Letter to Alice

Woman's hand with pen and letters with cup of coffee on desk.
August 13, 2024

2000

In my last blog I wrote about a special and timely letter from Alice. I thought about writing to her, and, in the spirit of miracles, I got around to it.

October 16, 2000

Dear Ali,

As I write you I am settling into a Chicago hotel restaurant. I am trying to imagine your response when you receive this letter from me. Let me begin by telling you I retrieved the letter that you wrote to me in October 1991 from a special place. I call this place my teacher memory box. Your letter to me has become an artifact and field text for the doctoral thesis I am currently writing.

I want to tell you the ways that your 1991 letter brought meaning to my life. In 1989 – not long after you were a student in my class – I moved into a college administrative position, which was followed shortly by a request to coordinate and teach in community college programs on an armed forces base in Germany. I jumped at the opportunity to leave my life in Canada and live a European experience. While setting up new programs, recruiting students, and teaching during the weekdays I travelled extensively through Europe on the weekends. I worked and played hard, got quite sick, and felt absolutely horrible about having to return home to Canada prematurely. I was eventually diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome.

You might empathize with my disappointment. I am reminded of some of the difficulties in your life when you were a student in my classroom. I remember your fear about the possibility of losing your eyesight.

On returning home, and this is where your letter comes in, I had little certainty about where I was going to live. I had given up my apartment, my fiancée, and my new job in administration. I returned to Canada on a scary military flight to Ottawa, and then into Toronto, where seeing the CN Tower actually warmed my heart.

After living through a period of bunking at other people’s places, I finally landed back at the apartment complex I left prior to my leave-taking, but with a much smaller apartment. This time around there was no fresh paint or wallpaper, and no view of the ravine. Soon after I arrived home I was robbed and some of the special things I brought home from Europe were stolen.

I was having a very disappointing time all round. Then your letter arrived. I coined the term “miracle letter” because it felt as if the words and your connection came at a time when I was feeling quite lost.

I have thought about writing you a number of times. The puzzles that I have about a community college educator’s professional identity took me back to my teacher memory box and your letter. The questions that I bring to my thesis are the catalyst for my writing to you now. I have been thinking about relationships in teaching – relationships between students and educators, and educators and their colleagues. Some of the adult education literature suggests the relationship between educators and their students should be autonomous. In the first eight years of my teaching and up until I moved into the post-secondary sector of the college, I sought, and I believe for the most part, found autonomous relationships with the students I worked with in the classroom.

I was wondering if you have reflected and thought about when you were a student returning to the classroom after being out of school for a number of years. I can still picture the classroom that you were in. The way my memory has it, you sat mostly to the right side of the curve in the u-shaped classroom chair formation. I remember the faces of the two women with whom you spent your time. Kate, the swimmer, and I’ve forgotten the name of the other woman, though I can still picture her face. Perhaps you remember the laughter in the class, and how sometimes a student named Pete used to make us all laugh. I also remember a class session on loneliness, and that, on some days, there were also tears.

Several months after receiving your letter after I was up and around again, I intentionally sought you out. I visited your store. I remember the gift that I purchased for my sister who was having her first baby. Perhaps the woman at the cash passed on my message.

As I write to you, I have considered the multiple dimensions there are to this letter and the one you wrote to me nine years ago. I am reminded about the complexity of each of our lives, and also of the complexity of classroom life. This is partly what my thesis is about. I won’t go on since this letter has already become longer than I intended. Perhaps you’ll read this letter in bite-size pieces, or when you have a quiet moment to yourself.

Classroom with green board and formula in chalk with microscope and magnifying glass.

Alice’s letter sits in this document, and when I reflect on it again, I’m pulled to employ the attributes of social media to find her. If I find her, I’ll let you know.

At Home with Dewey in Newstart: Subject Matter

Beginning with my initial orientation to teaching in community based programs within the non-formal educational program in the institutional structure of the community college system, I readily adopted the Deweyian perspective (1938) that the school is a form of community life. My initial teaching experiences in community based programs provided the students and myself with continuity between the home environment and the school situation. The curriculum and teaching methodology was real and vital. I utilized the Newstart Life Skills teaching model that I encountered during an intensive Life Skills Coach training program. My initial teaching experience with Newstart Life Skills was partnered with a counselling modality. Just as Dewey (1938) sees it, the subject matter of a life skills education program is a process of living and moral training. The Newstart (1973) definition of life skills are “problem solving behaviours appropriately and responsibly used in the management of personal affairs” (p. 1). As outlined in the Newstart literature, the curriculum in life skills consists of five key categories: self, family, job, community and leisure. The life experiences of the students within these five categories were the foundation for learning problem solving skills and applying them to real-life situations within the classroom setting. The classroom experience was applied directly to the students’ life situation both inside and outside the college milieu. Lessons in problem-solving behaviours evolved from the student’s issues and concerns with their real-life experiences. Turning again to Dewey’s (1939) notion of human communities, which come into being with interconnected action, and communication as the “most wonderful of affairs” (p. 385), our students were encouraged to connect, and explore with others their personal experiences as they related to their lives at home and in the workplace. Problems or challenges the students were encountering in their personal lives outside the five categories also became part of the course content.

