April 11, 2016 - 20:29
“Meet Them Where They Are”:
Listening to Unlearn, Learning to Listen
In the Fall of 2014, I participated in an intensive workshop, led by two performers whose art form is listening. Over the course of the day, we were trained in their process, and used it to hold listening conversations of our own, many of which brought up incredibly personal and emotional stories. The hallmark of their pedagogy was the “bowl,” imagery they used to describe the space one creates, intentionally, to hold what someone is sharing with them. The more available you are to listen, the bigger the bowl you offer. This availability depends on far more than just time and physical space--it is also dependent on removing preconceptions about the other person, and pushing aside, at least temporarily, distractions that you bring with you. At the beginning of each listening conversation, both partners named to one another how they hoped and needed to be listened to. Next, they listed out the issues that were keeping them from being entirely present in the moment (for example, having just had a fight with a friend, or not having eaten lunch before coming to the conversation). Lastly, both partners took a piece of paper and pen, and listed out a number of assumptions they had made about their partner. These were not limited to negative judgements, and could include pieces of gossip they had heard, or their first impressions from looking at their partner that day. When the lists were finished, they tore them up, and put the papers aside. Having completed this activity with an open mind, intentionality, and a forgiveness for their own, human tendencies toward judgement and assumptions, the partners were expected to enter the space most prepared to really hear the other person as they were, not as they assumed them to be.
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In my Empowering Learners class last week, I was surprised to hear a fellow student raise a conversation around what she perceived to be the particular disability of one of the artists at the center. “Because of that,” she explained “he has a hard time lifting things and speaking in a way that I can understand.” That may have been the first time that I realized: I had never thought or spoken directly about the “diagnoses” of any of the artists at the center, even while (and perhaps because I am) engaging in two Disability Studies courses at the same time. A diagnosis is a story that has been assigned to a person by an “expert”--a medical professional who has likely not spent extensive time with the individual they are diagnosing. As a result, many people feel constrained by their diagnosis, a single term that the rest of the world may use to reduce and dehumanize them. I certainly could never understand the complex humanity within each of the artists through their diagnoses. I wonder if I move away from these labels because I fear my own capacity to reduce through “knowing.” I don’t want the opinion of a doctor to impact in any way the relationship I have with the artists. I prefer to know them only through our interactions, our partnerships.
--Field Notes, Critical Disability Studies, 3/30/2016
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In exploring trauma-informed education, I repeatedly stumbled across the idea of “meeting people where they are.” This mindset insists that an educator should understand the circumstances of each student, and should offer them an education with this in mind. For some students, for whom events in their lives have led them to experience anxiety around groups of people, individual work is more suitable, and will likely be far more effective in the student’s learning process. There are clear benefits to this philosophy, and evident danger if it is not taken up.
While my experiences with the listening conversations held last Fall and with the participants at the center for adults with intellectual disabilities certainly have considerable differences, unpacking them beside a trauma-informed way of teaching and interacting raises important questions. Is it necessary to “unlearn” one’s assumptions before being able to listen? Is it safe, or even considerate? When does learning about someone else outside of the interactions shared with them enrich those relationships--and can it undermine the relationship or oversimplify the other person?
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“Recent neurobiological, epigenetics, and psychological studies have shown that traumatic experiences in childhood can diminish concentration, memory, and the organizational and language abilities children need to succeed in school. For some children, this can lead to problems with academic performance, inappropriate behavior in the classroom, and difficulty forming relationships. Learning about the impacts of trauma can help keep educators from misunderstanding the reasons underlying some children’s difficulties with learning, behavior and relationships” (Trauma Sensitive Schools).
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Considering the role and positionality of an educator, it became clear that “listening” in this context has far different requirements, and drastically different stakes. Patterns of discipline at school and its consequences reveal that those vulnerable populations most likely to be exposed to traumatic events at a young age are also those most vulnerable to marginalization and demonization in an academic setting. As the Association of American Colleges & Universities claims in articulating the barriers to educational access for young men of color today, “Instead of addressing behavioral issues, schools are inclined to place a disproportionate number of male students of color in special education programs,” citing rates approximately double those for female students (Williams and Flores-Ragade, 2010). If these “behavioral issues” could stem from responses to traumatic events experienced outside of school, it is certainly the responsibility of educators to have awareness of these factors, when a recommendation for special education could ultimately increase their chances of ending up incarcerated, as further studies demonstrate.
And trauma is not the only circumstance in which listening and teaching benefits greatly from an increased understanding of a learner’s history and background. In their piece entitled “Funds of Knowledge for Teaching: Using a Qualitative Approach to Connect Homes and Classrooms,” Moll, Amanti, Neff, and Gonzalez explore the numerous benefits of teachers visiting the homes and communities of their students. Only in these social settings, as one teacher expresses, do “we identify funds of knowledge that can be used in the classroom to help improve [the child’s] academic development” (DN, qtd. in Moll et al., 137). Gaining an awareness of a child’s interests, values, past experiences, and more natural ways of being (often largely invisible in a classroom), teachers are then able to directly apply what they have learned to an educational setting, one which can now value students by granting attention to these funds of knowledge.
