Achieving Against The Odds

3 Learning to Listen to Students and Oneself

54 Tim Sieber 3 Learning to Listen to Students and Oneself It is in listening to the student that I learn how to speak with him or her. —Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom To teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin. —bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress AT THE end of one semester, I was reading a student’s fairly conventional research paper, “Effects of Adoption on the Family,” for my interdisciplinary course Childhood in America and reached that last, unexpected sentence: the student had written, “I’m very familiar with this situation, since my brother is adopted.” There it was again—so odd, I thought—that brief mention at the end, almost an afterthought, of a personal connection to the paper topic. I had never imagined that this student had an adopted brother until I read the last sentence. At first I thought it was a coincidence that students often chose topics of personal interest, even if they alluded to their personal links in such limited ways. Having given them completely free choice on the paper topic so long as it concerned problems of children in the United States, I wondered if this effect was just random. It did seem, however, that students often chose topics—adoption, divorce, single-parent families , immigration, and so on—related to their life experiences, even if this only leaked through their work in indirect ways. It crossed my mind, at times, whether this was appropriate, or maybe even an easy way out. If anthropology argued that social and cultural analysis was suitable mainly for applying to the “other,” the unfamiliar or the different , did a personal connection with the material hamper, rather than help, effective learning? Still, papers like this suggested to me in some inchoate way that there was a puzzling disconnect between personal experience and academic analysis in the work that students were doing in my course. Why didn’t the students discuss the link earlier and more openly? I spent some years observing this pattern, though remaining a little uncomfortable with it. In my early teaching, two decades or more ago, I had unconsciously assumed that participation in the academic enterprise, and academic achievement itself, required—even depended on—such a disconnection . It was the pattern I had learned earlier as the secret to success and to my own entry as a student into the academic world. Learning to Disconnect at College I grew up in the country, on the edge of a small town in Appalachia, a white, working-class boy in the 1950s. My mother had quit her job as a receptionist at a country music radio station so that she could stay home with me, and later with my brother, after we were born in quick succession . My father was an electrician who, because of shortages of work in the region, often worked on construction projects in other states and visited home on weekends. My paternal grandparents and teenage aunt and uncle lived next door, all of us forming a closely cooperative extended family. My parents valued education and pushed me strongly to achieve and to enter what was then called the “college-prep” track in high school. From rural, working-class backgrounds themselves, my parents had both been tracked in school away from such a course of study. My mother and father never hesitated to communicate to me their resigned disappointment over their lack of access to all the education they had wanted and felt they were capable of handling. I did well in high school and was a leader in many extracurricular activities. In that era of great expansion of higher education in the 1960s, I was offered scholarships to attend a small, elite, Quaker, all-men’s liberal arts college on the east coast. As a rural, working-class boy and a West Virginian, I was admitted to add diversity to the strongly uppermiddle -class, suburban, East-Coast student body at the school. In those days, affirmative action was limited to whites like me and aimed at adding mostly regional and class variety to the fundamentally middleand upper-class, white student bodies that characterized higher education at the time (there was just one African American in my class of 125). College changed my life, introducing me for the first time to critical intellectual work, progressive politics, and new class...