How the Language We Use Leaves People Out in the Cold
Last year, to quote Mean Girls, I felt personally victimized by the word “innovation.” It followed me wherever I went. It was on giant buses that parked outside my glass-walled office. There were innovation awards, innovation grants, innovation seed funding, innovation lectures, innovation cookies served at innovation conferences alongside innovation lemonade, innovation goodie bags full of tiny pieces of innovation swag. Innovation for the office, the home, the road, the grave. So much innovation that when everything became innovation nothing actually changed very much. This year, the word seems to be “place-making.” Creative place-making. Place-making as the future of urban cities. Insert city here, a bastion of place-making. Place-making toward shared value. Place-making for culture, identity, and economy development. Place-making, so hot right now.
Don’t get me wrong, innovation and place-making are strong ideas and concepts, very worthwhile pursuits. But, beyond the semantic satiation of each word slowly losing its meaning through repetition (driving said writer of snarky blog entry mad), we have a jargon problem.
Thus, I have an uncomfortable critique of my fields, education and the arts/design disciplines. Both groups latch on to words in a effort of inclusion that tend to instead become barriers to participation, understanding, and community building. In-reach versus outreach. Place-making versus public space. Innovation versus a new idea. Fostering non-cognitive skills versus supporting creativity, compassion, or integrity. Maximizing shared value versus something that drives the local economy while also provides a benefit for the group that actually uses it.
And, to make matters worse, we are aghast when we read news articles or journals about how a college education is ruining America, or how more and more Republicans believe a higher education has a negative impact on the country. Anti-intellectualism and anti-education has reached a fever pitch, which as defined by the 1961 Merriam Webster International Dictionary seems quite fitting as it was defined as “ a degree of abnormal excitement that usually develops rapidly among a number of people and sometimes leads to impulsive violence” (via The Word Detective). Now, don’t get me wrong, David Brooks example of the gourmet sandwich shop being too much for his friend “with only a high school degree” induced in me an eye-roll that probably could have been seen from Mars. But, maybe within his babbling about fancy salami, there is a bit of uncomfortable truth.
In summary, maybe we really are pompous jerks.
When I was but a fledgling student affairs professional, I attended my first national education conference. I WAS SO EXCITED. It happened to be in Boston that particular year, just down the street from where I lived and worked, which I thought made it even cooler as I would be the oh-so-knowledgeable lady about town with all the details on the best happy hours nearby. (What really happened was that I had to slog through wintery-mix and stand outside in the cold for the train, arriving to the conference each day looking like a wind-swept haystack and smelling like a wet dog in my stylish wool coat.) I was down for professional development! Dazzle me with research, new peers! Let’s talk best practices! There is sangria and intentional conversation to be had just across the street! Instead, it was a lot of mind-numbing, boring Powerpoint presentations, Times New Roman or a rule-breaking Neutraface Slab on standard templates, and a whole lot of jargon.
Slide One. Intentional. Benchmark. Information Silo. Millennials. Slide Two. Civility. Professionalism. Change-Agent. Holistic Development. Slide Three. Learning Outcomes. Rubrics. Needs-Based Assessment. Slide Four. Place-making. Engagement. Slide Five. SYNERGY.
Beyond deciding that the name of my future punk band should definitely be Neutraface Slab, I mostly came away from that very first conference experience feeling like a true outsider. This field was one I wanted to pursue, and yet it seemed so divorced from the realities of working with typical eighteen year-olds or gritty non-traditional students ready to get down to business. Or, even jaded 24 year olds in wet winter coats, standing forlornly on the train platform waiting to go home, questioning all her life choices that led her from opera to education.
But, I loved working with students, getting them to explore new ideas, challenging their preconceived notions, watching them become passionate about their next steps. I was willing to learn the jargon, the buzzwords, to write intentionally. So, I did. But, the next conference I attended, I made a bingo sheet.
Intentional. Civility. Assessment. Place-making. SYNERGY. BINGO!
Over a decade later, I still work in higher education. Not surprisingly, I am a bit of a rule-breaking, dark horse within my chosen field. In the final course for my doctorate, the very last article I had to read was actually the first I read for my master’s program, a full circle moment, Manning’s (2009) piece on the philosophical underpinnings of how student affairs as a field approaches difference. Manning presents seven possible approaches to educational practice’s intersection with difference, looking at 1.) political correctness, 2.) historical analysis, 3.) color or difference blindness, 4.) diversity, 5.) cultural pluralism, 6.) anti-oppression, and 7.) social justice. This article is really interesting, short, and provides both negative and positive attributes for each component. It’s also completely useless outside of the realm of academia in its original format. I quizzed my husband, a (“very moderate,” addition his) Republican data analyst with a English degree and a career in technology, about what he thought about “cultural pluralism” and “difference blindness.” Response: “…(awkward pause)…Uhhh…I have no idea.”
But, back to the New York Times op-ed on higher education ruining America…Whilst ranting on social media about the benefits of a equitable, quality public education as a vehicle for social mobility, a colleague and friend mentioned something about which I cannot stop thinking. Her point, linking back to the gourmet sandwich shop of many current discussions, was that these are design decisions to make people feel like outsiders, sometimes intentional and sometimes not.
Language as exclusion is a design choice.
And, I very much agree these are sometimes design choices in a effort to appear upscale, connected to a different culture with high social or cultural capital, exclusive, etc. And, these choices can be immensely polarizing and stratifying based on socio-economic status. Some of the gap is also the amount of cultural competency, the ability to take a risk to try new things, to approach with intent to learn, and to understand all the underlying values associated with power and privilege, the ability to ask yourself why would you want a fancy, expensive sandwich at a snobby shop and do you really want to give them your money? I still think, jaded though I may seem at times, that these are all things a quality, equitable education would help people navigate. The important part of reframing this as a design choice, though, is that there are design solutions.
But, for education and the arts, the first step is going to need to require getting out of our own echo-chambers, our hollow enclosures of like-minded individuals. It’s going to necessitate intentional design choices (threw you that intentional bone there, higher education) to ensure that we are communicating to new audiences in ways by which they would actually like to absorb information or digest new ideas (aka innovations). That we aren’t being snobby in our approach, akin to only drinking Starbucks whilst mocking Seattle’s Best without realizing they are the same thing in different contexts. More importantly, that we aren’t doing all the talking, rather focusing on living and asking questions. That’s where change and hope comes. That’s where solutions start. And, that’s the hard part.
Intentional. Design choices. Innovations. Changes. Solutions. Bingo!
