Stop Preaching to the Choir! – An Interview with Dr. Sam Rocha
Dr. Samuel Rocha is the Owen Duston Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Teacher Education at Wabash. He came at the beginning of this school year and will also be returning next year. The Wabash Conservative Union sat down with Dr. Rocha to discuss his work as a philosopher of education, his impressions of Wabash, and his recent chapel talk “White History Month” along with the follow-up “Interrogating Whiteness” seminars.
Wabash Conservative Union: Philosophy and teacher education seems like a bit of a strange combination at first blush. What is it and why does it make sense?
Samuel Rocha: Philosophy of education often works in one of two ways. In my case it’s a little bit of a mix. Sometimes it’s people who are invested in questions of schooling who take a sort of theoretical interest in philosophy. In other cases they enter [the field] to study their own practice of teaching or schooling or what have you philosophically. Then, there are people who through the study of philosophy, encounter questions of education and sometimes epistemology. In my rare case, I’ve actually found metaphysical questions I want to ask about [education].
WCU: How would you say that philosophy of education would be different from a psychology of education? For example, what makes a philosophy of education different from studying learning theories?
SR: It doesn’t have to be different than that. In my case, I’ve never taken a course in teacher education; my undergraduate degree was in philosophy and Spanish literature. When I finished undergrad, I taught for a year. I taught Spanish at a small parochial school K-8. Being there and simultaneously studying in an education program [at the University of St. Thomas] really showed me the extent to which I missed theory—what I considered to be rigorous theory. I missed philosophy in ways that I didn’t really expect I would, so I came back to it.
WCU: What would you say to the idea that theory is something that is way out there, divorced from practice?
SR: I reject the theory-practice dichotomy. Flat-out. On these grounds: first of all, my doctoral work was deeply invested in the study of the works of William James, who comes from being a practitioner of medicine to being a theoretical psychologist, and eventually becoming interested in metaphysics. James led by example to prove to me that theory and practice are not necessarily a binary, that one can inform the other. In fact, one and the other aren’t necessarily distinct.
But my more basic interrogation of the theory-practice dichotomy is that when I’m theorizing—by which I suppose I mean thinking—to what extent is that act of thinking not a practice? And to what extent does it not bring itself to bear on practical affairs? For instance, if I want to do something that’s very external and physical, am I exempt from thinking? The converse is also true. To what extent is practice bracketed away from thinking or imagining?
WCU: So you’re saying that, ideally, practice and theory don’t differ.
SR: No, I’m not saying that ideally they don’t; I’m saying that in practice they don’t. The assumption that we could dichotomize experience into these two domains just doesn’t happen. Any theorist who is serious about theory is clearly practicing something in the fullest sense of practice. And anyone who is serious about praxis is clearly invested in thinking, imagining, reconstituting, and reconstructing those thoughts into theory. So for me, there is no difference.
The paradigmatic case is the arts—in particular the improvisational arts, and in particular jazz. Here we find a place where the practice is the theory and the theory is the practice. There’s no distinction between them. In a jazz improvisation, there are practical limits: the structure of the thing you are playing, the structure of your instrument, the material limits of those things, and then the structure of the performance. There’s an entire contextual, practical domain. At the same time, in order to execute that practice, you don’t just draw on theory, you are [actively] theorizing. For whenever you improvise, you can’t just play back this or that. In classical music—at least good classical music—it’s the same thing. You’re constantly reinterpreting the score, reperforming it, and emphasizing it in a way that’s new every time. So, the theory-practice dichotomy in my mind breaks down in the arts.
And the art that I am particularly interested in looking at is the art of teaching. By this I mean not the science of teaching, because in my mind that doesn’t exist. In other words, the sciences reveal themselves as arts in the same way that I’ve described jazz and teaching.
WCU: You said that you have developed “metaphysical interests” in teaching. Could you elaborate?
SR: This is where I bake my bread as a theorist. Largely when we think about education, we think about learning. And largely when we think about learning, we think about learning knowledge. Largely when we think about learning knowledge, we immediately jump into a philosophical mode of epistemology, which is the study of knowledge. So, a lot of people would basically interpret philosophy of education as a lower form of the field of epistemology.
I reject that claim. The most formal, basic, fundamental conditions for knowledge to happen assume that something exists at all. If I want to know something, there needs to be a thing to be known, and I need to exist as a knower. This takes us to a different field. It moves us away from epistemology to metaphysics.
What I take to be the most important question of metaphysics is why is there something instead of nothing, which is not self-evident at all. It’s self-evident that there is, but it’s not clear why something instead of nothing would be the case. In my mind, philosophy of education has largely ignored that question. It has basically assumed that insofar as there is something instead of nothing, and insofar as that something is very specific, education is simply learning [that something which is not nothing]. And it’s not really learning for the sake of knowledge anymore, but more learning for the sake of learning. It is an ungrounded sense of education.
