Funny, Isn’t It?

Posted on October 26, 2017 by Brooke Hessler

When I was 7 years old, I’d spend the weekend with Mema in rural New York. On Sundays we’d get up around dawn and head to the Maybrook Flea Market, park in her regular stall, and unload her station wagon, pulling out long tables and boxes packed with antiques and knickknacks tucked into newspaper, unwrapping each one like a present–a wooden cuckoo clock; a sawdust-filled babydoll with a cracked, handpainted face; a pocketwatch bought cheap at a garage sale the day before; a nest of pink plates–Depression glass was her specialty. Sometimes my step-grandfather would join us and sell his old tools. He loved flea markets too but he was a drinker and not always good about getting up early.

Once everything was set up I’d start roaming around. First to the snack bar for hot cocoa or popcorn. (The place was a drive-in movie theater at night.) I’d take the route past the candy people’s table, see them unloading box after box (they were always slower setting up) and continue snaking around their row until they finally put out that week’s display of Wacky Packages.

From Topps Wacky Package series 1 (1973)

They were sold as trading cards, each containing a puzzle, a stiff slice of gum, and two different stickers: parodies of familiar household products. To my kid mind they were witty and wonderful.

My dad had been a Madison Avenue ad man. Mom told me he was responsible for putting “Indescribably Delicious” on the Almond Joy candy bar. My preschool friend starred in commercials for Colgate toothpaste and Breck shampoo. I was more than a little obsessed with branding. When Dad would visit I’d observe the products he used–Parliament cigarettes, Dymo label makers, Hertz rental cars–because they were clues into who he was and what he did.

Looking back, I think what made Wacky Packs so consequential to me was their peculiar intimacy with my lifeworld and their gift of parody as a new way to process it. They popped my mind open to an irreverent alternative reality for which I’d been primed by television (Monty Python, Laugh-In) but could now hold in my hand. Awful Bits Cereal, Blecch Shampoo, and Hostage Cupcake stickers were subversive little artworks like I could make myself–the illustrations, the writing, the humor were all accessible to me. I thought I understood all the jokes and I knew all the products. The appeal was wickedly right. Dad was a copywriter; I could be a copywronger. Making spoof ads made me feel powerful. Professional.

From Topps Wacky Package series 4 (1973)

As I skim the stickers from my era, the early 1970s, I’m struck by the messaging, thinking about how I might have interpreted it then. The jokes about gender and politics delivered in that way of grown-ups amusing themselves through cartoon narratives. (Turns out, the grown-up behind the jokes was Art Spiegelman, author of the graphic novel Maus.)

I don’t remember this feminist spaghetti-o sticker, but I would have liked it. I would have translated it as acknowledging rather than mocking “women’s lib.”

I might have stuck it on my lunchbox, feeling clever and righteous.

I find myself searching through this Wacky Packs archive from my sofa in Oakland, recovering from a fever, listening to the schoolkids playing nearby, wondering what stickers they’ve got on their lunchbags. What makes them feel clever and righteous.

I’ve spent most of my career helping people in and out of school make media their own by making their own media. During my early years teaching college writing I routinely assigned parodies as a way to give students the opportunity to author the kinds of texts that influenced their lives, such as websites for corporations and universities. After a decade or so I pivoted and assigned more earnest multimedia projects, digital stories developed through a process of collaborative inquiry and reflection. The digital storytelling work shared the same basic goal: authorship as critically reflective empowerment done in a makerspace scenario that would bring people together creatively, hashing over ideas that were larger than the homework at hand.

Nowadays I teach writing to both kids and adults, working in a community literacy center, a writing center, college classrooms. And I find myself wondering whether I ought to be spending more time with parody, or less. Is parody what we need now more than ever before? Or is it just another way to amuse ourselves to death?

Wacky Packages – Fracky Packages series Trumpocracy: the First 100 Days, card #28 (2017)

This is a serious question.

