Chapter 7: Autoethnography and The Emergent Public: Counterstories from a Community College Classroom

It’s the first day of class. The room is large and has no windows. Seventy-five students sit at desks bolted to the floor and arranged in tiered rows. The first tier, closest to me, is nearly empty. The last tier, farthest away, is full. My place, which I’ll take up shortly, is at a lecture podium centered on the floor. Before doing so, I’ll hand out my course outline. It’s a bureaucratic masterpiece, a perfect expression of “rational social machinery”: “businesslike,” “not emotional at all,” “inhuman” (Mills, 1959/2008c, p. 195). Ostensibly designed to offer my students clear and unambiguous information about how to be successful, its real aim is to rationalize failure and insulate me from future complaints by unhappy students. It is constructed around the exceptions; its target audience is “problem” students. Each year, the outline gets a little bit longer, as I add to the list of anticipated problem behaviors.¹ The outline communicates to my students that I expect the worst from them, that they are untrustworthy. By this point in their formal education, most of them have become numb to such assaults of disrespect; it’s just more blah, blah, blah As a result, many of them won’t read the outline at all. I know this, although I attribute it to laziness rather than self-preservation, so when I take my place at the podium in the center of the floor I will bombard them with the REALLY IMPORTANT stuff. At the same time I will construct for their first impression a relationship of distance, presenting myself as their adversary.