AC Discussion | Common Place: Collective Learning Outside the Institution
On July 26th, Cass Eddington, Alex O’Hanlon, and Valerie St. Pierre Smith sat down with Amanda Huckins, to talk about the ways in which artists and organizers cultivate common spaces for learning in response to shifting paradigms of “value” and “worth” in higher education. During the discussion, they offered possibilities for ongoing education outside the institution by uplifting humanly-scaled models of collective learning that reorganize value systems conventionally bound by money, exclusivity, and expertise.
Read through the transcript of the full conversation below, and share your thoughts in the comments section.
Title of Discussion: Common Place: Collective Learning Outside the Institution
Panelist 1: Cass Eddington
Panelist 2: Alex O’Hanlon
Panelist 3: Valerie St. Pierre Smith
Moderator: Amanda Huckins
Date of Discussion: July 26th, 2023
List of Acronyms: [CE] = Cass Eddington; [AO] = Alex O’Hanlon; [VSPS] = Valerie St. Pierre Smith; [AH] = Amanda Huckins; [PF] = Peter Fankhauser
Transcript
[PF] Welcome everybody. I think we're gonna go ahead and get started.
My name is Peter. I work at Amplify Arts. And we're really thankful to have you all here for tonight's Alternate Currents panel discussion Common Place: Collective Learning Outside the Institution, with our panelists Cass Eddington, Alex O'Hanlon, Valerie St. Pierre Smith, and our moderator, Amanda Huckins. They'll introduce themselves to you in just a minute.
For anyone who's new to Amplify, or joining us for the first time, Alternate Currents is one of our cornerstone programs that works to center critical discussion and collaboration as tools for building activist oriented practices. That includes this discussion series, a blog and working group of artists and organizers who kind of hold everything together. Tonight's discussion is just one and a year long series that investigates how regenerative economies and alternative modes of exchange can bring about more just and equitable futures not just for artists, but for everybody.
So our panelists will be in conversation with each other for between 40 and 45 minutes before we open up the floor to questions. But the Q&A and chat functions will be active throughout, so please feel free to share your thoughts anytime. I'll also mention just really quickly that a video and transcript of tonight's discussion with links to more articles and resources will be posted to the Alternate Currents blog in a couple of weeks. You can find it, along with a lot of other great discussions like this, on our website at www.amplifyarts.org. Thank you again for being here. We really appreciate your willingness to engage in critical discussion with us. Thank you to the Sherwood foundation whose support helps us run programs like this one. And with that, I'm going to pass it over to Amanda.
[AH] Hello, and thanks for joining us. My name is Amanda Huckins. I'm part of this year's Alternate Currents Working Group at Amplify and my interest in education comes partially from the fact that I'm an early educator. I've also been involved in some DIY spaces that have focused on skill sharing and education. I’m really excited to talk to our panelists tonight about their experiences in and outside of academic institutions.
We're gonna go around and panelists will offer some background about themselves and some context for this conversation and where they're coming from. And then we'll jump into the discussion. If you want to start, Valerie?
[VSPS] [Valerie introduces herself in Anishinaabemowin].
Hello, all of my relatives. My name is Valerie St. Pierre Smith. I just shared a traditional greeting in Anishinaabemowin. I am a Two-Spirit, multimedia artist–textile artist, designer, healer–and have also worn the hat of educator and helmed the costume design program at two different universities, most recently at University of Nebraska Omaha. And I've always had a lifelong fascination with the concept, what we conceptualize as Western education and all the other ways there are of learning. Now that I have three kids of my own and have stepped both in and outside of academia, it has become an area of much deeper interest, and one that I think impacts us in ways that we have yet to unpack. I'm happy to be with everybody tonight, too.
[CE] Hi, my name is Cass Eddington. I am trans, an ex-Mormon poet, educator and community arts organizer with quite a bit of institutional background. I’m currently a PhD candidate in the University of Denver's creative literary arts program, and former Denver Quarterly poetry editor. Outside of that, adjacent to our through institutions, I've also taught adult English language learners, facilitated creative writing workshops for incarcerated youth, and taught community writing classes and worked in community arts organizations. I also created and curate Vocational Poetics, which is a platform for both in-person and online classes that works to create spaces of accessibility and creative sovereignty and radical communion for writers.
