On Waste

I have been thinking a lot about waste lately. I have moved to a place with a much more strict waste management program than where I used to live and it has forced me to be much more mindful about what I buy, what can be recycled, what is sadly straight to the landfill garbage. I have been surprising myself but also surprised in general at how much that mindfulness can impact what is waste or what is seen as waste.

So this week I want to reflect and chat a bit about waste and what is seen as wasteful in higher education. The etymology of waste (opens in new window) is interesting and complicated. There is waste as verb, waste as noun, and waste as adjective, and they all seem to come from slightly a bit different places. There is the idea of waste as verb as to spoil or ruin, but what I am more interested in is waste as noun that finds its way to English from the Latin vastum or empty or desolate. In fact our use of waste as synonymous to garbage is from the 1400s. 

When we think about waste in educational spaces it is often in relation to time (as is most things in higher ed to be honest). The refrain about "wasting time" or what is considered time wasting in eduspaces is of course a normative concept. What can seem like wasting time or empty time to one person is actually valuable reflective or connection time to someone else. Waste is often viewed in relation to productivity. If you are producing something an article, an essay, a presentation, then you clearly did not waste time. And yet, there is very little in this about the process needed to get to that tangible representation or production. 

For example, I knew I wanted write about waste since last Friday when I put out my garbage (which is only collected every two weeks here) and I had 1/4 of a black garbage bag to put out. I wrote down "blog about waste" in my phone app and I ruminated on what to say in this post for the last week. On bus rides, while watching football games, on walks, sometimes waste would pop up in my head and I would think about it and what I wanted to say. On the outside this looks like the opposite of "wasting time" I took "down time" to think about something that I would produce - this blog post. 

And yet, I feel like some would also see that time as a waste. Why did I waste my bus ride thinking about waste when I could have just looked outside at the changing leaves? And the answer of course is that one cannot control when thoughts or ideas happen, they just happen. But a lot of our structure and scaffolded frameworks for assessments presuppose that thinking will only happen between 9-10 am in class. So what happens if I think about that project outside of class? Is that wasted thought? Is that wasted time?

It clearly isn't empty thoughts, it clearly isn't ruining anything by thinking about things on my own time instead of the time noted on the class schedule or on my timesheet. So this brings me back to work-life balance which I am pleasantly finding myself having much more of here. In my old life, I actually had no time for wasted time. Every minute of my life was accounted for because everything took longer. So I had to think about blog posts on the bus, I had to respond to emails on my phone. 

And this is similar to many many situations students find themselves in right now. They are working 2 jobs to pay for school, they are taking 6 courses so they can finish their degree on time, they have no time for waste. And that also means that they may see some of the very well crafted assignments that are scaffolded meaningfully to support learning, as wasting their time. And that means work is done, if at all, last minute, no proofreading because that is also time they don't have to waste. 

I mention this because I want to really acknowledge the work folk put into scaffolding things for their students and how awesome that is and how it sometimes just doesn't work even if it is awesome. And that is because I want to also acknowledge that assignments can be scaffolded meaningfully and still just not work for some because social systems are requiring continual production, not stopping to think reflect, and certainly not stopping to think and reflect exactly during class time. We can think about due dates vs do dates (opens in new tab 13 minute video) as Karen Costa notes and support that.  But ultimately even the most amazingly supported scaffolded assignment will not work because some will just see it as waste.

Waste is of course intimately tied to value. What we don't value we see as waste. So we talk about having more authentic assessment because we want learners to see the value of what they are doing for class, to not see it as waste. But that also can be seen as waste even if authentically connected because it lives in its own time, in its own class container, and when that work is done and that course is over that project stays there. Yes the learning objectives and goals can be applied to other assignments and other courses, but the thing they produced, the assignment, the project, the presentation stays there, stays in the LMS and in a society that values productive and tangible markers that is waste. 

I can hear some at this point in reading say okay so the big bad is productivity, is capitalism. And yes of course it is. But our higher education systems are directly capitalist systems so good luck with that. What would be better is to think about what certain things are seen as having value and certain things as being wasteful. How many blog posts and podcasts say to professors, do not go over the syllabus in the first class, that is wasting time! Says who? Whose time is it wasting? Yes there are certainly more effective ways to address the syllabus content, but to not go over it at all, is actually a recipe for wasting time on emails with questions later. And yes you will still get the emails, and yes you will still get the questions, and yes you should still answer them because that is how you build a community of learners. But I also know some who will say those emails are a waste and I will not answer them because "it's on the syllabus" (rolls eyes). What we need honestly is a repositioning of what is of value in our eduspaces and what we are willing to fight for in terms of hopefully other people appreciating it as having value as well and not to be seen as waste. 

I know that some probably didn't even get to the end of this post because it was too long this week and they didn't have time to get there. And I am sure others will think well that's a waste, a waste of words, a waste of your time. But I don't see it that way, simply because I value the time to work through these ideas, whenever it happens for me, and I am still processing how much my life has changed that I can now have time to do that thinking, to reposition what I need, and what is of value in my life. So think about waste this week. How is waste seen in your life? What is wasteful in your classes and curriculum? What waste systems are being placed on you regularly that you would love to get rid of?