Why are You Here and What Constructive Purpose Do You Serve?: Classism in the Classroom

Willie Jennings was right: there are a lot of unspoken dynamics—secrets—if you will, in the hallowed halls of academia.^[i]

Many things need to be said out loud, and I’m in a telling mood. There are too many questionable ideas and practices tied to classism in the classroom that, if we ignore them, can become the beginning of triggers and sites of trauma stories for students. These questionable practices can feed growing suspicions, and stain the face of our institutions.

Why are you here and what constructive purpose do you serve?

This needs to be named and talked through. 

We teachers must collectively pause, identify when something is off in the classroom space, and then address the roots and origins of the things that wrong. We do not want to perpetuate a harmful economic. 

The higher-ed classroom can perpetuate classism. 

If we are honest, classrooms can be hubs of moral judgement and value assignment. The hierarchy of the classroom manifests in the teacher-learner dynamic, and this sometimes takes on moral tones. A student’s preparation (or lack thereof) is treated as reflective of their moral upbringing, the integrity of their culture, the character of their families, and the value of the educational systems in which they were raised. 

The classroom is a layered and complicated environment. Many wrestle through doubts with material reception and retention and, for instructors, with questions about the force of their pedagogical impact. Wrestling is to be expected. But it gets tricky when wrestling with, and against, superiority complexes become just as prevalent as wrestling with inferiority complexes. If we do not work to dismantle this construction, a construction that every single person brings with them into the classroom in some way, even the sincerest instructors will fall prey to this harmful economy. 

We know how class feels, how it feeds into fears and insecurities. Through our respective educational journeys, we might have struggled with feelings of inadequacy, so over time and as we earned degree after degree our insecurities could then become coded as “classroom authority” and a mission to “preserve rigor.” We mislabel our shortcomings so that our (untended) fears can have a place. But we need to be honest: feral fear only wants permanence. It wants a home, so it nestles itself into our syllabi, the material we want or don’t want to face, our classroom policies, our tones and tongues towards certain students—whether oral or in graded benchmarks.

Classism in the classroom is about us. This is hard to admit.

Our issues with place and ranking and hierarchy make their way into the environments we foster, environments that are supposed to be spaces of growth and learning for our students. But what learning is truly occurring? 

Why are we here and what constructive purpose do we serve?

Why can’t we be gardeners? 

We know the lay of the land and have a plan to plant seeds, but we also know we do not control how the growing happens. 

We do not—cannot—control how the learning happens. We can only create and tend to the environment. 

What kind of garden do we want to plant, to see grow (in its own time)? What kind of atmosphere have we curated for the seeds to endure their own processes of underground unbecoming and becoming—to show us fruit in their upward (and outward) evolution?

Do we remember that when our flowering happened it was underground, that it only broke the surface when it was ready? Can we tap into that memory and grant our students the same time and process?

Instead of harmful economies, can we build ecologies of blossoming and maturation—where fruit emerges when it is supposed to?

I get it; semesters are only so long, but maybe we should work on not being so hard on ourselves and allow to let be what will be. The hardness and rigidness we harbor (and even prize as intelligence) too often falls on students, becomes their responsibility. But our stunted internal processes are not theirs to hold.

Economies of hardness make no sense. Classrooms are processes, not economies. They are spaces of systematic learning to be sure, but we must work hard for them not to be consumed by structures and strictures that do not work for them.

All of this clarity—this clearing and tilling of land—begins in us. The ecologies of learning that await, start in you.  

This is why you are here. This is the constructive purpose you serve.

You, my friend, are a gardener. Rest in that.

Notes & Bibliography