A New Classroom Reality

One Room School House in Pound, Wisconsin. original photographer unknown

by Barbara Anne Radtke

It is good to be back from my “blog break.” Thanks to Kathy Hendricks for covering the bases while I was gone.

Since I wrote last, I have been back in the online classroom, teaching a graduate course to students who are pursuing ministry. Although an accelerated course is intense, being with the students is always refreshing because it provides me with a different lens on life. This year it opened my eyes to a new classroom reality fueled by current politics.

We only need to follow the headlines to pick up on the theme that education, and, in this case, higher education, is in the political crosshairs. I was aware that many time-tested partnerships of government funding for university research were being dissolved.  My awareness was heightened by living in the Boston area where the dismantling of that partnership at Harvard University has been aired very publically.  I knew also that this tension between government and university could deeply touch students’ lives. Tufts is also a prominent university here. The local news repeatedly reported on the case of a Tufts doctoral student who was snatched by ICE outside of her apartment and transported for incarceration to Louisiana. It took a semester, which is how students often measure their lives, to get her back to New England and freed while she awaits the next steps. Her offense, by the way, was writing an Op Ed in the school’s newspaper.

While aware and concerned about the impact of this struggle on all universities and colleges, I did not anticipate that it would have an influence on my summer classroom experience. I assumed our course would be isolated from an engagement between higher education and government that would be played out at a much higher level.

How wrong I was. I had international students, potential leaders in their own religious communities, regularly mention concern about their visas as students and the possibility of their studies being disrupted. I had students, currently leaders in parishes or charitable organizations, who were distracted from their studies when situations regarding deportation arose in families to which they ministered. Yet, they continued to navigate studies and life admirably well.

Student life often has burdens we forget when we get more established in life. Students need to juggle studies, family obligations, jobs and/or work study. They worry about grades, finances, roommate trouble, if single, child-care if they have their own family, deadlines, and landing a job. If they are international students they are encountering a different culture, different foods and holidays, even different weather.  They are learning in a second or third language to the one with which they grew up. These students also had coped with the pandemic during some of their formal educational journey. Somehow, they negotiate all these demands. Now they also face developing issues from a newly emerged geopolitical reality.

One day, while online, I realized how much we were asking of them.  We were discussing creeds.  This year is the 1700^th anniversary of the well-known Nicene Creed. Why did it take until 325 CE to emerge?  I mentioned to some that the early Christians were under duress. They needed to wait for the persecutions to reside and for acceptance in society before they could begin to frame a statement of what they believed.  As soon as I wrote these words, I realized that I was asking these students to articulate what they believed in the midst of great international distress. This realization did not shift my responsibilities as a professor. I still evaluated their work. The realization did focus my empathy. It also allowed me to provide them a more useful critique. I did that evaluation through a new lens of what they faced as fledgling leaders of churches that regularly encounter the world, a world they allowed me to see for just a moment through their eyes.

Response by Kathy Hendricks

Thank you for sharing this experience with us, Barbara. While the news about the cuts to higher education has rightly focused on the impact to enrollment, curriculum, and faculty staffing, the experiences of the students is also critical. There are so many factors to consider in which eliminating international students from our colleges and universities will affect not only their lives but also those they will potentially serve. We are all poorer as a result.

The description of the burdens of students’ lives resonates strongly. While studying for my graduate degree, I worked a full-time ministerial job while also raising two pre-school children. It meant getting up in the middle of the night to type my papers (on a manual typewriter to boot!). Thankfully I had the support and assistance of my husband who took on a large share of the household and childcare needs. Your post broadens my recognition of the various challenges students face. Placing an additional one around their potential disruption to their studies – not to mention the threat of deportation – is both unnecessary and unjust.

In describing your own experience of “focusing your empathy” through the teaching of the course, you remind us all that, for every decision made that affects the lives of students, immigrants, government workers, medical providers, small business owners, and others, there are human lives involved. May we all take away a similar lesson from your insights and focus our own empathy toward their needs and challenges.