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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[i] See “Prologue: Secrets” in Willie Jennings’ After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2020). 

for Rebecca Badertscher What’s your superpower? The question is playful. It invites imagination. It flirts with the extraordinary. It asks us to consider who we might be if we were not so bound by the ordinary limits of time, fear, gravity, or flesh. It is a contemplation of freedom. Common answers come easily. Flight. Speed. Mind reading. Super strength. Time travel. Invincibility. The question suggests that we long for capacities beyond ourselves. It suggests that we are weary of constraint. It suggests, too, that power is something we add on, something we acquire, something that dazzles. We yearn to be more. But some superpowers are not imagined. They are practiced. They are learned early. They are honed in ordinary spaces where fear lives quietly and persistently. Invisibility is one of those kinds of real superpowers. The ability to make oneself invisible is often imagined as magical. A sudden disappearing. A body present then vanished—moved to the unseeable realm. In classrooms, invisibility is neither magical nor sudden. It is deliberate. It is disciplined. It is a survival strategy.I learned invisibility in elementary school. I do not remember a single lesson on how to do it, yet I mastered it quickly. I learned to still my body. I learned to avoid eye contact. I learned to quiet my breath and fold myself into the smallest possible version of who I was. If I did all of this well enough, the teacher’s gaze would pass over me. I would not be called. I would not be exposed. I would not be required to speak. This invisibility protected me. I was shy. I was anxious. Speaking felt risky. Answering incorrectly felt dangerous. I learned that when another student answered a question wrong, the room changed. The air tightened. Time became prickly and slowed. Mistakes lingered longer and thicker than they should have. I learned that invisibility could carry me safely through those moments. I could disappear until the tension passed.This is how classrooms teach. Not only through curriculum and standards and objectives, but through atmosphere. Through tone. Through what happens when someone gets it wrong. Through what happens when fear enters the room and no one names it or ushers it out. We often mislabel invisibility as disengagement. As lack of interest. As laziness. As absence. As passivity or disinterest. But invisibility is effortful. It requires attention, control, and constant monitoring of the environment. It is hard work. Frequently it is exhausting work. For many adult students in our classrooms the practice of invisibility is their work. They sit in seminar rooms, lecture halls, and Zoom squares, perfecting disappearance. They keep cameras off. They speak only when required. They offer safe answers. They avoid drawing attention. Like me, they learned invisibility early, and like me, they learned it because learning spaces did not feel safe. Too often learning spaces were harmful, painful, even violent. A superpower is needed for survival. Educators often misread student silences. Silence is wrongly judged as deficiency. Quiet becomes lack of preparation. Invisibility becomes a problem to be corrected rather than a strategy to be understood. We ask students to participate without asking whether participation feels dangerous or is an invitation into violence. We celebrate visibility without interrogating the conditions that make invisibility necessary. Participation is not politically neutral. Visibility is not innocent. Who can risk being seen, heard, corrected, or misunderstood is shaped by race, gender, class, language, past schooling, and accumulated harm. Some students speak because they trust the room. Others disappear because they do not. Many classrooms are not trustworthy. Invisibility, then, is not a student’s failure. It is intelligence. It is the body remembering what it needed to do to survive learning spaces. When we label it as resistance or apathy, we miss the story it is telling. We miss the work of teaching all the students in the room rather than simply teaching the complying students. Good teaching requires listening for what is not said. It requires noticing who disappears and when. It requires asking not Why won’t they speak? but What makes silence feel safer than voice?If we are serious about education, we must teach against invisibility—not by forcing students into the light, but by changing the conditions of the room. We must slow down. We must treat mistakes gently. We must create multiple ways of being present. We must make fear discussable rather than disciplinary. I suspect it is a superpower of the highest caliber to invite students to reappear. Making learners visible again is worth the effort. Perhaps the better question for the teaching life is not What superpower do you have? but What powers did you develop to survive classrooms? And then, more importantly, What would help you no longer need that ability?Teaching is not about exposing students. It is about making it possible for them to reappear. At their own pace. On their own terms. In rooms where invisibility is no longer necessary.