Following Dewey’s (Dewey and Ratner, 1939) distinction between “joint activity” as a condition of the creation of a community and “communal life” (p. 387), students were encouraged to bring their emotional and intellectual selves into the classroom. Personal resources and newly acquired skills of the students were continually utilized in the application of group problem-solving skills for the resolution of the shared problem.

There was ongoing evaluation of the students’ application of skills throughout the entire process. This evaluation was for the most part, informal and took on many forms. We met students individually and in case conferences. My teaching colleagues and I also entered into conversations with the students and their referring worker. Through written and verbal feedback sessions in the life skills, job search and vocational exploration components, students received many opportunities to see themselves through the eyes of their peers. Students often saw themselves through the lens of the video camera, which was used on a regular basis to offer feedback.

Dewey’s notion that “There is no mystery about the fact of association, of an interconnected action which affects the activity of singular elements” (1939, p. 365) follows my initial orientation to teaching, which was the application and bridging of the outside and inside situation. The following classroom story, telling about a student who brings a real-life dilemma into the classroom community, captures Dewey’s notion about the interconnection between action and association.

Judy was a small woman. Her face was thin and she had tired eyes. Her skin tone was light with freckles, no make-up and her hair tucked behind her ears to keep it from falling into her eyes.

The content of the life skills class was the five-step problem-solving model. In order to put the model to the test, and allow the students to apply it, I asked for a volunteer to share a problem for our application. Judy, who was the newest student in this continuous intake program, volunteered her problem.

During the process of attempting to define the problem Judy shared that her boyfriend, whose name she withheld, was in prison at the present time and about to be released. I don’t recall all of his crimes, but he was charged with bodily and physical assault toward Judy. Judy told us she knows that her boyfriend has a gun and she fears that he will come looking for her when he gets out of jail.

During the information gathering stage of the problem-solving model I was beginning to feel afraid that I was in this over my head. I remember thinking, ‘here we have a very frightened woman, of whom I knew nothing, telling us she knew she was going to be hunted down and killed.’

The session was exhausting. I remember noticing that all of the students were engaged in this woman’s terrible dilemma. She trusted no one. She did not trust the police and her experience was that peace bonds don’t work. She had every confidence that her boyfriend would find out where she was. (She had just moved to this community to maintain her anonymity.) As she described her life, that of a woman owned by a motor cycle gang to which her boyfriend belonged.

There appeared to be no way out. It was easy to empathize with her pain and sense of being trapped. I recall trying to keep a balance in the group, conscious that her story not take the life out of the discussion.

During the telling of the story, Judy began to shake and cry. We allowed her. She told the group that she has never felt support and kindness like this before. As she spoke, she sobbed. Though she did not disclose names and specific details – she was very street smart and she saw danger in disclosing – she started to hear, and seemed to accept, support from some of the men and women in the group. I remember there being ‘an energy’ in the group that I have never come to experience again.

It felt like there was a collective experience of a wide range of emotions. The morning session spilled over into the students’ lunch hour and no one seemed to notice. The challenge for me was to establish closure – when and how can I pull this ‘ energy’ back in, meet some of Judy’s needs, the needs of the group and even my own needs? (I was exhausted – the kind when I feel I could cry.) As the session was wrapping up, I recall one of my male colleagues entering the room and saying something like “Wow! You can really feel the energy in here!” He opened his arms and gave me a huge hug. I needed that. (OISE Course 1300, Audiotape Transcription, July 1995).

Two women sharing a desk at an adult education class look up

In the role of  teacher, I embraced the practicalities of the term life skills coach adopted from my Newstart Training (Training Research and Development Station, 1973). I did this in an attempt to breach the distance between the adult student and the educator, especially for learners with histories of negative school and learning experiences, which were deemed unsuccessful. I began to think of myself as a facilitator of change, a change agent. For many of these learners, teachers and formal learning environments still held negative connotations, and for this reason, the job readiness programs were housed off campus.

When I was teaching and learning with students like Mark, Alice and Judy, I participated in the formation of the social life of the classroom similar to what Dewey describes in My Pedagogical Creed (1938). The creed or belief is the vehicle Dewey uses to explain that education is the ongoing interaction of the individual and the social conditions of the community life that encompasses the individual. As a social servant and a member of the community, the teacher ensures that the students’ natural powers are channeled. Education is seen as a process of living, a continuing reconstruction of experience. Through exposure to the “experience,” or the subject matter in academic upgrading, life skills and career exploration, individuals like Mark, Alice and Judy grew, progressed, and emerged as a moral member of the community.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *