It's true: I may never really use my undergraduate education. Well, at least not in the traditional sense. I didn't learn business skills (though, rumor has it, neither do the students at Haas), I didn't learn how to farm, or to litigate, or program, or whatever it is people in our service economy should know how to do nowadays. My thesis on the political underpinnings of the agricultural production of Mexico sits gathering dust on my shelf while I try to run a school-based non-profit on the virtues of sweat and enthusiasm alone (the food policy think tanks weren't hiring). I may never be asked to recall the name of Gramsci's seminal work or define his concept of the intellectual. Yet in a way, these ideas still linger, even today as I shoved our copy machine back across the room at the office.
When I first moved in to my office, I had grand plans: not just for program development, but for record-keeping and even the office layout. In the mornings, before my part-time coworker got in, I moved the furniture about, making the place my own. It was ridiculous to have the copier all the way across the room, I thought, when I can make a study corner there near that built-in table. A recent college grad, I was ambitious, with a burning desire to do things right, and do them right now. Of course, in order to move the copier, new furniture was needed, which we scavenged from the sidewalk and my coworker's apartment. The awkward setup filled up with paper, and the other tables would overflow with printed material whenever we would need to assemble large packets of paperwork. Meanwhile, my study corner was used only sometimes, the books it housed were out of the way and underutilized.
Now, the end of the year, I once again had a bug to reorganize. I used some left-over grant money to get closet organizers for our art supplies, and once again started in on redoing the office layout. This time I asked my coworker what she thought of the new copier location (now perched precariously on top of the extra computer desk), and we hemmed and hawed over the perfect location. A few days later everything was arranged, and I noticed with a sigh of resignation that the copier was once again back in its original location, the shelves across the room restored to theirs. It would give us more room to make copies and lay out our supplies, and with the bookshelf back towards the center of the room kids could more easily find what they needed. "Makes sense," said my friend, who used to work there. "That's why we had everything there in the first place." Of course, this renewed setup came with modifications: the power cord to the copier no longer stretched across the doorway, and the stack of literature was switched with textbooks on shelves, with everything positioned to ease access and make them child-friendly.
The placement of a copier is a trivial thing to worry about. If anything, however, it serves to think about how we are in the world and, most especially, how my work in a non-profit can build upon the resources there or fight against them. It is easy to come in to a space, a school, a community, and tell people what you think is best. But it is a whole different thing to involve yourself wholly, to watch, to listen, sometimes for years, and to then act with people to make changes and help achieve what is needed. My ideas can be grand, but if they don't work for the students I am trying to serve then they don't really serve them at all. Decision makers, wrote Gramsci, must engage with everyday understandings, from pop culture to, in my case, study habits. While there are many possibilities for change out there, they are contained within the local and historical conditions in which they are located. This includes the environments in which my kids grew up in, the relationships they've had, and their way of interacting with the world. As a program coordinator, and as a mentor, I can't go in expecting to change things. I have to really pay attention to how things work and how we can build upon them to improve.
In this way, college taught me to be a a critical thinker. I mean this not just in the same trivial sense that college teaches you how to bullshit on assignments or spellcheck for grammar. An undergraduate education in development studies taught me to think about how I am in the world, and what impact (for better or worse) my actions can have on the developing world around us.
When I first moved in to my office, I had grand plans: not just for program development, but for record-keeping and even the office layout. In the mornings, before my part-time coworker got in, I moved the furniture about, making the place my own. It was ridiculous to have the copier all the way across the room, I thought, when I can make a study corner there near that built-in table. A recent college grad, I was ambitious, with a burning desire to do things right, and do them right now. Of course, in order to move the copier, new furniture was needed, which we scavenged from the sidewalk and my coworker's apartment. The awkward setup filled up with paper, and the other tables would overflow with printed material whenever we would need to assemble large packets of paperwork. Meanwhile, my study corner was used only sometimes, the books it housed were out of the way and underutilized.
Now, the end of the year, I once again had a bug to reorganize. I used some left-over grant money to get closet organizers for our art supplies, and once again started in on redoing the office layout. This time I asked my coworker what she thought of the new copier location (now perched precariously on top of the extra computer desk), and we hemmed and hawed over the perfect location. A few days later everything was arranged, and I noticed with a sigh of resignation that the copier was once again back in its original location, the shelves across the room restored to theirs. It would give us more room to make copies and lay out our supplies, and with the bookshelf back towards the center of the room kids could more easily find what they needed. "Makes sense," said my friend, who used to work there. "That's why we had everything there in the first place." Of course, this renewed setup came with modifications: the power cord to the copier no longer stretched across the doorway, and the stack of literature was switched with textbooks on shelves, with everything positioned to ease access and make them child-friendly.
The placement of a copier is a trivial thing to worry about. If anything, however, it serves to think about how we are in the world and, most especially, how my work in a non-profit can build upon the resources there or fight against them. It is easy to come in to a space, a school, a community, and tell people what you think is best. But it is a whole different thing to involve yourself wholly, to watch, to listen, sometimes for years, and to then act with people to make changes and help achieve what is needed. My ideas can be grand, but if they don't work for the students I am trying to serve then they don't really serve them at all. Decision makers, wrote Gramsci, must engage with everyday understandings, from pop culture to, in my case, study habits. While there are many possibilities for change out there, they are contained within the local and historical conditions in which they are located. This includes the environments in which my kids grew up in, the relationships they've had, and their way of interacting with the world. As a program coordinator, and as a mentor, I can't go in expecting to change things. I have to really pay attention to how things work and how we can build upon them to improve.
In this way, college taught me to be a a critical thinker. I mean this not just in the same trivial sense that college teaches you how to bullshit on assignments or spellcheck for grammar. An undergraduate education in development studies taught me to think about how I am in the world, and what impact (for better or worse) my actions can have on the developing world around us.
No comments:
Post a Comment