Cross-College Colleagues

I spent the afternoon yesterday with a couple of tremendous people: Steve Kaufman and Kathleen Devore over at Minneapolis Community and Technical College. Kathleen graciously allowed me to sit in on a class -- and even chime in with a story of my own, no matter a bit off-topic -- and observe her teaching, her students, her milieu. I learned about a book I'd never heard of: Contemporary Plays by Women of Color.

These kind of conversations and collaborations are absolutely essential, I think. It's so easy to get caught up with the issues on our own campuses, with our own colleagues, in our own classrooms. A simple visit to another college, to another colleague's classroom opens that trap we'd been "caught up" in.

It's risky, though: most of us don't like the idea of someone else observing our space, our interactions with our students: why is that? The ever-present fear of evaluation? Most of us have been graduate students where evaluation was personal, or so it seemed, and had serious ramifications. Others of us have been observed by deans and supervisors, folks whose job it is to grant us better or worse working conditions. Others of us are just private, I suppose, although a truly private person probably doesn't go into teaching much.

The biggest thing I learned, though, is something I keep learning over and over from my colleagues: that good teaching and learning happens in so many ways, through so many small and serendipitous events/acknowledgments/comments, with so many different kinds of people/artifacts/questions/constraints.