On the Wednesday morning of Thanksgiving week, I spoke with a group of students in a Global Class hosted by Durham College in Ontario. There were about 40 people signed onto the call from several countries including Canada, China, Russia, Indonesia, Malaysia, and India. We talked about the ways in which bandwidth was depleted by the social/economic “differentisms” in their countries. These bandwidth-stealing phenomena differed in the particulars but were all based on exclusion, hostility, and messages of “you don’t belong here” and “you’re not good enough.”

I talked about how understanding the idea of bandwidth – how it is depleted by social realities beyond the control of students – helped take the blame and the shame away and could help students recover. Just as we were winding up the conversation, Inga Koryagina, a professor of marketing at Plekhanov Russian University of Economics, joining the class from Moscow, made the comment, “Blame and shame are great management tools. It's hard to manage free people." Her comment stayed with me all day.

“It’s hard to manage free people.” What a powerful statement. It would be easy to think, “Well, of course, that’s Russia, where people aren’t free like they are in the US.” My mind immediately went to students, and I thought of the wisdom of the phrase, “It’s hard to teach free students.” It's much more troublesome to teach and learn with free students as compared to those who have been and are being subdued by blame and shame. And as long as we attribute the persistent failure of certain groups of students to individual deficits, we can choose not to look at societal and school factors that continue to zap their bandwidth.

My kids – now all grown-ups – went to a wonderful neighborhood elementary school where there was lots of diversity among the students and fantastic teachers dedicated to student learning. My oldest daughter had a first-grade teacher who ran an open classroom in which students moved around freely based on their activities and learning needs. She loved that class; she thrived with that kind of freedom. A memorable moment was when she came home after school on the first day of second grade, where the teacher ran a much more standard sit-at-your-desk-all-day classroom. My daughter was appalled. “She expects us to sit at our desks all day and be quiet!” This teacher was excellent, as it turned out, just with a different style.

As I reflect on my own children’s journeys through elementary school (and later through middle and high school and then through university), what mattered was not freedom of movement or “strict” vs. lenient, it was the way each teacher nurtured the freedom of their minds. It was about how the teachers loved each of their students and strove to bring out the best in them and how they expected the best from each of them. There was a teacher at the elementary school who, with his fifth-grade class every year, wrote and produced an opera – script, score, sets, costumes, and all. Amazing! That was freedom. And it was tons of work for the teacher; way more than if he had kept the kids at their desks with pencils and books.

Yes, it is harder to teach truly free students. We have to give up a bit of control. We need to be willing to see that different students need different kinds of instruction, support, encouragement, involvement. I suspect, though, that any teacher would tell you that it’s so worth it to teach and learn with students who are using their whole minds and hearts and whose curiosity drives them to push on the boundaries of their own potential.  Students need access to all their bandwidth to make this happen. As Bell says, “Wonder…is an experience that happens to an available mind” (2017, p. 18).

In order for all students to thrive in school, at all levels, we need to place the blame and shame for failure where it belongs, on societal realities, like poverty, racism, classism, violence, etc. We need to create learning environments in which all students are free – and have the available cognitive capacity – to learn and thrive. This can happen within any classroom organizational scheme and is dependent on things like the recognition of students “funds of knowledge” (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992), designing “identity-safe” spaces (Steele, 2010), and making sure students basic needs are met. Free students demand lots from us but give back way more in the end.

Bell, R. (2017, September/October). How poverty kills wonder and what we can do about it. The Humanist, 16-19.

Moll, L. C., Amanti, C., Neff, D., & Gonzalez, N. (1992, Spring). Funds of knowledge for teaching: Using a qualitative approach to connect homes and classrooms. Theory Into Practice, XXXI (2).

Steele, C. M. (2010). Whistling Vivaldi: How stereotypes affect us and what we can do. New York, NY: W. W. Norton.