[AO] Hi, my name is Alex O'Hanlon. I live in Omaha, Nebraska. And I guess the ways that I engage with formal education, in my job, I work at One Omaha and we support neighborhood organizers. I coordinate a lot of trainings about how the city works, how transportation works, how development works and package that information in a way that is interesting and consumable, but also usable. Beyond that, I've also taught English before and I participate in a lot of collective gardening projects. I've been gardening and farming for the last 12 years and feel like I've picked up some tricks along the way. I’m part of a seed saving cooperative, Blazing Star Seed Cooperative, and make it a point to go out and learn from others and then share what I learn. So that’s a little about me.
[AH] Thank you. So let’s get deeper into some background about our core beliefs and our paths in education and whoever wants to take this first just jump in. What is the most valuable information or skill set that you've acquired? Where did you acquire it? From whom? And what makes it so significant to you?
[VSPS] I'll go ahead and jump in. This question gave me some serious pause, because I'm at a certain stage of my life where I'm not as young as I used to be. Having learned so much through different avenues, and for different reasons, I realized this definition is continually changeable. When I was younger, I certainly would have said, especially being a costume designer and a fashion designer, that so much that goes into that skill set, I inherently value it. At the same time, my mom is a first generation American and my father is a mixed race Native man. And the idea of formal education was very big in our house as a way of establishing economic stability, and resilience. Neither of them got to go to college or finished college. For me, going to college and graduating from college was a goal because I saw how much it meant to my mom.
Then, having gone through college, and getting the diploma, and getting the job, and the career, I realized how much I missed in terms of self-awareness skills, establishing boundaries, and building relationships. So, at a different time in my life, the skills that have come from both traditional and what we think of as conventional institutional means have been very important. And then, as I get older and build that awareness of myself and figure out how I want to navigate my Anishinaabe ancestral teachings, the most valuable information and knowledge I've gained has come through the Anishinaabe language because it is an animate language. It communicates in a way that is so different from English, which is what so many of our inherited concepts and notions and perspectives are based on, inanimate ideas.
So it’s kind of this soup made of my changing perspectives over time. Also, watching my kids, who are now early teenagers, I realize that we are hardwired to learn from the community and to learn from Elders and our aunties and our uncles and not necessarily just from a parent or an immediate family member. And the nuclear family is what has been institutionalized to the point of being myopic, to the point of losing the rich, broad intergenerational teachings and wisdoms that are shared and passed down. Institutional educational systems are much more compartmentalized, and so missing the ancestral and experiential, the watching, learning, and then doing. I've become keenly aware of how important those things are.
[CE] I'll jump in. I don't want to under emphasize the institutional privilege that I have, the resources that I have, that I have had as a result of those experiences. I think learning to navigate those resources, intellectually, creatively, relationally, materially was something huge that came from those experiences, as well as opportunities to grow as a teacher, which is work that I feel called to. And also, those experiences did not come without a cost. Before even entering academia and higher education, I was very insulated within Mormon culture and religion in Utah. That's not a negative, but the skill sets I've acquired come from what a lack of personal authority and relationships of institutional dependency create, and what altering this relationship looks like. The structure of academia helped me leave Mormonism, whose resources and community I was culturally, intellectually, and materially dependent upon. Growing up in Utah County, I was raised by a single mom in government subsidized housing projects. And, you know, academia also perpetuated many of these self-limiting merit narratives that I was taught in Mormonism and, at the same time, it gave me access to a wealth of resources that helped me navigate my way out of those situations.
I’m not saying academia taught me how to create or access community. I don't think that is its function. I had a hunger and a desire to figure out how to do that, because I didn't have good models for what that looked like, in a healthy way, growing up. Related to that, despite receiving Pell Grants and teaching assistantships and fellowships and scholarships, I incurred debt from student loans which has accrued with significant interest. But I refer to this debt as the price required to escape the limitations of my circumstances. So I'm very interested, for many reasons, in what happens outside of the limitations of the institution and what other economies we can imagine.
