The structures I want to alter, the silences I want to break, have been a long time a-building—not only at the village, but also at Bryn Mawr, where I have little interest in restoring the college’s history. Drawing on Dean Spade’s description of institutions like Bryn Mawr as “political projects,” and the questions of “who gets to learn, and what they learn there,” as “deeply political questions,”Dean Spade, talk at Barnard College, April 2014. Monica Mercado decries the founding of influential universities as part of the larger colonial project of unsettling Native Americans, clearing the land of people who lived there, replacing them with white settlers—who, in turn, founded institutions of study, “not for the enslaved or the replaced,” but for white men. Colleges such as these, Monica maintains, are “part of the arsenal of European imperialism”; all the leading universities promoted and profited from slavery, racism, and colonialism. The earliest of these were playgrounds for wealthy boys, where ideas about race were “made and taught.” Created as “bastions of white upper class women,” the Seven Sisters Colleges followed this model, denying to African Americans the education they made available only to “a certain kind of woman.” The histories of elite institutions like Bryn Mawr are histories of intense privilege and wealth, and of the hierarchies they create and maintain.Monica Mercado, “A (Short, Incomplete, and Often Invisible) History of Race and Higher Education” (paper presented at the Bryn Mawr Teach-In on Race, Higher Education, Rights and Responsibilities, Bryn Mawr College, November 2014).

Racism remains insistently present-and-active at the College, as it does elsewhere in the country. And much of our current work to unseat such campus hierarchies seems to me problematic, paradoxical, enacting the dream of restoration, grasping for a time that never was, and never can be. Sara Ahmed is prescient here, once again, cautioning that diversity can be offered as a narrative of repair, as what allows us to “recover” from racism. She cautions that such recovery is not possible:

Diversity is often imagined as…a way of mending or fixing histories of being broken… . diversity enters institutional discourse as a language of reparation; as a way of imagining that those who are divided can work together; a way of assuming that “to get along” is to right a wrong. Not to be excluded becomes not simply an account of the present…but also a way of relating to the past. Racism is framed as a memory of what is no longer.Ahmed, On Being Included, 164.

Searching for an alternative to “restoration,” “repair,” and “recovery”—seeking for a way, in other words, to “stay with the trouble,” while not settling for-or-in it, I realize that the sort of “slippage” we encountered at the village is not confined to those with intellectual disabilities. It happens all the time, everywhere—including at communities like Bryn Mawr, where many members have been identified as “intellectually gifted.” More importantly, Emily Elstad’s essay suggests that such “slips” offer the college a way to move beyond old forms of failed engagement, in which those of us who “belong” welcome (or refuse welcome to) those of us who have more newly arrived. And where those who belong, my friend Alice Lesnick adds, have to keep showing that they do, in an ongoing performance, never “one and done.”

As we construct and re-construct ourselves during our college years (and for decades thereafter), as we construct and re-construct the institutions within which we live and work, the differences within-and-among us are always in motion. Ahmed is once again helpful here, calling out how each act of inclusion, each gesture of hospitality, re-figures an old—and yet somehow always new-and-surprising—exclusion:

To be welcomed is to be positioned as the one who is not at home…treated as guests, temporary residents…welcomed on condition they return that hospitality by integrating into a common organizational culture, or by “being” diverse, and allowing institutions to celebrate their diversity… . this very structural position of being the guest, or the stranger, the one who receives hospitality, allows an act of inclusion to maintain the form of exclusion.Ahmed, On Being Included, 43.

If each new inclusion reactivates old exclusions, how to speak with one another about such divergences? (How) is it possible to construct a classroom space, a campus, a county or a country, which can hold them all?

I get a chance to work through these questions the next semester, when I offer “Ecological Imaginings,” a course structured around the premise that “the real, material ecological crisis…is also a crisis of representation…a failure of narrative.”

Not so surprisingly, the narrative that holds this course together falters. Ahmed again: “solutions to problems are the problems given new form.”Ahmed, On Being Included, 143.

