Being Righteously Thunder-Headed in the Nineteen-Eighties

I enrolled in an Introduction to Sociology course as an undergraduate in the 1974-75 school year. There I came across this question:  Does an organization select its members to be included in it or does an individual select the organization in which to be included? I came to the conclusion a long time ago that organizations select their members accepting only those possessing an equal correspondence of ideas, values, beliefs, customs, language and work habits and rejecting all those who differ.  But there are some organizations, such as schools, which allow a broad range of folks to enter, but, who to maintain inclusion, especially for a life-time of employment, must come to fully accept the organization's philosophy, theory and daily practice regardless of their usefulness in or effectiveness to individual and organizational goal achievement.  I guess this is where my rebelliousness comes in as  I will not subordinate my professional education judgment to schooling  imperatives, to what are collectively called “the hidden curriculum”, at any level, especially the collegiate, when accepting them and working through them goes fully against what by instinct, training and reflective thought I know to be cognitively stunting and emotionally hurtful to children, adolescents and young adults. Globally, I refuse to accept the reality of a world where schooling admits folks into its working ranks with the promise of exercising professional prerogatives, especially true of the academic freedom well celebrated in higher education, but forces out those who will not forsake those prerogatives for the organization's.  Yet, by stubbornly insisting my professionalism be recognized in my practice of educating in whatever school I wish to be included, I am, like all refusing to adapt to any organization, rejected by the organization and placed outside of it. Indeed, this persistence in being included within schools on my own professional judgment-that is, by sticking to my Principles-has resulted in a working life-time of disappointed employment.

My parents were both high school teachers employed in the New York City public schools.  While my father, living in his own dream world, thought I should become a scholar-warrior, an officer and a gentleman and a scholar,  my mother thought I should follow my father and her into "the family business".  My father, in this, eventually agreed and, so, when I finally went back to complete my undergraduate degree-this time as a Communication Arts major-they agreed I was to be a teacher, a scholar, a Professor. 

As I was working through the last two years of the BA this made great sense to me as well. But there were warnings I did not care to observe: I discovered that each little tidbit of curriculum information sparked a dozen questions and a need for learned conversation, but the Professors to whom I directed these queries did not have the time nor the inclination in fielding my questions or engaging in any level of learned conversation with me. I discovered they were too preoccupied with their own research, scholarly writing or other professorial projects, college committee work and class session prep, not to mention private life activities. I should have taken the hint that my expectations of what it meant to be a Professor, to be a scholar, an intellectual, a teacher and a family man simultaneously, may have been unrealistic, but I didn't.  Still, the engagement with university curriculum content uncovered a deep wellspring of intellectual curiosity which mixed with my great propensity for conversation yielded a pleasant talent for oral learned discourse continuously confirming the Professorial choice of career as I swept through course work in the Media Studies Masters at The New School and in the Media Ecology Doctoral program at New York University. Learned writing, well, that was and remains a very painful enterprise. I have done as much of it as my psycho-dynamic allows which is not that much and which did not include the doctoral dissertation. Nevertheless, I looked to collegiate teaching as the place for me as much as an All But Dissertation (ABD) could to make his mark on the world.

During the 1980's as a Communication/Media Arts adjunct, I found students responding very well to my idiosyncratic encouragements for learned conversations right there in class.  I also found that what I was doing worked well to build real world skills in the broadcast lab courses I taught.  But, I also saw that my view of what the Communication/Media Arts learned world and its conversations were about and what the Communication/Media Arts learned classroom was also about were not what all others in the Com Arts departments took as appropriate curriculum, instruction and assessment.  I ignored all that as I went from college to college as an eternal adjunct. I mean, I saw no reason to adopt the course construction and instructional strategies of fellow faculty as student learning, individual and collective young adult cognitive development and pre-professional growth in course after course I taught demonstrated the efficacious power of my approach to teaching/learning. Indeed, working well with so many students confirmed the deep insights into the Communication, Media and Pedagogical worlds I possessed and I perceived others did not-certainly this was the case with almost all I observed in the various Com Arts departments as they were schooling late twentieth century youth with mid-century interpretations. There was no way I could adopt the Com Arts organizational imperatives, especially the one saying that I had to do everything pretty much exactly as everyone else teaching in the departments were doing as I deeply believed student cognitive and professional preparation had to keep pace with the nearly instantaneous advance of technology and its impacts on individuals, cultures and societies and, frankly, none of the Communication/Media Arts professors within the departments I taught during the 1980's outside of New York University were keeping that current.

