Is that So? Professional Development, Equanimity, and the Life Path of Faculty (Sebastian, #27)
Field notes: Teaching Climate Change in Higher Education
Sometimes, when I think that higher ed in the United States is really falling apart fast, with absolutely zero vision for meeting the planetary climate crisis that unfolding before our eyes, I visit websites of small, alternative colleges. Just to ground myself, and think for a minute. I love colleges like Deep Springs, where residential students do 20 hours of farm labor every week in tandem with rigorous, democratically designed, seminar-style academics, or Sterling College, which dedicates its entire mission to addressing the climate crisis. (Sterling College now sends me emails thinking I’m a prospective student, not realizing that I am a lurker, or some kind of super nerdy administrative fangirl.)
I know that it’s like comparing apples and oranges, or grapefruits and grapes, or durian and wild blueberries. But my eyes go wide when I read Sterling College President Matthew Derr’s recent blog post, where he writes:
Higher education cannot continue to be addicted to growth and consumption and address the contemporary problems we face in the United States and hope to regain public confidence in the role we fulfill for society. If colleges and universities continue to be the source of training and inspiration for an extractive economy that robs our graduates and the communities in which they live of the futures we promise, while failing to give them the education they need to contend with the ecological and social challenges they face, we will betray our obligation to this and future generations. The seizure of the planet’s natural wealth for financial gain must become a moral concern for college and university presidents and trustees. It is worth noting that the zoonotic, animal origins, of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, resulting in the loss of and dislocation of the lives of millions of people is attributable to the encroachment of people into wild spaces and the deterioration of our appreciation for the role humans play in the natural ecological systems of which we are all a part.
Can you hear the standing ovation of the seventh generation? Why does it still feel sometimes like the sound of one hand clapping?
According to this nice map by the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, there are 4,726 accredited colleges and universities in the U.S. 1700 of them are two-year colleges. When it comes to sustainability, 671 U.S. institutions have a STARS rating from AASHE. Only 9 are Platinum stars, places like ASU (of course), Stanford, and UC Irvine. I should add that there are many many gold ratings, and that my own campus conducted a preliminary STARS and brushed up against Bronze. (But we will do better next year now that we know what we know and more importantly know what we don’t know. It’s all about data, because as I like to say, we measure what matters… and everything matters. There’s also the Princeton Green rankings. I have some friends who work in the Top 50 — places like Oberlin (of course), Dickinson, Whitman, PSU, and Berkeley.
Of course, there’s money involved in being a green school, and it’s easier for a private school than a public, but really, there’s a lot of variety — big schools, even mega schools like ASU (but not always); and rich schools, even elite ones like Stanford (but not always); and vision-driven schools like Oberlin (but, not always). There are many elements needed to make sustainability transformation work in higher education.
The areas that I encounter most frequently, because I focus on curriculum:
- Professional Development : structures and experiences to support faculty in course design, teaching practice, assessment, learning new content and maintaining currency in their disciplines.
- Administrative Support: Banner codes, scheduling, course catalog descriptions. Things that registrars and department chairs do.
- Faculty governance: sometimes faculty senate meetings can be downright scary.
- Community Partnerships: IMHO, this is what really makes sustainability curriculum work, whether through service-learning, undergraduate research, internships, or other ways that nonprofits and informal education sites work with a university.
My chancellor has a term for the people who say “no” to everything (and there are a lot of them). She calls them redlights. Occasionally, a redlight person is actually doing a good job: being meticulous about records and systems is good, being protective of information is sensible, being reluctant to overcommit is good practice. Being under a delusional spell of climate denial and neoliberalism is….pretty common. A Greenlight, on the other hand, is me, who gets super excited about new ideas and loves pilot projects and thrives in an environment of change.
My friend Shanah Trevenna wrote this great book of axioms for sustainability work called Surfing Tsunamis of Change: a Handbook for Change Agents (2011). It’s a real gem, and I was honored to write the preface. It’s a case study, and organized around 33 Axioms for creating change in higher education. Shanah taught me these axioms early in my sustainability work: things like to always give all the credit away, how to pilot and then scale, how to follow the Pull and not the Push.That’s the one that’s been the most helpful to me. In other words, if something doesn’t work — back off from it, pursue another angle. Go with the flow.