In order for this to work, teachers entered various households without a specific goal in mind, without particular information to gain. With this broad and open approach, they were surprised to find that family members were very excited to share their experiences and knowledge. In turn, their broad approach broke down stereotypes that teachers may have held (whether consciously or unconsciously) about their students, and were able to see them in the classroom in their totality, meeting them with the knowledge that the students, too, were experts of their own world.
The problem with stereotypes and prejudice is that, all too often, we don’t even know we have them. The exercise of listing out assumptions about another person and tearing it up is powerful, but depends on two prerequisites: first, that you are conscious of all of your assumptions, and second, that you are truly willing and able to rid yourself of them. For most people who have been conditioned since birth to hold preconceptions about other cultures and identities, these are so deeply ingrained that unlearning them is a lengthy and arduous process. Prejudices are built into the very structure of our society, and are thus reinforced in individuals who simply participate in everyday life. Dismantling personal prejudice takes concerted, conscious effort over time.
What we gain from this perspective is the notion that intentionally “unlearning” or refusing to gain information about an individual’s history is not only unproductive and perhaps counterproductive--it is also essentially impossible.
And yet, there is a vast difference between prejudice and actual knowledge of an individual’s background. So we listen. We listen because we must--to unlearn those prejudices, and to replace them with new, pertinent, and essential knowledge about another person. Perhaps where the paper-tearing exercise falls short is not in its assertion that we should forget what we think we know, but in its underlying assumption that we can unlearn without learning new, replacement information--truths--in the process.
bell hooks, the renowned feminist, scholar, and social activist, defines love as M. Scott Peck does--as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth” (Peck, qtd. in hooks, 4). If teachers hope to hold a space for students to grow, intellectually and as people, they must be willing to enter the role of learners themselves. This process of “extending oneself” requires a willingness to abandon previous expectations, in exchange for truer, more personalized, individualized ones. How much more love could teachers demonstrate if they took the time to break down conditioned prejudice through the process of intentionally looking outside of the classroom to learn more about their students?
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Looking beyond a diagnosis, as I do quite naturally each time I visit the center, is far different from looking beyond a person’s history, their experience, and the factors that may directly impact the ways in which they engage with the world around them today.
No, a diagnosis is not enough to tell a story that will benefit a teacher or a student. Nor is it enough to know that a child “is traumatized.” What counts, and what impacts a student’s ability to engage with their own education, is the way in which this trauma manifests, and how the student responds. Similarly, at the center, the name of a disability itself is far less significant than its implications on an individual’s behavior and their unique needs. And this information cannot be gained solely from interactions as they come--to assume so would be irresponsible.
Ultimately, it is with an enriched understanding of another human being that we can move beyond any “damage-based” view we hold of them to a “desire-based one,” as Eve Tuck asserts in her piece entitled “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities.”
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“Desire, yes, accounts for the loss and despair, but also the hope, the visions, the wisdom of lived lives and communities [. . .] Desire is about longing, about a present that is enriched by both the past and the future. It is integral to our humanness” (Tuck 417).
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“Desire is not a light switch, not a nescient turn to focus on the positive. It is a recognition of suffering, the costs of settler colonialism and capitalism, and how we still thrive in the face of loss anyway; the parts of us that won’t be destroyed” (Tuck and Ree 647-48).
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To listen well, to listen fully, it seems, is to live at a juncture in time--one which, like the desire-based framework suggested by Tuck, encapsulates and acknowledges the simultaneous significance of past, present, and future. With this in mind, the thought of an individual defined by any diagnostic label, whether “traumatized” or “autistic,” unless proudly claimed by the individual, sounds absurdly reductive and unuseful. When a teacher is able to engage actively with all parts of a student, they have committed to becoming a learner themselves, eager to accept this beautiful simultaneity.
Works Cited
Hooks, Bell. All About Love: New Visions. New York: Harper Collins, 2001. Print.
Moll, Luis C., Cathy Amanti, Deborah Neff, and Norma Gonzalez. "Funds of Knowledge for Teaching: Using a Qualitative Approach to Connect Homes and Classrooms." Theory Into Practice XXXI.2 (Spring 1992): 132-41. Print.
"The Problem: Impact." Helping Traumatized Children Learn. Trauma and Learning Policy Initiative, n.d. Web. 10 Apr. 2016.
Tuck, Eve, and C. Ree. "A Glossary of Haunting." Handbook of Autoethnography. Ed. Stacey Holman Jones, Tony E. Adams, and Carolyn Ellis. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast, 2013. 639-58. Print.
Tuck, Eve. "Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities." Harvard Educational Review 79.3 (Fall 2009): 409-27. Print.
Williams, Ronald, and Adriana Flores-Ragade. "The Educational Crisis Facing Young Men of Color." Diversity and Democracy 13.3 (Fall 2010): n. pag. Association of American Colleges & Universities. Web. 10 Apr. 2016.