I get a good handful of requests every year to blurb forthcoming books in the education space, many from people I know and some from people with whom I’m unacquainted. I turn down most of the latter category because of the pressures of time, but a book called Teaching for Slow Hope: Place Based Learning in College and Beyond by Douglas Haynes grabbed my attention, and once I started reading it, I knew I would be finishing it and offering my endorsement: “The transactional nature of college where students experience a system of indefinite future reward has now failed multiple generations. Teaching Toward Slow Hope shows that there is a different path: one rooted in community, shared purpose, and mutual exchange. We’d be wise to heed this call.”
This is a particularly timely book as we think about what’s essential for humans to nurture as the pressure for AI automation is exerted on our labor and institutions. I was pleased that Haynes was open to answering some of my questions about the genesis and execution of the book.
Haynes is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh. He is the author of a narrative nonfiction book, Every Day We Live Is the Future: Surviving in a City of Disasters, as well as Last Word, a chapbook of poetry. You can learn more on his website.
John Warner: I’m curious about the roots of the book, what in your experiences as a professor, as a human being, directed you toward writing a book like this.
Douglas Haynes: I teach environmental humanities and writing, including a lot of personal narrative writing. I get to know students well through their writing and through sustained conversations about their lives and concerns both in and out of the classroom. I consider this a good fortune of teaching the subjects I teach, and learning students’ stories helps me teach them more effectively.
But it also presents pedagogical challenges. Many of my students at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh are one family, health or financial obstacle away from dropping out of college. Their lives are often peppered with traumas ranging from poverty to mental illness to the impacts of the opioid crisis. On top of that, most of them work long hours and/or care for family members. I need to take all this into consideration when I teach, because the circumstances of their lives on any given day can dramatically affect their ability to engage and learn. But the way most college teachers (including me) were trained to focus on content delivery and assessment doesn’t sufficiently account for that.
So, one root of this book is my recognition that I needed to reimagine what matters most in my own teaching. I wanted to better help my students thrive as whole people, both in college and beyond. And I wanted to find paths to address a sense of disempowerment I often hear from them. They’re confronting a precarious future—economically, socially, ecologically—and I felt like I had been trained to help them understand these precarities but not to learn how to live with them meaningfully. I had notions about how to do this, but I felt like I needed models, so I went out looking for them.
In terms of my own life and the roots of the book, I reached a sort of rock bottom during the COVID-19 pandemic through isolation and online teaching. No matter how hard I tried to design engaging online courses, I lost the joy of human connection and deliberative spaces that in-person teaching creates. This motivated me to prioritize learning how to build relationships through college classes.
I remembered how joyful and transformative leading community-based study abroad courses was for me and my students a decade earlier, and I wanted to recreate that locally to give more students (and myself) access to this kind of experience. As I get older and the social fabric frays in American society, creating community through education matters to me more and more. Likewise, fostering attention to the physical world as life becomes more and more mediated by technology. My students are thirsty for this, and so am I. So, the book was a way of mapping possibilities for how we (and all educators and students) can meet to mutually create community and new forms of attention.
Q: As a whole, the book takes aim at and seeks an alternative to the “transactional” nature of our education system. This is something I’ve been thinking and writing about for years because I first noticed the problem not in my students’ writing skills, but their attitudes toward writing, where they put together a few moves or tricks in service of a grade. What are some of the specific signs of this system you saw in your work?
A: My answer to this begins with what I see in my own students the first weeks of class. They are trained to sit quietly and passively absorb information. And many, they tell me, are terrified to talk because they would be ashamed to voice a wrong answer to a question. They’ve been taught that education is about regurgitating correct answers. In this climate, open conversation, critical thinking, reflection and taking risks that lead to learning are difficult.
I also see signs of the transactional nature of our education system in students’ attitudes toward general education. Though many tell me they found a passion they didn’t know they had in gen ed classes or enjoy learning more in humanities classes where discussion is prioritized, they also vocally resent classes that don’t clearly contribute to their major or career. I chalk up this contradiction mostly to the high cost of college, which forces students into seeing only return on investment in their education.
I’ve also increasingly begun noticing and reading about the shift in students’ expectations about education since the No Child Left Behind Act required mandatory, high-stakes standardized testing in 2001. I think standardized testing has reinforced students’ sense that education is about going through the motions to get a grade. And I agree with Steven Volk and Beth Benedix, who say in their book The Post-Pandemic Liberal Arts College that “Our students are collectively burnt out. We have burned them out.”
