Experience shapes who we are as individuals and is important to use as valuable means of connection; connection to self, others, and education. bell hooks (1994) would also argue that pedagogical practices in higher education should change so that our students learn to engage more fully the ideas and issues that actually do have relation to their experience: “Critical pedagogies of liberation respond to these concerns and necessarily embrace experience, confessions and testimony as relevant ways of knowing, as important, vital dimensions of any learning process” (p. 89).
Have you ever listened to a story about your grandmother, or great grandmother? These histories provide valuable learning opportunities. These experiences, positive or negative, are what shapes individual identity. We must listen to our histories, ask questions, and talk about our experiences with our families, our teachers and students to begin to connect and learn about each other and on a larger scale, connect with our peers in formal educational settings. Any experience could be a priceless lesson. Experiences shape who our students and families are and who we are as individuals. With better a knowledge and understanding of who we are we, formal classroom settings should allow students and teachers to speak from the voice of experience and connect in different ways. Consequently when pedagogical practices allow for this type of connection to take place it helps students own their understanding about subjects being studied. Unfortunately this is not usually the case. Families do not listen to each other, students are silenced when they question what they are learning, and teachers adopt what Paolo Friere calls the banking model as pedagogy in the classrooms.
As a woman it is even more important that my pedagogical practice changes so that I don’t silence myself or my students and our experiences as women and men are validated as culturally distinct (even where essentially similar) and pertinent to educational experience for all. Women and men are different, not just in sex characteristics, but in how professors often shape their pedagogical practices towards suppressing differences in how each gender learns. Ultimately, pedagogy tends to genderize traits negatively towards females Jane Roland Martin (1985) says we must worry about trait genderization and how it is used in informal and formal institutions to maintain the male dominating hierarchical structure.
"Otherwise we can expect females to continue to be caught in the middle of a war between educational goals and processes based on the assumption that sex is a difference that makes no difference, on the one hand, and cultural images and expectations that assume sex is the difference that makes that makes a difference, on the other hand (p. 36)."
It is not our sex, but our differences in learning who we are and how we learn from our experiences as men and women in cultures that insist on there being a difference that should also be considered.
As mentioned above it is especially important in university settings because, often, there is one kind of learning that is privileged. Adrienne Rich (1979) asserts that white male experience is taught in the universities.
"One of the devastating weaknesses of university learning, of the store of knowledge and opinion that has been handed down through academic training, has been its almost total erasure of women’s experience and thought from the curriculum, and its exclusion of women as members of the academic community (p. 232)."
In order to investigate the claim that people identifying with different genders learn differently, while simultaneously valuing experience as a learning tool, I conducted a few informal interviews, the most important of which was with my grandmother. This project of looking at my grandmother’s experiences under the microscope is about exploring more about where my ways of knowing come from; why is listening to my grandmother’s voice so important? How does it shape my mission to change current pedagogical practices to be more inclusive and open to listening to experience within the classroom?
When I was younger, I did not know why it was so important that my grandmother told stories about her family. I didn’t see the value of her experience; Now I believe I value this more because I see that my grandmother knows more about what would shape my identity. By sharing the family’s history and most importantly the choices women made in the family, my grandmother was teaching me about who we were and most importantly how we should respect the experiences and choices that women make. For example, she respects my decision to stay in school rather than start a family, as I respect her decision to stay with her mother rather than go to college. This is similar to what the authors of Women’s Ways of Knowing speaks about:
"Both the story and the actualities of family life change because parents and children evolve in tandem, supporting and challenging each other to develop ever more complex ways of knowing as they play out their lives together. Children encourage the development of parents as much as parents encourage the development of children (Belenky et. al., 1997, p 156)."
This is the process of how informal education takes place. My goal is to get teachers to acknowledge the process of supporting and challenging each other in developing ways of knowing. What the authors of Women’s Ways of Knowing suggest happens in informal settings can also happen between students and teachers. This idea is exemplified in my interview with my grandmother.
