Total floundering is no good and total guidance is no good either. We need guided floundering. - Isobel Contento, former Johnston College Faculty
It's late July and monsoon season in the Sonoran desert, where I live. I sit at my computer in my Tucson home, wrestling this story into some kind of final draft, and I feel the wetness in the air. This afternoon it will rain and tomorrow morning I'll see another piece of green in my backyard that wasn't there the day before. I can count on the rains, even though I never know the exact moment the clouds will break open. The pounding water outside taps a muted and soothing meditation on my roof. And I find that my Johnston experience is a lot like desert monsoons: sudden and predictable, torrential and peaceful -- a rhythm of growth and drought.
I graduated from Johnston College [now the Johnston Center for Integrative Studies] in August 1977. Twenty-one years later to the month, in a quirky moment of synchronicity, I have a deadline for this magazine and I will finally pay off my student loan. I'm elated that I have only one more loan payment -- and then I start to worry that without my monthly griping about the bill and muttered affirmation that "My education was worth it!" I will begin to forget my Johnston experience. I'm grateful I have this chance to write about my journey, then and now. And then I'm afraid that when I finish this article, somehow I'll be finished with Johnston. But I know better.
I look at the last two decades and see the threads of my Johnston experience alive in the fabric of my history -- both in my professional life, as a teacher and scholar, and in my private life, as an individual seeking community. Nostalgia occasionally invites me to romanticize an idyllic Johnston past, where the image of an idealistic, 20-something young woman in search of a future eclipses my present incarnation as a 40-something, single, working mom, who is currently unemployed. But more often than not, a more honest and complex take on the past-present continuum (a perspective made possible only through the great benefits of aging!) reminds me that my time at Johnston included moments of confusion, as well as clarity; moments of conflict, as well as harmony; moments of failure, as well as success. Maybe if I had taken one of those psych courses I continually bad-mouthed, I might have been more adept at integrating the Jungian dark side before now. One thing I do know: My Johnston experience continues to function as a lodestar, a steadfast beacon that invites me to question complacency and to jump blindfolded into conditions of labor and love that nurture professional and personal congruence.
I've lived in Tucson for three years now, after having quit a tenure-track position as an assistant professor in an English department at a southern university, where I was hired right out of graduate school to teach world literature from a "non-western and minority perspective," as the job ad explained. As a graduate student at the University of Texas, I learned, like most doctoral candidates, that a tenure-track position is the ultimate reward for all our caffein-filled nights of study and stressed-out days of underpaid student teaching. And, if you should be one of the lucky few to survive the ego-bruising academic job process and actually land a tenure-track position, then you hold onto it with clenched teeth and scrabbling toenails. Let me be honest: My decision to quit a job that offered the possibility of life-time employment security was not an easy one. My Johnston education didn't teach me about the tenure system, since faculty held renewable three-year contracts and personnel decisions were made by committees composed of staff, students and faculty. But graduate school corrected my ignorance and taught me that life without tenure constituted a kind of death, ignominious and with little hope of reincarnation.
That I risked countering this kind of professional indoctrination has a lot to do with my Johnston education, which taught me that finding my own particular voice, and then using it, constitute the greater part of integrity. I have not learned this lesson absolutely, nor do I expect to, since the challenges of daily life continually offer me opportunities to practice solutions to this conundrum -- how do I stay true to my creativity and pay the bills?
When I quit my assistant professorship and moved to Tucson, I had no job in hand. But I thought my employment prospects were decent since Tucson is a metropolitan area 20 times the size of Hattiesburg, Miss. I've got family in Tucson. And unlike Hattiesburg, Tucson is a hub city for Johnston graduates. Over the last three years, I've worked at the University of Arizona as adjunct faculty in both the women's studies department and the humanities program, and I've renewed friendships with people who knew me as a 20-something Johnston student.
Getting together with Johnston alums is always like coming home. We share a unique undergraduate experience. And, like most Johnston students, we're a passionate, committed, highly creative, often neurotic, opinionated and frequently vocal bunch.
