To Blog, or Not to Blog: That Is the Question

The March 20 Forum:Part One:

I struggled late into the night with whether, and if so, how, to report on last night's forum at UW Law School. Once again, the responsibilities of blogging: the competing tugs of honesty and healing, revelation and circumspection. Needless to say, it did not make for a good night's sleep.

The evening was a mix of highs and lows, a few encouraging, a few profoundly disheartening.

To get one thing quickly on the table and then out of the way. My own attempted contribution to the evening (see multiple long posts below, which I will be revising--or more accurately, reinstating--post meeting) stayed strictly at the margins of the evening's concerns. This was somewhat disappointing to me, but hardly surprising, given the evening's focus and program. To the extent I can be honest with myself, I don't think this played a large part in my reactions to the meeting, but there it is.

Let me focus in this post primarily on the positive.

Three colleagues (all female, and all widely respected both as persons and as devoted and superb teachers) opened the evening with prepared presentations on their experiences, both as students and as teachers, with controversial and sensitive matters in the classroom. Their recollections of their experiences as women students in an earlier era of legal education were potent reminders, even to fellow teachers of a certain age, of just how far the legal academy had to come from the bad old days of blatant sexism, marginalization, and humiliation of law students outside the white male mainstream of the time. (There was enough humiliation to go around, actually, but some had it much worse than others.) Their comments were, I very much hope, revelatory to the current generation of law students, of just how deep this cut, and how profound its continuing impact on those who experienced it.

The three then went on to discuss both attitudes and techniques that they have attempted (and problems they have encountered) in trying to bring sensitive and controversial subjects into their classroom teaching. This fell squarely within the long-standing Wisconsin "aardvark" tradition of seminars and workshops on pedagogic objectives and teaching techniques, and provided the major "formal" educational component of the evening. The presentations were consistently thoughtful and constructive, and occasionally illuminating; I suspect all teachers present, myself certainly included, came away with several ideas to try out in our own work, as well as cautions to reflect upon as we approach dangerous ground.

All in all, a good start to the evening. Then we moved to discussion, for which ample time had been programmed, and a format determined to (try to) ensure a forward-looking emphasis, a constructive spirit, and engaged dialogue between students and teachers.

We spent the rest of the evening mostly walking on eggshells.

To be continued...