During the interview I asked her about what she remembers about education growing up in the small town of Jonesboro, Texas. I asked Nanny if education was important. She answered emphatically:
Yes, it was…My mother was a fairly educated women for her day. My father wasn’t. But she had actually gone to college a little. She went to Tyler Junior College. Then her father became ill and she returned home. There was nobody left at home but boys, two little boys. Her other sisters had gotten married. Her mother had died from childbirth complications at age forty-two and I don’t blame her. She had to feed [all those children] and take care of the farm. Women were slaves…taking care of the farm, and they even milked the cow…It was a hard job being on the farm. [When she was younger, my mother’s] sisters taught her how to be a good housekeeper, seamstress, and all that.. She was one of 10 or so kids.
My grandmother insists that education was important because of the role education played in her own mother’s informal and formal schooling. Below, she only speaks of only formal schooling when I ask her to describe her education:
We didn’t have a big school, probably about 100 kids 1-11 grade. We had fun and we loved our teachers. We played ball. No one got in trouble we just had fun. There were some parents who kept their children to pick cotton, but they needed them to help out. When ever we got through with school we would go home and help pick cotton and make some money. My mother never kept us out of school. That is how much it meant to her.
My grandmother never went to college and she regrets not going. In fact, she even calls herself stupid about not going. This is not the first time I have heard my grandmother call herself stupid.
Certainly I have regretted that all my life because I loved to learn. The deal was we were stupid. [Mother and I] moved to Hamilton. If we had just moved to Stephenville where the college was. We were stupid not to go to Stephenville. We didn’t think of it. If we had of I probably would have gone to school. She might of, too. That is how much she thought it was important. We can’t rewrite a book over. But I did go to school later…out at TCJC [Tarrant County Junior College] sometimes, just as a senior citizen or to Weatherford College.
My grandmother describes herself before she had children, “I never did have much of a care free life because mother and I were alone. We had to take care of the farm by ourselves after dad left.” Indeed, a woman who has experienced such pain in her life as a father abandoning her and feeling an overwhelming pressure to care for her mother would have much to say about the differences between men and women. This is what shapes my grandmother’s identity and who she is right now. These are experiences that are not only in my grandmother’s sphere but also in other women’s worlds and they need to be listened to and shared. They are the testimonies that bell hooks refers to above. There is value in both the informal and formal education my grandmother was incapable of claiming which is why she denigrates herself and calls herself stupid.
When I asked my grandfather who the smartest person he knew was, he said,
Nanny…she is the smartest person I know. She knows just about everything. she can explain everything. If it hadn’t have been for mom, we wouldn’t have been here today. Even though I made a lot of things happen, she helped me along the way. I think she is the best thing that ever happened to me.
Nanny did help Pa along the way; she helped him with his contracting business by managing books and dealing with clients. She has proved her “smarts” often so that even the whole family knows she is a very intelligent woman with many experiences to share—one’s that I value more now.
If my grandmother had been a women who was interviewed by Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, and Tarule (1997) in Women’s Ways of Knowing, she would have been included in what they call the “received knowers” epistemological position. She remained self-less in devotion to others.
"Thinking that everything must be ‘either/or,’ the received knowers assume that in times of conflict between the self and others, they must choose one or the other but not both. Women worry that if they were to develop their own powers it would be a the expense of others. Not only are they concerned to live up to the cultural standards that hold that women should be listeners, subordinate, and unassertive; but they also worry that if they excel, those they love will automatically be penalized…Men choose the self and women choose others (Belenky et. al., 1997, p. 46)."
My grandmother understands that men are more about self than women. She refers to this difference concerning the experiences that they each are allowed to have depending on men and their “freedom” to make choices. When I asked my grandmother what it meant to be a man and a woman, she responded,
[Being a man] means freedom; freedom to leave four children with a sick wife. (meaning her dad) But it also means you have a lot of responsibility. It overpowers men to have five people depending on you and you having to clothe them. I think my father was just mentally ill and he just left. But also it could be like Pa. He got up about four thirty every morning to go to work. He had four children and had lots of fun with a lake house and giving them presents. Every man stands unto himself, makes what he wants to out of life.