[AO] It’s a pretty intense question! But what comes to mind for me is curiosity and observation. I think in academia, those things might be conflated as critical thinking. But I think of them in relation to my own education–my 13 years of K through 12 and my four years at university studying history and philosophy. I spent a lot of time thinking. I studied metaethics, which is the most institutional way of thinking out there. It's like, how do we have a conversation about a conversation? At a certain point, I was like, I can't think that hard about this. I need to be working on projects with a tangible aspect. I can't think about what's good all the time; I need to decide what feels good enough and start trying to do that. And so, with farming, reading about how to harvest a potato never felt tangible. Okay, stick the shovel six inches deep. What does that look like on a shovel? I really like doing and I had a lot of opportunities to learn by doing and that encouraged me to stay curious.
To learn to farm, you think, I'm gonna go work on a farm for one year and then I'll just know how to do it. But in practice, you go work on a farm for a year and then you'll have an idea of the questions you can ask in years two, three, four, five, six, seven, and eight. After that, you have an idea of the questions you ask in years nine through twelve. And I'll let you know what comes after that soon. It's this continual need to observe and stay curious. What did you think was going to happen? What actually happened? What was within your ability to control? What was outside of your ability to control? Will you ever control the things that are outside of your ability? And that can seem overwhelming. But if you're curious, and it's interesting to you, then it's so fun. It can be fun to do alone, but it's way more fun with other people.
[AH] I'm hearing some really interesting things about how we learn from what we aren't taught. And you know that negative space almost creates a motivation to find what we didn't get. I want to ask you all to elaborate more on a specific challenge institutionalized education has posed in your experience, and how you’ve responded in your practice either as a teacher or a learner. Does that make sense?
[VSPS] It does make sense. Something that I mentioned before was language, and you talk about traditional education. We're not talking about traditional education. We're talking about conventional Western institutions of education. Institutional legitimacy has been one of my primary challenges. I was very proud of being a product of the institution given my family history and expectations. Looking back on it, I realize I was super lucky I went through it in a creative field. I think my soul would have died otherwise, even though I had all these great intellectual pursuits. When I got into the classroom, and became a teacher, I really started to understand the impacts of Western education on learners. I do a lot of decolonizing work in design and art and creative practices and I actually hate the word “colonize” because it goes much farther back than the time period we think of when colonial settlers came to this land. When I got into the classroom, I really had to start picking apart what I held as firm beliefs and understandings and my knowledge of the creative experience. I didn't learn this stuff until I got out. So, I wanted to work it into my curriculum. Then, I also realized that the curriculum and the structure itself was at odds with my internal understanding, experience, and view of teaching. And for several years, when I first started teaching, I was replicating the experience that I had and trying to fill in the gaps a little bit, until I realized that aside from student evaluations, nobody was watching over me. I thought, wait, I am perpetuating so much of what I inherited. And of course, costume history is all English and French and from a very Eurocentric point of view, but even in the way I was approaching projects and assignments and information gathering, I realized I had inherited those same Eurocentric conventions.
My challenge was feeling confident enough to create something that I felt better serves the student. I do have goals when I'm in the classroom, but I’m interested in restructuring a system and how to take it apart and reframe it where it's safe, I'm not gonna lie, there's a lot of space in formal and institutional education that isn't safe for me, and for how I teach, or how I view and understand knowledge and wisdom keeping. My views and perspectives are rooted in Anishinaabe culture and from my ancestral teachings which are very much outside of what we're normally taught. Straddling that line also puts me at risk of being accused of appropriation. And that's a whole other conversation about the ability to change and manifest and shift. Respectfully, working in academia and being mixed is a pain in the ass sometimes. You're not allowed to exist in liminal space. You have to pick one track or the other. Teaching from that position has been a big challenge.
