Learning through doing

Jazmin:  “what does c*** mean?”

Me: … what?

Jazmin: “c***”

Me: huh? Wait. What? (thinking to myself I must have heard wrong)

Jazmin: “c***!”

It wasn’t a conversation I prepared for. And it certainly was not a conversation I anticipated having, but it came up nonetheless.

***

Tajonna: “I have a job.”

Me: “Oh yeah?”

Tajonna: “I am a speaker.”

Me: “What do you speak about?”

Tajonna: “How I used to be homeless”

***

Throughout our sessions at MHS, I’ve tutored three very different students. There was Andy, who never made eye contact with me. Jazmin, who was a bit quiet but also really pushed me to help her keep focus and prompted me to guide outside her outside of academic conversations. And, finally, Tajonna, who taught me what a 13 year old can really accomplish. Looking back on my first post from MHS, I was a bit worried with how I interacted with Andy because we literally—and I guess figuratively as well—didn’t see eye to eye. However, when I started working with Jazmin, she challenged me in both my tutoring and how I viewed my role within this experience. In the above conversation, Jazmin came to me for more than just tutoring advice, and while I was uncomfortable talking to her about this word, I wanted to because she kept asking me about something she didn’t know. And she found me approachable enough to ask this question. It may not have been a tutoring question, but what I got out of it was a feeling that somehow I connected with Jazmin enough for her to listen to my response and hear me out.

In our final day of tutoring, I worked with Tajonna since Jazmin wasn’t there.  While I helped Tajonna on grammar and revision, she taught me how much confidence and drive a 13 year old has to use.  In our revising, we talked about how her subject (a model) had to go through so much work in order to get to where she was. Tajonna wanted to add that part into her narrative because she said that that’s a goal of her own—to show people how hard work can help you get to a better place and that you have to overcome difficult things for resolutions. I only worked with Tajonna once, but in our hour together, Tajonna and I did accomplish something: we read through her narrative, added transitions, talked about grammar, and made sure that the main point that she wanted to come across did. And she finished her narrative. That, to me, is an accomplishment.

 Each of my students was difficult in various ways, but overall I feel as if I accomplished something personally: I learned to relax a bit more in my tutoring, to not try and overpower the sessions. And I connected with my students and learned from them. I was a little concerned, going into this, how 13 and 14 year olds would react to me, but I enjoyed chatting with them, and I liked how they kept challenging me in my tutoring and in my personal interactions with them. 

Doing what we can do

                I was really interested in class discussion this week because, like you, I’m still trying to figure out how community engagement plays out in a course. On the one hand, I’m thrilled at any opportunity we have to get involved with a community outside of the walls of Holmes hall! On the other hand, I’m cautious of thinking that I will change huge issues tutoring for a couple hours. But here’s where the optimist in me is going to come out. I think that we need to be cognizant of Herzberg and Deans’ critiques and hesitations about involvement in the community, but we also need to start somewhere! Start small and build up, right?

                I understand the critiques that we can’t do much in a couple tutoring sessions. And I get why Deans especially cautions against being involved in the community and then almost immediately leaving it. BUT, we are working with 826 Boston and MHS throughout their project. The goal of our interaction is to help them complete their book. So, if we stay throughout that process, I don’t think that the quantity of time spent with them should be looked at negatively. In theory (if things go as planned), we will have helped them with the goal we all set out with. This seems to me to parallel Chris’s ideas (drawing on de Certeau) of tactical projects. Sometimes you do what you can do, in the time given and with the resources available. Then, you build on it!

                Another thing that I was contemplating throughout our discussion also had to do with the question of how much time is enough to have a meaningful relationship with someone. For instance, in the different writing centers I’ve worked in, I’ve had very productive sessions in just 30 minutes! And other times an hour allows us to accomplish the goal of revising an essay or brainstorming an assignment. I know I’m not changing the world when I tutor, but I do think that that hour or half hour can make a difference—even if it’s just helping someone understand an assignment better. Understandably, there seems to be a disconnect between helping someone with an essay and drawing attention to larger systemic issues that we’ve talked about, but I wouldn’t say that’s always the case. For instance, I have students come in with essays about race, homelessness, sexism, poverty, etc. and we talk through ideas. And we work on writing an essay or doing a project that, in turn, will also talk about these ideas. So, I guess I do think that if I can help guide someone through their ideas, while also learning about them myself, a difference can be made. Maybe it was by me, maybe it was by them; but most importantly, maybe it was through (or encouraged by) our interaction.

Rethinking service

I’m a service-learning junkie.  For the past year and a half I’ve been figuring out what service-learning is and what it means to me. And, with that, I’ve realized that I’m not too keen on the actual term service-learning. I write this as I am now wearing a specially designated service-learning TA shirt (yes, I got free clothing). The shirt says, “I am the hyphen.” So, if we take the shirt for what it’s worth, I (as a Service-learning TA) am the hyphen between service and learning? The one who connects these two words? I like the idea of that, but the word service bothers me.  

One of Deans’ questions states, “When and how do service-learning pedagogies reproduce rather than disrupt dominant ideologies?” I have a difficult time with this question because of what I think about service-learning: I like to think of community work as engagement more than anything, focusing on reciprocity of learning, the moving between genres of writing and sites of action (classroom and community sites), and the intersectionality of factors such as race, gender, class, sexuality, language, etc. To me, these ideas are important because they necessitate a dialectical approach—something that is not just one sided “us serving them” or “us imparting our wisdom.” It’s active and engaged; I don’t see it as service.  I never really thought much about the definition of service-learning until last semester when Chris got me to think about what it would mean to say “community engagement.”  The more I think of it though, it’s an important move. For me, service-learning can very well perpetuate oppressive roles in community interaction, though Deans’ definition cautions us not to fall into these roles. It’s so easy to “reproduce” ideological assumptions, even when we try to “do good.” So, I guess that’s where this question leaves me: my goal isn’t “to serve.”  My goal is to engage with a community and learn about it, with it, and from it. To do this, we have to be able to notice the multiplicity of perspectives that comprise the community, and that create our own ideologies.  And somewhere in all of this, the community MUST come into play: what do they want? What are they learning? What do they need? I’m not saying that this removes ethical questions; once we think all ethical questions are solved, we have a major problem. But I do think that going about service-learning as community engagement highlights different ideals.

Thinking back to last week, I think part of the problem with my session was that I went into it thinking I had to “help” my student. Yes, I would like him to do as well as he can on his writing. But, I think what matters more is that he gets what he needs out of the session. I try not to fall into the “server/served” binary that Deans cautions, but I think it takes a constant reminder that this is a difficult mindset to break. And again I keep coming back to the idea of engaging in conversation may make a difference. I’m not there to serve, but to engage and work alongside.