This week, when I interviewed Sebastian, who teaches writing, for the Teaching Climate Change Study it really stood out to me how he described what it’s like to be teaching complex issues related to the climate crisis, or what Sebastian would call Earth Literacy, in this time. He said:
“I’m worried about the climate and the future of the earth. But I think I have a spiritual perspective where things are sort of going to happen the way they’re going to happen. It’s important to do what you can do so that people are not hurt and so that people take care of each other, but I sometimes feel that there’s not much that we can do. We are on this apocalyptic trajectory. But the earth is going to be okay. We may not be, as a species, and I don’t want that to become nihilism, but it is honestly part of how all this climate stuff has affected me spiritually. To do what you believe is the right thing. To care for people, To have compassion, to try to contribute to your community and to do all these things but not to have a meltdown over something that we perhaps cannot do anythign about. How can we gracefully just BE with the situation that is.”
Like me, Sebastian teaches composition and literature courses. (He is the third writing teacher that I have interviewed (here you can read about Willa and Carrie.) Composition is a unique space where you are teaching a skill and practicing a writing process, but you can really write about anything, and engaging with meanginful topics is important. I have mentored many faculty who come up from the entry level rank of Instructor, and I intersect with them at faculty development institutes, or peer-evaluation, or new faculty orientations, or through our sustainability curriculum committee. However, Sebastian is unique because he started his tenure track position with thirteen years of experience at another community college, so I can learn from his there and how they formed his career and identity as a teacher.
He had experience with formative Professional Development through Miami Dade’s Global Sustainability Earth Literacy Program. He also worked with the Narrow Ridge Earth Literacy Foundation in Tennessee. (I’m adding Narrow Ridge to my bookmarks list of websites to go to for inspiration.) But again, it’s Durians and Blueberries. How do you do radical transformative earth literacy work in the context of a workforce-driven multiversity? I‘m obsessed with the institutional level and the global big picture. That’s my role right now.
But teachers like Sebastian just stay focused on their practice.
Think of teaching as a personal practice, like meditating. The autonomy of college faculty work provides a wide landscape for constant reflection and analysis: it’s reading the world. Sebastian uses writers like Bill McKibben, and TV shows like The 100 and poems, and YouTube videos, and museum exhibits and, well, just life, all become part of his curriculum. Developing an assignment where students first name a place that has water (think: a beach, a lake); then they research it; then they write a poem about it, and this all gets skillfully layered for them using open sentences and, in this remote learning era, apps like Padlet.
Teaching is like creating a labyrinth for students to walk. You carefully create this path for them, using shells or rocks or masking tape, and then you pace them through the turns, they arrive in the center, they find their own way out.
Sebastian described his teaching to me: “I ask myself, who am I as a scholar, a teacher, and a person, and what do I have to offer?” Professional development, at all levels but particularly for junior faculty, needs to be an experience at that personal level.
“The professional development experiences I’ve had have been profound….the visionary sort of understanding that these leaders had, which is that, you can’t just talk about this suff. It requires a shift in your worldview, a shift in your heart and in your spirit, so they found these amazing teachers who were able to create experiences for faculty.”
He added that skills training — like writing student learning outcomes statements, or understanding Title IX, or getting better at engaging on Zoom, is valuable as well, but development is something different, a transformative experience. He said, “Even in ideal circumstances, it doesn’t always work.”
“For me, it was being able to step out of the institutional space and learn about this stuff as a person, not as a faculty member or a part of a committee. These were heart-felt experiences that are still rippling in my life.”
Sebastian told me a Zen story. It’s titled, “Is that So?” You can read a great version of it here, but this is how Sebastian told it to me: “There’s a monk who somebody brings a baby to, and he’s accused of being the father of the baby, but he’s not, everybody’s angry at him and they say he has to take care of the baby and he says ‘I will’, and then like five years later, the community discovers that he’s not the father of the baby he didn’t do anything wrong, and they come back to him and they say, we are so sorry, we found the family, and with the same equanimity he just returns the baby.”
Faculty development, according to Alex, is a journey that leads to experiencing equanimity.
Student says his grandmother has Covid and he can’t make the final. Teacher says, “is that so?”
Student says she’s super excited to apply for a big scholarship. Teacher says, “is that so?”
Faculty member says they want to add a sustainability designation to their course. Department chair says “is that so?”
Chancellor says he wants to achieve AASHE platinum. Operations manager says, “Is that so?”
Faculty will likely be furloughed and their pay cut. “is that so?”
State budget is 2 billion dollars in the red because of the collapse of tourism due to a global pandemic. “Is that so?”
And so on. An academic koan about Equanimity.
