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Understanding the larger context: The contexts in which undergraduate learning takes place frequently prove alienating to students in the pursuit of higher learning. Memorization of facts often dominates over the exploration of ideas. The excitement of learning seems to be drained away by the structured, hierarchical forms of instruction under which undergraduate education occurs. It leads to what Kuh terms a “disengagement compact” between teachers and students. I’ll leave you alone if you leave me alone. That is, I [the professor] won’t make you [the student] work too hard (read a lot, write a lot) so that I won’t have to grade as many papers or explain why you are not performing well. The existence of this bargain is suggested by the fact that at a relatively low level of effort, many students get decent grades – B’s and sometimes better. There seems to be a breakdown of shared responsibility for learning – on the part of faculty members who allow students to get by with far less than maximum effort.11 With the increasing cost of education, students are forced to spend more time working outside the classroom to cover their expenses. Many can only afford to be part-time students. Embracing the learning outcomes embedded in a school’s mission statement becomes secondary to just getting by. Also, there is relatively little educational outreach to the broader community through which students become engaged with community affairs or see how their education is entwined with the broader society. There is limited focus on the bigger picture beyond the school’s campus. As a result, when students plan protests, they tend to stay within their comfort zones – conducting protests on their school campuses rather than in the larger community where they would likely involve more people and have a broader impact. They tend to view their school as having more power to shape public events than it does. School administrators may know prominent public figures. School endowments may include large, multi-national corporations. But they usually have limited power over these groups’ behavior. School administrators are often marginal players in shaping public policy. They may have some influence, but it is only influence, not power. Still for many students, the school’s campus seems the best place to carry out a protest. They view changing the power structures of their school as a way of changing policy in the wider society. This misperception is encouraged by the school’s approach to education. Because schools tend to isolate students from the broader society during their undergraduate education, students often lack a sense of how to affect social change in the larger society. The narrow focus of what students learn at the undergraduate level – focused on facts and details rather than the broader social dynamics at work in their society – limits their social visions of how to protest effectively. They stay within their comfort zone of the college campus, not reaching out to the larger communities, to the larger sources of power which direct change. Students do, however, find a sense of power in what anthropologists term anti-structure. Anti-Structure: Victor Turner, a famous anthropologist, suggested that the structured, hierarchical order of everyday life (embodied in the presentational style of knowledge in undergraduate classes) is counterbalanced by a more communally oriented sharing (or anti-structure) that temporarily unites people without the differentiations or hierarchy of the normal social order. Turner describes this anti-structure as “a way of relating distinct from the demarcations and separations of normal social structures.” It is, Turner writes, “a community . . . of comrades and not a structure of hierarchically arrayed positions. This comradeship transcends distinctions of rank, age, [and] kinship position.”12 Turner perceives: two alternative “models” for human interrelatedness, juxtaposed to one another. The first involves society as a structured, differentiated, and often hierarchical system of politico-legal-economic positions [noted in the fictional school discussed here] . . . The second . . . is of society as an unstructured or rudimentarily structured and relatively undifferentiated communitas, community, or even communion of equal individuals . . . [common in protests].13 Turner suggests that society “seems to be a . . . dialectical process with successive phases of structure and communitas. There would seem to be – if one can use such a controversial term – a human ‘need’ to participate in both modalities.”14 The school’s president suggested that the recent protests could be seen as a way of countering the hierarchical and relatively impersonal structures of the classroom and teacher-student relations at their school. The president implied that beyond the specifics of the protest, there was a broader, more universal, dynamic at stake. She implied the protest was more than a rational, reasoned, political demonstration. It was an emotional, experiential, community-forming process. Trying to resolve the protest solely in terms of rational, political arguments was to miss an important part of it. The Anthropological Connection: What makes anthropology distinctive among the social sciences is the way it engages in personal terms with those studied. Anthropologists get to know those they study as people – their experiences, their vulnerabilities, their hopes. They pay particular attention to the stories these people tell about themselves. This anthropological focus – of trying to understand people in their own terms, from their own perspectives – is critical for drawing opposing sides in a protest to engage with one another in a positive manner. In Live Science Stephanie Pappas writes: People respect those they disagree with more when their position comes from a place of personal experience, not facts and figures . . . This is especially true when the personal stories are rooted in experiences of harm or vulnerability. “In moral disagreements, experiences seem truer than facts,” said Kurt Gray, a psychologist and director of the Center for the Science of Moral Understanding at the University of North Carolina. . . Gray and his colleagues focused on how facts versus experiences affected people’s perceptions of their opponent’s rationality and their respect for that opponent. [In] over 15 separate experiments[. They] found that although people think they respect opponents who present facts, they actually have more respect for opponents who share personal stories. Pappas suggested people respected opponents more when they’d been through a difficult experience that they then shared with others. “Ultimately, people can always come up with a way to doubt or discount facts,” Gray said, “but personal experiences are harder to argue away.”15 The National Governors Association’s campaign, centered on “Disagreeing Better,” similarly focuses on trying to understand an opponent’s position in personal terms, rather than as moral abstraction. The campaign emphasizes four principles: “(1) Get Curious, Not Furious, (2) Listen for Learning, (3) Respond with Respect, then Reflect, and (4) Agree to Disagree.”16 Your Assignment, Your Challenge Your challenge in this assignment is to CREATE A FICTIONAL STORY – with its own characters and events – regarding a protest that emphasizes a more educationally positive experience with a more positive result than the one discussed above. Taking advantage of a protest’s anti-structural qualities can you build a learning community that moves beyond simply protesting to focus on helping the people for whom the students are protesting?17Can it be a learning experience for students in line with their own educational goals? You should ask yourself: What is the goal of the fictional protest you are narrating? How would you structure it to achieve this goal? Specifically, your assignment is to create a fictional protest that: Embraces as many of the above school’s learning outcomes as possible – namely (a) critical thinking, (b) problem solving, (c) effective communication, (d) a sense of morality, and (e) an awareness of the broader world. While the students in the above protest developed some of these as part of the protest, you should be more purposeful in your development of your fictional protest. See if you can expand and improve on the learning outcomes they achieve? Builds bridges between campus students and broader communities through the use of the “anthropological connection” and “disagree better” tools emphasized above in order to build larger, more effective alliances. Understand that the critical powers in play shaping the success (or failure) of a protest usually lie beyond your school campus. Finds ways to reduce, whenever possible, the violence that marred the fictional school’s protest. Your fictional protest should focus on not harming others! Getting consumed in conflict alienates those you need to build broad alliances beyond the school. It alters the appealing quality of the protest – trying to alleviate the suffering of others. The focus should be on building positive coalitions with others not on opposition scenarios that mostly alienate those whose you need to help facilitate change..
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