The biggest problem in teaching right now is students. Not the people in the classroom who have paid (or someone paid) for them to be there, but the idea or conception of student itself. The notion of “students” as distinct from “teacher” is obvious but there are deeper implications here, such as student as different than adult, worker, person, neighbor, etc.

Having a conception of “students” that is not different from nor in opposition to other modalities of being and identity is the biggest barrier to empowering higher education. Currently, the notion of “student” is shorthand for “proto-careerist” or something like that (not exactly pleased with this naming; took a bit to settle on this naming). It reminds me of being 23 in my first job as a teacher in high school chatting with another young teacher about how difficult it was to keep conversations going with women after you answer the question “what do you do?” We tried to come up with a good synonym for “teacher” – which for a lot of good reasons really turns people off as it’s identification with a type or a kind of person out there; a stereotype perhaps but with a powerful grip on the mind’s eye – so a stereotype then. We settled on “manufacturing semi-furbished replacement parts for American society.” At the time hilarious but now the standard motive as revealed in the way that universities talk about students, each other, and themselves as institutions.

Faculty aren’t much better, spending a lot of time chatting to one another about how their students cannot seem to do anything that they would like them to do. Ironically, most faculty wish themselves into irrelevance in these conversations, most notably when teachers of writing, critical thought, or reading are upset that their students cannot do the things that it seems they are in the class to learn how to do. The “students” are incapable of assumed basic abilities and tasks that somewhere someone has assumed they would be able to do when they arrive in class. Often this seems to spill over into the job of the professor-as-teacher, which these conversations reveal most professors would be happy not to do.

Faculty talk about students as a vulgar herd of frustration punctuated with little stories about some people in the class who are “the good ones,” often only because they were obedient, or had some power to determine what the professor really wanted by being able to interpret overwrought assignment instructions, often written in a style or manner that would not pass that professor’s own standards. The idea that faculty can and often do discuss the silver lining popping through the cloudy sky of teaching should give us hope, but too often these narratives are used to reinforce this idea that the vast majority of students are problems who interfere in their own education to a point where the faculty can’t do anything about it. In short: Students come predestined for failure or success.

Is there a way to think about your students, or students, or those who are the reason the University exists – hard to hear for most faculty but perhaps the truest thing you’ll read today – that is inclusive of other identities and motives rather than exclusive? We tend to think of the student as lacking capacity and ability. Could there be a way to think of the identity of student as containing capacities rather than being the marker of an empty space?

The re-conception of the classroom as a place that is not meant for correction but construction is my favorite approach: What can we build together from what we brought with us to this place? Another way would be to ask what we can do, as an assembled group, with the time and place given to us?

These questions move us away from the diminutive “student” identification and towards the shared identification of a community, where everyone has capacities and incapacitates, abilities and inabilities, and through the mix of these various things we develop something that all the members of the community can benefit from. Of course, the nature of this thing, it’s benefits and harms, and its longevity are always the subjects of deliberation and debate in healthy communities. Since they are not known capacities, not really measurable in a way that would immediately satisfy everyone (for these joys and deficits always come to us and others in mediation) so they must consistently be discussed when the exigence is identified and made known to everyone. In this way, the class is the “diorama” of larger community behavior and practice where most of what goes on is discussion about things done and things that need to be done.

Seems like learning to me.