30% of Oakland school kids live in poverty; 1 in 8 is the child of an undocumented immigrant. What sticker might help them feel smart and savvy and hopeful and empowered? What writing projects are the best interventions?

The Topps company now makes custom Wacky Packages, including at least one series parodying the Trump presidency.

The mass appeal of absurdity is what made Trump’s election possible. Our gleeful consumption of parody is one of the luxuries of our democracy, after all.

Nixon was still president during my Wacky Pack era. Did grown-ups then feel as I do now, brittle and weary from joke after joke?

Wacky Packages series Trumpocracy: the First 100 Days, card #37, “Q: Are We Unqualified? A: We Are DEVOS!” (2017)

As a GenXer and educator I know I’m the target demographic of this sticker. But I just can’t bring myself to buy it.

Back to Basics

Posted on January 10, 2017 by Brooke Hessler

My breakfast this morning was a gloppy, vile mess. I ate it anyway because I’d spent hours last night preparing it: a new no-one-is-a-blacksmith-at-birth crockpot recipe for kitchari, the nutritious Ayurvedic porridge of beans, grains, spices, and vegetables that has become my mainstay during cold weather or whenever I’m organized enough to prepare a big batch that I can eat all day.

I used Meyer lemons from the tree in my new backyard, and ghee and tricolor quinoa, organic parsnips, coconut, a stick of cinnamon, cloves, other good things. Sounds delicious, doesn’t it? Nope. Vile. And the texture was repulsive–mush and objects that felt like mushrooms only there were no mushrooms. But nourishing, surely. And instructive. The commonsense me thought, “Of course it was awful. You tried too hard.”

It’s true. When I try too hard at things, overthink them, invest too much time and aspire too much, the outcome is usually mediocre at best. Yesterday I’d fantasized throughout the afternoon about preparing the meal, shopping for the ingredients after work, pouring a glass of wine and relaxing into the process–but the process went on too long and became too much and I couldn’t find a place to plug in the crockpot and had to dig in the attic for an extension cord and just generally I was a big ball of peevishness by the time I set the timer and left the kitchen.

This is a clear pattern in my teaching as well–as a yogi and as a professor–when I turn the corner of basic preparedness to over-planning, when I hope too much or expect too much from a class it becomes too precious and I lose my mojo.

I’m trying hard to remember this lesson as I prepare to teach my first class at a new college. Of course I want to be a great teacher to my students, but as a critically reflective practitioner I want to bring my best self to this experience, the one who is prepared but not obsessively so; the one who improvises easily and joyfully; the one whose students know she cares deeply about their well-being, no matter what else the day or class may bring.

My reflections today are about my core values and expertise, the things that are tried and true to my pedagogy, not about all the things I have done or that I could do–that’s all just too much; it’s how I ended up adding the seaweed to the kitchari.

“It’s too expensive”: On team teaching

Posted on April 2, 2016 by Brooke Hessler

If I were appointed U.S. Tsar of Higher Education I would require that all courses be team taught. –Stephen Brookfield

Yesterday I crashed Steve Brookfield’s keynote address at the Transformative Learning Conference. I couldn’t attend the whole conference because I had too many teaching commitments on my own campus, but I couldn’t miss Brookfield. I’ve been working with his methods for ages–personally, collaboratively, locally, and even cross-institutional-longitudinally. I’m a critical reflection geek.

I didn’t expect him to dip into the topic of team teaching, and I was so glad he did. During the talk he invited the audience to use TodaysMeet (an anonymous back channel communication site) to record our reactions and questions and someone immediately responded: “team teaching is expensive.” I’m sure it’s what a lot of us were thinking, probably because a lot of us love to do it and have had to get really creative to make it a viable option. He said for him it boiled down to giving students the opportunity to observe critical dialogue in action: two experts with different perspectives exchanging views on a topic. In that regard, team teaching doesn’t have to necessarily be two faculty co-teaching all semester long. It could [more] simply involve a mutual agreement to visit one another’s classes, perform a critical dialogue, and include time for Q&A with students.

