Bystander to Advocate:
Instructing Apathy in the Classroom
Abstract
Prompted by her travel course to Germany and Poland to study Holocaust sites in the history of
place, English Professor Karen Wink describes her journey that began intellectually, yet
unexpectedly became a personal transformation from apathy to advocacy both in herself and
teaching practice of writing and literature. By introducing the notion that apathy is
understandable and even expected in classrooms in which there are rules and guidelines, she
shares a variety of her encounters with models of moral courage from the past who inspired her
to examine her own values, assumptions, and beliefs, so that she, in turn, could allow a safe
space for her students to raise their own consciousness. Her article poses the question: Can
critical thinking square classroom conformity and expectations? Dr. Wink discovers that student
thinking could transform when she was more willing to become fully present and even
descriptive of her own experiences as a catalyst for learning in the classroom.
Bystander to Advocate 3
Bystander to Advocate:
Instructing Apathy in the Classroom
Calling war a “terrible confession,” Joseph Galloway, author of We Were Soldiers Once…And
Young (1992), a veteran war reporter, and the only civilian to receive a Bronze Star with a
Combat “V” in Vietnam for rescuing an American soldier, said the best writing is about war
because of its vivid detail lying in memory. Sitting with my students in our military academy
class that day listening to Galloway explain why he had crossed the line from objective reporter
to rescuer, I remember his voice strengthening when he said, “there are times when it is not
enough to be a witness---there are times when you must participate. You have to be of some
more use than simply acting as a tape recorder or a camera,” (lecture, November, 2002). His
words sent me whirling out of my guarded gates of thinking and back to my travel study course
on the Holocaust in Germany and Poland during the summer of 2001. When Galloway discussed
soldiers, courage, rescuing, and a need for self-expression, my reflective journey began with a
slow rising, yet venerable epiphany about my courage in teaching that occurred around this trip.
In my composition and literature classes, I had begun to uncover moments of apathy, a sense of
resistance, in both myself and my students when it was easier to wrap ourselves as witnesses, or
even bystanders, in the classroom.
After my fifth year of teaching college English at a military academy where the constraints are
paradoxical: cadet abeyance to the protocol, yet relinquishing of this righteousness in the
classroom once they have called “Attention on Deck,” to examine, analyze, and even criticize
texts. This tension exists inexorably, yet it is alluring because I have an increasing commitment
to help students rediscover their voices. Several apathetic moments in class allowed students’
voices to hail loudly, requiring me to examine my own teaching. As a result, I began to discover
that transforming apathy relates to encouraging full participation in moments when students
resist and challenge me in the classroom. As faculty, we all encounter moments when we enter
into apathy where our own unbound learning and instruction is “limited by social, historical, and
cultural conditions” (Mezirow, 2000, p. 27). We learn, for the sake of stimulation, the need to
have freedom within boundaries to continue as engaged, rather than dispassionate teachers. We
face the mirror with a small sticky note in the corner hailing our true role: “to foster …conditions
for [helping students] to make more autonomous and informed choices and develop a sense of
self-empowerment” (Mezirow, 2000, p. 26). I argue that this role is crucial on dual personal and
professional levels for teachers’ growth and effectiveness.
Following Galloway’s presentation, I began to reflect on what keeps the fires of interest burning
for myself and other teachers in the marshaled school days. As those, including myself, who
espouse learning, I wondered what spurred teachers’ passion to prevent themselves from
becoming bystanders in their own classrooms and resist passivity that can hover among the
discussions, texts, handouts, websites, and videotapes. How do we, as teachers, transform apathy
and resistance into real learning? Some comfort or a settling is required for learning, but here I
refer to an apathy that is part of some classes, a numbness that looks like students receiving,
rather than claiming their learning and teachers conveying instruction, but not critically
challenging students’ assumptions. For the purposes of this discussion, “apathy” is defined by
denotation as “a lack of emotion; lack of interest; unconcern; indifference” and by antithesis as
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“challenging one’s own thinking” (Webster’s). A snapshot of apathy can also “look” as though
teachers and students have a “silent agreement of ‘I won’t ask much of you if you don’t ask
much of me.’” Apathy can exist as smoke in front of the mirror of learning. Mezirow (2000), in
his theory on transformation of learning, argues, “…we learn to negotiate and act on our own
purposes, values, feelings, and meanings rather than those we have uncritically assimilated from
others—to gain clearer control over our lives as socially responsible, clear-thinking decision
makers” (p. 8). When real learning takes place, there must be an environment of safety and trust
in which students can take risks in their thinking—an imperative part of our tradition of
education. Without a trusting classroom not safe enough for students to transform, they become
apathetic because it is easier for them not to critically engage in learning and reflection. Thus, the
real question, “How do we transform apathy into a willingness to question the foundations of our
own thinking so that students, in turn, can question their own?” is a crucial question to ask in
education. Kegan argues, “…learning that reflects on itself can only be accomplished through
transformational education, a ‘leading out’ from an established habit of mind” (as cited in
Mezirow, 1994, p. 232). I transformed an emotional experience to re-examine my role as a
teacher and learner. A fundamental premise of teaching is that students will not transform their
learning if they are passive, if they are not allowed “to suffer” loss and refine assumptions with
support. A subtext of this premise is that we teachers will not transform learning until we too
have departed from apathy and examined our own assumptions in such a way that we can, as
Poet Robert Frost claims, “become educated when [we] have the ability to listen to almost
anything without losing [our] tempers or self-confidence.”
