Black Hawk College Problem—I need an edit...please..ments...suggested cuts...HELP! (smile) Dear Dean, Union President, and AAEEO: Below you will see an email conversation I had with the chair of my department regarding the teaching of a traditional Nez Perce song that happens every semester in my humanities class. The singing never lasts more than five or six minutes. This morning, unlike any other time in about fourteen years, one of my colleagues, the chair of the department, aggressively responded to the singing portion of a lesson by banging on the wall himself or by having a student bang on the wall in order to silence a multicultural project every humanities group I have ever taught has experienced. In fourteen years, there has never been a negative response from any of my colleagues, even those who could hear me and the students singing because their rooms were next door. We live in a place where there are no reservations, so having this kind of multicultural experience is recognized as being quite unique, and the pedagogical methodology is well vetted (campus performances, collaborative experiences between Nez Perce people and the Quad Cities community, National Council of Teachers of English support, a school powwow, and so forth). I wrote a description of the events in an earlier post in order to seek advice regarding how to address this issue. I did what a family friend suggested. She advised me to not assume anything and to simply ask the chair an open-ended question like, “why was their banging on the wall this morning?” She also advised me to not get sucked into the aggressiveness of the interaction. That earlier description of the events (called “Explanation of Context”) follows this brief introduction and precedes the email correspondence. In order to keep the derogatory (objectifying) name calling and aggressive behavior from escalating, I have decided that, I will not teach the Titoquin (Indian) song this semester, though I believe being transferred to another room not adjacent to the chair’s room is also in order. That is, the overly aggressive response to the singing of a Nez Perce song, because it is part of a pattern, has moved me to silence the this multicultural project. This description of events will be sent to the dean. And I will also send the description to my Union representative and to the AAEEO. I will also check into getting a music room next semester where the students can learn the song and my chair will not again be moved toward the maintenance or escalation of such aggressive responses. Explanation of Context: Students in my humanities classes learn to sing a Nez Perce (Niimiipuu) song every semester as part of an exploration of Native American humanities. They used to learn two songs, but I eventually settled on their learning just one song. The experience includes an outreach component that allowed, over a nine-year period, a Nez Perce representative to provide authentic cultural experiences for hundreds of classes of students and several thousand community members. He would provide lectures. The outreach program included a school-sponsored powwow, and the National Council of Teachers of English opened a listserve that supported a national (actually global) discussion with well known scholars and Indian people (who exercised sovereignty over their knowledges) about Native American humanities traditions in which students from my classes here in Moline provided the foundation. Over the course of one semester, twenty-some students wrote more than 3000 pages of discussions related to the idea of Nez Perce humanities. Eventually, the school funding for such events was reduced, and the outreach program was minimized substantially. The singing got loud sometimes: There was never a complaint from a colleague or an administrator. In fact, I was awarded the Black Hawk College Diversity Award for my efforts. Nowadays, I simply continue the in-class Native American humanities portion of the experience, the foundational project that gave rise to the much larger projects. The students and I sing a traditional song, spacing the lessons out to about one every couple weeks. Every lesson is the same: the students and I sing the song four times, just like I used to do in the sweat house with my Niimiipuu uncles and my brothers and my dad. I teach the students how to learn a song. I also lecture on Nez Perce humanities specifically and Native American humanities in general. By the second or third lesson (week six or so), most students can sing along with me. By the end of the semester, most students have the song memorized. One time, a group of ladies softball players who were behind in a game sang the song: they won. Individual students have “sat in” with other traditional drummers, both in the Quad Cities and across the nation. I have done this some twenty-eight semesters. Every once in awhile, a problem arises, but never with faculty. In the past, students would point and laugh at the humanities students as they sang. Every once in awhile, a student would hit the walls of the room where we are singing (which used to be downstairs in the ILC area in room 101G, from which two years ago the chair or assistant chair moved my class without explanation). Every once in awhile, I find out that the traditional song is not appreciated...to the point of aggressively threatening action. This time, however, the aggressive banging came from the room where the current department chair teaches, and it happened just after a young student had started the song. It was the first time in twenty-four semesters that a student started (sang solo) the song this early in the process. He had really been working on it. This hostility is part of a continuous pattern of aggressions that has included removing classes from my teaching assignments without notification, changing my rooms without notification, and telling me I am insane (a claim immediately followed by questioning me as to why I was planning on discussing the issue of dual credit with the Illinois Community College Board members in charge of that program). I think it is safe to say that the students were somewhat shocked. I had told them that such things happened when the presentation of a subjugated knowledge is encountered by people who are ideologically committed to dominant knowledge. Naturally, I used the wall-banging incident as an opportunity to facilitate a teaching moment, telling the students about how my Niimiipuu family members and friends have to deal with that kind of hostility on a daily basis and how those same people have helped me to understand the need to work against prejudice and ignorance. I wish I could say this is just a case of a minor indiscretion, but it is far worse than that. First, it seems quite likely that the chair either succumbed to this loss of control in front of his students, or he directed a student to do his bidding. Either of those choices indicate a loss of emotional control, especially if you could imagine that simply walking out of his classroom, crossing the ten feet between his room and mine, knocking on my classroom door, and then politely asking me to lower the tone of my singing could be considered a reasonable and controlled response. Beyond that, it was an unjustified response: There have been music-based events at the school this semester that were quite loud, loud enough to be heard in any location of Building 1 (where the two of us teach). Those events went on for much longer than any song the students and I sing. Moreover, the humanities class also includes opera music, which can get much louder than the singing and lasts continuously for a couple of weeks. None of those musical experiences or other aspects of the course ever received the kind of threatening response delivered by or at the request of the department chair. That is, the chair never made proportionally aggressive responses to the other musical interruptions of his classroom interactions. Again, the Nez Perce song usually only lasts about six minutes, and the chair is fully aware that the students are learning a traditional Native American song presented as part of a Native American humanities unit. He has known that for years. And to conclude, he was, to the best of my knowledge, the one who made the current room assignment. Regardless, if he did not make the room assignment, he could certainly have requested a room change last year that would have prevented his perceived need to aggressively demonstrate his absorbance of traditional Native American singing. Email Correspondence: #1 On Sep 30, 2014, at 6:25 PM, Leonhardy, Galen wrote: Chairperson, This morning during class (around 8:08 a.m. or so) there was a banging on the classroom wall. Do you know why there was a banging on the wall? Galen #2 From: Chair of Department Sent: Tuesday, September 30, 2014 8:25 PM To: Leonhardy, Galen Subject: Re: Banging on Walls? Galen, Do you know why there was a very loud caterwauling from the other side of the wall that made any type of concentration in the room I was in impossible? I do know that after the banging ceased so did the caterwauling. My students were relieved. We could get back to work. Chair
Posted on: Wed, 01 Oct 2014 04:39:40 +0000
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