Of course, full-blown teaching involves much more than that. But what struck me was how rarely it happens even within a team-taught course. So often when faculty team teach they collaborate behind the scenes intensively but then take turns facilitating class or even just lecturing to class. I had to dig into my own memories of team teaching and think about how often my co-teacher and I truly carved out time to perform critical dialogue as Brookfield described. Not enough. At least not much as a planned event–and this most likely because I tend to not want to “perform” to students, I want dialogue to arise organically with me and with visitors to class. But Brookfield made a good argument, and he used the term “perform” quite deliberately. He said this kind of critical dialogue often becomes rather dramatic, even theatrical, and in a good way. When a student-centered pedagogy guru promotes this sort of front-of-the-classroom performance I think it’s worth seriously considering.

So I tried it a few hours later.

It was fairly spontaneous, actually. A colleague and I serve as our institution’s Learning Commons Faculty Fellows. Our responsibilities include mentoring the peer educators in our Learning Enhancement Center–she covers Math, I cover Writing, but we both integrate broader issues such as intercultural communication, learning styles, and so on. Her discipline is Education; mine is English. Yesterday we coincidentally prepared discussions involving the pros and cons of asking students to think aloud as part of a tutorial. My discussion was focusing on second-language learners of English, hers was focusing on students with learning differences. So I asked if we could take some time to talk through our disciplinary perspectives on think-aloud protocols and practices, to briefly replicate the sort of critical dialogue Brookfield recommended. We didn’t get theatrical but it was exciting for us and seemed to be a nice change in format for the peer educators. And I used some of my colleagues’ insights to modify a think aloud lesson I’d just posted to our course site.

I’d like to try it again but also to find more ways to give the peer educators the opportunity to engage in critical dialogues that draw upon their disciplinary and lived experience. I know sometimes, especially this late in the semester, they can feel relieved to have us perform so that they can just listen and respond. But I think once they got started they would be energized by the alleged drama of exchanging counterpoints on such topics as math and writing pedagogy.

Organizing critical dialogue performances doesn’t make team teaching less expensive, but it does give us an inroad to reflecting on when, exactly, it might be the most beneficial to have two faculty (or two experts from any profession or life experience) teaching in the same room, and in what ways.

This topic is also coming up as I work on an essay about participatory media. My writing partner and I are discussing the core concepts of story-work for a volume on digital storytelling in higher education and I’m increasingly mindful that the kind of learning experience we try to foster as co-facilitators of digital storytelling workshops depends on a teaching model that is “expensive” to replicate in the college classroom.

There are at least three main ways that expert co-facilitators can make a big difference in a digital storytelling workshop: (1) increasing the diversity of connection between facilitators and participants (which enables the facilitators to tailor the experience more sensitively, sometimes in ways that can ensure participants feel more safe and more meaningfully heard, as well as more productive and better guided overall); (2) more skillfully managing the invention process–during story circles and individually (helping participants identify, reflect upon, develop, distill, and complete a narrative that makes best use of the constraints of the genre); (3) supporting the hands-on making and public sharing of the completed project in a way that is successful to the participant. When the workshop is conducted as part of an academic course or assignment sequence, there will most likely be just one facilitator–the instructor of record–perhaps assisted by a student or staff member with some experience of storywork and/or relevant technical expertise. These kinds of help are valuable, but not a real substitute for the level and degree of attentiveness an experienced co-facilitator can provide.

Most of us doing this kind of teaching in college classrooms–or at least those of us who love it and include it repeatedly in our classes–believe it’s worth the effort even if we are unable to co-facilitate with a peer. We deputize current students, enlist help from volunteers, and so on, often with meaningful and even serendipitous benefits. But in FTE parlance (i.e., faculty workload), it is an “expensive” way to teach.

