(Thanks to Lorraine Walker for the felicitous terminology)
Students are not blank slates. They have lives outside the course, and many students come to classes with a great deal of experiential baggage; and all of them have at least a carry-on caseful:
- some of it helps their learning (such as positive experiences of success in learning in the past, or previous acquaintance with the subject area). On the whole you don't want to interfere with this, apart from their being wedded to surface learning because it has got them this far. But...
- some of it hinders. It may be preoccupation with external issues (money worries, problems at home, absorption in relationships, good and bad), or an ambivalent history of learning or more particularly of being taught. And...
- some of it does both at different times and for different topics.
You can ignore it: that is what most of us do, most of the time. Usually it works, with occasional hitches. If you are teaching a technical or highly academic subject, the effect of students' baggage can be negligible. It usually only shows up in requests for deferral of assessment or "mitigating circumstances" reports. It does not reach into how you teach mathematics or geology or history or law or marketing or Spanish.
- Maths and geology may be immune, but if the history is that of the slave-trade or colonialism, or the law is family law, expect the occasional passionate and non-academic reaction from those who have been touched by it.
- Even issues in marketing and Spanish may touch on personal experience to the extent that they provoke a reaction.
- And child-care and ethics and some parts of psychology and politics and education... If you ignore the baggage here, you might as well give up.
You can encourage "distancing": This may be a combination of tactical, practical and psychological measures:
- Insist on mobile phones being switched off.
- Generally this is a standard rule to minimise interruptions, but making a point of it emphasises that the class is in a sense apart from the rest of the world.
- Use a ritual opening, a standard procedure for a minute or so which helps people to register that they are now in a class, which is different from the rest of the world. Taking the register is one such standard device.
- And of course do not use everyday examples. Keep the discussion to esoteric scholarly debates suffused with jargon.
However, as the last suggestion shows, in some circumstances you may well be losing more than you gain.
You can embrace it: You may get obsessional questioning and discussions which generate more heat than light, you may get intense "Can I just have a word?" pleas before you reach the door after the session; but you do get engagement because the material resonates with real-world experience. It is a question of containing the baggage for benefit of all rather than trying to ignore it.
I have mainly taught on professional rather than purely academic courses, to part-time students who are doing the job at the same time as they seek a qualification in it. For them, the "baggage" is the real world, and it is what they test the theory and "book-learning" by.
Practically, the only option here is to embrace their experience and to invite them to explore it, even at the cost of the purity of the theory.
In 2003, I was part of a panel re-validating a degree in Youth and Community Work. One of its most impressive features was a module on "Black Perspectives", and the students we spoke to (including white students who had taken it) were full of praise for it. It had been developed out of a recognition that black students' experience before the course had often been treated simply as a "problem", but there had been little recognition of what it pointed to in socio/political terms. It was designed to contextualise and explore that baggage in the light of historical and sociological perspectives.
I am not advocating embracing baggage as a panacea.
- For one thing, it is experienced very differently by different learners, and paying attention to the most concerned and involved can lead to the alienation of those for whom this particular issue means little.
- For another, it can privilege those particular experiences represented in the group above the general issues verified by rigorous research
...but acknowledgement and respect not only costs little, but also pays dividends in terms of learning. The problem is that you have to be prepared to divide your attention between the content of your teaching and continually "reading" the class, and that assumes sufficient experience to be able to take for granted the basic teaching process.
If you are not confident enough to believe that you can do both these things at the same time, make a low-key (don't make a big deal out of it) but clear statement that you can imagine that some of the session content may have a personal dimension for some students. Still, you are sure that the best way to deal with it is as a whole: if, after the session some people still have questions, they are welcome to talk to you privately. Some will, but many will be reassured simply by the offer.
All this has been fairly open, so far. What about the more clearly negative issue of students who don't trust teachers or the system they represent?
- They are not likely to say anything. In fact, they may be amongst the most compliant of our students. They see themselves as playing a game with opponents who are more powerful than they are, and up to a point they are prepared to play (usually as surface learners, trying to get tactical advantage by going through the motions): but pass that point and they will say, "Stuff that for a game of soldiers!" (or words to that effect) and clear off, psychologically and probably physically.
- Their baggage may well come from labelling in previous school and college experience. You may have many years' experience to overcome. It is not easy, and in a sense it is not your problem. The only advice is to play it straight: anything else is as likely to compound the problem as to alleviate it.