A joint keynote with Sean Michael Morris at the Dream 2019 conference in Long Beach, California. It is urgent we have teachers, it is urgent we employ them, pay them, support them with adequate resources; but it is also urgency which defines the project of teaching. In a political climate increasingly defined by its obstinacy, anti-intellectualism, and deflection of fact and care; in a society still divided across lines of race, nationality, religion, gender, sexuality, income, ability, and privilege, teaching has an important (urgent) role to play.

1. An Urgency of Teachers
Sean Michael Morris (@slamteacher) Jesse Stommel (@Jessifer)

2. “Prophetic imagination is outrageous—not merely in dreaming the dream, but
in already living out the dream before it has come to pass, and in embodying
this dream in concrete action.” ~ Mary Grey, The Outrageous Pursuit of Hope

3. “What makes teachers valuable is not the education, lesson plans, and
experience they bring to their jobs, but the humanity, the connection, and the
ability to remember what it was like to sit on the other side.” ~ Linda Bolsen

4. “The wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile…”
~ Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

5. There is a human imperative toward critical consciousness, an imperative
to always look closer at what we think of reality, what we think of our
historical moment, what we think, even, of a single line of text.

6. “I’m tired of reading ‘think-pieces' speculating about situations when actual
facts are almost entirely lacking. I’m just as tired of reading ‘think-pieces’
opening debate on established, incontrovertible facts. The present moment is
being treated as a hypothetical.” ~ Jesse Stommel

7. Poverty isn’t an idea when you’re broke.
Racism isn’t an idea when you’re stopped by TSA every time you go through the airport.
Hunger isn’t an idea when you don’t know where your next meal will come from.
Hate isn’t an idea when you’re trans or nonbinary and on the bus with a group of Proud
Boys.

8. “As beings programmed for learning and who need tomorrow as fish
need water, men and women become robbed beings if they are denied
their condition of participants in the production of tomorrow.”
~ Paulo Freire, “A few reflections around Utopia”

9. “To teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is
essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most
deeply and intimately begin.” ~ bell hooks
“Proven” methods and“best” practices that rely on sociological and psychological
research as “evidence” dehumanize teaching, leaving teachers at a distance from
learners. Does evidence-based teaching seek to care for the souls of students?

10. It is urgent we have teachers, it is urgent we employ them, pay them, support
them with adequate resources; but it is also urgency which defines the project
of teaching. In a political climate increasingly defined by its obstinacy, anti-
intellectualism, and deflection of fact and care; in a society still divided across
lines of race, nationality, religion, gender, sexuality, income, ability, and
privilege, teaching has an important (urgent) role to play.

11. Let us not become accustomed.

12. “Though we live in a world that dreams of ending
that always seems about to give in
something that will not acknowledge conclusion
insists that we forever begin.” ~ Brendan Kennelly, “Begin”

13. The present moment isn’t a hypothetical.

14. In my first teaching job 19 years ago, I was given a stock syllabus
and told I couldn’t change anything. “Why would you need to
change anything? Everything you need is right there in the syllabus.
Besides, you should be focusing on your research.”

15. That stock syllabus had one blank line for me to write my name.
I couldn’t help but feel interchangeable. A cog in a machine I didn’t
yet understand.

16. Learning can not be reduced to or packaged as a series of static,
self-contained content. Rather, learning happens in tangents,
diversions, interruptions — in a series of clauses (parentheticals)
… and gaps.

17. “It’s okay that we are throwing you into a classroom with absolutely
no training. We trust you. And we are certain this will work, because
it was done to us.”
If what we want to create in new teachers is fear and compliance,
this messaging is a great strategy.

20. Teachers in higher education are asked to do work they (often) have
no preparation for. And that usually isn’t even directly
acknowledged. Without higher education pedagogy recognized as
a discipline, discussions of teaching end up centered around purely
logistical or instrumental concerns.

23. Teacher working conditions are student learning conditions.

24. 1975 1995 2015
Full‐Time Tenured Faculty 29% 25% 21%
Full‐Time Tenure‐Track Faculty 16% 10% 8%
Full‐Time Non‐Tenure‐Track Faculty 10% 14% 17%
Part‐Time Faculty 24% 33% 40%
Graduate Student Employees 21% 19% 14%
Labor Force Totals 100.00% 100.00% 100.00%
29%
25%
21%
16%
10%
8%
10%
14%
17%
24%
33%
40%
21%
19%
14%
0%
5%
10%
15%
20%
25%
30%
35%
40%
45%
1975 1995 2015
PERCENT OF LABOR FORCE
Trends in The Academic Labor Force,
1975‐2015 Full‐Time Tenured Faculty
Full‐Time Tenure‐Track Faculty
Full‐Time Non‐Tenure‐Track Faculty
Part‐Time Faculty
Graduate Student Employees
45%
34%
30%
55%
66%
70%
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
1975 1995 2015
Tenure Line (full‐time tenured and tenure‐track)
Contingent (full‐time non‐tenure track, part‐time,
and graduate student employees)
Compiled by the American Association of University Professors Research Office, March 2017. Source: Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System.