In my own pedagogy, I continue to experiment with ways to front-load or rearrange the process to figure out how I can reconfigure the workshop experience–by, say, making the media-production process more of a team-based learning session and the story-invention process a Bruffee-esque collaboration of knowledgeable peers. But while each experiment teaches me something new about classroom-based facilitation, I’d still always much prefer an expert co-facilitator, not for the big things that you might expect–not for the formal pedagogy or the writing conferences (though those matter a good deal)–but most of all for those subtle, in-between moments where I catch a skilled colleague smiling with a student, sharing a back story that informed the thing on the screen; catching the non-verbal cue of an anxious participant; saying something that needed to be said. When this happens it can make a world of difference in ways we may never fully know but can’t afford to miss.

On Representation

Posted on March 23, 2016 by Brooke Hessler

Penguins on the beach in Cape Peninsula, SA by Tricia Jenkins

Beach penguins at Cape Peninsula, South Africa. Photographed by Tricia Jenkins.

A leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole. Each particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of the world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

The first time I read Emerson I was a teenager in college–more of a beach bum, really, enrolled in classes in San Diego but having trouble concentrating day to day. I liked how Emerson’s words felt as they drifted through my mind, his sentences like fractals, repetitive pulsations of insight. I would sit in the sand and look at seashells and think about how each one was a metaphor for lives lived and gone, leaving fragments of themselves strewn about, beautiful and broken.

The second time I read Emerson I was more ready for it. I was twice as old and studying rhetoric for a living. As I ruminated on his essay Language I realized that even though Emerson talks about nature symbolically, he isn’t using metaphor in the customary way. He isn’t just suggesting that we, for example, view a seashell as a symbol of death, nor even as a representative fact of life (even though he says that). Rather, he is suggesting that every seashell is Life, every seashell is the whole world. It’s not merely a “likeness” of the world (even though he says that too); it is uniquely significant all on its own, as a divine creation, and by studying it deeply enough we come to understand its infinite wisdom. The trick, if I can call it that, is to value the single seashell so much–to stay with it long after I think I’ve grasped its metaphorical meaning–to trust that it has much more to notice and ponder because that seashell itself contains everything.

So the American tourist goes to South Africa and sees penguins on the beach. First, let’s face it, she’s just gobsmacked to see penguins on the beach. In Africa. Second, she observes how the behavior of penguins at the beach is pretty much just like the behavior of humans at the beach: they’re all visitors, waddling around, lolling in the sand, cooly observing one another there–each as if the other species belongs somewhere else. Lots of metaphorical observations ensue, during which the tourists (human or penguin) come to represent keen insights about social dynamics or globalization or commercialization or whatever.

But all of that is too pat, isn’t it? It’s fun, but it’s smug. It’s the kind of insight a lot of us make every day, congratulating ourselves on our witty reading of a representative anecdote. It’s a meme.

If we really want to understand the metaphor, to deeply learn from it, we must start by taking seriously the thing itself rather than leaping to conclusions about whatever it may represent.

This is the lesson I learned in South Africa last week. My new Emerson is Karen Worcman, founder of Brazil’s Museum of the Person. She challenged us all to acknowledge that every person’s story matters not for the ways it represents some larger idea or trend or community but because it’s enough. A life lived matters. It is worth remembering. It is worth knowing. An individual life is enough because it is everything. It is the whole world.

As I return to my classroom tonight, to students whose mission is an oral history project with people representing (yep–I said that on the assignment sheet) different perspectives on the gentrification of the historic neighborhood near campus, I feel humbled, schooled really, and grateful to Karen for reminding me to have faith in the power of individual stories to teach us enough. To teach us everything. Here is the video I will use to begin that conversation in class:

The Heart of a Teacher

Posted on March 6, 2016 by Brooke Hessler

Yoga is the annihilation of the walls we build around our hearts. –Baron Baptiste (in Cox, Warrior Self)

The courage to teach is the courage to keep one’s heart open in those very moments when the heart is asked to hold more than it is able so that teacher and students and subject can be woven into the fabric of community that learning, and living, require. –Parker Palmer, The Courage to Teach

Much of what I am learning this year is about the discipline, the yoga, of teaching with an open heart. When I call it a yoga I mean that it is an intensely deliberate practice, one that involves paying attention to the ways resistance and receptivity arise in any learning environment and in ourselves. This approach to open-heartedness is different than simply being enthusiastic with students–which is how I would describe what I’ve always been before. I’ve always loved them, but it was automatic and easy for me, kind of the way it’s easy for a hyper-flexible person to do a split or a forward fold. My open-heartedness was just me being myself. Even those students who may not love me or my class I will pretty much love anyway because I remember what it’s like to feel disconnected from a teacher; I empathize. Love doesn’t have to be reciprocal. Likewise, I always love teaching, even on bad days, because it is such creative and compelling work. I will forever be learning how to teach. I love that, even when I don’t love how I’m teaching in a particular moment. But again, all of this is me defaulting to my habitual self as an open-hearted teacher teaching.

Many teachers are like this. Parker Palmer knows it. I think one of the things Palmer is challenging us to address is that open-heartedness brings with it a vulnerability and, I would add, a loss of mindfulness, that can be damaging to ourselves and others even if it sometimes enables us to do our best work.

Open-hearted teaching isn’t just about approaching our students with loving-kindness, nor about owning up to the fact that we care about whether they care about our teaching. To teach with an open heart you first must know where your heart is, and what it is. The walls Baron Baptiste inspires yogis to annihilate aren’t necessarily barriers we’ve erected to protect our hearts from others; they may also be barnacles–crusty creatures that have latched on to us over the years, giving our lives an interesting form but concealing who we are underneath. Palmer describes this truer heart as our identity and integrity, a melding of intellect and emotion and self-awareness and being.

Teaching yoga has been surprisingly difficult for me because my apprenticeship requires me to practice by leading a room full of students through a series of poses. This is what a yoga class looks like, after all. And yes when teaching I am encouraged to walk around from person to person, not to stand and lecture, but the experience still feels profoundly artificial to me because what I want to do is work with just one person at a time–to look closely at her alignment and engage in a dialogue about how she got there before articulating a sequence of actions.

What I am describing is a tutorial–says my writing teacher self. So what I am learning, or remembering, about myself is that even though I have grown comfortable teaching groups of people about subjects I know better than yoga (such as writing) my teaching identity is really more of a tutor, someone whose heart opens most fully during one-to-one moments of teaching and learning. Those are the moments when I feel most effective. As a yoga teacher, part of my challenge is that I haven’t yet learned to scale-up my teaching, to quickly assess the needs of a dozen bodies aligned in rows, and until I can do that it’s tough to manage the choreography of deftly pausing to assist an individual.

Learning to teach something new has stripped away most of the scaffolding I’ve built over 20 years as a professor of writing and left me with just myself. In the studio, all I have is 200 hours of yoga-teacher training, a serious interest in therapeutics, and the heart of a tutor.

Recognizing that dimension of my teaching heart doesn’t excuse me from showing up and teaching a whole class, but it does give me a clue about what it looks like to ask my heart “to hold more than it is able.” To strengthen my heart’s capacity to be true to itself in the studio I must practice two things at once: holding fast to my integrity as someone who values personalized instruction, while releasing the expectation that I would, in a single transaction, make a bigger difference in each student’s life as a tutor than as a teacher. If the heart of my teaching is being present, in any context, I need to remember this is something that comes from within. The number of students in the room neither magnifies nor diminishes how much presence I can bring. Remembering that is yoga too.

The Courage to Teach . . . Yoga

Posted on March 4, 2016 by Brooke Hessler

Last week I had a horrible teaching experience, then a wonderful one. A colleague is making a documentary film about liberal arts professors, and the film crew came to record my brilliant transformative teaching–I dressed in blue, had a smart interactive class planned as a lively debriefing about the arts-integrated field excursion my students had just completed. And as the cameras rolled various factors conspired to make the whole class period an awkward mess–and not in a good way 😉 I felt awful and embarrassed, and beat myself up afterwards but still had to walk over to the library to meet the film crew again for some additional footage, doing yoga with a former student to re-enact a funny memory from a year ago when we did spontaneous headstands in the classroom, and she reminded me why this work makes my heart sing, and that made everything nearly OK.

When I got home I opened Parker Palmer’s The Courage to Teach, and read this:

This book is for teachers who have good days and bad, and whose bad days bring the suffering that comes only from something one loves. It is for teachers who refuse to harden their hearts because they love learners, learning, and the teaching life. (1)

Here’s the thing: teaching is a humbling experience no matter how good you try to be, no matter how great your students may be, no matter what Period. And I tack on greater degrees of difficulty because I’m constantly integrating new community partnerships, new projects, new methods. When Palmer wrote that introduction he was entering his third decade of teaching. He’d been teaching 20 years. I began teaching college as a graduate student in 1996. I’m at the same moment in my career as Palmer was, seeking, as he did, to clarify my identity and integrity as a teacher, and to help my colleagues do the same.

About 2 years ago I began a process of attempting to start over, with beginner’s mind, the path of learning my teaching self. I enrolled in yoga teacher training. My purpose for doing so was in some ways straightforward, in others not. My practical motivation was that I was already informally teaching yoga in some of my writing workshops–we would do moving meditations and “yoga for writers” activities, but I wasn’t formally trained and knew I ought to be. Around this time a couple of friends were diagnosed with serious illnesses and I wanted to understand how therapeutic yoga could help them prepare for and recover from surgeries and after-effects. I was also still very much interested in how digital ways of knowing intersected with embodied ones and an immersion in asana and anatomy seemed like an interesting new way to get at that. Ultimately, though, my motivation was more selfish and less intellectual. Deep down, I just wanted to get out of my head.

During weekend intensives each month I spent 20 hours in a yoga studio learning to be a teacher. But I was really learning to be a student again.

Palmer says,

When you love your work that much–and many teachers do–the only way to get out of trouble is to go deeper in. We must enter, not evade, the tangles of teaching so we can understand them better and negotiate them with more grace, not only to guard our own spirits but also to serve our students well. (2)

One of the tangles of teaching is that it even though our best practices remind us to focus on the learning, on the students, teaching is still largely about us. We enter the room hoping to share knowledge that we believe matters so much that we’ve invested most of our lives into learning and sharing it, and we have selected subjects and activities that we believe are most crucial for students to engage–quite possibly because they have sparked our our own hearts and minds so brightly. We want to give students the experience of our subject they can best or only get, uniquely, through us. (Otherwise, why not just log on to a MOOC?) If you think a lot about all this (and many of us do) you can find yourself trying so hard to be a great teacher that you lose your grip on the fundamentals of being a good one. Fortunately, there is almost always another chance to do better–another class period, another semester. But this means there is also always another chance, a likelihood even, that you will flop again. Palmer’s book became a classic, I think, because his awareness of the vulnerable, personally invested “self who is teaching” is so honest and true. He challenges us to be, as Florida Scott-Maxwell put it, “fierce with reality”–to own who we are and where we’ve been and why we are still here doing this work (29).

I sit on the mat, nearing the end of my formal training [for now], grateful for that chance to begin again, from scratch, learning to be a teacher. Being a novice is frustrating. I haven’t yet memorized all the Sanskrit terminology or anatomy lessons; I stumble over ways to tell people where to put their feet; I take too long observing the students’ physical alignments before transitioning them into the next pose. But here’s what I know: this is nothing compared to what all there is to know, and yet it is really important stuff. It is fundamental. And when I return to my academic classroom, the teaching of yoga is reminding me to notice again, as if for the first time, where my students “feet” need to be in order to feel grounded enough to move from one task to the next. It is reminding me to notice where mine are as well.

Material Metaphors

Hands-on Rhetoric, Teaching & Craft in a Digitized World

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