Windows of Inquiry:
Students’ Lived Experiences Serve as Brave Openings for Becoming Agents of Transformation
Anais Nin, “Life shrinks and expands according to one’s courage.”
Like hundreds of college composition teachers, my first assignment for students has been what’s commonly known as a “diagnostic.” Essentially, I ask them for a writing sample, so I can see what’s wrong with their writing; what’s their diagnosis. I can anticipate the surface errors. They’ve been studied and inventoried for almost 100 years. Comma use remains pesky as do sentence fragments and run-on sentences. Confusion about prepositions and article use is typical, and especially trip up our English Language Learners.
Recently, I have come to view the diagnostic as a deficit model that, in effect, marginalizes voices that demonstrate lesser writing ability. In the early days of the semester, it’s more important that students and I get to know one another, not to focus on their surface errors — there’s ample time for that. Instead, I have widened the window through which to view the purpose of that first essay. I want to know who my students are, what’s important to them, what they value, how they think, and what lived experiences they bring to the classroom. The first step is through an essay assignment designed to allow students to expand on changes in their perspective, to imagine their future, or to explore concepts like fear, hope, or courage. In other words, what vistas of possibility and understanding about themselves and the world will they add to our learning experience.
I am reimagining my approach to that first essay and how I can use it to build upon the competencies of the class and, more significantly, grow a trusting and respectful community in which students will feel empowered to have courageous conversations about tough topics like poverty, racism, climate, law enforcement, education. I want to set the stage for a culturally appreciative learning environment that sustains difference rather than patronizes it. Brene Brown urges us to, “Be here, Be You, Belong.” Yes, that’s a warm little quote for a magnet, but seen on a deeper level, that is exactly what I want to cultivate. It is vital that we nourish our students in safe spaces (Be here) where they matter (Be you), where their voices and experiences Belong and are necessary to help my students respond to, “What Can We Become?”
Inviting students to tell their story helps them affirm their identities and, I hope, lets them know that who they are matters in this class, for they are vital contributors to why and how we will delve into challenging questions. The act of writing is invaluable in that process. “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” E.M. Forster posits. Every time my students respond to questions, to information, to learning the student next to them lives in their car, or survived eight foster homes, or grew up on a multi-generation farm, they cannot but help to open another window to see the connections among their fellow students. To push them further, to consider unfamiliar knowledge that runs counter to their thinking, to entertain the complexity of issues that some have reduced to a bumper sticker in order to demand a quick answer to a troubling reality. Writing extends their thinking to learning.
Belonging is a cornerstone of community, a community of thinkers where inquiry and respect serve as pillars of intellectual discourse. Students who have a trusted sense of belonging, of trusting that teachers care about them, realize more academic success than those who feel (and are) excluded, less than, othered. My students can lean on each other to build knowledge and greater understanding that will fuel confidence to take risks and grow intellectually and feel belonging in navigating the complex crises they and their country face today.
What can our students become as a result of this moment — this fracture that has illuminated for so many what most educators have known for some time.: opportunity and tech assess gaps; racial economic disparities; inequitable health care; housing and food insecurities. The classroom is, in fact, where we can and must foster spaces for critical and transformative thinking, to inquire more deeply about the injustices that define our landscape. My questions for my students: “What are the injustices? How did they come about? Why? What or who sustains them? Why? Who benefits? Why does this matter? What happens if nothing changes?” As I help my students develop their skills at critical inquiry, they can become more confident in questioning boundaries and suffocating prejudice.
Let me be clear, though. We cannot lay the mantle of burden on them. It is ours. Even as young learners, students have been minimalized since preschool because of the color of their skin. For example, while most preschool teachers do not intentionally apply stricter behavior norms to children of color, the Racial Equity Institute finds that “ black preschoolers [are] 3.6 times more likely to be suspended than white children, [so] it seems implicit bias is shaping teachers’ attitudes towards young children.” It is troubling that the same study reveals that teachers assume lower expectations of children of color, especially boys. Time and again, research finds that students live up to our expectations. Indeed, my colleagues and I have heard the haunting words that students of color have carried for years, “My teachers told me I wasn’t smart enough for college. My teachers told me I could never be a good writer.” Such damning words scar hope for bettering one’s life.
What happens if nothing changes for our students? If their families remain hostage to systems of poverty, remain limited by systemic discrimination in education and the workplace? What happens If the dominant culture continues to criminalize the color of their skin, style of their hair, or the sound of their spoken language?
As an educator during this time in our country’s history, I can invite my students to explore the urgency, and risk, of taking on social justice, or I can fall into the exhaustion of COVID-19, anti-racist rhetoric, and political firestorms. If I shrink from challenging and growing my teaching practice and the potential of my students, I fail to prepare them to listen, to question, to imagine, to raise their voices, and to disrupt the status quo, I fail to empower them with courage. In that failure, I foster fertile space for violence, racism, hunger, and despair. I maintain the boundaries that exclude and dehumanize difference.
I will not waste the privilege of being an educator, for I am invested in helping my students cultivate deep understandings of cultural, socio-economic, educational, and political structures that, for many, offer opportunity but for many others impede opportunity for equitable agency in our democracy. I consider it a moral and ethical commitment to help empower my students through intellectual challenge, valuing difference, encouraging effort, and normalizing failure, empowering them to reimagine how their own? and others’ lived experiences serve to increase the breadth and depth of what we can become, what they can become.
When I meet my students for the first time, I strive for them to experience a welcoming and authentic commitment to building, with them, a challenging and purposeful learning environment, not through a narrow window of commas and apostrophes. Rather, together, through inquiry, courageous conversations, and writing, they can collectively explore windows that seek truth — a renewed willingness to practice curiosity, respect diverse views, wrestle with intellectual challenge, and give their voices to the clarion call to mend the fractures and reimagine a more just society and world. Let us not fail them.
