A Few thoughts on Selfie, by Will Storr

Selfie: How We Became so Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us is the latest in a series of thoughtful books by journalist Will Storr. I was attracted to the subject because I think that the rise of the "Imperial Self" has done so much to shape and degrade modern life.

Storr examines the modern self through several lenses, such as Esalen ("be what you are"), Ayn Rand, the self-esteem movement and, of course, the rise of social media culminating, including the selfie itself. He points out that our growing emphasis on self-actualization flies in the face of and denies a central reality of life, namely that we control much less of it than we'd like to think we do, that we are flawed, mortal beings living in a fluid, even unpredictable world and that we therefore need each other.

Of course the emergence of the self has been positive, even liberating in many ways, particularly for members of oppressed groups. But the emphasis on self-actualization has been accompanied by a decline in curiosity about or empathy for people different from ourselves and has commonly led privileged people to discount the idea that privilege entails responsibility. A focus on the self is also behind much of the social isolation that is responsible for high rates of depression and other mental-health problems.

You Don't Need to Be "Fearless"

One of my pet peeves has long been the phrase "and I am fearless" used to describe people who have done something courageous.

In the first place, courageous acts are seldom solitary. Courage usually arises from working alongside and encouraging each other. We are at our best in the company of others.

Second, I doubt that many of us actually are without fear when we face a difficult task. If fearlessness is a prerequisite for courage, then most of us have good reason to not even try.

The students in the year-long Freshman Inquiry class I recently completed at Portland State certainly taught me both of the above. We worked together to encourage and support each other as we shared vulnerable stories with each other, confronted personal fears and hardships, and volunteered more than 1,000 hours with vulnerable youth, often helping them to overcome their own fears.

Many of us often confessed, including myself, that we often felt afraid. But, as the adjectives we selected to describe the class reveal, we were also  "courageous," "strong," "caring," "together," and "family."

We don't need to be fearless to do great things if we care for and support each other.

My Promotion and My Mother

I thought of my mother upon recently learning that my application to become a full professor, effective in September, had cleared its last hurdle.

Bessie Priscilla Barber Peterson had a deep love of learning. She had taught for a few years in one-room school house during the Depression, and she made sure that we always had plenty of reading material around. There was always money for books and time to drive me to the library. It also helped that we didn't get a TV until my childhood was more than halfway spent. So I also thank her for that.

Of course my debt to her runs much deeper. I gave up my tenured job in British Columbia nineteen years ago for family reasons, so that we could live in Portland, so my route to this academic honor or accomplishment has been circuitous. Mom didn't like it when I did unconventional things, whether it was growing my hair long, becoming a single foster parent, or giving up any sort of secure job. But she was exactly the sort of person who set aside personal ambitions for the good of her family, so she couldn't really get after me too much about my unconventional academic career or for sometimes defining "family" pretty broadly.

My mother's quiet life suggests to me that our most important contributions come through showing up every day for the people we care about. It made her nervous when her children took risks. But she was the one who taught us and showed us that we could and should do something to help people less fortunate than ourselves. I wish that I had reminded her of that more often. She never realized what a big difference she made in people's lives, directly and indirectly. Most of whatever love I have in my heart is from her.

The committee who recommended my promotion noted that I had an unusually strong record of teaching and particularly service to go with my scholarly production of books and articles and such. Having the mother that I did, it has been difficult for me to do or be otherwise.

Narrative 4 International Summit: A New Story

Along with my good friend Deb and two of her high school students, I had the great honor of attending the annual summit of Narrative 4, which this year was held in New Orleans.

Narrative 4 believes that exchanging meaningful stories can engender deep empathy, not just a deeper appreciation of or care for each other on an interpersonal level, but changed behavior. Certainly I have felt a lot of that over the past year as we did story exchanges first in my Freshman Inquiry class at Portland State and then out into the broader community, including several classrooms. We witnessed empathetic leaps between parents and children, teachers and students, and people with very different political views and ethnic backgrounds.

In New Orleans we had the pleasure of meeting some one hundred Narrative 4 students, teachers, writers, musicians, board members, and staff from all over the world, from Israel to Mexico to South Africa to England, from famous writers like Colin McCann and Ishmael Beah to young empathy warriors who will one day be famous, like Uri and Babsie.

We split into five groups to explore the major themes of Narrative 4 in more detail. I was part of a group that traveled to the delta's edge to experience the land of the Houma Indians, which is rapidly sinking under the ocean. The impact of climate change, pollution, industrial methods of farming, energy extraction, and transportation together with several hundred years of colonialism were palpable. So was Houma grace and hospitality and hope.

Over the next year our group will be trying, from our various corners of the globe, to take their story deeper. We believe that stories can change the world.

Seven of My Students Receive IRCO Award

Very proud of Briana, Jessica, Leen, Ximena, Erik, Brandon, and Dacha of our Immigration, Migration, and Belonging Freshman Inquiry course for receiving Africa House--IRCO's Rising Star Award for volunteering more than 200 hours of tutoring with immigrant teens this year, plus a major research project.

They also undertook a major research project to try to determine how to balance the number of tutors and youth on any given Saturday. This entailed researching the impact of tutoring on immigrant youth as well as creating a mechanism for students and tutors to register their intention to attend and to reward them for using that mechanism.

This seems to me like a good example of authentic learning, a research project in which students are charged with learning academic knowledge and practical skills that will improve the lives of people they know and care about. The knowledge and skills are not, pun intended, just "academic."

"Something Helpless that Wants Our Love."

Yesterday I had an experience with a pair of high school students that reminded me of a quotation from Rainer Maria Rilke:

"How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us."

There are students who put others off through their anger, their willingness to argue and yell, to attack. And there are students who take a more passive-aggressive approach, who are interested to see if they can get under your skin and make you back off through sheer "I don't know and I don't care" apathy.

Neither type of student is truly helpless. But they often feel that way, have been betrayed many times by the people who were supposed to love and support them. So when an adult reaches out, their first response is usually to test, to put weight on the hand you extend to see if the hand will fall away or whether or not it will return.

Our job as adults is to care for and love others, especially children, as hard and as long as we can, to see in them strengths and potentials that they dare not recognize until others shine a stubborn light on them. It has been my experience--and certainly was on Monday--that few joys in life equal what one feels when a wounded child offers up her or his trust.

Eluding "The Snare of Preparation"

Cristina Rojas wrote a fine article about the sort of volunteer work that my students and I have been doing over the past fifteen months that just appeared on the Portland State University website.

The great social reformer Jane Addams spoke many years ago of the "snare of preparation" she felt when she was a young adult, the feeling that it would be many years before she would be allowed to do something meaningful.

This year, with my yearlong Freshman Inquiry class on Immigration, Migration, and Belonging, I decided that we would start volunteering with vulnerable immigrant children in the winter term. In fact one of the students started volunteering in the fall, despite her fear of going out at night in Portland, to encourage young refugees. Others were much less eager, at least at first.

The work is not always easy. You may hear a lot of sad stories, situations that seem impossible. Many immigrant adolescents feel, or are tempted to feel, hopeless. If they are happy to see you, they won't necessarily let you know.

But I think what my students and I share in the experience, even after hard days, is the knowledge that we are fighting the good fight, that our work is not simply "academic," as it were. I think of each at-risk child of holding a scale, like the scale of justice, in her or his hand. On one side are all the reasons to stop trying: feeling excluded, struggling to learn English, drugs, gangs, alcohol, the temptation to just "chill" and not take school or life seriously. On the other side is the prospect of a better life and the people who care about you: your family; a teacher or two or three; maybe a coach; someone from your church or mosque. And, if we choose to make ourselves available, us. Volunteering with such youth gives my students and I a chance to put our bodies on the line, to be present in a vulnerable child's life as someone who believes and is invested in his or her success and potential.

We don't need a PhD to do that.