December 19, 2014 - 11:46
though I am constantly resistant to posting work on serendip that I've deemed unfit to be seen yet, I need to just get this up here and let it be a visibily evovling work rather then another abandoned document.
This past semester has been a period of intense transformation for the Bryn Mawr-Riverside Book club. The future of our group seems all at once full of possibility and uncertainty. As I write today with the intention of reflecting on our past, interrogating our present, and envisioning our future as an established program on Bryn Mawr’s campus, I cannot help but pause for a moment to consider just how far back I need to reach in order to more fully illustrate what this book club has come to represent.
It was during the summer of 2013, while I was working at the Canaday library help desk, that the reading group fell in my lap. My introduction to this work was unlike that of Hayley Burke, as I tend to refer to the reading group as her “brainchild,” or that of Sasha De La Cruz, who was selected along with a small group of students by Anne Dalke and Jody Cohen, to be offered the opportunity to work at Riverside Correctional Facility. My involvement was far more casual- I happened to be working at the help desk on an otherwise, uneventful day, when Jody walked into the library and within the trajectory of small talk, described the budding project. “I would love to be involved!” To my own surprise, these words tumbled out of my mouth, as though they were inevitable. I couldn’t help myself. All at once, I felt a hunger, some kind of yearning I had forgotten, left over from the fall semester of 2012, when I participated in the Women in Walled Communities 360. I write and speak often about the impact the 360 had on me as a learner during that semester, however much less frequently articulated, is what happened the following spring, when I returned to regular academia after having “completed” the 360 experience. I found myself suddenly facing a profound absence in the work I was pursuing. Everything felt lacking in substance… It had not fully occurred to me until then that the meaning I had assigned to my work pre-360 was entirely too flimsy, and was no longer adequate... and that the loss of meaning would feel so devastating. I could not simply return to being an English Major… I had abruptly discovered that my entire reason for existing as a student had shifted, and I felt powerless to do anything to change it.
I just barely managed to scrape by that semester. I finished with a heavy sense of failure and personal inadequacy that I could not force myself to care more, and an overwhelming inability to reconcile that failure with the intellectual person I know I could be and wanted to become. Jody walking through those library doors is the closest I have come to believing in fate. She brought more then just books to return; she brought with her the possibility for my own redemption. She returned to me something precious, irreplaceable- she returned not only my desire and hunger to make meaningful work, but the absolute necessity for it, the realization that my very survival depends upon feeding this hunger. It is the reading group that has taught me, over and over, that making meaningful work can save your life.
It is really this understanding, above all else, that formulates the basis for why I believe the Bryn Mawr Riverside book club must continue to be supported as a program at our institution. Given a growing movement towards self-care on campus, and immediate concerns over the mental health of students, it is urgent that the Bryn Mawr community begins to recognize that making the necessary space within curriculum for learners to fall deeply, passionately, and irreversibly in love with their work is absolutely a critical component of self-care. It needs to be recognized that self-care is about more than just taking a hot bath, or doing yoga, or reading a book for pleasure. Advertising these suggestions as solutions, or as a means for attaining mental stability only seems increase the already overwhelming workload of a college student… now on top of homework, class, jobs, social life, etc, you must also find time to perform “self-care”… as though “self-care” exists entirely in a separate sphere from our work. We are outsourcing the task of caring for our bodies and our minds onto solutions that just barely manage to fulfill our hunger and in no way provide sustainable sources of wellness and well-being. However, this ‘outsourcing’ does succeed in shifting our attention away from the severe deficit within higher education coursework for opportunities to love ourselves and to love our work more fully.
Coming into this knowledge has been a continual process. Sitting behind the help desk, and later, sitting with our newly formed group to plan lesson plan for each session at Riverside, I could not have yet understood how intertwined the worlds of ‘work’ and ‘love’ would become for me. Originally, we had not considered participating in the reading group for credit, but I realize now how important our decision to take on the project has praxis has towards developing an actual program. I don’t know if would have survived without this validation; I don’t know if I would have survived without knowing, each week, that I had the space to fully invest my time- I was privileged enough to know this work never had to come second to my academics.
It was within this transformational space of discovery that I began to see myself not only being deeply capable as a learner, but also recognizing my potential as an educator. Along side this; I also began to see those around me as simultaneously holding this power of both teaching and educating. Dually humbled and empowered… As our group grew and learned together, we began to talk about how we could share our then isolated experiences with the community around us. Though at times, it has been impossible to articulate the importance of the reading group, we knew that there needed to be a way to preserve it.
I can remember toward the end of last year, I sent Anne and Jody a several page long email about my hopes and dreams for the reading group. In excitement, I think I wrote it all in one, breathless sentence, as though the act of pausing to break up each idea would somehow remind me of how overwhelmingly ambitious and unattainable it all was. I wanted a real program, supported by the college, with multiple layers of student involvement.
Lalala something about being how surreal it is to see pieces of something you believed was so far off coming into being…. And something about being grateful to bryn mawr for supporting the group this semester… then something emphasizing growing student involvement and possibilities that can be achieved with continued support…..
I should quote Andrea Gibson’s poem say yes in this piece of writing. One, because I can talk about how we used it in the reading group and how powerful it was… two, because I JUST WANT BRYN MAWR TO SAY YES
During the spring semester of 2013, one of the reoccurring themes throughout our classes was the function of reverberation as a metaphor. To reverberate; to echo; to have resonance. As part of the lesson, I read a spoke word poem by Andrea Gibson aloud to the class. The following in an excerpt from that poem:
“this is for the possibility that guides us
and for the possibilities still waiting to sing
and spread their wings inside us
cause tonight saturn is on his knees
proposing with all of his ten thousand rings
that whatever song we’ve been singing we sing even more
the world needs us right now more than it ever has before
pull all your strings
play every chord
if you’re writing letters to the prisoners
start tearing down the bars
if you’re handing out flashlights in the dark
start handing out stars
never go a second hushing the percussion of your heart
play loud
play like you know the clouds have left too many people cold and broken
and you’re their last chance for sun
play like there’s no time for hoping brighter days will come
play like the apocalypse is only 4…3…2
but you have a drum in your chest that could save us
you have a song like a breath that could raise us
like the sunrise into a dark sky that cries to be blue
play like you know we won’t survive if you don’t
but we will if you do
play like saturn is on his knees
proposing with all of his ten thousand rings
that we give every single breath
this is for saying–yes”
play like you know we won’t survive if you don’t but we will if you do
this could also become a ‘play’ on words and the importance of play within curriculum… but more importantly, this line just resonates for me… this is what it’s all about. Work + Love = Self Care, and Self Care = Survival.
JUST HIRE ME TO DO SOMETHING BRYN MAWR SO I NEVER HAVE TO LEAVE
Last semester, spring 2014, I wrote a proposal to build a playground on Bryn Mawr’s campus for my ecological 360. The project idea arose for me when I kept returning to this awareness that there are not enough value placed on creating spaces on campus for students to physically and mentally “play.” Sanctioned….
In the beginning, I had simply imagined the space itself as the site of creativity… however, as I continued to work- or should I say, “play”- with the idea, I realized that the process of creating that space itself could be a potential source for student play. I envisioned this project as a way to engage students in the labor of playing…. Recognizing that the ways in which we conceptualize productivity often obscure how critical it is for students to become lost….
Also the art idea….
I could move into existing sites for this kind of work and play on Bryn Mawr’s campus… the 360 is one of them, praxis is another, Serendip, anne and jody…
But they are always located outside the central experience of college, little pockets of resistance that interrupt the trajectory of the “normal” traditional college student… and it makes sense because Bryn Mawr has many non-traditional students…
Also something about changing the way we “report out” because it sends the wrong message about the function of the 360s which leads faculty members & those involved in the programs future evolvement to make potentially unnecessary changes with the idea of creating a program that focuses heavily on a tangible end goal rather than the process of learning itself… what a 360 “gives back” to the Bryn Mawr community and beyond should not be so easily determinable….
Allowing these radical pockets of pedagogy to flourish and reach a wider body (bulk?) of the Bryn Mawr community requires radically re-thinking the ideology beyond approaching the success of these various instances of learning. It requires an emphasis on the process
Maybe it’s idealistic of me, but I swear I haven’t stopped looking at every good idea as a new opportunity for innovation in education. The other week, I walked into the second floor Radnor common room to find two of my friends had completely rearranged the furniture. The change was refreshing, and the placement of the sofa, the chairs, and the tables had all been carefully planned to make the room appear inviting and more homelike. I complimented their work, feeling that they had accomplished this goal very effectively. However, immediately following my comment, they began to voice aspects of the room that could still use improvement, such as the artwork, which felt trite and out of place. “We should start displaying student artwork!” declared one of my friends. Instantly, I began outlining a Bryn Mawr College related curriculum, involving the creation and installment of student artwork in each dorm. I could see the curriculum designed to include a variety of …
On a more metaphorical function, this moment also speaks to the broader issues that innovative educational movements (another word…) face when they exist within the structure of a larger institution. These two students successfully arranged the furniture as much as they could within the limits of an already existing building structure.
The difference between this small example and the larger picture is that part of our “building”- the foundation construction the basis of the institution- is not represented in a physically concrete form but is formed ideologically. This is critical because restores agency to human beings when engaging in dialogues about the systems we take part in. We have the power to change our minds. We have the power to reconstruct our foundation to accommodate something new; we are not static beings, but humans with an unknowable capacity for continued learning.
This is another lesson I have l learned throughout my time at Riverside: it is tricky to navigate dialogue
It is my awareness of this tension that frames much of my initial work in and about Prisons. I can remember one of the women in our class in the Canary, who pointed to her head with her index finger and said, “We get out and I feel like we all still have one crime left in us.” This is within the context of a conversation about fearing release… it also speaks to the way of thinking about one’s identity that I have encountered frequently… I could stop thinking about it- How do I navigate the articles and papers I read in class at Bryn Mawr and the individual women I meet who are convinced that they alone, as criminals, are the reason beyond their own incarceration. The very work written to free those from the systems denying them agency, requires in someway, that we consider those marginalized humans as never having a certain measure of agency to begin with. It means viewing them as less powerful, less in control, then they may view themselves, it means further silencing them from the seemingly tenuous agency they have constructed to understand their lives. Or maybe something about how it feels so tenuous to me
Something about the pinkert ….
Sam brought up how urgent this is especially because Bryn Mawr prides itself on having a campus that is oriented toward social justice
Though vastly different in many ways, I can connect this navigation of identity and self within a larger structure…
I need to acknowledge for a moment, the importance that spontaneity has played a role in writing this “proposal.” I can rarely write in a meaningful way if I have already set up a rigid idea of my “end goal.” I started with one guideline: to present my experiential knowledge and learning in way that while encourage a potential reader to fall in love as I have fallen in love. I did not foresee that I would ultimately also be addressing the labor of self-love, or the importance of innovation in education,
In many ways, these are the “categories” that my learning has centered around, and on one level, this piece of writing feels like a culmination of my learning… but simultaneously, I’m reminded that I re-learn as I write,
I have been uniquely fortunate that opportunities for making meaningful work have been present in my experiences in college.
I envision the program growing