[CE] A lot of what you're saying, Valerie, resonates, especially the idea of being in the classroom and trying to teach in a way that feels integral to your own experiences without having received those models. I shudder to think of my first few years of teaching. I also think that's normal. Educational spaces do not understand the needs and the unique qualities of the populations they serve. That is no one person’s fault. It’s a structural violence issue. I think that happens really early on. For me, because education was an anchor, I'm trying to figure out my relationship with my own self worth. People pleasing as a survival mechanism can really be understated. A person thinks, I need this resource and in order to get this resource, I perform this way, and then I get that resource. That pattern is reinforced by funding, everything that you apply for, and everything that you succeed at. And so it creates a relationship to authority that undermines our relationship to our self worth and the ability to develop self-sovereignty. I know they are debates about self-sovereignty versus interdependence, but coming from a place in which I was very put in a position of dependence, I feel like that idea of self-sovereignty, along with interdependence, is really important to me. I really had to redevelop a relationship to my own creative practice, to my own creativity, and undo the unintentional harm a lot of those structures perpetuate. As someone who sort of thrives with some degree of healthy stress, sometimes unhealthy stress, that's worked in my favor. Ultimately, the higher I got in my educational journey, the more I realized that those spaces were not designed for people like me. Like being expected to not work for a summer while studying for comprehensive exams in the PhD, as one example. The relationship with one's own process is so deep and I don't feel like I was encouraged to explore that. It has become really important to me in my own work and in my teaching, and something that I'm continually working to better understand.
[AO] When I was teaching English, it was one of the only times I've ever been in an authoritative role as a teacher. And I was 19. Everybody I was teaching was twice my age. I didn't have the experience of owning the classroom. Since then, I have taught workshops for groups of people that are free. But even in those spaces, I was fairly young and there was a lot of stuff I didn't know. I could really only communicate my experiences. In situations like that, I’m not the not the teacher, but maybe just a person who has the most experience in the room. So my challenge has been, how do you teach, communicate without hierarchy?
When I work with Blazing Star Seed Cooperative or Free Farm Syndicate, nobody is paying me to be there. It wouldn't be fun for me if I didn't see it as an opportunity to learn and work with my friends. There’s also the opportunity to learn when we disagree on what we should plant, or how often we should water it. In those instances, I can only share my experience. I have 12 seasons of experience, you have three, but that doesn't mean I'm right. It also doesn't mean that I'm right this year, because there are so many variables. So, when do you explain to somebody simply that something is probably not going to work and when do you just go through the experience with them and find out? Or maybe that it does work. Or maybe it works better than you thought it was going to. That can be really rewarding.
In farming, there are a lot of different approaches. There's the traditional approach, and there's the settler approach, and there's the descendant of the settler who wants to go back to the traditional approach, and they're all really different. There are things worth learning from all of them. Even if you don’t take the same approach as somebody else, that doesn't mean that you can't learn something from them. In my own practice, I'm coming to it in a way that’s values focused. With seed saving, we ask everybody to pick a specific plant, plant that plant, and observe that plant. And when it comes time to process seed, everybody looks up their plant and how to process its seeds. They troubleshoot and are in charge of the group while processing the seed from their plant. And we might not know it perfectly, but next year, we'll have more collective knowledge within the group and we can build upon that knowledge each year. We’re co-creating that knowledge.
[AH] There's so much coming together. I feel like we could go on for hours, but before we move onto another question, let's see if there are questions from audience members. In the meantime, we touched on your different experiences with the economics of learning and economic security, whatever that means. Higher education is often positioned as the route to stability. What comes up when you think about the economics of entering academic institutions? And how can creating or reclaiming more human scaled collective, collaborative methods of education impact the participants’’ economic realities?
[AO] A lot of what we're trying to do in the projects I'm working on has to do with sovereignty–learning to grow food, learning to save seed. And I definitely save quite a bit of money on food in the summer, but to some extent, the thing that we're really learning is how to cooperate, how to pivot, how to adapt, how to work together, how to communicate. Those are big things. I don't know that it affects any of us economically in the moment but I see it as building resiliency into our communities so that when shocks happen, we have some sort of autonomous infrastructure that we've built. And as things change, and as some of these changes become more radical, we'll be able to adapt.
[AH] I do want to clarify, I think it's important that we do think about the possibility of having an economy that exists outside of capitalism. That's something I've learned in the last couple of years. I think Alex is talking about forming an economy. If you know your supply chain and all of it happens without money, that's a workable economy. Any of these responses can completely set aside attaching a monetary value to producing knowledge.
[CE] I’m interested in addressing assumptions about the value of work with Vocational Poetics. And by that, I mean not only how we value creative work, but how we think about work as redemptive, when it's not. And the gatekeeping that happens with creative work in institutional spaces. And that work in process is not valued. I'm personally really interested in a process-based approach to creative work and learning that makes space for that outside the more theoretical question about value and work. Continually changing the material conditions is what's going to make this kind of work possible. I'm still figuring out what that looks like for Vocational Poetics.