25. When at least 50% of the teachers in higher education have no
preparation at all for the work of teaching (and 70% are contingent),
the conversation about what higher education is for should begin
there. And not from a place of demeaning those (or any) teachers.

26. Graduate students and new faculty are made to feel so busy that
preparation for the work of teaching becomes optional, cursory, a
distraction, or is offered only as an afterthought.

27. Why and how did we get to this place of devaluing the work of
teaching in higher education? Why has the project of community
colleges, where teaching is at the center of the work, been
denigrated? Why are graduate students told (sometimes
commanded) to turn their nose up at jobs at teaching colleges?

28. Teachers need teachers

29. I was recently describing my pedagogical approach to working with
faculty. One response was a declarative, “faculty aren’t students.”
I was taken aback. Of course, college faculty aren’t undergraduate
students. But all of us in education are students, and we should be
able to acknowledge this without derision or shame. It’s a systemic
problem that so many in higher education fail to respect teaching as
both a craft and a discipline. One that requires preparation,
continuing education, and appropriate compensation.

30. To honor and support the work of teaching, we must also honor
students. Students as teachers. Teachers as students. We can’t
push education to be more and do more without starting from a
place of trust (and compassion) for students.

31. 62% of higher education faculty/staff stated they’d been bullied or
witnessed bullying vs. 37% in the general population. People from
minority communities are disproportionately bullied. (Hollis 2012)
51% of college students claimed to have seen another student
being bullied by a teacher at least once and 18% claimed to have
been bullied themselves by a teacher. (Marraccini 2013)

32. “Today’s college students are the most overburdened and
undersupported in American history. More than one in four have a
child, almost three in four are employed, and more than half receive
Pell Grants but are left far short of the funds required to pay for
college.”
~ Sara Goldrick-Rab and Jesse Stommel, “Teaching the Students We Have
Not the Students We Wish We Had”

33. “We need more, not fewer, ways to listen for the voices of students
reflecting on education. We need more, not fewer, ways to include
students in conversations about the future of teaching and learning
in college. These conversations cannot begin by sending a signal to
students that their voices don’t matter.”
~ Sara Goldrick-Rab and Jesse Stommel, “Teaching the Students We Have
Not the Students We Wish We Had”

34. These are the words of several students commenting anonymously
on a piece I wrote about student-shaming:
• “Part of the reason why I never asked for help was because I saw
what my professors thought of those who did.”
• “I dropped out of college, in large part due to the hoops I had to jump
through to get my disabilities recognized.”
• “It’s a lot easier to stay motivated when you’re not made to feel like
you’re stupid or a liar. It’s a lot easier to focus on studying when you’re
not focused on having to justify yourself.”

35. “The reason we are talking about basic needs today is because the
students brought it to our attention. A student spoke up, ‘the reason
I am not succeeding in college is because I haven’t eaten in two
days.’ In fact, 1 in 2 of your students are experiencing food
insecurity. In the last 30 days.”
~ Sara Goldrick-Rab, Dream 2019

36. This means we can’t throw students (with nowhere else to go) out of
their dorms over the holidays. Or craft laptop policies that make it
impossible for disabled students to receive accommodation without
their disability made visible to an entire classroom.
And it means we can’t throw college teachers into a classroom with
no (or virtually no) preparation for the work of educating these
students.

37. The process that makes teachers increasingly adjunct is the same
process that has made students into customers. And the gear that
makes this system go depends on the pitting of students and
teachers against one another. Not preparing higher education
teachers is a powerful lever in this system.

38. “We need to design our pedagogical approaches for the students
we have, not the students we wish we had. This requires
approaches that are responsive, inclusive, adaptive, challenging,
and compassionate. And it requires institutions find more creative
ways to support teachers and prepare them for the work of teaching.
This is not a theoretical exercise — it is a practical one.”
~ Sara Goldrick-Rab and Jesse Stommel, “Teaching the Students We Have
Not the Students We Wish We Had”

39. What practical—not hypothetical—steps can you take at your
institution (as soon as tomorrow) to support responsive, inclusive,
adaptive, challenging, and compassionate pedagogies?