“What You See Depends on Where You Sit, and for How Long”: On Perception and Knowledge

            My last five blogs (here, here, here, here, here) have dealt in some way with perception and knowledge, with what we see and hear and from what vantage point, what we make of it all, and what we do with it. I want to continue exploring this web of issues with a passage from Back to School that takes us right to the center of the web.  

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What you see depends on where you sit, and for how long. You enter the classroom from the rear, wanting to be discrete on your first visit, and slip into the desk closest to the door. A few students notice you, but most are walking around or leaning over to the person next to them talking. Except for one woman, the class is all men, twenties and thirties, a few White guys, the rest Black and Latino. Hoodies, baggy pants, loud profanity. The teacher is in front at a cloudy overhead projector. Three men are around him – each seems bigger than the next – and they are arguing.         

The room is old and dingy, no windows, bare except for the irregular rows of desks, the table with the projector, a cart holding pipes and metal bars, and in the corner a worn flag from the American Welding Society. You’re trying to take it all in when a sullen guy in an oversized t-shirt, a bandanna around his head, walks over to you and asks, “What are you doin’ here?”

The classroom is attached to a large welding shop in a community college vocational program. Two days a week, the welding instructor teaches basic mathematics to his novice welders because some of them checked out of school long ago and never learned, or learned poorly, how to divide decimal fractions and calculate volume. And some knew it but have been away from it in the military or in a job that folded. Most people who make policy that affects students like these – and a fair number whose research involves them – haven’t spent time in such classrooms. And, with few exceptions, those who do aren’t there for long.

But if you stay… and come back… and come back again, you’ll notice that on some days the baggy jeans and oversized tees are traded off for work shirts with company logos on the back. As you move around the room, you’ll hear that amid the f-bombs, students are explaining to each other how to solve a problem or challenging someone else’s explanation. The men walking over to other men’s desks are typically bringing their open notebooks with them. The big to-do that can flair up around the projector – lots of pointing and trash talk – usually involves a disagreement among students about coursework that they take right up to the instructor, the shadows of their fingers flitting across the diagrams on the overhead screen.

And that guy who wanted to know what you’re doing here? Well, it’s a legitimate question, isn’t it? And everything depends on how you answer it. When it was posed to me, I said I was here to study programs like this one because we need to know more about them to convince our politicians that we need more of them. The man’s features softened, and we moved out into the hallway. “We need programs like this,” he said. “People like us.” “It’s the teacher that really makes a difference,” he continued. “He treats us like we’re people.”

I later found out more about this man – his name is Ray. Ray has been in the two-year program for a year, is doing well, and, in fact, just got a job. The boss sent the instructor an email praising Ray, adding that he’d hire anyone else that good. The instructor then told me Ray’s story. During his first few weeks in the program, he tried to cheat on a test of welding terms by erasing the name on a paper being handed toward the front and writing his name quickly across the top. This was so pathetic a move that several students called him on it – and, besides, the instructor could clearly see the traces of Ray’s handiwork. Ready to throw Ray out of the program, the instructor called him into his office the next day, angry at both the stupidity and insult of Ray’s stunt. Ray was mortified and begged to be given another chance. Ambivalent, uncertain, the instructor relented. “You just don’t know,” he said to me. “You have to be open in a program like this, give guys a chance to leave the streets behind.” For the instructor, the program was a buffer zone. Some people will change. Some won’t. It’s hard to know in advance. But Ray seems to have made it.

  Back to School:Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education, pp 115-117.

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            Let’s consider the kinds of knowledge involved in this little vignette—and the dynamic, evolving nature of that knowledge.

            What the narrator sees and what he comes to understand about what he sees shifts as he spends more time in the setting. And his interaction with Ray, the fellow who approaches him, adds to what he learns. Because the narrator is part of a state-wide research project, the knowledge he gains can be used to inform other occupational program administrators and policymakers.

            This is also the story of what Ray is learning. He is becoming a skilled welder. He is also acquiring other ways of being in the world of school and the world of work, ways of being involving knowledge that is an alternative to the knowledge he brought into the welding program.

            The instructor possesses knowledge of welding—valued capital—and also knows how to teach it, what educational psychologist Lee Shulman calls pedagogical content knowledge. The instructor possesses yet another kind of knowledge, knowledge of the world many of his students come from—which has a significant effect on Ray’s opportunity to gain knowledge of welding and of other ways to lead his life.

            And then there is the knowledge of applied mathematics being generated as the students interact with each other, at their desks, around the projector. Teachers would pay serious money to have their students care enough about math to argue over it.

            Though not explicitly present, there is one more kind of knowledge surrounding this scene, a powerful, consequential knowledge: the knowledge that informs public policy. Such knowledge can include some of the kinds of knowledge I’ve listed, though too often doesn’t. It is primarily demographic and administrative knowledge (student background information, rates of enrollment and retention, cost). It is important, for it provides a broad view of trends and contributes to administrative and financial operation and accountability. But it is limited, lacks the lived experience of the people it represents. As the narrator explains to Ray, he hopes to add other kinds of knowledge to this policy-making knowledge.