I've only been doing this for not quite a year, and so far, I've done most of it. And I just don't feel like I can ask people for labor without compensating them. I've been able to compensate my guest teachers, and that's felt really great. I want to move toward a space where my labor is compensated, everyone's labor is compensated, but also, there's some work that we're just doing because we're creating a resource. That is the larger picture, creating a resource for people. This might be pre-recorded videos, asynchronous versus synchronous material for people who aren't interested or aren't able to pursue an MFA. Or for people who have that background, but are looking for a community to co-develop, following June Jordan's Poetry for the People model where students become teachers and flatten that hierarchy. That feels like one way of disrupting the current economy around education.
[VSPS] I love hearing both Cass and Alex share what they do and their perspectives. To me, we’re talking about the economic impact institutionalized, or non-institutionalized, education can have and it's all wrapped up in value and worth to some degree. But the thing I think about and I'm striving for is, again, breaking that. I don't want to say breaking; building an economics of shared respect is fundamental. In the Anishinaabe way of life, we were given one charge by the Creator, and that was to be a good relative. That's it. There aren't ten commandments or a laundry list of do's and don'ts. We were given the gift of the Seven Grandfathers: love, bravery, wisdom, respect, honor, humility, and wisdom. It’s like, be a good relative and here's how you do it.
I keep thinking, and there are studies that already corroborate this, even when we’re looking at a capitalist system, diversity and a broad range of experiences strengthens that. Just because you're fifteen years into your career, that doesn't necessarily position you above someone with two years of experience. There’s more of a communal aspect to it. That's the part that I'm curious about. Right now, we live in a time when money's important. That's how our lives are structured, particularly in the United States. But in the beginning, and even settlers to be honest, you did not survive well in the prairie if you did not have a community to help. And I think what we're talking about is building these really fundamental ways of being that then our economy reflects, rather than centering it the other way around.
One thing we haven't talked about is student expectations as a huge thing to contend with in any sort of educational setting, whether it's institutional or not. What baggage and expectations are students coming in with? There has to be an absence of ego to be able to say, I don't know. Or to be able to say, I love you, but no, in this instance, it’s different. I've come to realize that as a parent and acknowledging what I wish I had as a parent. I wish our teachers were empowered and had the ability to the same. My girls are in middle school and god bless anybody who teaches middle school because those years are really tough. Can we just have a ‘how to be a good human class?’ Or a ‘let's go make a cake class?’ Can we play recess some more? It’s more about that than a degree. What's the value of a degree? You can make a whole bunch of money because you have a bunch of letters after your name? And that's coming from someone who values letters after her name.
[AH] The common theme I'm hearing is that relationships and the way people relate to each other in these spaces should be more important than a transactional trade between faked expertise and a salary, or a bunch of tuition money and a piece of paper. We're working through transactions in a lot of institutions now and if we could transform that into more humanly scaled relationships, then what comes out of those transactions would be more impactful, more legitimate, more relevant. We would be facing each other as human beings and not as a boss and an employee, or a student and a teacher, or the dean and an adjunct.
What’s next in your practice? What are you all excited about?
[AO] I just learned how to hand pollinate corn. I went to a farm in Indiana and learned how to cross pollinate corn. As soon as we jump off here, I'm heading down to one of our lots because I've got corn that's tasseling and we're going to take the first step. I’m also excited about making more connections and growing community that way, not just locally, but regionally too. We're not trying to be self-sufficient. We're not trying to be community-sufficient. We're working to be a vibrant node in an interconnected network of folks who are just creating their own communities.
Blazing Star Seed Cooperative is also hosting seed processing days every Sunday in October starting at noon at Reformed on 20th and Vinton Streets in Omaha. We're also putting an almanac together. We did one in 2023 and we're getting ready to do another one that will be published in 2024. If you're working on a growing project, please get in touch and share your ideas. Hopefully, some collaborations come through that.