I’m alarmed about this situation because it lends itself perfectly to the proliferating use of so-called artificial intelligence tools (as you’ve written insightfully about, John). Of course, students want to use these tools to cut corners because they’re emotionally and financially taxed and their schooling has taught them that all that matters is a right answer or [a] polished product. I don’t blame students one bit for using AI under these conditions. What needs to change is the conditions we ask students to learn in. That’s one reason I wrote this book.
Q: I also want to ask about how and why you decided to root the book is what is really a kind of sociological/ethnographic fieldwork. You go investigating. How much did you know about what you were looking for when you started? Were you looking for evidence of notions you already had or were you starting from closer to scratch?
A: As a creative nonfiction writer and journalist, I view research as firsthand observation and interviewing. My first book, Every Day We Live Is the Future, is based on immersion journalism—intentionally following people in their life and work, noticing, listening and asking questions. In Teaching Toward Slow Hope, I wanted to apply this same approach to higher education.
This would allow me to provide a felt sense of different learning environments and foreground student and teacher perspectives. This is a novel approach to writing about college, so I thought it would add some helpful elements to national conversations about the purpose and value of higher education. I thought it would add overlooked voices and experiences (especially from the kinds of regional institutions most college students attend), as well as the often-missing contexts of students’ lives and emotions. On-the-ground reporting also enabled me to make the places of learning come alive as teachers in their own right, I hope. This is essential, in my view, for writing about place-based education.
As for what I was looking for, I began with a broad desire to witness courses and programs that model how to foster hope and purpose through learning in college. I wanted to have a better answer to my students’ persistent questions about whether college is worth it given its financial and psychological costs and the difficulty of imagining livable futures. This meant looking for models that help students address concerns about equity, ecological crisis and well-being. I wanted to learn from others thinking about the question of “What is college for?” in terms of what would help students thrive.
I also wanted to learn more about how to center community and connection with the physical world in college classes. How much I knew about what I would find depended somewhat on the place and stage of my research. Early on in my research process at UW Milwaukee and UW Madison, I was just soaking up these exciting ways of working with students outside the classroom and then sifting through what I gathered for key practices and pedagogical principles. At the same time, I was reading books and articles that influenced what I was looking for. So, by the time I visited Kalamazoo Valley Community College and Northland College, I had a sense that I was looking for vivid examples of collaboration and embodied learning and that these schools would fit the bill. They did and then some. But I also want to add that all four of the programs I reported on surprised me in positive ways and shared all of the teaching practices I highlight in the book.
Q: The book is organized around what I’ve come to think of as “capacities”—listening, reciprocity, collaboration, wandering—that you see as ways to nourish hope. Maybe take one of them and help readers understand its specific importance and application.
A: These capacities are interrelated and not neatly separable. But for the sake of organizing my material and detailing each capacity in action, I focus on only one in each story of a place-based learning program in this book. I’ll highlight one here, collaboration.
One way I’m trying to reframe the purpose of higher education in this book is by showing how college can prepare students for what anthropologist Anna Tsing calls “collaborative survival” in an age of intersecting crises. “Without collaborations,” Tsing writes, “we all die.”
In other words, collaboration, in both a social and biological sense, determines who we are. Yet most courses students encounter when they’re trying to better understand who they are and what they can do in the world don’t prioritize teaching collaboration. Instead, they focus on performance of individual cognitive tasks. As a result, the illusion of separateness students (and most of us in the U.S.) suffer from is compounded. This not only feels bad and lonely but can be disempowering. A logical response to a complex public problem in this situation is throwing your hands up and saying, “I’m only one person. There’s nothing I can do.”
So what does training for collaborative survival look like in college? I found a marvelous model at Kalamazoo Valley Community College in Kalamazoo, Mich. This college’s decade-old Bronson Healthy Living Campus has become a national leader in hands-on education that integrates allied health programs, a culinary school and sustainable brewing program, and a food hub, urban farm and sustainable horticulture program. There, working together to solve problems is baked in not only to individual classes but to the whole campus and its work in the community.
The campus aims to improve public health in the area and create a sustainable local food system. Its programs are linked to local institutions including a hospital, senior center, farms and schools. This regional network of collaboration is mirrored by the daily work of students, faculty and staff. Culinary students learn about food systems by working on the urban farm and in the campus food hub. Nursing students learn to cook with crops grown on campus for units on food as medicine. Students and staff grow, plan and pack weekly free boxes of food for any student who wants one.