Apathy showed up in my classroom in a series of incidents that I now began to reflect upon
differently in light of my Holocaust trip. The following vignettes, taken from my classroom are
the “mirror” that reflected for me. Interestingly, as I shall discuss later, I had an opportunity, as a
result of my trip to reframe and transform the meaning of these experiences. In my first vignette,
I recalled the day I taught Holocaust poetry: Nelly Sachs “A Dead Child Speaks,” Anne Sexton’s
“After Auschwitz,” and Martin Niemoller’s “First They Came for the Jews” in my freshmen
Introduction to Literature course. This was the first among several incidents contributing to my
epiphany about bystanding, witnessing, and ultimately, advocating learning in both my teaching
and students’ experiences in my classroom. In a series of vignettes, the first of which I introduce
as an impetus, the second and third as retrospectives in light of my Holocuast trip, and the fourth
and fifth as recent resistant moments in a lighter classroom.
Vingette #1
One of these moments of resistance lived in my classroom during my second year of teaching
literature, in my classroom, a student, Carrie, challenges her peers to discover the darker and
deeper message of Niemoller’s sermon (as cited in Schilb and Cliffords, 2000, p. 1006)
unsatisfactorily. I had assigned students poetry recitations and facilitations of question-and-
answer sessions. Thus, I watched Carrie recite Pastor Niemoller’s sermon:
First they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
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Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me.
I noticed her passion and conviction. I heard the anger in her voice when she pleaded, “What is
he really trying to say to us?” Dissatisfied with her peers’ responses, she answered her own
question: “He is telling us to stand up for what we believe in!” Though clear and forceful, her
words fell to the floor, as it was a paradoxical statement to the freshmen at a military academy
where there is an emphasis on thinking as a group and sometimes even consequences for voicing
opinions. A moment of truth rattled inside of me as I watched Carrie and my students’ passive
reaction: I was teaching at a place where conformity was valued, even cast as survival, yet
critical thinking was espoused. This is the fundamental tension of military education and critical
thinking—in fact, the abuse scandal in Iraq suggests that military members need this type of
critical thinking, yet how does it square with obeyance and conformity? My answer is through
instruction and spirited discussion, even at academies and places of higher education where rules
reign. This brings me back to Galloway’s reminder of participation conquering witnessing. In my
classes, I had begun to uncover moments of apathy, a sense of resistance both in myself and my
students when it was easier to wrap ourselves in bystander roles until it became too
uncomfortable to do such--a time when I needed to shake myself and my students out of being a
witnesses in the classroom. As both a civilian and a member of the speakers’ bureau, I invited
him to come to my freshmen composition class to talk to students who were languishing in their
distaste for writing. Challenging them to attune their own writing styles and thinking by constant
self-evaluation achieved only by asking themselves the question: “What am I doing and What am
I not doing to influence this situation?” Though he was addressing the students, his words
startled my own senses. Upon contemplation, I knew I had pushed past similar silences in the
classroom, but pondered the most critical question, “Was I a model of courage at a military
academy?”
In his sermon, Niemoller reminds us that apathy is unacceptable, even dangerous. How do I, and
other teachers, apply this lesson of transforming apathy and resistance into meaningful learning
for ourselves and our students? If we use solely using text it is easy for teachers and students to
become apathetic. How do we encourage full participation in moments when students resist and
challenge our efforts in the modern classroom? Perhaps by uncovering moments of apathy and
instructing them, not letting them slide into silences, but bringing them out into the open and
rendering them powerless. Perhaps there is something alive, visceral, and dynamic in traveling
and experiencing “place.” What experiences do most of us educators have? We mainly rely upon
texts and class discussions, even multimedia. Yet, it is simple for the texts to become deadened
in the classroom. The teacher’s experience, as true of my own transformation on the trip, can be
a catalyst for transforming what happens in the classroom. In places such as the Academy,
apathy is understandable and even expected where students are taught, first followership and
later leadership of military protocol. We need to stay emotionally connected to our intellectual
selves, thus fully engaging in becoming aware of our own unspoken assumptions so as to allow
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students to examine their own thinking. In his “Philosophy of Adult Education” chapter,
Mezirow (2000) argues, “Central to this process [adult education] is helping learners to critically
reflect on, appropriately validate, and effectively act on their (and others’) beliefs,
interpretations, values, feelings, and ways of thinking” (p. 26). Furthermore, Mezirow (2000)
argues, “We make meaning by becoming critically aware of one’s own tacit assumptions and
expectations and those of others and assessing their relevance for making an interpretation” (p.
4). As teachers, this is our core focus, both to demonstrate the antithesis of apathy ourselves and
to engage in reflexive discussions with our students.
For my own experience of apathy, it took going on a trip to Germany and Poland to encounter
models of moral courage for me to learn that apathy is not something to avoid in the classroom,
but rather to instruct. For me, to learn to engage resistance when my original instinct was
sometimes to detour it equated to a paramount learning experience. When I registered for this
trip, I wanted an intellectual experience of history, culture, and religion. I wanted to “realize the
nature of suffering” (His Holiness Dali Lama, 2000, p. 33) as a way of making sense of the pain I
noted in the Holocaust poetry and other readings. Instead, this trip became very personal—not so
much about place. While visiting the Nazi rally grounds, Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz camps,
Wansee Conference Center, a deportation site for Jews, and the Warsaw Ghetto, I felt a myriad
of somber emotions when I gazed at the victim in a photograph, whom I described: “One lone
Jew—his coat thick with white dust, his back bent double, pain searing through the rubble of his
bones. He turns around wearily, his hardened eyes filled with grief and fear; his hand barely
holding a shovel. He is so tired of digging. He knows lunch is only meager. His bristled beard
unkempt, the long ridge of his nose and hopes pointing downward.” As I looked away from this
photograph, I realized that I felt similarly—alone, raw, weary, and, more poignantly, exposed. I
felt un-anchored as I faced my own inadequacies and when I saw how hard this victim and others
like him had to think to challenge the information coming toward them, I came face to face with
my own inadequacy. My assumptions were stripped away like the ashes on the victim’s coat. In a
military environment, I began to look at myself in relation to the models of courage whom I
encountered on this trip and pondered the question, “What did I have to learn from these models
of courage?” I suddenly saw myself in a real moment of vulnerability as a teacher and as a
daughter. I saw myself not as active, but a purveyor of my own competency as a teacher and the
expected norms of the curriculum, but not with true critical thinking. When students challenged
me or made me a target of their anger because of their discomfort, I usually responded with low
tolerance and defensiveness. I had let myself and my family down. My family had an edict: “It is
not acceptable to live passively. Plan, foresee, be present, build your character, give, advocate,
honor your commitments, and stand on principle.” Apathy was something for me to avoid both at
home and in the classroom. I continued to reflect on how I could apply this lesson to the
classroom and keep us all from becoming bystanders as I and others were called to attention after
September 11 th and other tragedies.
As a professor, I have reflected on engagement and what moves people to action. I noticed in my
own and other classrooms that students may adopt a strange numbness, but shake out of it during
stories, especially when they were ones where humans took action. In the classroom, the energy
rises when stories are told. We listen and depart from the classroom, allowing ourselves to be
present in different places, if even for a few moments to be where they were, to feel their
surprises, mishaps, or winnings. Stories keep us engaged. I told my students the following story
Bystander to Advocate 7
and read from my journal as a vicarious experience for them. Students said they had heard, read,
and viewed many Holocaust texts in secondary school and seemed mildly engaged until I began
to read from the excerpt in my journal:
It was in the prison cell of Martin Niemoller where I walked. The first happened on the visit to
Sachsenhausen: I walked through the prison alone with only a few distant voices in the
background. The grey iron doors, cold concrete under my feet, white washed walls, a scattering
of cracks, earth cell barricaded by a door of steel bars, all locked with similar dark silver locks.
Angry and anxious, I looked at the cells. With my back to one and facing another, I saw a
common cell with a harsh, small bed and a small worn, wooden table with plenty of splinters for
writing? Eating? Contemplating death? I took a photo, a stamp on my mind, and turned around.
Now, I was facing Niemoller’s cell. I gasped. Even though I knew his cell was housed here, but I
was not prepared for this. [Carrie’s conviction had returned to me.]
As I stood outside his cell, I felt the cold wind whip against my skin and bones. Noticing that I
was alone in the prison...”fitting,” I thought, “a time for understanding.” Would I comprehend
why persons such as Pastor Niemoller were imprisoned for not murder, or theft, or rape, but for
having his telephone tapped and criticizing Hitler; for having thoughts and opinions. I drew my
own thoughts back and gazed at his picture, the empty cell, and a lone red candle on the floor
underneath his gaze—one sad, seemingly sorrowful tribute to his memory. What should I do?