Finally, there is the knowledge-rich nature of the scene itself, its epistemological abundance. This richness is not always granted to settings and populations represented by that spare occupational classroom. Yet much depends on perceiving it, from our individual responses and interactions to the development of further programs to foster it. 

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What College Can Mean to the Other America

This week's blog was originally published in The Chronicle of Higher Education on 9/11/2011. Given all the loose talk these days about "class warfare," it seems especially relevant.

It has been nearly 50 years since Michael Harrington wrote The Other America, pulling the curtain back on invisible poverty within the United States. If he were writing today, Harrington would find the same populations he described then: young, marginally educated people who drift in and out of low-pay, dead-end jobs, and older displaced workers, unable to find work as industries transform and shops close. But he would find more of them, especially the young, their situation worsened by further economic restructuring and globalization. And while the poor he wrote about were invisible in a time of abundance, ours are visible in a terrible recession, although invisible in most public policy. In fact, the poor are drifting further into the dark underbelly of American capitalism.

One of the Obama administration's mantras is that we need to "out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build" our competition in order to achieve fuller prosperity. The solution to our social and economic woes lies in new technologies, in the cutting edge. This is our "Sputnik moment," a very American way to frame our problems. However, the editors of The Economist wrote a few months back that this explanation of our economic situation is "mostly nonsense.

Instead, the business-friendly, neoliberal magazine offered a sobering—at times almost neo-Marxist—assessment of what it considers the real danger in our economy, something at the core of Harrington's analysis: chronic, ingrained joblessness that is related to our social and economic structure. We are looking toward the horizon of innovation when we should be looking straight in front of us at the tens of millions of chronically unemployed Americans and providing comprehensive occupational, educational, and social services. Otherwise, to cite an earlier issue ofThe Economist that also dealt with American inequality, we risk "calcifying into a European-style class-based society." For people without school or work, we already have.

There are a few current policy initiatives that are aimed at helping the disadvantaged gain economic mobility, mostly through some form of postsecondary education. Sadly, the most ambitious of these—the federal American Graduation Initiative—was sacrificed during the health-care negotiations, although some smaller projects remained in the stimulus package and the Department of Education. Private foundations, notably Gates and Lumina, have been sponsoring such efforts as well. These efforts reach a small percentage of poor and low-income Americans and, on average, are aimed at the more academically skilled among them—although many still require remedial English and mathematics. A certificate or degree alone will not automatically lift them out of hard times—there is a bit of magic-bullet thinking in these college initiatives—but getting a decent basic education could make a significant difference in their lives. At the least, these efforts are among the few antipoverty measures that have some degree of bipartisan support.

For the last year and a half, I have been spending time at an inner-city community college that serves this population, and I have seen firsthand the effects of poverty and long-term joblessness. Although some students attend the college with the goal of transfer, the majority come for its well-regarded occupational programs. More than 90 percent must take one or more basic-skills courses; 60 percent are on financial aid. A fair number have been through the criminal-justice system.

As I have gotten to know these students, the numbers have come alive. Many had chaotic childhoods, went to underperforming schools, and never finished high school. With low-level skills, they have had an awful time in the labor market. Short-term jobs, long stretches of unemployment, no health care. Many, the young ones included, have health problems that are inadequately treated if treated at all. I remember during my first few days on the campus noticing the number of people who walked with a limp or irregular gait.

What really strikes me, though, is students' level of engagement, particularly in the occupational programs. There are a few people who seem to be marking time, but most listen intently as an instructor explains the air-supply system in a diesel engine or the way to sew supports into an evening dress. And they do and redo an assignment until they get it right. Hope and desire are brimming. Many of the students say this is the first time school has meant anything to them. More than a few talk about turning their lives around. It doesn't take long to imagine the kind of society we would have if more people had this opportunity.

But right at the point when opportunity is offered, it is being threatened by severe budget cuts in education and social services. For several years, the college—like so many in the United States—has been able to offer only a small number of summer classes, and classes are being cut during the year. Enrollment in existing classes is growing. Student-support services are scaled back. And all the while, more people are trying to enroll at the college; some will have to be turned away, and those who are admitted will tax an already burdened system.

Given the toll the recession has taken on state and local governments, policy makers face "unprecedented challenges" and say they "have no other choice" but to make cuts in education. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, borrowing a now-ubiquitous phrase, has called the necessity to do more with less "the new normal."

I don't dispute the difficulty of budgeting in the recession, nor the fact that education spending includes waste that should be cut. But we need to resist the framing of our situation as inevitable and normal. This framing makes the recession a catastrophe without culpability, neutralizing the civic and moral dimensions of both the causes of the recession and the way policy makers respond to it.

The civic and moral dimensions also are diminished by the powerful market-based orientation to economic and social problems. Antigovernment, anti-welfare-state, antitax—this ideology undercuts broad-scale public responses to inequality.

If the editors of The Economist are right, the deep cuts in education—especially to programs and institutions that help poor people connect to school or work—will have disastrous long-term economic consequences that far outweigh immediate budgetary gains. And rereading The Other America reminds us that the stakes go beyond the economic to the basic civic question: What kind of society do we want to become? Will there be another Michael Harrington 50 years from now writing about an America that has a higher rate of poverty and even wider social divides?