which you can certainly argue but that I believe prevails not only on college campuses but in all kinds of business settings--is that it relieves privileged students of their responsibility as human beings to think about the world as a person who actually lives in it.
My fear is that most of my students assume that they do not have "life experience." What this blinds them to are the very cultural assumptions that they need to reflect upon in order to be critical thinkers. In a way, it exempts them from reflecting on their own "life experience," understood as simply being a human being who has a body and lives in the world. Their experiences may be banal, but they are experiences had during one's life, and they need to be recognized as formative. The danger is that students aren't able to see themselves as formed by dynamics of class, race, gender and more. They are able to float free, claiming a lack of "life experience" and succumbing to the silence of apathetic existence.
This is not a millennial problem. This is a cultural problem that runs deep in our collective anthropology. Before older folks go blaming those pesky kids for their apathy, they would do well to examine their categories for adulthood. We think we know what we mean by "real world" or "life experience." Perhaps we do. But perhaps that meaning is an insidious component of the deepest flaws in our view of what it means to be human.
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