One of my experiments here is to ask each student to take a turn at selecting our class site. I hope this will result in our meeting outside more often, and so engaging with a range of interesting eco-pedagogical questions: how attentive should we be to the distractions of wind, sun, rain, birdsong, and the voices of others nearby? How much space and time should we give to those interruptions not on the course agenda? I take my inspiration from a student who enrolled in the first version of “Ecological Imaginings,” and challenged me to “expand the net of attention” in class. Sara Gladwin asked if it were “ecologically literate” to teach and condition children to filter out divergent thinking,” to teach them “not to pay attention to their surroundings, to let the environment fade into the background… . maybe the environment would be better protected,” she posited,

sara.gladwin

if instead of reprimanding the student whose eye has been caught by whatever can be seen from a classroom window, we were to give that student the opportunity to go outside, to broaden their thinking horizons. Maybe we would be able to expand our concept of importance, give focus to what has been consistently pushed into the backgrounds of our imaginations.Sara Gladwin, “Divergent Thinking,” December 2, 2012 (5:24 a.m.).

The weather is pretty miserable in the Philadelphia area this winter and spring, so we don’t get outside very much. We do relocate twice a week, however, in various buildings around campus.

On April 21, we gather in the common room of Radnor dormitory, which was the site of the stand-off around the Confederate flag. Radnor has also long been the site of the biggest party of the school year (and, as a result, also the site of occasional shutdowns, and fairly frequent disciplinary action); in short, it is the dorm that students, faculty, and administrators are least likely to associate with schoolwork. The common room has been well-decorated, with lots of Christmas, Halloween, and flower lights hanging at the entrance, above the fireplace, along all the walls.

The week before, we read Terry Tempest Williams’ memoir, An Unspoken Hunger.Terry Tempest Williams, An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field (New York: Vintage, 1994). In its aftermath, a member of this class writes,

our classes in academic institutions feel a little like going to church on Sundays: there are so many powerful, moving, ecological thoughts, but in the end we all leave the building and go home…. There isn’t much space made for intellectual thought to be brought into tangible practice. It’s not just the question of how we can effectively educate people, but also the question of how we can provide spaces and practices that embody thinking in doing… . It is scary to be vulnerable and honest with ourselves and each other…. Because in doing so, we realize that we have so much to sacrifice and let go of.“Earthquake Aftermath,” April 17, 2015 (8:05 p.m.).

Sitting in a circle in the Radnor common room, I ask class members to take turns reading this passage aloud. Midway through the course of this exercise, one of the students looks around the room, and says suddenly that the lights make her uncomfortable, because they remind her of Christmas—and she is not Christian. In response, another of the students immediately offers to turn off the lights. When she does this, the others seem to me disappointed, but—glad not to have to negotiate this division, which has caught me off-guard—I quickly re-direct our attention back to the text at hand.

Immediately after class, however, another student writes in our course forum:

I do want everyone to feel comfortable [and safe] in all of the spaces we share… . i think it’s important for every member of a community to be heard. so i’m also uncomfortable with a majority giving in to the wishes of a minority. every voice is not heard and respected in that situation either. consensus based decision making seems impossible on the scale of this entire campus, and too time consuming for our classroom, but i wonder if we can make a little more space for it in our lives.“consent/consensus,” April 22, 2015 (10:22 p.m.).

Recognizing this as a call to “make a little more space” in our class, I start our next session with the observation of yet another student that “thinking ecologically” has ceased, for her, to be about the environment, and more about collaborative and interactive process.Purple Finch, “Teach in Thoughts,” April 17, 2015 (12:52 a.m.). Following her lead, I say, we need to talk about our interactions, about how, in particular, we might adjudicate differences such as these that have arisen among us. The student who originally objected to the lights says that they are an explicit reminder of “Christians killing Jews”; one person’s “Christmas” lights have become another’s “Holocaust.” The student who posted says that she, too, is Jewish, but finds the lights a comfort; they make her feel that she belongs at Bryn Mawr. Yet another student observes that seeking “consensus” among these views might limit the range of our knowing. I posit that this tension is one we’d also seen in the fall, when the display of a Confederate flag by two Southern students, declared by them a sign of “home,” was read by most others on campus as an unequivocal symbol of racist segregation.

We all slip.

The structures with which we surround ourselves are slipping, too.

As Monica’s “(Short, Incomplete, and Often Invisible) History of Race and Higher Education” makes clear, these institutional structures are actually built on slippages.