Cry? Pray? Rage? Throw a rose? I just stood for a very long time and pressed #12 on my
audio...”After 7 years in concentration camps, both in Sachsenhausen and Dachau, Niemoller
was asked, “Was it really so bad, and I answered, “It was 1000x worse.”
With Niemoller among the ghosts of the so entitled “celebrated prisoners,” the steel bars on the
windows, a crack in his window, at first like a well-blasted firecracker, but upon second
glance—an ugly spider vein spewed over dirty glass, just over Niemoller’s picture. I decided to
memorize his face: eyes that had lost their veneer, grief rising under his skin in patches, wide
forehead with deep burrows giving was to a look of distinction and determination, no resignation
in his lips, a terse line separating full top and bottom, and every hair in place. So, I glanced
around, still alone and ripped the top off of my map and wrote a little note: Bravo Pastor
Niemoller, Bravo” all because I happen to like that word and I happen to like his face. I looked
quickly, side to side, noticed no one was near, threw the paper in his cell, then walked away
slowly.
When I was traveling, I encountered, in addition to Niemoller, three other models of moral
courage—all of whom were rescuers during the Nazi regime. The trip, an experience of
deportation, confinement, and liberation, took us from Nuremberg and Berlin to Krakow and
Warsaw. A memorable moment on the trip, which I always detail to my students during our
Holocaust poetry segment, was an overnight train ride in a bunker with six women each sleeping
in a minimalist “rack” with her passport, money, and other valuables. Once settled, we watched
as the door jerked open and a train employee with an officious air, demanded to see our
passports. With some fear and anxiousness, we obliged and, thus began our feeling of rising
discomfort that we were not completely in control. In my anger of their experience and my own
sense of despair, I began to seek rescue and comfort, even if only putting my face in the
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raindrops coming in the window. They too must have yearned for rescue in the brown cloud of
doom.
In her text Conscience and Courage, Eva Fogelman (1998) explains, “Rescuing was not
glamorous or filled with dramatic moments of valor. Rather, it was a tedious, enervating job,
more like an assembly-line worker’s duties than a movie star’s. They did not know how it would
end. Many rescuers describe their weariness from endless days of deception and anxiety. Yet
most did not abandon their charges” (p. 83). The models, including Niemoller, as
rescuers—blatant or subtle, but those who stood in the face of resistance and acted courageously.
When I went on the trip, I became entranced with these models of courage before me. They
stood on principle in the face of resistance, they were ethical and courageous, and they were
independent thinkers, despite living in a time when they were taught not to think, but to react and
perform their duties upon demand, just as teachers needed to do in the classroom. If I examined
my assumptions, then I too could come to know how these models can serve me. They were not
able to engage resistance because of punishment, even death. What did I have to learn from
them? How can their experiences serve me in the classroom? Can moral courage be taught?
After hearing their stories, I believe courage can be taught—implicitly.
Pharmacist Tadeusz Pankiewicz
We visited the Krakow ghetto where, “in March, 1941, between 15,000 and 17,000 Jews were
forced into the confines of a ghetto here…the final deportation took place on 13 and 14 March
1943; that was the end of the ghetto, and the end of Cracow Jewry as one of the great centres of
Jewish life across four centuries” (Gilbert, 1997, p. 186). We stopped at a now defunct, yet
preserved pharmacy in operation during the Holocaust on the edge of the ghetto by a Christian-
Polish Pharmacist, Tadeusz Pankiewicz. I was deeply moved by visiting the pharmacy, seeing
old-fashioned equipment on tarnished shelves, amidst them a case containing a letter to Mr.
Pankiewicz from a Jewish man whom he aided by medicine. Despite the sharp risks, Pankiewicz
secretly smuggled in medicine and food for the Jews whom he helped to escape the ghetto. “His
efforts were deeply appreciated inside the ghetto” (Gilbert, 1997, p. 188). Perhaps it was
Pankiewicz’s full awareness of the deplorable conditions of the ghetto and his horrific
observations of the “constant screaming of the Germans, mercilessly beating, kicking and
shooting; old people, women, and children pass by the pharmacy windows like ghosts” as he
wrote in his diary that catapulted him into rescuing Jews, to stand near the backdrop of the SS
men and be willing to show humanity toward his fellow men and women. In the midst of the
pharmacy, now a museum, was a glass case holding a letter to Mr. Pankiewicz:
Bystander to Advocate 9
Dear Tadeusz Pankiewicz:
Enclosed please find a modest cheque for $250. Please accept it in the spirit in
which it has been sent to you and consider it as a symbolic payment for the 3 pills
of Panflavin which you gave to me in 1943 and for which I did not pay you then.