So, here I was with my idiosyncratic, “cutting edge” thinking and instructional practice when I was given an opportunity in September, 1987, to do as I liked with an audio course at Long Island University, Brooklyn, the school where I had been a Physical Education and a Theater major, and where I was the college radio station's inaugural Chief Engineer and one of its premier Progressive Rock D J’s. LIU, Brooklyn, when I was there-in and out from 1967 to 1972-did not have a Media major, no less a Media Department, but by '87, it did. In discussion, the then Media Department Chair and I narrowed the choice of student selection to a course exploring sound or a first part of a radio broadcast course. I wanted an exploration of sound as much because of my own interest in it as there not being a radio broadcast sequence for students to complete making a first part of a radio broadcast useless, but I put the choice to the class without favor. Unfortunately, to a student, they were so habituated to being told what to do that they were afraid to make this kind of decision. Being so paralyzed in making such decisions they couldn't, and didn't, leaving me to make up their minds for them, which I did and structured a course exploring sound. As usual, my way of approaching course construction and of working with students yielded a great advance in them, not only in the uptake of the content of the course, but in their cognitive and social growth. I was happily amazed as students were coming out of their shells. The progress in student growth was being recognized by the Chair and, consequently, we began talking about developing a radio broadcast sequence where I would be the Department's radio broadcasting guy. Unfortunately for me, a fellow Media Arts teacher had other plans. I guess (I have to be provisional here because I never uncovered the actual sequence of events) he was interested in doing the radio job, although he already was a full-time faculty member instructing television/video and working with the Athletic and Public Information Departments on promotional material. I also suspect he objected to my approach to course construction and working with students seeing what I did as ignorant of the way it all should be done. (I venture this view of me as ignorant of the way teaching should happen-at all levels-and thus marking me as unsuitable for being hired or for continued employment was held by many fellow faculty, chairs, deans. principals and not a few students and can be posited as one of several powerful causes of my failure to sustain work in the profession.) Anyway, he was quite close to the Dean under which the Media Department organizationally rested and I always had the feeling that, since it was the Dean who had the final say on who got what in the school, the a few “kind” words this fellow faculty member spoke to the Dean on my behalf put me out in the street having taught just the one course there.

Well, I kind of took a hint and decided to try my hand at another level of teaching. I applied for a teaching position with the Diocese of Brooklyn and received an appointment in September, 1988, to teach American History and Science to seventh graders in St. Thomas Aquinas School, Flatlands, an adjacent parish school to our Marine Park, Brooklyn, neighborhood and in whose parish our son, Sean, and myself were enrolled as a Cub Scout and a Webelos Den Leader respectively. Long story short: I lasted a little more than two weeks before the Principal fired me saying that she did not want me to learn more than the students. I did not understand what she meant as I was instructing the way I though it should be done. Eventually, I came to understand that my oral-aural-experiential class discussion-demonstration approach to teaching/learning was not the instruction to which the students were accustomed and not the textbook teaching, workbook/worksheet drill and practice approach the principal required, and the students were trained to expect, although I got the distinct feeling that since this seventh grade broke from the school's early elementary concentration on academic reading, writing and math skill development to concentrate on focused subject content mastery, the students in front of me would eventually become comfortable with my instructional approaches given the consistency of practice over the school year. However, the Principal, measuring professional competency fit for her school as all faculty doing the same textbook teaching, drill and practice from kindergarten through eighth grade, could only find my instructional approaches very professionally wanting.

Indeed, treating students as if they were active learners in a mutual exercise of knowledge building, a foundation in my instructional approach, wasn't on in this school, and, as it turns out, not in any of the schools or colleges where I have taught. This is the basic conflict I have whenever I have undertaken to instruct in schools. I deeply believe in the Constructivist view of learning which sees students as active decision making partners in the exercise rather than mere tabular rosa vessels into which to pour information for ready recall. Unfortunately, schooling imperatives-at all levels-demand the tabular rosa view and require all teachers to abide by such philosophy, theory and daily practice.

Although each college course I was privileged to instruct during the 1980's demonstrated the correctness of my Constructivist approach, it was taken as wrong-headed by those passing judgment on my professionalism and employment fitness. Nevertheless, I was beginning to find an adjunct home in Bronx Community College.  I think this was far more a case of having a warm teacher body to cover courses rather than an endorsement of my professional fitness.  Regardless, my stay in the Bronx came to an abrupt end when in fiscal year 1990 the City University of New York, within which Bronx Community College is a component, retrenched and thus knocked me out of both any further adjunct courses and the prospect for the full-time position for which I was told I was in line. 

Did I take the hint?  Nope, I decided I should take the methods courses needed and become City licensed and State certified to teach in the City high schools following my parents into “the family business”.

Resigning from Professional Education, Totally and Finally

Withdrawal from all professional education affiliations-heck, the abandonment of the teaching profession itself, of which I persisted in trying to make my life’s work for forty years, was immediately precipitated by this most recent replication of supervisory censure.

My approach to college course construction, an obligation of every professor regardless of rank, has been through an idiosyncratic internalization of ideas formal education and teaching experience has provided me.  Thus was the course construction of the communication/media course I was given to teach this past semester (Fall 2013 at Fordham University).  It was premised on judgment developed from nearly forty years cultivating the deepest understanding of Human and Technological Communication processes and their affects on individuals, cultures and societies and of learning theory, pedagogy and practice in Experiential Learning, Project Based Learning, Cooperative Learning, Socratic Method and Developmental Lesson Planning across levels of schooling from junior high to college, especially the collegiate. Well, as become usual since 2006, the exercise of professional judgment upset a small number of young adults who had difficulty adjusting to my course construction and who complained up the chain of command to the effect that I was called on the carpet for exercising this acumen and required to implement a “course correction” in the methods and the substance of the course I was given to instruct.  I was to move away from a multi-instructional strategy to a single one: from my synthesis of Experiential, Project Based, Cooperative, Socratic to the common narrowest understanding of instruction which the education profession calls textbook-lecture teaching.  I was, also, to move away from a targeted content far better calculated for longer than single course memory retention to the customary widest definition of content aligned with other faculty's course construction which is forgotten once tested.   Further, I was to halt project based writing in favor of test based writing to assess learning.  More, I was to abandon re-teaching even when assessment said otherwise. Naturally, I obeyed and by so doing I destroyed each and every learning objective I devised for the course and I became a poorer teacher for it.  But, the changes satisfied the complaining students as they got to do as they expected to be doing:  working the system to generate “A's” without having to be intellectually challenged, without having to grapple with ideas and concepts to cognitively and emotionally grow.  And the changes satisfied the powers that be as they did not have to deal with any further student complaints.

Dr. David Linton, when working for him as a Dean at Marymount Manhattan in 2006, said I possessed an articulate rebelliousness. That, indeed, flattered my profound desire to see and to project myself aligned with the great Irish rebels and with the equally great European and American tradition of free thinkers and non-conformists. But the reality is that all I was about, all I am about, is putting in the service of the field of Communication/Media Studies education-and in the service of whatever subject area at whatever schooling level I was privileged to instruct-the pedagogical judgment that narrowed focused content study through a mix of Experiential Learning, Project Based Learning, Cooperative Learning, Socratic Method, Developmental Lesson Planning and personal student responsibility for learning engagement have the best chance of information retention well beyond the immediate schooling need to demonstrate learning and, especially, to move college students away from the learned helplessness of the elementary-high school years to a self-actualization of the collegiate, from the infantilization of conventional primary and secondary teaching/learning toward the empowered adult of whole cognitive developed higher education. So, yes, I have ends in mind other than the specific content mastery of the course.