The incorporation of racial diversity was not part of the original vision of Bryn Mawr; the views of its second president, M. Carey Thomas, who re-designed and re-directed the college’s mission, were both exclusionary and supremacist. According to research conducted by my friend and colleague Linda-Susan Beard, Thomas’s letters and speeches entwined “feminist ideology with talk of racial hierarchies,” her “views about Negroes and Jews” particularly discriminatory.Linda-Susan Beard. “The Other Bryn Mawr History: The M. Carey Thomas Legacy” (talk at The Community Day of Learning: Race and Ethnicity at Bryn Mawr and Beyond, March 18, 2014).

Coates: “America begins in black plunder and white democracy, two features that are not contradictory but complementary.”Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic (June 2014).

It takes most of our class time that day, but the students eventually arrive at a quantitative judgment: that one student’s pain outweighs the slight loss of pleasure experienced by the others.

I am very glad that we have this conversation. In directing the students outside the classroom, I had asked how much space and time we should give to interruptions not on the course agenda. Instead of the distractions I’d anticipated—“of wind, sun, rain, birdsong, and the voices of others nearby”—we have been brought back inside, to attend more directly to our interactions with one another.

Of course I also have the contradictory thought (which may well have occurred to you while reading this account) that, in focusing on how we handle differences among ourselves, we very well might be deflecting the even more overwhelming questions raised by the texts I assign for discussion this week: excerpts from Naomi Klein’s new book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate,Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014). and from Joanna Macy’s reflections on World as Lover, World as Self: Courage for Global Justice and Ecological Renewal.Joanna Macy, World as Lover, World as Self: Courage for Global Justice and Ecological Renewal (Berkeley: Parallax Press, 2007). These books ask us to reflect, respectively, on the mounting dangers of climate change, and of the storage of nuclear waste. We set these reflections aside, in order to talk about community making.

And yet. The two projects are closely intertwined. At semester’s end, one student writes a manifesto about this relationship:

The slow, amorphous, complex entities of climate change and environmental disaster upend conventional ways of teaching and learning. To grow empowered and thoughtful students, environmental education needs to provide shovels for us to dig deep into the way systems are set up, the way we live, as well as to inculcate a rich ethic of stewardship based on empathetic, compassionate encounter with both world and self.“Manifesto for Environmental Studies,” May 13, 2015 (6:45 p.m.).

As I and my students stumble and slip, re-framing, re-shaping and unsettling the systems in which we operate, I hear our work well described, once again, by Sara Ahmed:

We come up against the force and weight of something when we attempt to alter the conditions of an existence…when we do not “quite” inhabit the norms of an institution… . When we are…held up by how we inhabit what we inhabit, then the terms of habitation are revealed to us. We need to rewrite the world from the experience…of “being stopped”…from the point of view of those who do not flow into it… . Diversity work…can describe the effects of inhabiting institutional spaces that do not give you residence…being made into a stranger…not being at home in a category that gives residence to others.Ahmed, On Being Included, 175–77.

The student who felt “stopped” by those Christmas lights, which “made her into a stranger” at Bryn Mawr, writes up what has happened. In doing so, she records what we said in class not as statements made by individuals, but as “a collective undertaking”:

I tried to not assign opinions and emotions to people, but instead see this discussion and conflict as a joint issue/problem that…we all must confront… . In this exercise, I am claiming people’s ideas…not as my own, but as unowned, and flowing in through, between the collective.

I find what she calls her “political, social, racial, gender writing experiment”“Class Observation/Notes,” April 24, 2015 (12:53 a.m.). a wonderful, concrete example of using language to reflect a more interactive and collaborative way of thinking-and-enacting, one in which each of us assumes a role, not of insider or out, familiar or strange, but all co-habiting, re-shaping our institutional “residence” as we do so.

Conversations continue afterwards among pairs of students. Some of the differences among us are exacerbated, as classmates recognize how much their interests diverge, and they choose not to work together on their final collaborative projects; other differences among us get smoothed over during these last stages of the course. Slipping generates a range of different outcomes here than it did in the earlier course. I have a couple of ideas about why. It may be the (random?) capacity of this particular group of students to come together. It may be (more likely?) because the structure of this latter course invites the students to focus more on environmental matters than on individual ones. It is most likely because we are working long-term together over the course of the semester—rather than just visiting for a week, as we did in the village—that enables us to make productive use of the inevitability of messy slips in the classroom. We have an ongoing relationship, an ongoing commitment to working it out together, which gives us time to attend to, and clean up some of, the messes we make.