I consider it a great honor to have had the privilege of shaking your warm hand.
In fact, I have never forgotten your kindness for all these years.
Best Regards for you and your wife.
Yours sincerely,
Martin Baral
Oddly drawn to this case, I choked up when I read this letter that Mr. Pankiewicz received 50
years later and, unfortunately, a few months after his own death from cancer. This experience
stayed on my mind for the remainder of the trip. I reflected on this risk and one man’s
humaneness that overreached his fear. What could I learn from him? Rescuers, like Mr.
Pankiewicz, are similar to teachers in their values. Fogelman (1998) argues, “A core confidence,
a strong sense of self, and a supportive situation had allowed bystanders to undertake the rescue”
(p. 68). “The rescuer had to be competent, resourceful, and practical in order to get through each
day safely” (p. 69). “The rescuer self was vigilant, inventive, and quick to take the unexpected in
stride, holding together when the stress of living in confined quarters unhinged others” (p. 71).
Fogelman found three common characteristics of rescuers: (1) suffered loss or illness in their
own childhoods; (2) experience support and caring of another person/nurturing; and (3)
discipline in education. I was struck by the commonalities and overcome by their acts of
kindness; their acts as advocates, rather than bystanders. I began to feel mobilized and more alive
than I had felt previously on the trip when I must have shut down my emotions to cope with the
tragedy before us at each stop on our Holocaust journey.
St. Maximilian Kolbe
When we visited Auschwitz, arguably the sickest and most twisted place on the face of the earth,
I encountered the story of St. Maximilian Kolbe, a priest who, according to my scribbled notes
from the text on a memorial, aided approximately 3500 Poles from Wielkopolska and
approximately 100 Jews and displaced to Niepokalanow by the occupant where he was arrested
and imprisoned at Pawiak on 17 February 1941, then shipped to Auschwitz on 29 May 1941.
Number 16670. On 29 July 1941, he volunteered his life in place of a condemned inmate,
Franciszek Gajownickzek, on 14 August 1947 where he was injected with phenol in block 11.
Cannonized on 10 October 1982, he was known as a resistor in the movement against the Nazi
regime. When I stood before his cell, no larger than a small bathroom, in solitary confinement, I
felt intense sorrow and wondered about the essence of St. Kolbe that allowed him to confront the
horror and even sacrifice his life to allow another innocent victim, a stranger, to escape death. He
was even said to “love his persecutors” and develop an unselfish love for his fellow man. As the
Bible states, “No greater love hath a man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends”
(John. 15.13). Deeply moved by his plight, I could hardly tear myself away from his tiny, artic
Bystander to Advocate 10
cell. Suddenly, I felt his courage, his willingness to sacrifice his own life in adversity to the Nazi
machine. I felt stronger in the most heart-rendering place of history. Feeling a sense of comfort
rising, my thoughts jolted to light when my own justice sense became validated.
Profiteer Oskar Schindler
When we arrived in Krakow, we visited one of the places where Director Steven Spielberg
filmed Schindler’s List, the film how Oskar Schindler’s list of Jews, whom he saved from death
and destruction during WWII (Keneally, 1982). Having seen the film in my coat, scarf, and hat
in a cinema with a faltering heating system, I immediately recalled the scene when the Gestapo
ordered the frightened families out of their flats to the deportation sites. I remember the wild-
eyed women and children in the movie, in particular, whom the guards victimized them. Once I
had come face to face with their disempowerment, I felt outraged at the injustice. It was not until
we visited the Warsaw Ghetto and gazed at the place that once was Schindler’s factory that I felt
a sense of power again. From the inhumaneness came Oskar Schindler, a “womanizer, a
manipulator, and a seasoned briber” (Fogelman, 1994, p. 3), yet a rescuer and an advocate for the
1100 Jews whom he allowed to work in his enamel factory. Simply, an oxymoron: a humane
criminal, more humane, than criminal. Why? He proclaimed, “I hated the brutality, the sadism,
and the insanity of Nazism. I just couldn’t stand by and see people destroyed. I did what I could,
what I really had to do, what my conscience told me to do. That’s all there is to it. Really,
nothing more” (Bulow, 1996). I admire Schindler’s reflective courage, shown boldly in the film
when he is on his horse gazing intently down the hill at the chaos of shootings, looks of wild fear
in the eyes of children and other victims. One lone girl in a red coat—a trajectory in an otherwise
black and white film—caught his attention. Observing with antagonism at the shooting at close
range, he lingers though his female companion prods him to “…please, let’s go.” He does
proceed to a turning point of transfer from an observer to a participant by hiring and saving 1100
Jews to work in his enamelware factory, affirming it as a “haven, not a factory.” Though he was
an educated German with power in the Nazi regime, he did not abuse his power—an admirable
quality which I value immeasurably. He utters the infamous words, “Power is when we have
every justification to kill, and we don’t” to his compatriot with a colder soul. What do these
models espouse? Departing from the bystander role and advocating anti-apathy. Despite the
undertow of conformity, they resisted and, mobilized by their morality, outwitted the Nazis,
arguably the most formidable lovers of victimization. They were capable, instinctive individuals;
they were nobody’s fools.
