Piercing the Armor of Student Indifference
Lyon Rathbun
Abstract
Preoccupied with their own disciplinary concerns, college teachers do not always appreciate how upheavals occurring in the broader society are directly impinging on the lives of their students. As a result, teachers overlook a potent way of coaxing their students into engaged learning. This article describes how college teachers in regions around the world can use texts depicting social calamities to deepen student engagement. Following the example of how one teacher uses texts about the ongoing drug violence in Mexico, the article explores a range of texts and topics for teachers to consider. While engaging students’ interest is a necessary step, it is not sufficient, in itself, to trigger deep learning. Teachers must also employ a pedagogical methodology that will foster cognitive development while avoiding the possibility that students will be indoctrinated with the teachers’ own response to the social issues being brought into consideration.
Keywords: Language teaching, Teacher-student interaction, Violence, Intercultural education.
College teachers in the humanities and social sciences often look for ways of grabbing the attention of their students and of piercing the armor of indifference that students wear to shield themselves from the hard work of the genuine inquiry. Teachers succeed when they bring materials into the classroom that students perceive as deeply interesting, or as manifestly relevant to their present or future lives. Alternatively, teachers can take students outside the classroom, to engage with actual challenges that exist in the local community. A variation of these approaches, which keeps students in the classroom, but keenly focused on what is occurring nearby, is to present students with texts that have been written in response to ongoing social upheavals that impinge on students’ lives.
As a professor of English at the University of Texas at Brownsville (UTB), located at the southern tip of the US border with Mexico, I have experienced the pedagogical power of teaching texts about the ongoing drug cartel violence in Mexico, which has affected many of our students. A rich body of literature, both fiction, and non-fiction, has emerged over the last decade that seeks to make sense of the on-going violence in Mexico. Because ninety-seven percent of our students are Mexican-Americans, they become deeply engaged when presented with texts that address the cartel violence in Mexico. Whenever the opportunity presents itself, whether in a composition or literature class, I include texts about the mayhem in Mexico. I do so to give my students a subject in which they are deeply invested, a subject they will discuss and explore with real interest, and to engage my students in deep, authentic learning.
Social dislocations, whether caused by criminal activity, political upheaval, or economic transformation are ubiquitous in the contemporary world. Whether the topic involves the sexual abuse of young women, or the threats from climate change, a rich body of literature clusters around every social calamity – like antibodies that form a healing scab over an open wound. Because college teachers are preoccupied with their own disciplines and are insulated from the lives of their students, we do not always perceive how ongoing social calamities affect our students. We are often blind to the rich pedagogical potential offered by texts about social upheavals that touch their lives. An account of how one professor uses texts about Mexican cartel violence offers lessons for teachers in other regions, where students are affected by different, but analogous, calamities.
Every contemporaneous social calamity has deep historical roots that can easily be incorporated into classroom discussion and student inquiry. Take the example of the University of Texas at Brownsville. The very grounds of the university are rooted in the history of conflict between Mexico and the United States. The campus sits a few hundred yards from the shore of the Rio Grande River, directly across from its sister city, Matamoros. It was built around the original site of Fort Brown, erected at the inception of the Mexican-American War, to protect American forces from the cannon fire coming from the Mexican side of the River. The fort played an important role during the American Civil War, and in 1929 became the home of the 124th Calvary Regiment, one of the last mounted Calvary regiments in the United States Army. After being decommissioned, the fort was acquired by the city of Brownsville, became the site of Southmost Community College in 1948, and of the University of Texas at Brownsville in 1994 (Ortiz, 2005).
When Felipe Calderon was elected President of Mexico in 2006, drug-related violence escalated in Mexico. Stories filled the local papers of increasingly brazen shootouts in Mexican cities; ghastly atrocities became increasingly common. In 2010, seventy-two Central American immigrants were abducted by the Zeta drug cartel and massacred at a ranch in San Fernando, some 150 miles from Brownsville (Overmex, 2010). In Matamoros, where several hundred UTB students live, and many more have relatives, gun battles between the Zeta and Gulfo cartels became common occurrences, contributing to a mounting death-toll in Mexico that by 2014 has reached about 80,000. (Davison, 2014). Inevitably, the reverberations of the violence reached into the sanctuary of the university itself.
In September of 2010, a UTB freshman, Jonathon Cazares, was shot dead when the bus he was traveling was hijacked in the Mexican town of Ciudad Mante in the southern part of Tamaulipas, the Mexican state that borders South Texas (UTB-TSC mourns…). In November of that same year, the campus was closed when stray bullets from a gun battle just across the river in Matamoros hit a campus parking lot and Recreation Center. The fight, between cartel gunmen and the Mexican Army, left at least 47 dead in Matamoros. According to The Brownsville Herald, official