NCHC 2019 Conference

The 2019 National Collegiate Honors Council Conference, held November 7-10 in New Orleans, LA was by far the largest conference I’d ever attended. In spite of having to work through some personal problems, I found myself at home in the community and invigorated by the sessions. Several sessions made significant impressions on me, most notably, a presentation about Hip-Hop in Honors, forum on diversity, and workshops about Theory U, and creative play.

“Hip-Hop is Hella Honorific”

I was particularly interested in the Hip-Hop presentation since I teach our honors Hip-Hop course. The presenter was Dr. Frederick W. Gooding Jr. of Texas Christian University. I was gratified to see that I was covering most of what he discussed, although he included “knowledge of self” as one of the elements of Hip-Hop culture (along with the DJ, MC, break dancing, and street art). The text I use, Hip-Hop Headphones, by James Braxton Peterson, addresses this of course, but not in this way, and it would be worthwhile for me to make more of it. I have been fortunate to have Josephus Thompson III, a local slam poet, come in to do a session on poetry and writing, and one of his central messages is “make your voice heard.” Following his sessions with a consideration of self-knowledge (“what do you have to say?”) would be an useful follow-up exercise. He also had an interesting cognitive framework for exploring significant themes in Hip-Hop:

• Description (paint a picture)

• Rejection (defeat an enemy)

• Prescription (give advice)

• Aspiration (share a dream)

• Demonstration (display power or skill)

• Recognition (pay homage)

When I developed the course, I used a chronological structure because it made the most sense to me, but I spend one session at the beginning of the semester talking abut cognitive frameworks, and going over the different ones Peterson proposes (Elements, Categories, Eras). I always comment that any one of them could provide a basis for the structure, and in the back of my mind there is always the possibility of “shuffling the deck” a little when the teaching starts to get stale. The course has proved so popular that I have taught it three times in consecutive semesters, and am scheduled to teach it again in the Fall. Dr. Gooding’s framework could really help freshen things up.

My biggest take-away, however, was that my teaching has remarkably little heart. While a great deal of the course concerns income inequality, racial profiling, mass incarceration, and other social justice issues, I feel that my experience as a member of the dominant culture lends a certain objectivity to my approach, in spite of my passion for these issues. When Dr. Gooding spoke about aspiration in Biggie’s “Juicy” and Rick Ross’s “Magnificent,” there was a catch in his voice that I simply can’t achieve.

Ultimately, I’d like to hand the course off to someone more qualified, and develop parallel courses in Country and Metal. Dr. Hedman, the head of the Honors Scholars Program, is all for this, but with the upcoming changes in the music curriculum, it might be a few years before I can address this.

Forum on Diversity

The forum on diversity was as interesting for its failures as for its successes. I was delighted to work with my breakout group in dealing with some profound equity issues. I found their considerations of exclusive messaging, entrance requirements, and recruiting strategies thoughtful, and I came away with a lot of new questions. The facilitators, however made some unfortunate missteps that effectively illustrated both how difficult it is to be all things to all people, and how well-intentioned solutions can have unexpected consequences. One of the members of my breakout group was a member of the LGBTQ community, and she bristled visibly when the presenter said we needed to regard our classes as “congregations.” While I understood what the presenter meant, that ideally (in Heaven, perhaps) congregations would be all-inclusive, the reality, of course, is that churches are just as flawed as any other institution. I am sure she was using the term in this aspirational sense, but it certainly struck a nerve with someone from a community that is specifically excluded from many congregations. As we were released to our discussion, I took a moment to affirm that, as a Catholic, I felt the idea that “congregations are inclusive” was naive at best. She relaxed somewhat, but ended up leaving the session early, so I didn’t have time to pursue the conversation further.

Another exercise I found profoundly problematic was called “Who’s in the Room.” For this, the same presenter called out various experiences or identities (“Who has a learning disability?” “Who is a first-generation college student?” etc.) and expected people who shared them to stand. I found this troublesome because it could potentially exacerbate prejudice rather than alleviate it (“Oh! So he’s one of those!”), it violates the students’ privacy (and, even though the self-identification was voluntary, the power imbalance between instructors and students could easily make it seem that non-participation carried a penalty), and it marginalizes the inequity that diversity programs are meant to address. “Who’s from the West Coast?” for example, would certainly identify people with a different cultural experience, particularly in the South, but the blanket of white privilege still covers that demographic. At worst, this exercise would allow white people to congratulate themselves on being open-minded enough to accept diversity (among other white people), while continuing practices that foster real inequity.

I don’t in any way mean to suggest that the presenters were inept, just that they were human like the rest of us. This session reminded me that diversity is a difficult issue, we all have something to learn, and we won’t always get it right.

Workshops: Theory U and Creative Play

These workshops were probably the most impactful of all the sessions I attended. The first, titled “Think Differently and Lead from the Emerging Future,” presented by a team from the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. It was based on Theory U, and the Dutch presenters were amused that almost none of us had heard of it (it was developed by Otto Scharmer at MIT!). We were divided into groups, identified problems that we;d been avoiding, and followed the steps to arrive at action items. i had a great team, and we found a lot of common ground in the problems we discussed. I took about four pages of notes, and later bought the book. There is a lot of potential here, particularly in our music department, and I will need to immerse myself in these ideas more completely.

The second, titled “Post-Conference Workshop - Play, Performance, and Improvisation: Tools to Maximize Creative and Developmental Pedagogy” was another that was full of interesting ideas. The main idea that stuck with me was that development doesn’t happen to us, that we create it together, and play creates the richest environment for this to happen. My notes include a little table:

Who/What are People?

• Shaped by environment → shapers of environment

• We use tools → we make tools*

• We adapt to culture → we create culture

• members of social groups → builders of new kinds of social groups

• We are what we are → we are other than what we are (what we are becoming)

• WHAT IS → WHAT IS BECOMING

* I later encountered (somewhere) the idea that tools make us as much as we make them; “when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail,” sort of thing.

I like this for a lot of reasons, not least of which is that it aligns with Deleuze and Guattari: milieux are in a constant state of transcoding, etc.

Some more (practical) ideas that came out of the session were the use of improvisation, and challenging different groups to respond to the others’ presentations with a poem. (I later used this in a Hip-Hop class: when students have to translate the information into a different form, they pay a lot more attention to the presentation!).

Closing…

New Orleans is a place I like to go, especially for the Catholic culture, and I have a special devotion to Bl. Fr. Francis Xavier Seelos, so I made it a point to visit St. Mary’s Assumption Church and his shrine. While I considered this a personal journey, the Honors Scholars Program director was very supportive and offered the trip to the attending students. I was ready to make a “Place-as-Text” project to support the visit, but as it happened, none of the students took me up on it. My wife always reminds me that most people go to New Orleans with other experiences in mind.