In the history of place, I saw the innermost goodness of these individuals who believed “singling
out a group of people, vilifying them, and hounding them to death was wrong” (p. 80). After
encountering a succession of individuals in context, I felt anything but apathy. The words of my
dad came to mind: “Build your character by contributing to others; look for the good in them.” I
was touched by the essence of these individuals who stayed loyal to their own values in the spite
of the excruciating weight bearing down on them. They bare witness to the capacity of
humankind to bring influence to a situation no matter the cost.
The trip brought me to a place of different thinking and the truer sense about several incidents in
which students’ challenged my instruction and value of self-directed perspectives in the
classroom. I concurred with Carl Rogers (1961) in his argument, “the only learning which
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significantly influences behavior is self-discovered, self-appropriated learning: (p. 276). When I
returned to work, colleagues politely inquired, “How was your vacation?” Perplexed, I would
respond, “Depressing and exhilarating, with nothing in-between.” There was a guardedness, a
newness to my feelings that I was just now beginning to explore. I felt changed and inaccessible
for awhile. I needed to integrate the pain and allow myself to explore this whole experience
inside my classroom and myself.
A poignant experience, I encountered individual stories in the history of place, a place of
uprising where those such as Niemoller, Kolbe, Pankiewicz, and Schindler departed from a place
of prescribed thinking to risk self-reliance in a time when conformity was survival.
Retrospective Vignettes
It was the trip and Joe Galloway that propelled me to reflect differently on this incident that had
occurred in my classroom in my first few years of teaching at the Academy.
Vingette #2
A student challenged by lesson on freedom of speech because he did not see the subject as
applicable to him or his peers. In my composition and speech course, I introduced a writing
assignment in which students were to locate a particular website for American incidents in which
their freedom of speech was threatened (ex. a disc jockey at a roller skating rink in Louisiana
was ordered to stop playing rap music after he received blame for adolescents vandalizing his
property). They used the evidence to respond to the questions: Is freedom of speech a right? A
privilege? or both? Our discussion in class involved the purpose of the First Amendment in the
American Constitution and how the purposes demonstrated or threatened our country. As
students fresh from bootcamp, they perceived themselves as conduits in a hierarchy with little
power. Upperclass and military constraints had rendered them voiceless. Though leaders in high
school, they were now taught to become followers. This tension burdened me, and I argued with
myself about how to teach followers outside of the classroom to become critical thinkers as
active members inside the discussions about values, freedoms, and rights. While the class viewed
the website on the screen, a student Ron defiantly challenged me with the question: “Why are
we doing this assignment when we have no freedom of speech here?” I was stunned by his
question and suddenly felt both defiant and vulnerable. I was angry with him, the school, and
myself. I thought, “How dare you push me? How dare you don’t understand this right?” Drawing
on my belief in the assignment and Democracy, I replied tersely, “Because you are still an
American citizen, and this matters. The first amendment is relevant to us all.” At that moment, I
felt powerful and powerless. I had uncovered students’ apathy. Ron retorted with a sullen
response, “I guess.” Where did this response have its roots in me? My family. I wanted to
challenge his assumptions and everyone’s unexamined views. I could not accept their passivity.
If I could rewind the clock, I would tell Ron that he was still an individual with an intellect, a
citizen of a democracy whose membership was incumbent upon them to survive, regardless if
they were in the military. How can I deal with this? How do I transform apathy in my
classroom? Instruct it. Call upon examples of speakers. Be a model of courage myself. How I
needed to respond to him came from my own experience as a teacher, a person, and a daughter:
everyone participates and carries his/her weight. Everyone has a voice; no one is passive. Parker
Palmer (1998) claims, “We are not be able to teach in the power of paradox until we are willing
Bystander to Advocate 12
to suffer the tension of opposites, until we understand that such suffering is neither to be avoided
nor merely to be survived but must be actively embraced for the way it expands our own hearts”
(p. 85). In retrospect, I would have taken Ron and the remainder of our class with me as we
found our way through the paradox until the tension resolved at a satisfactory level. We would
have “stood the gaff” (p. 85) so that real learning could have taken place, so that I could model
the value of staying in the discomfort until we reasoned why freedom of speech matters to even
fourth-class military students still expected to become problem solvers and critical thinkers. Now
that I have been on this trip, if I could rewind the clock, I would re-visit these three moments,
and I would tell Ron that a democracy was incumbent upon his participation, regardless if he was
in the military. When I was writing the article, I approached Ron and reminisced with him about
this incident. A junior in college now, he said, “Well, I was very bitter as a fourth-class. I just felt
like I had no voice or way to express my opinions; no one listened to me. Things have gotten a
little better, and, y’know, I can express my views a little more often now, not that anyone still
cares.”