So, when I discuss collaboration in this book, I’m not just talking about assigning students to do more group projects. This, too, is important work that builds students’ communication and listening skills, as well as empathy, organization and more. But I’m trying to expand the scope of how we imagine collaboration in college. What if, for example, we designed campuses, classrooms and courses around how to create relationships, enhance wonder and address community problems rather than around how to convey information?
My experiences at Kalamazoo Valley taught me that this is possible and helps students feel invested in their community. Time and again at Kalamazoo Valley, I heard students say they felt cared for at the college and wanted to stay and work there. This is powerful testimony for the importance of collaboration in creating belonging, which we know is also a key to student success.
Q: The book is set among three regional universities/colleges, one community college and one state flagship (University of Wisconsin at Madison). Did you notice any differences among students in these different institutions?
A: Students everywhere are often dealing with mental health issues, financial stress and difficulty imagining a livable future. However, the students I encountered at UW Madison, which has become an elite public institution, stood out from the others I worked with. They weren’t all more privileged by any means, but they had access to a range of opportunities and resources that the students I collaborated with elsewhere for the most part didn’t have: scholarships, internships, volunteer experiences, a huge range of events and activities, robust student health and wellness services and facilities. Even nap pods and free transportation to community-based learning sites. One UW Madison student I interviewed described college as “a fantasy land of all these possibilities.”
This sense of possibility in college also translated into a sense of possibility for meaningful careers, even amongst first-year students. I heard some of this from students at UW Milwaukee and Northland College, as well, but their sense of self-efficacy was not generally as well developed, and their campuses were not nearly as stocked with seemingly endless supports.
The percentage of first-generation and low-income students at UW Madison is also significantly lower than at the other campuses I visited. Knowing this and seeing the possibilities offered to UW Madison students that my own UW Oshkosh students up the road could never dream of was difficult. The amazing community-based learning, first-year seminar I observed at UW Madison had two instructors, a teaching assistant and a team of community collaborators for 15 students. At UW Oshkosh, first-year seminars have 25 students with one instructor. Required community-based learning classes with 50 students were just eliminated from UW Oshkosh’s general education curriculum due to their cost.
This is just one example of how the inequalities in higher education are stark and growing starker. And these inequalities typically impact the students who are least prepared for college the most.
That said, the resources Kalamazoo Valley Community College was able to offer its students—many of them nontraditional—impressed me. Many students there told me the college found ways to keep them enrolled during the COVID-19 pandemic when they had no income. And the community partnerships the college maintains provide abundant opportunities for experiential learning in real-world settings. I left there inspired to see predominantly low-income and first-generation students given a great sense of possibility as well.
Q: Last, we should talk about the importance of “slow” here. Why should we acknowledge and even embrace the idea of slow hope?
A: First, I want to acknowledge the German historian Christof Mauch, who wrote an essay called “Slow Hope.” This essay argues that we too often overlook the hopeful progress toward social and ecological change around us because it typically unfolds slowly in fits and spurts. To appreciate how, in Mauch’s words, “visions of a better world have become reality,” he says we need to appreciate how hope gathers “sometimes invisibly and often despite great setbacks.”
This perspective resonates deeply with my experience of education, both as a student and teacher. Education, at its heart, is a story. Lessons unfold through actions, characters, dialogue, thought and more, all linked to an overarching plot of ways to enact what our society (or any given school) thinks is important.
Like all stories, education slyly inculcates values. It does this through gradual and cumulative reinforcement. We could have a long discussion about what these values are and how they’re imparted. But no matter what ideological angle you view education from, it’s a process of slow social transformation. I find this empowering, especially in an age of speed-obsessed techno-austerity. Embracing slow hope in higher education returns it to one of its original purposes: cultivating whole people who can shape their society together for the better. This process never finishes. Sometimes it sputters. But college can jump-start it and nurture it for a life.
There’s another importance to slowness, especially important right now as higher education navigates setbacks. Fast facilitates destruction, as we’ve seen in national politics recently and in the politics of austerity playing out in higher education (“aggressive timeline” has become a catchphrase in the University of Wisconsin system, for example, that indicates system administrators want to quickly force through a far-reaching change without much discussion).
Slow is the speed of deliberation, reflection and democracy. It takes time to build relationships that enable communities to work together. The educational models I observed writing this book showed me that teaching this kind of slowness—against the tide of technological and institutional disruption—is life-affirming and motivating for students.
Finally, on a more personal level, my students tell me regularly they need slowdowns. I think creating educational settings that encourage students to practice paying attention to something other than the next task or the next image in their feed is essential work. This requires slowing down to connect with each other and connect with place. This, too, is part of exercising slow hope. It fosters resilience to keep going. That’s what slow hope is all about.