This has opened the door for a lot of miseducative practices, such as defining education as having some kind of drive for “success” and defining success as getting a socially respectable job. And then, defining knowledge, not even in any epistemological terms, but rather in economic terms….
There is a big difference between talking about learning where learning is assumed to be step one and taking learning as actually step five, and realizing that there are really step one, two, three, and four—these metaphysical conditions. To be thorough, you can’t start at step five and call it step one.
WCU: So, let’s switch gears for a little bit. In the context of this, what do you think about Wabash after a year?
SR: I think Wabash has a structural foundation that I find extremely enchanting. For instance, the idea that Wabash isn’t particularly interested in getting bigger, it is more interested in getting better. It is more interested in the quality of its recruitment—as much as I may agree or disagree with what those qualities are. It has a more qualitative approach to whom we recruit as opposed to a sort of “let’s get however many people we can who can pass this many tests” approach. That’s huge. It’s counter-cultural. That in and of itself is an anchor for my hopes for the potential of this place….
I think that the kind of environment—intended or unintended—that the place builds in terms of the kind of students we have here is really neat. I like the weirdness. I like the fact that I can count on a handful of weird people being not too far away (and I’m speaking as a fairly weird person myself). By the way, being weird, in my mind, is a sign of being a bit normal. I think we live in crazy times. We live in a crazy, consumerist, capitalist culture. So, to be weird in the midst of crazy people is actually to be normal, so actually I admire that here.
Beyond that, though, I want to say that Crawfordsville is great! Sugar Creek, for instance. There’s no love given to Sugar Creek! I mean, you can get on an inner tube at the crossing of Creekside and you can float into Shades and Turkey Run parks and just lose yourself in nature. I don’t care what you say about the town, that’s amazing!
I do think the food could be better around here. And I don’t even mean like more diverse or whatever. I mean like just a good hamburger or a good steak! The food basically sucks around here, but that’s what a kitchen is for, and that’s what a grill is for, so that’s fine.
The other thing about the college that I like is that as much as Wabash has its politics, the politics are much more like family feuds. It is never like some of the things I’ve seen, for instance, when I was at Ohio State or at other big universities where it’s cutthroat. I do think that our family feuds could become a little bit more trivial, but Wabash is blessed to have that kind of culture among the faculty, which I think is much more unified than it gets credit for.
I also love Forrest Hall. I love my office. It feels like I go from home to home and then go back home. I mean, I literally come to a house for work everyday!
WCU: Any complaints?
SR: Yeah, I certainly have my critiques, and I’ve made them fairly publicly, including in my most recent chapel talk, so I don’t want to rehash those. (Actually, my talk is going to be published in the X-Position, which is coming out on campus soon.) But let me give you one.
I value the range of views on campus. [You have organizations from] The Phoenix all the way across to the Malcolm X Institute. But I also dislike the fact that we take all of these institutions and clusters for granted as to what their positions are on actual things. For instance, I don’t like that people make the assumption that the Newman Center is a safe haven for conservative Republicans because it ought not be that in principal and it is not that in descriptive practice. It is a much more nuanced, and searching, and questioning bunch, although it doesn’t do itself a lot of favors in terms of not looking that way. I also don’t like the idea that people assume the Commentary staff is this bunch of sexist, vindictive, pretentious people, because they’re not. They’re as insecure as I am or as anyone else is, and I think that, in the words of Cool Hand Luke, “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” And I think that this failure is clearly true across the different publications on campus. For example, I think idea that the MXI is just a black fraternity is absurd; it is simply not the case.
Wabash is too small to afford to become tribal. Not only too small to afford, but, in a more positive way, I think it lends people a particular opportunity to not have to punch a ticket in terms of what their political identities are and everything else. I am concerned about the fact that I attend a range of speakers and I see very different clusters [of people] at all of them. I question sometimes the convenience of the conversations we have. I think there is a lot of convenient choir-preaching that happens. I think that insofar as that becomes the norm of the way conversation happens, we become a community of those who have nothing in common. And a community of those who have nothing in common is not a community.
So I see an incredible potential for community: genuine, deep community—I’m using the term theologically. But I think that the way our affiliations and conversations go is alarming. [This] can’t be addressed at a sort of legislative or even a chapel talk point of view. I think it has to come from a deep conscience of students who actually desire more than what they think they think.
And that’s a very dangerous tightrope. On the one hand, I think it’s dangerous to throw out your views just for the sake of hearing another view. But I also think it is equally dangerous to entrench yourself in a view that you haven’t justified.
And I think the faculty divide along these lines, too. I think there is too strong of a dogmatic conservative faction and too strong of a pious, hand-wringing liberal faction. I think that, as faculty, we’re poor exemplars to you students in that we do divide along the same lines as the students….
WCU: Is there anything in particular you wanted to talk about on your “White History Month” chapel talk or the follow-up “Interrogating Whiteness” seminars?
SR: The student reception in my mind was really interesting, because, first of all, it was fairly theoretically driven. People wanted to know the thoughts behind the ideas. I take these “interrogations” basically as a chance to tell stories. And to interrogate those stories, but not with an in-advance conclusion. In philosophy it is a really bad deal if your premise is already loaded with conclusions that you want to come to. You need to have a freestanding premise. So, to me, “Interrogating Whiteness” is about putting whiteness to similar forms of questioning that we’ve had around other so-called races.
Now, here’s what’s dangerous: One could make the argument that we don’t actually have a sophisticated discussion of other so-called races. In other words, to what extent is blackness being interrogated? To what extent is Latino identity being interrogated? And here, I think, we need to pay attention to that and not assume that interrogating whiteness in some way excludes those other ways of questioning.
Some people, I think, still wonder why I’m interested in race if it is not for political motivation. This goes back to [what I believe the crucial question of education to be]: “What does it mean to be a human person?” Because, like it or not, racial identification is not only a part of legislative and legal policies, it is a “common sense” of the way people talk. And insofar as it’s a “common sense,” it hardwires itself into what people are and what people think they can be. And, in a lot of ways, some so-called “white people” who have said, “I don’t have to worry about race because I’m not a racist, and I don’t have a race because I’m just white,” are the people who are most susceptible to falling prey to this sort of non-identity identity. At that point, they don’t see existential questions as clear to them, because things like race don’t play out in their everyday life.
For example, in rural Indiana, I become more and more aware every day the extent to which I’m Mexican. It is not political for me. It’s just the way it is! I don’t know how long it’s going to take for people to figure this out, but I genuinely don’t have [political motivations]! I don’t really know why I’m asking these questions in the first place. I think they’re going to lead to these deeper aspects of what it means to be human and how we might make a more beautiful society, but I couldn’t even have a political motivation because I don’t even know if my own motivations are entirely explicit to me! To some people, that may be not taking a position, but I would rather not take a position wisely than take a position stupidly.
One good thing about “Interrogating Whiteness” is that the crowd that has been showing up is precisely the crowd I’ve been hoping to see more of. It is at the MXI, it has been well-attended by the Conservative Union, the Newman Center, the MXI, other people. I hope that as this conversation goes on you guys actually start talking to each other.
WCU: And, finally, you have a book coming out?
SR: Yes. My first book will be coming out this summer, called Things and Stuff. It’s an edited collection of essays I’ve been writing at the blog www.vox-nova.com for the last three years. I’ve had 137 contributions there. I edited it down to 71 keepers and then edited those, extended some, and then cleaned them up.
Vox Nova is a Catholic blog that weighs in on culture, politics, society, religion, and basically whatever you want. So, that’s interesting because I’ve learned a lot about myself, I guess. The book is partially a sort of memoir, and it is also deeply political. But I also have some other things: there are some short stories, some fiction, and one poem (I’m a bad poet, but I have one that I think is worth sharing!). It will be out this summer, and I plan every two or three or four years to publish another volume.
I also have another book under review with Springer Press. It is an edited and expanded version of my dissertation Education: Study and the Person. It gets into some of these metaphysical questions we’ve been discussing and things like that. But it also puts forward an ordinary way of doing that big thing called phenomenology in a way that teachers may use in their classrooms in school. So that’s in the works. If the review is successful, it should be coming out next year.
I also have my debut EP [Extended Play]. The difference between an EP and an album is that an album is ten to fifteen tracks. This is only five tracks. It is an EP with some songs I wrote toward the end of undergrad and just after getting married, and then a final title track. The title of the EP is Freedom for Love, which is a philosophical title. It is basically a quick, three-word argument against “freedom from authority,” saying that freedom should serve a higher value, which, in my mind, is love. Freedom from authority without love, in my mind, is just as impoverished as lack of freedom. It’s actually a form of oppression, I would say.
The EP goes through this sequence of love ballads and then ends on this free, jazzy piece showing that after you fall in love, then you can be free. I wrote all the music and performed the guitar and vocals. I have a saxophone player, Eddie Bayard—a fantastic player who plays with Pharez Whited, who I believe used to be on faculty at Wabash. And then I have a percussion/saxophone player [Walter Gershon] on two of the tracks. It’s in the bookstore, and it is really bad to pirate music from independent artists! It’s like stealing food from an orphan!
Also, a student here—Drew Palmer—did the art design for it, which I am very happy with. By the time this comes out, I believe it will be at the Wabash Bookstore, on iTunes, and an indie music site called CDBaby [www.cdbaby.com].
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