Most of us in the Tucson area are working parents with little left-over time and energy for alumni get-togethers, but a couple months ago, several of us gathered for a potluck dinner at Casa Tierra, the home of Karen and Lyle Hymer-Thompson and their bed and breakfast inn, to visit with Nate Budington '79 and his wife, Megan Morey, who were in from Redlands and celebrating their first anniversary. Since it was my first visit to Casa Tierra, I followed Lorraine Hedtke '78 in her red truck out through Gates Pass and down dirt roads. We brought our kids -- Addison, Lorraine's 5-1/2-year-old daughter, and Joshua, my 6-year old son. Josh was eager to see Andre again, Karen and Lyle's 3-year-old son, whom we'd first met in the fall at a Tucson Symphony Orchestra children's concert. Later, Dr. Terry Cullen '78, her husband, John, and their three children plus one cousin, also showed up.
I remember Karen Hymer-Thompson '79 as a student who carried a camera and played soccer. Nowadays, she has a M.F.A. in photography, teaches at Pima Community College and plays soccer on a team with Hugh McCrystal '77. Some of Karen's artwork hangs on several Casa Tierra walls, and I enjoyed admiring each innovative and polished piece. Lyle Hymer-Thompson was dean of student life when I was at Johnston College. He painted, took students on trips to Mexico and built the most beautiful adobe homes I'd ever seen. Casa Tierra is no exception, and as I sat for a moment alone on the porch, my busy city mind stilled to the steady heartbeat of the desert. I remembered crossing the Johnston Quad by following the Monopoly-painted sidewalk and hearing Lyle's voice call out: "Hey! Walk on the grass! It's there to enjoy." As a young woman with a lifetime of carefully obeying "Don't walk on the grass!" signs, I stayed within the lines even when no sign was posted. I'm sure the former dean of students has no recollection of this moment, but I remember Lyle's challenge as a kind of creative permission to break out of concrete symmetry into a place that celebrated the tickle of cool green against bare feet.
That May evening at Casa Tierra, we all shared a meal and talked. Lyle and I talked about the challenges of raising sons without toy guns. John and Lyle talked about woodworking, deforestation and practices of the indigenous Tarahumara. If I had blinked my eyes, 20 years would have fallen away, and we could have been in East Hall lobby, lounging in the oversized chairs after dinner and discussing that day's community meeting, or an art professor's most recent performance piece, or the progress of someone's internship at Indio, or whether we wanted to go into town and hear Buddy Reed and the Rockets, or stay on campus and catch the current offering of the surrealist film series.
Some time during that night, I sat next to Terry, who sat next to Lorraine. At Johnston, the three of us were feminists together, and we shared a common activism. Terry always wanted to be a doctor. She's now a family practice physician on the Tohono O'Odham reservation. Lorraine studied sociology. She got her M.S.W. degree and is a narrative family therapist. Shannon, Terry and John's 11-year-old daughter, sat next to me. We learned that Shannon had given her mom an ultimatum to ether shave her legs or buy Shannon a horse. This prompted Lorraine to remember when Terry was applying for medical school and agonizing about whether or not to shave her legs for the interview. I wondered what Shannon thought about this version of her mom, told in stories by college friends. Did Shannon know that her mom helped to build a geodesic dome on stilts, a place that became the Johnston College/University of Redlands Women's Center? Did she know that in 1976, her mom and I, along with Anne Brown '77 and Robin Burgess '77, co-authored the "Women's Health Guide," an update of the "University Women's Health Directory, A Handbook of Local Clinics"? Our guide highly recommended the now classic Boston Women's Health Book Collective publication Our Bodies, Ourselves, although we lamented that the $2 price hike of the 1976 revised edition to a cost of $4.95 was "unfortunate and seems unjustifiable." And, because our suggested readings included words like "lesbianism" and "masturbation," our guide was threatened with censorship. Nate Budington was a reporter for the Bulldog, and his series of articles on the health guide controversy prevented most of the censorship and allowed us to get much-needed information out to women students.
Our evening at Casa Tierra, like most events filled with children, ended fairly early, and we took our separate paths home. Some of us may not see each other again until next February, when most of us will gather in Redlands to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the founding of Johnston College.
I started my undergraduate education at Johnston in the fall of 1973, four years after the college had opened its doors. My interest in alternative education started in high school, where I contracted for an independent study during my junior year. I read A.S. Neill's Summerhill, John Dewey's Democracy and Education, George Leonard's Education and Ecstasy, and Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society. Along with a group of like-minded students, I visited experimental high schools in the area, and we discussed various methodologies of teaching and learning. My high school profile was that of an honors student, self-motivated and socially involved. As a 15-year-old sophomore, I traveled to Boston to check out colleges like Brandeis, Tufts and Boston University. I had mapped my future with a bold permanent marker, certain that when I graduated from high school, I would move seamlessly into college life.
Then I spent the summer after my junior year as an American Field Service exchange student living with a German family, and my world tilted. I learned that my book knowledge about war paled next to the stories of my host parents, who had dodged American and English bombs. European media in summer 1971 showed me pictures of the Vietnam War and the People's Republic of China that were unavailable in the States, and I learned that our freedom of press was partial and biased, not absolute and objective. And because many people told me that the words they connected with my country were "poverty," "racism" and "ghettos," I also learned that others did not see us the way we saw ourselves. When I returned to Connecticut at the end of that summer, I jettisoned all plans for college and worked as a waitress so I could save enough money to travel. I left for Berlin at age 18, and I didn't know when, or if, I would return.
Six months later, I was back home in a town devoid of friends, who had left for college or other journeys. Unable to see any future, I experienced my first immobilizing depression, a darkness I couldn't crawl out of until spring chased off the graying snow. Then I thought about college again and reached for a book I'd gotten as a Christmas present in Germany, a gift from Sue Morley '75, a junior high school friend who later also attended Johnston. The book was John Coyne and Tom Hebert's This Way Out: A Guide to Alternatives to Traditional College Education in the United States, Europe and the Third World, and Sue's black ink inscription, faded in places, still rests on the bottom of the first page: "To Sandy -- Maybe this can help you stay out. Love, Sue. Christmas 1972." Under the section called "New and Experimenting Schools," I found "Redlands' Johnson [sic] College," and although Coyne and Hebert never spelled the name correctly, they got pretty much everything else right in their two-page description, which ended with this recommendation: "We like this college. It's sound, has a well-constructed and imaginative curriculum. It is definitely for the student who wishes to explore his personality as well as gain academic experience. If you're not up to this, stay clear."
Certain aspects of my education remain clear to me, cherished moments of an experience I wish for many of the students I now teach. I loved curriculum building -- that heady week before classes started where the Orton Center walls were plastered with course proposals by faculty and students, and faculty members sat at the round brown tables waiting to discuss their ideas and yours. It was like an educational mini-mall where the only viable currency was collective creativity.
I loved the graduation contract and the process of drafting the blueprints for my course of study in tandem with an advisor and a committee. The role of educational architect presented both a liberating challenge and a serious responsibility. The first paragraph of my graduation contract contains this line: "I am at Johnston because I care as much about how I learn as what I learn." In this learning philosophy as a student, I recognize my pedagogical practice as a teacher who asks both herself and her students to pay as much attention to the processes of learning and teaching as to the content.
In every class I teach, there is one recurring moment, which usually happens when I'm explaining my ideas for an assignment or eliciting students' comments on how they want to be graded. I say, "You know, I don't believe in grades. I don't think they help you to learn." I go on to say that I went to an undergraduate school that had narrative evaluations instead of grades. Several jaws drop, eyes widen, and I hear one or two queries of "Where is this place?" This moment reminds me that, to keep my job, I have to do something I believe is pedagogically irresponsible and ineffective: I have to give grades. Some students will always learn regardless of grades. But the majority focus on the grade, not on the learning; they study the teacher's desires and requirements, not their own voices and opinions. Students must be trained to believe that teacher knows best, and unfortunately, academic elitism supports the idea that the classroom belongs to the teacher, not the students.
My student evaluations tell me I'm an effective and dynamic teacher. I know that part of my success is due to my role models, who were my teachers at Johnston College and at theUniversity of Redlands. These are the teachers who understood the fine art of guided floundering. I think these mentors would applaud my current pedagogical guides, who include Paulo Freire, a radical Brazilian educator, and Ms. Frizzle, a cartoon elementary school teacher who drives a morphing schoolbus and speaks with Lily Tomlin's voice. I want to end with their words, which I share with my students.
To study is not to consume ideas, but to create and re-create them. -- Paulo Freire
Take chances. Make mistakes. Get messy. -- Ms. Frizzle, The Magic Schoolbus