[CE] In September, I'm teaching a series called Adjusting the Signal. It's a three part series offered in conjunction with Regis University, which has a low residency MFA program here in Denver. And the series includes trauma-informed creative writing workshop facilitation, community-engaged grant writing, and community-engaged syllabus creation, including resources for those who want to begin their own community. You can register through the website, and there's a sliding scale and please reach out if any of that is inaccessible, of course. Otherwise, Vocational Poetics just received its first investment from a donor which is very exciting. It will go toward some web design, as well as scholarships. I’m also applying for grants to create funding for creating open educational resources through which I can pay writers and teachers for their labor. So I'm excited about all those things.
[VSPS] I'm two fold, maybe three fold excited. I’m in the process of birthing a book and writing specifically about decolonizing, or indigenizing creative practices. That’s come out of the work I've done for the past ten years examining the paradigms and processes in western, particularly American, education and in the profession. It brings my experiences in fashion and costume design into focus, but the through lines trace many creative disciplines and reframe and recontextualize those kinds of practices. Alternate Currents also has a book coming up that we're working on as a collective. I've been having fun playing with that.
I have a show out at the McCarter Theatre in New Jersey that's getting underway too, which is a really great piece called Bulrusher. You'll have to look it up because it's a beautiful story and I can't try to I can't synopsize it. After all of that, I'm looking forward to getting back into the studio. I work in the ribbon work tradition and fabric tradition and I'm so looking forward to actually getting back into my studio and, and working on some of those projects to see where they take me.
[AH] Awesome. Thank you all for being here and having this really amazing discussion! Have a good night, everyone.
*This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
About the Panelists:
Cass Eddington is a poet, teacher, and editor originally from Utah. They are the author of the chapbooks Vernal Hurt (Magnificent Field) and TRANSIT (Spiral Editions, forthcoming January 2023) with recent work in Annulet, Deluge, DREGINALD, La Vague. They are a PhD candidate in the University of Denver’s Creative Literary Arts Program and former Denver Quarterly Poetry editor. Cass received their MFA from Colorado State University where they also teach for their online Creative Writing Minor. Cass has also taught ESL/ELL to adult learners, facilitated creative writing workshops with incarcerated youth, and worked in community arts organizing. In their teaching, they encourage writers to draw on duration-based acts of meaning-making and facilitate writing rituals toward the process of creative self-sovereignty, as well as community.
Alex O’Hanlon is a community organizer who is committed to supporting resident-led projects that enhance their quality of life. She currently works as the Engagement Coordinator at One Omaha. Prior to that, Alex worked as a Garden Manager for City Sprouts South where she coordinated programs, workshops, and events. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy/History from UNO and travels to California every fall to harvest olives.
Valerie St. Pierre Smith (White Earth Ojibwe enrolled descendant) is a scholar, author and multidisciplinary artisan. Valerie's eclectic creative background includes fiber arts, sewing, painting, multimedia, and costume/fashion design. Her design work has been seen across the country with highlights that include The Kennedy Center, Woolly Mammoth Theatre, Mixed Blood Theatre, Sea World: San Diego, the National Museum of the American Indian and Pilobolus Dance Theatre. A bit of a unicorn, Valerie’s creative research and scholarly work focuses on cultural appropriation, inspiration, representation and decolonization in western creative practices. As a mixed blood Anishnaabe kwe, healer, and artisan, her work explores and is influenced by her experiences at the confluence of healing, social justice, traditional Anishinaabe teachings, and the power of identity. St. Pierre Smith has over 25 years of professional creative, academic, and scholarly experience, holding a B.F.A from Stephens College, and an M.F.A from San Diego State.
About the Moderator:
Amanda Huckins is a Nebraskan poet whose work has been published in booklet form as "Trying to End the War" (merrily merrily merrily merrily, 2017) and featured in A Dozen Nothing (adozennothing.com), among other places on paper and online. In her weekday hours, Amanda is an Early Head Start educator and participates in building the brain architecture for social emotional and cognitive development in infants and toddlers. In addition to her paid work, Amanda is a grassroots organizer who works alongside fellow community members to build self-determination, forge non-transactional relationships, and create radical free spaces (such as past DIY spaces The Commons in Lincoln, NE and Media Corp. in Omaha). She is also a letterpress printer who produces posters and other ephemera in her garage print studio, where she teaches typesetting to anyone who wants to learn.