RafaelFajardo

I’m a teacher, so mostly what I do is to make students feel aspirational anxiety about what’s valuable about them. This situation can’t be good for anyone. So I’ve developed a thing to say in class about what it means to see a classroom as a solidaristic space. I say, I could lecture you via email, but there’s a reason classrooms exist. It’s to help you to practice sustaining a thought beyond what you can do now. Everyone has their own style of lapsing into incoherence: it’s our job to pick you up where your thought loses its shape, and to take it somewhere. In that way we create solidarity. It’s impersonal, it’s not about who you are biographically. It’s about what it means to collaborate. Sometimes this speech works, sometimes not. Recently I was at a meeting about teaching. I told some version of this story, and about how my experiences on communes had made me committed to collegiality as a form of collaborative support toward building a collective world that didn’t exist yet. Someone at the table began to cry, saying I’ve been here a decade and never thought I’d hear the word solidarity here. I conclude that whatever solidarity is as process, people sense its absence as a presence.