A History Lived and Lessons Learned: Collaboration, Change, and Teaching Transformation

Abstract

It was 1985, and I was feeling frustrated. After all, my thinking went, wasn’t I paid to be an expert in my field? To give my students an accurate and current account of the state of thinking in my Ph.D. specialty areas? wasn’t that the reason that my department had hired me for the faculty in the first place, a decade earlier? Of course, what the students wanted to know mattered to me, and they had openings in my classes to say something, and were always asked at the end of each presentation, “Does anyone have any questions?” It was awkward, but there were seldom many forthcoming. Many informal faculty discussions, in the hallways and in the lunchroom, focused on the perennial problem of how to stimulate more “discussion” in the classroom, especially among the seemingly passive, working-class students we had, who supposedly had little experience with active learning in their earlier mediocre or worse high schools. During my classes, in fact, it was obvious that the students looked bored.

Talking to colleagues about what we do unravels the shroud of silence in which our practice is wrapped… Checking our reading of problems, responses, assumptions, and justifications against the readings offered by colleagues is crucial if we are to claw a path to critical clarity. Doing this also provides us with a great deal of emotional sustenance. We start to see that what we thought were unique problems and idiosyncratic failures are shared by many others…Just knowing that we’re not alone in our struggles is profoundly reassuring. Though critical reflection often begins alone, it is ultimately a collective endeavor.

(Brookfield 1995, 35–36)

Esther Kingston-Mann has been my continual collaborator, interlocutor, and comrade throughout my involvement in the two decades of change described here. As the visionary and principal leader of these developments, Esther has influenced my thinking on my own experience so much that it is difficult any more to separate my own understandings from hers. In addition, she and I have been discussing this history for many years and worked for years on writing together an earlier version of it, upon which this chapter draws heavily. Conversations with Vivian Zamel, Lin Zhan, Emmett Schaeffer, Estelle Disch, and Denise Patmon, including comments from some of them on earlier drafts, have also been important in shaping my understandings of this history. I thank all these colleagues and hope that my reading of our collective history overlaps substantially with their own.