Reflections on Class in Academe
An important discussion that took
place on Twitter last week after the budget was released in England had me
thinking about this topic more than I usually do. As someone who is always
thinking about accessibility, from a physical and social point of view, I
really wonder how accessible academe is to those who happened to grow up as
lower class or lower middle class (though such precise distinctions are
difficult to delineate any more in a world of austerity).
I work hard as an educator to make
sure that my class and the material we discuss is accessible to my students for
I am acutely aware of the financial strain they are under. About 80% of my
students are immigrants, a large majority of them are single mothers, many work
not one but two or more jobs to make ends meet and pay for school. By and large
they do not have access to fancy new phones or tablets. Everything I want to
use or ask them to think about needs to be accessible to them technologically
and in terms of time commitment as well. I do this because educational spaces
need to be ethical spaces and you canāt disregard a majority of students as
participants because they do not have ready access to technology. For an
educational space to be a rewarding space, it needs to be open and
collaborative for all.
Learning outcomes do not suffer
by being mindful of the constraints that your students may be under- in fact
you are more likely to achieve the levels of insight, analysis, creativity, and
literacy if you keep the need for open access at the forefront of design and
pedagogical implementation. However, upon reflection, I wonder if my passion
for making sure educational spaces are open and ethical comes from the fact
that I did not grow up financially privileged and I held many different positions
(some at some rather head-scratching places) to attain my masterās and my
doctorate.
I know that I am privileged in
certain ways and that cannot be eliminated from the equation, but I do wonder,
statistically, how much of the professoriate at any one university or college
is made up of academics who happened to come from a financially privileged background.
Further, do those demographics change when you compare college and university,
especially in Canada? I know that having conversations with colleagues at the
college where I teach, a large majority grew up in similar situations as I did.
When I was in grad school this conversation was different, many who were there,
in fact many who secured outside funding (the kind that makes you look really
great in front of a tenure track position hiring committee) were those students
who had a parent who was already a professor, a doctor, a lawyer. There exceptions of course, but has anyone run
a study on this at all?
I would
like to think that higher education is not only the realm of those who are
financially able to access it without the help of loans or government assistance.
I mean our whole profession is based pedagogically (ideally) on the
fact that this isnāt true- words from Ruskin on the Working Menās College come
to mind. Yet I canāt help but wonder that how all these austerity measures will
mean that academe truly will become the ivy gates of privilege. That only those
who have ready access and ability to pay for higher education will be the ones
who will circulate within the halls with the minds of the future. That concepts of access will slowly disappear
in an intellectual landscape that assumes that everyone is on the same page
because that is how it was for them. We certainly seem to live in a time where
empathy is dead- this translates to how education is thought of and accessed.
Is there a solution, I mean a
solution that does not involve cutting off our nose to spite our face like in
England and Wisconsin? I certainly hope so. The thing about the learning, about
the idea or concept of education is that it is not something that can be
confined to one space as much as people conceptualize it. Education doesnāt need
a classroom just as faith doesnāt need a church. The desire for education, the desire to learn
and expand our ideas lives in each of us and this canāt be contained to a high
school, a college, a university. If we cut access to higher education I would
like to think it will just grow elsewhere (funny how rhizomes seem to haunt) -
we just need to be comfortable enough with that paradigm shift to let it
happen. If you are worried look up the
Arts and Crafts movement of the 19th century, it will give you hope.
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