Teaching for Hope?

Vincent Lyon-Callo

This is a fascinating moment to teach anthropology in the United States, especially for those of us who remain concerned with such things as producing more equality, communalism, democracy, and freedom. Even as some socioeconomic trends make anthropological insights potentially more relevant than ever, anthropology itself remains little understood and has been under increasing attacks. From statehouses to popular publications, anthropology is being represented as, at best, irrelevant and, at worst, the poorest choice a student can make for their future well-being. (As I was editing this paper, I received a Yahoo! news story titled “Don’t Bother Earning These Five Degrees.” It cautioned students against the low average incomes of anthropology majors.) Concurrently, students today tend to be quite different subjects than even fifteen years ago when I first started teaching. In an increasingly corporatized university where the driving purpose of education is largely understood as credentializing for future employment, and in a nation where K-12 public education has been under intense attack such that students are largely taught how to spit back information for standardized tests, is it any wonder when many students, parents, and administrators fail to see a value in anthropological education? Given the confluence of such conditions, I believe the time is ripe for us to move beyond bemoaning these conditions and ask “what is to be done?” Can we begin to consider new pedagogical practices that make anthropology not only relevant, but essential, for our students and our world?

I imagine I am not alone in how I have structured my teaching of general education classes. Like many of us, I focused much of my teaching on skills to critically problematize common sense about things like race, class, gender, sexuality, family structures, migration and trade policies. One particularly popular tool was to introduce critical thinking through discussing a YouTube clip of George Carlin talking about education in the US. Carlin’s line about why it’s called the American Dream (“because you have to be asleep to believe it”) served as an entry point for a semester of critical interrogation of so many taken-as-normal assumptions. Then, I would take the critical analysis a step further by drawing upon anthropological work such as my exploration of homeless shelters or Dan Jaffe and Paige West’s excellent books on fair trade coffee to analyze how even these most well-intended efforts remain quite problematic. In this way, I have become quite adept at teaching classes that result in students who are critical of everything. Increasingly, though, I have begun to question if these pedagogical “successes” are reinforcing problematic tendencies.

One concern I have is that teaching critical thinking may be predicated on particularly arrogant liberal assumptions. Foremost among these is the notion that the goal of education is to enlighten students to the secret knowledge that we experts have access to because we are smart enough to not be taken in by all of the conditions designed to hide that knowledge and understanding. We believe that our teaching, by drawing on cross-cultural, historical, and critical analysis, will lay bare students’ false common sense so they can wake up to new possibilities. The whole premise that somehow we are enlightening students through critical analysis seems to no longer be quite the case. Many young people are very different social subjects than those entering college just a few decades ago. At least in Michigan, it’s easy for most students to see how race is made up and most know that the American Dream is a myth. Class exploitation is something most of them are all too familiar with.

But even if we aren’t troubled by the ethics or the accuracy of these elitist presumptions, our pedagogy faces a second challenge: so what? What are students supposed to do with their new understandings? Students who actually engage with my classes leave questioning everything, but they have little sense of what to do with their new critical thinking skills beyond being depressed. And when they read things like Paige West or Dan Jaffee’s work which make it hard for them to even feel good about fair-trade, the pessimism resonates there as well. To some degree, I have come to appreciate the perspective of those students who wonder why they are being forced to take the classes.

My worst fear is that anthropology itself has become the latest incarnation of a dismal discipline; producing experts in pessimism. I fear that my best teaching (and much anthropological teaching) produces people whose main skills are limited to criticizing and finding what is wrong with everything, and that I thereby reaffirm pessimistic views about the world. James Ferguson, in his paper “The Uses of Neoliberalism,” describes this as “the antis.” Unless there is some sort of utopia, it’s easy to critically analyze why x practice or y policy is problematic and should be resisted. That is all fun for a while, but eventually it gets tiresome.

Where I was growing up, many young people had a sense that their economic future was fairly economically secure. If you were middle class, you understood it as a truism that you could continue along the privileged path of stable employment without much effort. That is no longer the case. When I ask my students what they foresee in their future, I almost never hear any optimism.

For several years now I have done an assignment in my introductory level classes that builds off of Thomas Franks’ work in What’s the Matter with Kansas where students are asked to initiate and analyze a series of discussions with friends and family regarding what is wrong with Michigan’s economy, what should be done about it, and how those people are responding themselves. Close to three hundreds students have now interviewed over a thousand residents of the state and what has become apparent is an overwhelming sense of pessimism and hopelessness about the future. Most students and their families seem to “know” it to be foolish to have faith in government, unions, employers, or education to make any substantial changes to the conditions ending middle class life in the US. The fantasy of the American Dream has been replaced with a fantasy of the loss of the middle class as inevitable.

Focusing on structural violence and teaching students to look critically may only be reinforcing such pessimism and helping to strengthen the durability of capitalism. One alternative model of engaged teaching might be to follow the lead of geographers such as JK Gibson Graham and Stephen Healy, who suggest that we disrupt narratives of capitalist exploitation and declining democracy as all-encompassing and that we work instead toward producing a politics of possibilities. How do they suggest we do that? They advocate moving beyond denunciation to actually create the world we want. But, they do more. They urge us to locate and theorize the production of actually existing diverse economies and desires, especially non-capitalism, as well as spaces for potential transformation. Common sense understandings might then become sites of possibility for students. How do we do that?

Several years ago, I added a section to my introductory classes. We view the film “The Take” and discuss factory recovery movements and landless workers’ movements. Students in Michigan know the sight of shuttered factories all too well, and they often use these stories of worker activism as springboards for fascinating discussions about the possibility of similar efforts in the US. More recently, I have added sections on the Mondragon Cooperative. While this also proves interesting to many students, they cannot imagine tangible ways of implementing large scale cooperativism in their own lives.

But, then we turn to the United Steel Workers and the plan for redeveloping manufacturing within the US on the model of one worker, one vote. Manufacturing work, Big Unions, the Midwest—those are all very familiar and seem much more tangible and practical. We discuss the Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland, which took inspiration from Mondragon and the Cleveland Foundation, and students begin to ask “what if…?” A space of hope is crafted which can be expanded by mapping diverse economies locally. When they look, local examples abound: a restaurant in Grand Rapids whose owner converted it into a worker-run cooperative, cooperatively run farms, bookstores, credit unions, and more. The old common sense of exploitation and muddling through economically and emotionally insecure futures no longer seems so inevitable.

What I am suggesting here is that if we want our teaching to do more than produce compliant or defeated subjects, we need to make anthropology into a discipline that helps students see and know spaces of hope. Perhaps, we could even follow David Graeber’s suggestions and produce democratic, non-authoritarian, even anarchist, classroom spaces. In these spaces, an engagement aimed at producing the discursive conditions for new subjects and economies may emerge. In the process, perhaps, anthropology can become more valued and more vital.

Vincent Lyon-Callo is a professor of anthropology at Western Michigan University, part of the editorial collective for Rethinking Marxism, elected member of his local school board, and youth soccer coach. His ethnographic research explores homelessness, community responses to neoliberalisms, poverty and the possibilities of an activist ethnography.

via Anthropology-News http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/01/10/teaching-for-hope/