Vingette #3
In an articulation exercise, a student refuses to include his fellow cadets in his audience as he
read aloud a quote related to freedom. In a more recent composition and speech class I discussed
the qualities of effective public speakers with my freshmen students. On this particular day,
parents were invited to observe, and I asked them to memorize and recite famous quotes with an
effort to make eye contact with those on both sides of the room. One student Troy selected
Albert Einstein’s quote, “Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual
who can labor in freedom.” When he recited, he looked only at the parents. I asked him to repeat
the exercise, but look at his classmates as well to whom he replied sternly, “This doesn’t apply to
them.” Toil in freedom; turn to the parents only. They are the only ones who have freedom. He
repeated the exercise by slightly glancing at his peers, but again focused mainly on the parents.
Watching him carefully, I remember feeling angry at him, at the constraints in which he lived as
a fourth-class and low-rate student with no perception of freedom, intellectual, physical, or
emotional. I let the class conclude before I called Troy aside and asked him why he refused to
read the quote with full eye contact. I could not let this moment slide into the walls with his peers
silently agreeing with him. He replied [in paraphrase], “I just didn’t want to because I didn’t feel
that way, and I wasn’t going to pretend.” I said, “It’s important to read the quote with feeling and
connection with the audience,” and he looked at me with suspicious eyes and a “Yes ma’am.” At
this moment, I felt incongruent and unsatisfied, betrayed even by him and myself who finally
met my demands, if only superficially. Placing a different frame on this story after my trip to
eastern Europe, I would have managed this situation with more presence of mind, allowed a
large pause following his refusal and engaged him, the class, and their parents in a discussion of
freedom and its meaning in a military environment. Palmer (1998) would label this as “a space
welcoming both silence and speech [where] words are not the sole medium of exchange in
teaching and learning—we educate with silence as well” (p. 77). He would remind me and other
teachers, “Teaching always takes place at the crossroads of the personal and the public, and if
[we] want to teach well, [we] must learn to stand where these opposites intersect. I would have
headed this advice and opened the floor of discomfort until we pushed past the echoes of “We
aren’t allowed to do our own thing here, we have to listen to the upperclass” to the real feelings
underneath their words. Heading my own deepest voice, “I would have admitted to my own
Bystander to Advocate 13
despair upon hearing his refusal and my value of freedom of thought and Niemoller’s
admonishment that apathy is dangerous.” Essentially, I would have talked through this moment
and reached the tension until we lived long enough inside of it to make sense of their thoughtful
roles within the military protocol.
Vingette #4
A student questioned the choice of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay, “Self-Reliance” (as cited in as
incongruent with the Academy’s emphasis on teamwork and benevolence toward fellow
shipmates. In my Honors composition class of 15 students who are selected for the course based
upon a writing sample and their verbal SAT scores, I began the semester with Emerson’s essay,
“Self-Reliance” to set the tone for the class. To launch the discussion, I told my students why I
had chosen this particular essay, “We’re reading this to recognize one of the critical premises of
the class: Independent thinking, your voice that emerges after outside influences are stripped
away. I want to place the emphasis on originality and individualism in terms of our reading
discussions and your writing.” No sooner had we begun to delve into Emerson’s words, than
Derek, an assertive and bright student, protested, “Why are we reading Self-Reliance since we’re
in the military?” In that moment, I whirled back to Ron’s resistance on Freedom of Speech. I was
quiet. Other students rushed to protect me by turning on Derek and calling out certain comments,
“Why not?” “I like reading other things besides my Calculus book” and “She chose this so we
would think about something in a new way.” Watching the aggressive discussion, I felt
simultaneously angry because Dan was judging my choice of reading, then relieved because I
was better equipped to take this opportunity and use the benefit of my examination after
Germany to ask them, “What does it mean to be self-reliant?” Calvin, a fellow student who most
aggressively turned on Derek, responded smugly, “To use our own minds, instead of relying on
others to tell us what to think.” His answer, though obligatory, suggested his recognition of
Derek was now the quiet one, looking dejected after his classmates did not support him. My
instinct was not to leave him alienated; therefore, I looked mainly at him when I said, “You’re
thoughts matter. In the classroom, I want you to depart from the military protocol and use your
own good mind to invent and respond and cut an angle on a topic. You’re allowed to have an
opinion in this class, but you better substantiate it starting today.” Despite my words, I felt
perplexed and raised the question within myself: “Is the reason I am here to move them into
creative thinking?” My experience in Germany reminded me again that the teacher is the model
of courage, the model of anti-apathy with only one catalyst: a willingness to lay bare the apathy--
mine and theirs. We did this by engaging one another and talking about civic responsibility, both
as it related to them as students and as cadets. Later, he claimed, “We were just coming off swab
summer [bootcamp] and were taught to work as a team, and then we were taught Emerson, who
seemed so contradictory to the Coast Guard. That’s why I was confused. Besides, I have a
problem with Emerson’s and Thoreau’s philosophies.”
