November 28, 2014 - 17:46
Rebecca Cook
November 28, 2014
Disability, Identity, Culture
Mental Illness in Mawrtyrdom: Bryn Mawr’s Kairotic Spaces
Margaret Price, in her book, Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life, articulates the kind of contact zone exercised in the classroom through the invention of a new word: kairotic space. Price argues that kairotic spaces:
Are the less formal, often unnoticed, areas of academe where knowledge is produced and power is exchanged. A classroom discussion is a kairotic space, as is an individual conference with one’s professor… I define a kairotic space as one characterized by all or most of these criteria: 1. Real time unfolding of events. 2. Impromptu communication that is required or encouraged. 3. In-person contact. 4. A strong social element. 5.High stakes. (Price 60-61)
The elements of peer and professor reactions to the class discussion, the leadership of the professor, and the subsequent feelings of the students dictate the norms of the classroom and what is expected of all parties involved. In the case of Price’s argument, these spaces can disable or enable students with mental illnesses as well as different learning styles. Bryn Mawr College, in order to enforce a dynamic and ever-accommodating classroom, has established a Teaching and Learning Initiative (TLI) that allows willing professors to be paired up with a student who gives regular feedback on class participation and teaching styles. In this paper, I endeavor to evaluate the kairotic spaces applied in classrooms with professors both outside and involved in the Teaching and Learning Initiative. Drawing on Price’s text, especially her chapter: “Ways to Move: Presence, Participation, and Resistance in Kairotic Space,” an interview with a student TLI consultant about her experiences with different professors in the program, and Rochelle Skogen’s “’Coming into Presence’ as Mentally Ill in Academia: A New Logic of Emancipation,” I will apply the lens of the kairotic space to my interviewee’s experiences, finding strengths and areas for improvement in the kairotic spaces at Bryn Mawr College.
A senior at Bryn Mawr who has served in TLI since the beginning of her sophomore year agreed to speak with me about her experiences. She first explained that professors volunteer to participate in this program, and are assigned a student to help balance logistics and provide feedback and perspectives as a student. She explained that the professor and student pair meet once every week and that the student consultant also has a few meetings over the course of the semester with the students of the class, in order to directly receive their feedback. I began our conversation questioning how the professors with whom she has worked have defined participation in their classrooms, if at all. My interviewee commented that in Bryn Mawr classrooms, the general assumption is that verbal contributions qualify as participation, but she hasn’t ever experienced a professor explicitly defining participation for the class. Only one professor she worked with seemed to provide many different methods of communication, including barometer and fishbowl activities and writing exercises to account for different styles of participation. She also remarked that the head of TLI always provides a handout with many different ways of engagement in the classroom, but that she had not always seen these methods utilized. With relation to this idea, Price draws on Jason Palmeri in considering different ways of participating in the classroom. She discusses the difference between using “assistive” techniques versus what is defined as the norm. The Bryn Mawr professor to whom my interviewee referred that used varied in-class activities, in doing so, sets a new norm in her classroom, unwilling to accept only one kind of communication and method of expression (Price 77).
Because my interviewee had not had an experience with a professor explicitly defining participation in the classroom, I then questioned how the professors with whom she had worked enabled or disabled students in reacting to their comments and behaviors. To be precise, I asked if she or the professor had noticed differences in motivation and participation with relation to the professor making a conscious effort to acknowledge each student. She recalled that in a science class in which she worked, she noticed that not only were there four female students in a class of twelve, but that none of the female students had participated in the first three weeks of class--the male students seemed to dominate the conversation. My interviewee quickly notified her partner of this discrepancy, and she said he corrected his behavior in giving hypothetical examples with names of students who are there. “When he does that,” she remarked, “the [acknowledged] student feels present in the space. For students who aren’t as vocal, it’s really welcoming or affirming. When he recognizes them, I see students light up” (Interview). He also made an effort to correct students who started sentences with “sorry”--saying they shouldn't be sorry--and made sure to reform connections in the classroom by encouraging vocal students to listen to those who are less vocal. In this case, the student consultant made the professor aware of an important aspect that governs Price’s notion of kairotic space. Price notes the direct correlation between motivation and participation and the professor’s individual acknowledgement of a student )Price 71). The professor made a conscious effort to be egalitarian when acknowledging other students, and in doing so, the professor endeavored to address this challenge.
Considering Price’s perspective, I wanted to next address with my interviewee the reactions inside the kairotic space of the classroom to uncharacteristic behaviors and comments. I hoped to bring this topic up in order to further reveal the expected norms for classroom behavior of the professor. Price describes a fellow professor who had experienced a student that brought up seemingly irrelevant points and exhibited uncharacteristic behaviors, including bringing a bowl of ice cream to class. Price’s colleague responded with annoyance until she realized that this student had a learning disability. I thought this point was especially relevant to our discussion because, in Price’s words:
Although the notion of a classroom ‘discussion’ implies that it is open to all perspectives, this setting is in fact controlled by rigid expectations: students taking part in a ‘discussion’ are expected to demonstrate their knowledge of the topic at hand, raise relevant questions, and establish themselves as significant, but not overly dominant, voices in a crowd of fifteen. Further complicating the transaction is the fact that different teachers have different expectations for the ‘script’ of a classroom discussion. One teacher might want straightforward paraphrasing of the reading; another might want connections drawn between today’s material and last week’s. These expectations may or may not be communicated directly. (Price 60)
As indicated, the rules of the classroom, while not frequently expressed, have specific expectations. My interviewee provided an experience in which a student contributed rambling points in classroom conversation, which distracted the professor from the plan for that day’s class. To regain order, the professor and student consultant discussed how much eye contact he gave to the student, provided more opportunities for group projects, as well as writing time to allow students to have something specific on which to speak. In this case, the professor worked to provide different ways of interacting so that the student could still express herself without distracting others, including the professor.