If there is anything authentically different from conventional collegiate exercise in my judgments, it is that as much as possible I pare content down to basic concepts on which learning is centered rather than saturate content learning with the broadest range of scholarship fact-the usual, especially, for collegiate academic courses-and I employ a mix of instructional strategies within the same course and, frequently, within the same class period giving students an array of means by which to acquire the content of the course and providing students an authentic responsibility to accept or reject the conditions of inclusion in each class and in the course as a whole along with the consequences of their decisions. I take as given that this is the first exposure to these conditions and to these methods for students, especially for Freshmen, and I fully recognize the adjustment difficulty visited upon them, particularly on those holding expectations that they will be doing the same thing they have been doing for almost all of their schooling lives; thus, I incorporate personal support into each course, prominently among which is individual, one on one instructional/counseling sessions during and outside office hours.

This time around, I did not get the chance to be articulate, to explain, justify and argue the specifics of course construction. In fact, what was student complaint was given validation by all supervision without even a cursory chat with me to ascertain its authenticity. Experience has made it clear that there may be academic freedom for others but not for me. So, that’s it: stick a fork in me and pop me out of the oven, I’m done. I have always done the best for each young adult I was given the privilege of teaching, even those who complain. But, the conditions of employment whereby I am forbidden to use my considerable professional judgment, and where I am being forced to employ pedagogical methods which even the colleges in which I’ve taught hold workshops and seminars to persuade faculty to greatly move away from, i.e., textbook teaching and learning through lecture and testing, have become intolerable. If being rebellious means I will not accept having to implement the least effective pedagogy just to stay employed as an adjunct, just to not upset, not to differently challenge, any student then, I am a rebel. Unfortunately, the consequence of being a rebel is to be marginalized and equally to marginalize oneself. So, on the margins of education I am to return.

But, you know, there were plenty of hints along the way that I should be looking elsewhere to earn a living and plenty of opportunities for me to move on. And, at times I took the hint.  But when whatever other I did did not work out I rapidly flew back into education as I have always believed teaching is where the best of me works for the best of others.

Whistling into the Wind, Again

Inconsistent blogging loses anyone interested after a while of not finding anything newly posted.  Mass media programming with its regularity, its appointment consumption, I’d argue, has trained us to expect a consistency of event at correctly anticipated intervals.  The surprise and disappointment is when a series goes on hiatus.  However, one has to wonder with on-line entertainment sources moving to dominate people’s source selection dislocating consumption time to the user’s schedule and with the ever increasing use of the hiatus as a programming tool-when a series disappears from view altogether for a considerable time-if we are not being retrained to accept lengthy absences of affection attached mediated faire.  Still, I suspect our mass production standardized, sliced white bread, culture holds a deeper power over our feelings so when there is an absence in my blog, especially of the present kind, no one who said they were reading it even checks-in to see if it has resumed.  So, I resume writing as if this is new.  And as new within the oceans of blogs, I will be writing as much in the hopes of being recognized as knowing there is an audience out there waiting in anticipation for the blog to continue. 

What’s more, I have withdrawn from almost every professional and political group with which I’ve associated within the last ten years reducing to zero the publicity paths I’ve taken to gather folks to this blog.  So, I do not even have these channels available. 

An explanation of this withdrawal will be placed here over the next few weeks.   In sum, my stubborn insistence on the idiosyncratic synthesis and application of insights of authors my formal education assigned me to study and the obstinate resolve to actualize my deepest beliefs in the shared generosity of human spirit and the tolerance, if not the acceptance, of a diversity of educated thought and the practices constructed from it, met the equally tenacious human condition of having to go along to get along to have a successful working life yielding disillusionment in the faith I placed in those individuals and organizations I relied on to help me achieve a working life.  This disenchantment and the prospects of nothing further than more of the same led me to conclude there was only sustained hurt from the continued associations, especially, those build over the last ten years, but some which I had cultivated over the last forty.

So, untethered from where I was but still a person of my history, I am, more than the first blog post and on more than one level, whistling into the wind, again.