Vignette #5
A student Byron challenged a concept of identity’s stages, particularly tolerance, that he
perceived as oppressive. When introducing my freshmen literature students to a theory of
identity (Cass, 1979), I gave them a handout on the stages of identity development: confusion,
comparison, tolerance, acceptance, and synthesis. They were to read the handout for homework
Bystander to Advocate 14
and apply the theory to the character of Jing-Mei, a young woman conflicted about her identity
as a Chinese-American in Amy Tan’s short story, “A Pair of Tickets.” During class, I asked
students to define “identity.” Their various responses included: “who you are” “your valued
Self” “the sum total of your background, beliefs, interests, and values.” Once defined, we
discussed the difference between public and private identities, relating this to their lives as
cadets. Their uniform and disciplined, polite, and confident demeanors as their public identity
and the assumptions, such as their honorable behavior and patriotism, that others make about
them based on their appearance. Their private identity involved their conflicted feelings about
their daunting commitment and dissimilarities between them and their civilian friends. I
suggested they, as freshmen, were at the stage of identity comparison as they transferred from
the top of their high school class to an entirely new group of students where the bell curve lived
again. as they chose majors and, one student, Byron, began to show dissatisfaction. When I
discussed the theory more in depth, one student, Byron, showed dissatisfaction and began to
argue that he did not want to reach the stage of tolerance because that would signify his “selling
out” of his identity and lose his individualism. He claimed that he was the same person now as
prior to his entrance to the Academy and choose not to become fully integrated into a military
mindset for fear of becoming a different person altogether. His feelings escalated and a few other
students took this as permission to finally reveal their own conflicted feelings and said they
preferred to skip the tolerance stage and move to acceptance of their own self-chosen identities. I
reminded them first of the theory’s fluidity and flexibility, then clarified the goal of the theory: to
become comfortable in one’s surroundings and to reconcile one’s private and public identity.
Byron and the others seemed to understand the concept of a theory, but it yielded an opportunity
to become “co-transformers” of apathy, that is, to discuss it and allow them to reveal their
feelings to understand identity in a different way. We had uncovered an internal process, and I let
it happen without fear or rectitude. As a result of my re-examination of my role as a teacher, I
allowed a student to think about things differently because I now did. We discussed the need to
maintain a “self” in the face of expected conformity and loosely agreed that this can be done if
one’s stays aware of his/her assumptions. There is no need to sell out, I yelled to the class, “you
can still be a responsible member of the military even if you garner an intellectual mind and
question assumptions.”
In light of the this trip, I stayed connected emotionally with my intellectual self as a way to bring
myself and my students out of apathy; a way to deter from becoming a bystander in my own
classroom or allow my students to slip into a passive state for too long. The experience of this
trip allowed me to draw upon the models to transform my own assumptions about teaching,
student challenges, and apathy is inevitable in the classroom; uncover moments; instruct apathy,
welcome step, uncover vulnerability, transform apathy, courage, ability to speak out, keep
vulnerable. The trip affected me as a teacher, a citizen, and a learner. Better equipped and more
enlightened, I am on the other side now where I advocate critical apathy in the classroom for
myself and other teachers. This concept involves us, as teachers, feeling safe as we allow our
students to question silent assumptions, to allow a transformation of learning where students
move from comfort to discomfort and back again. We must be willing to call upon students to
find their voices, and engage in “creative conflict, not because we are angry or hostile, but
because conflict is required to correct our biases and prejudices about the great nature of things”
(Palmer, 1998, p. 107). We must be willing to question our own assumptions for if we remain
apathetic and comfortable, our students, in turn, will be more apathetic. Apathy begets apathy.
Bystander to Advocate 15
Teaching requires our vulnerability, we can look upon this positively and teach from “curiosity
or hope or empathy or honesty, places that are as real within [us] as are…fears” (Palmer, 1998,
p. 57). Thus, learning to teach from a sense of place allowed me to begin to transmute my fear to
courage.
Bystander to Advocate 16
References
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Note: All students’ name are pseudonyms.