DECEMBER 1, SUNDAY

DECEMBER 1, SUNDAY

WARREN WILSON COLLEGE: IDENTITY 4

I taught at Warren Wilson College for 45 years and am grateful that the college, for most of that time, allowed me to experiment with projects that I liked doing and for, most of the time, letting me teach in my own way.  I particularly felt at home in the Warren Wilson community in which almost everyone in the first years I was teaching, work staff and teaching staff, lived on campus in campus housing.  Our children found this to be a wonderful place to grow up together.  We had a great number of community celebrations.  It was great fun. None of us got paid very well but we all got paid about the same.  We were dedicated to teaching rural mountain children.  

And then the College began to change with a lesser emphasis on work and service and stronger emphasis on academic teaching with the model being the academic rigor of the graduate schools the teaching staff had gotten their degrees from.  Gradually the gap between teaching staff and work staff increased.  We were no longer all equal.  Academic rigor was the central value.

But the way this affected me was that I wasn’t an academic.  I didn’t really fit in the tribe.  I had gone endlessly to graduate school but I never fit in.  I taught about India but was not interested in the academic approach to learning about India.  I was much more interested in the experience of, the sensuous feel of, India.  My projects with school children were to convey to them for a day the feel and taste and smell and sounds of India.  The way I did this with Warren Wilson student was to take them to India, usually for two months at a time, often for four months, and when there I gave no lectures, we had village stays and visited rural projects in Sri Lankan and India and kept a journal record of their experience.  

But Warren Wilson College is an academic institution and all academic institutions try to be alike.  They all measure learning in college credits which are assumed to be equivalent in every college.  Central to academic learning are the many academic disciplines in which students are introduced to a highly developed discipline through scholarly studies to create a body of knowledge and a form of scholarly learning which can eventually lead to mastery of that discipline or at least some portion of it.

I didn’t do that.  I like reading scholarly books, generally the more popular and wider ranging ones, than studies of a particular literary discipline or historical time.  But I didn’t like trying to fit students into this discipline either through lectures on my part or the standard textbook.  This kind of academic learning seemed to be wooden and an attempt to fit students into an abstract set of conventions seemed like fitting them into tribal conventions.  So I didn’t do it.

I was much more interested in the student’s experience as they made their passage through life and how they felt their way along.  Students who wanted a strictly academic approach didn’t like this, but before they could get upset, I tried to talk them into dropping the class.  I did use India as examples of different perspectives in Introduction to South Asia, but put emphasis on the personal student response.  Most students knew what they are getting into and deliberately chose this approach to learning.

But not all.  And more than that I knew that I wasn’t teaching in the same academic lecture method as other teachers and was running the risk of being exposed.  It is a little like a person wanting to fit into the MAGA tribe because his whole community is so friendly and all his friends are MAGA people but still publicly being pro abortion, defending trans and gay people, and being skeptical about Christianity.  Eventually this could catch up to him and it did to me to the point that strongly academic people in authority wanted to fire me and almost did.  Warren Wilson was, after all, an academic institution, not a place where you feel your way along and get credit for it.

But I wasn’t fired, probably because it was difficult to do and because firing someone causes a lot of ill feeling and also because the students who took my classes weren’t complaining, they liked learning in a different way, in at least some of their classes.  So I went on teaching in just the same way for the next twenty years and having a great time, under the radar, until I retired.  

But the message to me was that when you belong to a tribe you have to fit in to be fully accepted and if on a major point you don’t fit in you might get pushed out.  But if you can appear to fit in and don’t make a big deal about doing things differently or having different values you may get along just fine.  You can’t change the basic values or the identity of people in a tribe.  Asserting yourself and causing a fight causes polarization.  It is better to just try and get along.