In April of 2019, I published a post on this blog that turned out to be a roadmap for a successful dual credit mission for the humanities. To those of you inclined to fret about metrics, let me observe that “successful” in that sentence means that, against all odds, we’re still teaching college humanities in high schools.
In my original post, I articulated two important principles behind my work with dual credit. First, I put to rest the question of whether dual credit is a fundamentally bad idea — not by refuting the numerous objections, but simply by stating a policy of not engaging in that conversation with anyone, any more. My motive was not to run from detractors, but to announce that I was too busy finding ways to make dual credit successful for our faculty and our students. As I put it then, “That ship, as they say, has sailed, and like it or not, we’re deckhands.”
Second, I analyzed the structural challenges of the dual credit experience for both professors and students, and I argued — correctly, I maintain — that most of those challenges arise because of the inherently dual nature of dual credit. Guided by this analysis, I set about empowering an impressive group of professors and instructional leaders — like our dual credit liaisons — to find ways to make it work. There are many persistent challenges, most of which, I believe, are inherent features of the duality of dual credit, but as I said, in spite those obstacles, our dual credit program is not only largely successful, but a model.
Incidentally, that’s not just my assessment: People in our formal and informal discussions of dual credit at CCHA, for instance, took notes and asked how they might implement the sort of work we’ve done.
I’m not writing today to gloat — though I think we have a lot to be proud of — but to explore a bit more deeply one aspect of the duality of dual credit: The liminal space between cultural hegemony and the sense of individual identity.
The relationship between culture and individual identity is far too complex and overdetermined to unravel in a blog post, so I’m simply announcing some general principles behind the approach I encourage.
However powerful culture may be in shaping identity, individual selves and their unique stories transcend culture, and for that reason, we are in the business of individual success — whatever that may mean to the individual self we are nurturing, and whoever that individual may be. And because that’s our business, I resist drawing lines between roles like “professor” and “student” (or even between “us” and “HS advisor” or “principal,” who contrary to some stories, are also individual selves seeking fulfillment and meaning).
When people encounter their own anxiety in liminal spaces, they often fall back on cultural hegemony as a defense — and in those liminal spaces, it’s rare to find someone invoking the hegemony of the other culture. This plays out in power struggles large and small, in classrooms throughout education. How often have you heard a well-meaning humanities professor say something equivalent to “I’m teaching you to critique structures that shape our experience and put your name on the upper left side of the page or I won’t accept it.”
If you notice the contradiction in the previous “hypothetical,” then consider how much more central to dual credit collisions of cultural hegemony must be. High School, seen as a cultural system, regularly collides with College; these cultural hegemonies don’t exactly compete, but offer alternate meanings of the same words and gestures and narratives. Competition begins not in these collisions, but when we impose our own preferred meanings on other people’s experience.
Moreover, the duality of dual credit actually runs even deeper, because Students are not instantiations of either High School or College, but constitute yet another cultural system replete with its own meanings and counter-meanings.
This is why I have often said that, if the Humanities were a mission, we would take high school campuses as our primary mission field — except that our aim as evangelists of the Humanities isn’t merely to win converts but to equip people with the skills and knowledge to critique cultural hegemonies while embedded in them.
Along the way, learners and teachers may well become convinced that those skills and knowledge are distinctive features of the human condition, and when they do, they’ve discovered the beating heart of the Humanities — but that is not a victory for the cultural hegemony of College. On the contrary, it’s a victory for every individual who strives to understand their own unique voice and make room for it in the Great Conversation.