My interviewee went on to explain that she believes these kinds of interactions don’t frequently occur in Bryn Mawr classes, in her words, “because Bryn Mawr trains people to stay in line. There are expectations [for students] about how and what to share and beginning with ESEM, students get regular feedback about their interactions” (Interview). These expectations seem to pervade classroom discussions, and one of them is physical presence in the classroom. My interviewee explained that in one 360 cluster for which she consulted, there were only 11 people, and there were 1-2 people absent just about every week for unavoidable reasons. The professor had to learn to work with this situation because Bryn Mawr seems to have such a high expectation for attendance; in my interviewee’s words, “there’s an assumption both that you really missed out by not being there and the class also missed out because you weren’t present to contribute” (Interview). This analysis reminded me of Price’s reference to Marvin Druger’s “Being There: A Perspective on Class Attendance” which discusses the inexplicable experience of being in the classroom and how that cannot be replicated (Price 66).
These high expectations can be daunting for students who can’t always attend class or who learn in different ways, as reinforced by Price’s book. My interviewee explained that the level of focus demanded by many of the professors does not make these expectations easier. She recalled one professor with whom she worked that assigned three hundred pages of reading per week, and as a mother of three who had published four books over the last three years and appeared very successful by academic standards. This professor had difficulty understanding why students weren’t completing all of her reading or assignments. My interviewee tried to explain that students have other classes, commitments, jobs, and lives beyond her class, but that the professor had difficulty understanding. This pressure loop begins with the fact that, as she explained, “professors, in general, especially at BMC, seem to be balancing everything, and they have so many expectations placed upon them. Academia, especially, expects professors to do so much and that students will be able to do that much. This puts pressure on students who do and don’t want to go into academia--unnecessary pressure” (Interview). Both Price and Skogen reinforce the presence of high expectations for professors in academia and how professors often don’t understand that students learn differently and can’t always take on as much responsibility.
Price’s analysis endeavors to consider the role of mental illness in the classroom and ensuring that students who differ from the norm in this way should be given equal and considered treatment. From my interviewee’s recollections, it seems that Bryn Mawr professors try to shape the whole classroom in a certain direction. There appears to be an expectation at Bryn Mawr that if you suffer from a mental illness, you will fill out the required paperwork and inform all of your professors about the way you differ from the norm. Instead of singling students and illnesses out, Bryn Mawr professors think of the classroom dynamic as a whole, especially with regard to the effectiveness of their style of engagement, and shift to try to address all students in a way that will hopefully engage them. This approach, which seems to prevail among professors who participate in TLI, synthesizes Price’s argument for opening up channels of communication and being flexible. This method is a dynamic and productive one, hoping to queer or crip the teaching methods and respond to the classroom’s reactions. This is a good start, but it seems even the most careful professors at Bryn Mawr could benefit from acknowledging their own mistakes out loud as well as articulating the norms of the classroom and participation to students. The professors mentioned by my interviewee seem to think of the class as a moving process, but would have to deal less with changing the process if they were more upfront about expectations for the classroom, allowing students to have a conversation early on with the professor about how the student learns differently or allow the student to change into a different class.
I was pleased to hear that many of the faculty participating in the TLI had practiced different efforts for inclusion in the classroom, and disappointed to hear that the program was a rather small one, somewhat limited by size. I would like to posit that encouraging students of different learning styles to participate in the classroom is something on which Bryn Mawr could further improve, both within TLI and outside of it. While Bryn Mawr is a student-focused institution, it could benefit from explicitly acknowledging different learning styles. Price notes that professors should consider the differences between having a quality of silence in the classroom that might allow more reserved students to feel more comfortable participating, versus a silence that is inflicted upon the students by the teacher rejecting their thoughts (Price 79). From my interviewee’s recollections, professors do not reject the contributions of students, but instead sometimes filter them and restate them with the professor’s own perspective. While professors often provide autonomy and different methods of expression in allowing students to choose their own final paper topics, it seems that many classes could benefit from a high quality silence as well as from more honesty and discussion of learning differences and the concept of the kairotic space.
As Rochelle Skogen articulates about her experience as a mentally ill professor:
Was it not possible that people were also attributing some of my behaviors to my personality rather than to my medical condition, something few knew anything about? What right did I have to advise Jim to disclose his condition when I had not yet done so myself? And in not having done so, was I not depriving this student and others like him of an important role model, of someone who showed them it was possible to reach and maintain a certain level of success in spite of having a mental illness? (Skogen 505-506)
Skogen postulates that if more professors shared information about their own mental illnesses and learning differences, they could not only enable students to speak up about their own experiences, but could empower students to discuss the stigma of mental illness in the context of the classroom, brainstorming solutions and improving the situation at hand (Skogen 506). Students could play a role in subsequent anti-stigma campaigns and even redefine Bryn Mawr’s norms of classroom participation (498). Further, professors could benefit from not only interacting with an outside student representative about how class is progressing, but by having discussions with the students in the class about what has and hasn’t been helpful in their learning. Professors could question class directly, providing another outlet for communication. In this method, a professor directly demonstrates to the classroom his or her motivation to engage all students instead of taking on the problem singlehandedly, behind the scenes. In doing so, the professor empowers the students to shape their own classroom and engage with the professor directly about these issues.
Works Cited
“Experiences as a TLI Consultant.” Personal telephone interview. 26 Nov. 2014.
Price, Margaret. Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2014. Print.
Skogen, Rochelle. “‘Coming into Presence’ as Mentally Ill in Academia: A New Logic of Emancipation.” Harvard Educational Review Winter 2012;82, 4; ProQuest: 491-566. Online.