A friend and fellow professor once shared advice that her mother, also an educator, told her in regard supporting students.  It went something like this:

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“If he’s struggling, list ten possible hypotheses for the problem.  Then list ten more.  Look at all of these and you likely still won’t know what’s going on.”

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No matter how many years I’ve worked with diverse students at various institutions and how deeply I've studied pedagogies, I remind myself not to make assumptions and really listen.  And as a writing teacher, I strive to create assignments that allow students to speak back to the world about their experiences, understandings, and critical thinking in the contexts of the most important and troubling issues of our times.  

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In the fall of 2017, after the white supremacists marched across our campus and incited violence in downtown Charlottesville, I revised my courses in order to enable first-year writers to “partake of those very qualities and purposes best representative of true scholarship—namely, broad, informed, intensive reading, thinking, and writing and a commitment to the social betterment of a troubled world” (Radavich 112).  I’ve always asked students to analyze how writers depict the clash of social forces and use words to fight racism and injustice. Nonetheless, my preparation and experience didn’t make the work of anti-racism and the teaching of writing any easier or less frightening, and the events of August 2017 raised the stakes considerably. 

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When I asked my students in first-year writing class to join the conversations started by the New York Times article: "What UVA Students Saw" by writing personal essays about their experiences on campus this year, I expected to read of fear, confusion, and hope--that a community composed of intelligent, caring individuals could take on the challenges ahead--feelings that I’d experienced myself.  

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And there was some of this. Students learned, in my class and in others, what white privilege meant and wondered what could be done to achieve social justice.  Courses contextualized systematic racism and revealed UVA’s contradictory history.  In the essays that follow (which students have given me permission to put out into the world) you’ll also read about faith, in both the Uva Community and their diverse religious beliefs.  

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But what I didn’t expect, and what reconfirms that I can never make assumptions about what troubles and disrupts the learning of my students, were too many narratives about pervasive racism, anti-Semitism, and silencing.  Despite our community-wide efforts to have dialogues, these narratives indicate that we have, in many instances, failed. As you’ll read in these essays: students of color do not feel supported, and some white students disregard campus efforts to promote social justice.  

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No, I didn’t expect that so many of my students would express frustrations and injustices in their narratives.  Additionally, in the second assignment, in which students could engage with course texts, I did not foresee that so many students of color would reiterate Ta-Nehisi Coates’ anger and hopelessness at our both our country’s past and present.  As Coates as has articulated repeatedly, he is not optimistic about race relations and politics in this country.  His work offers no solutions. But he writes.  

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Junot Diaz, in another course text, explains:

I find in the culture silences, places people don't want to talk, and I build in them. I work in them. Because that's what an artist does. You know, the artist has conversations that folks don't want to have. An artist talks about, points their finger in directions that not everyone wants to look. I mean, that's been historically the role. And I can tell you, as someone who's worked in this society's silences for a long time, we have not done the work to talk about race. We haven't. We've been avoiding it. And I think one day we'll get to talking about it more. But right now, we've been just avoiding it.  (Diaz qtd in Moyers np)

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On this site, my students, like Diaz, speak into silences.  

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As an educator, I will continue to pay attention to how my students respond to injustice in Charlottesville and the larger world. I’ll do everything I can to support them as writers and learners.  

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We ask that you please read and listen.

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Please note: while these are mature drafts,  these texts are still works in progress.