A woman starts out as a baby girl, then grows up because of the culture she’s in that she is the caretaker of the family and her world. Many girls don’t feel that way and don’t have to, and I am not talking about everybody, only myself. They grow up and have kids and grandkids for their own.
This knowledge that my grandmother has gives voice to other women who have similar feelings of being silenced by the knowledge that for women it is about caring for others.
Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, and Tarule (1997) describe their definition of voice and silence: “By telling us about their voice and silences, by revealing to us how much they could hear and learn from the ordinary and everyday, women told us about their views of the world and their place in it” (p. 19). Now after hearing my grandmother explain her decision to stay with her mom instead of going to college, I am less frustrated with the circumstances and more respectful of her decision out of strength in making that choice. She does not see it that way, however. In fact my grandmother is clear that she lived in silence to keep her family together. My grandmother told me during a recent visit back to Texas that she thinks staying silent through stressful times in her marriage gave her breast cancer therefore she is more aware of her self, her feelings, and how powerful voice can be.
When I asked my grandmother how she sees herself now, she talks about her experience as a mother: her three sons and daughter were her life. Indeed, this is the experience of which she is most proud: “I have some regrets because I didn’t go to school. I still learned and read and wrote. I feel that my children were my life. And I did a great job. They had excellent citizenship marks in school. They were very respectful.” While my grandmother measures her accomplishments with the citizenship marks her children made in school, I believe that a woman’s responsibility is more of what Adrienne Rich (1979) articulates,
"Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you…Responsibility to yourself means that you don’t fall for shallow and easy solutions—predigested books and ideas, weekend encounters guaranteed to change your life, taking ‘gut’ courses instead of ones you know will challenge you, bluffing at school and life instead of doing solid work, marrying early as an escape from real decisions, getting pregnant as an evasion of already existing problems (p.233-234)."
Women will continue listening to other people’s experiences, connecting and learning from these experiences. More importantly what I have learned from this exploration of my grandmother’s experiences is that voice and experience has a place in not only informal settings but in formal classrooms. This type of experience is valuable and instructors should make every effort to value it. One way of doing this is through what Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, and Tarule (1997) call “the connected class.”
"The connected class recognizes the core of truth in the subjectivist view that each of us has a unique perspective that is in some sense irrefutably ‘right’ by virtue of its existence. But the connected class transforms these private truths into ‘objects,‘ publicly available to the members of the class who, through ‘stretching and sharing,’ add to themselves as knowers by absorbing in their own fashion of their classmates’ ideas (p. 223)."
This type of connected class is a change in how traditional college classrooms are held. As bell hooks (1994) suggests, “Allow your students, or yourself [as professor or teacher], to talk about experience; sharing personal narratives yet linking that knowledge with academic information really enhances our capacity to know” (p. 148). She elaborates that when one comes to their own voice in the act of telling about their own experience you can begin to speak freely about other subjects like race, class, and language (hooks, 1994). Connected teaching allows student and teachers alike to gain a stronger voice of subjective knowledge. That voice when allowed to speak from experience will help students grow and begin to feel more a part of their own learning as a person rather than an objective listener. Teachers need to open up their classrooms to allow personal experience in and allow opportunities to connect that experience with the subjects being learned. True learning can only take place when connections are made; connections between people and the texts they might be reading. When students are allowed to share their voice of experience, knowledge and experiences are shared without dominating or suppressing pedagogical practice, they begin questioning which is critical in connecting and understanding the subject.
References
Interview. Wilmuth Mavinee Box Johnson. November 21, 2004.
Interview. Lester Lee Johnson. November 21, 2004
Belenky, M. F., Clinchy, B. M., Goldberger, N. R., & Tarule, J. M. (1997). Women's Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind. New York: BasicBooks.
hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge.
Martin, J. R. (1985). Reclaiming a Conversation: The Ideal of the Educated Woman. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Rich, A. (1979). Claiming and Education. In On Lies, Secrets, and Silence (pp. 231-235). New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
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