Learning from “Dirty Jobs:” Reflection on Work in the Classroom

This article will examine how the work environment presented through popular culture can enrich and extend ideas of work in a community college curriculum. The article presents the context and pedagogy of utilizing notions of “dirty jobs” in the classroom and highlights the discoveries made about theories of work in the process. Students documented these discoveries using three writing assignments. These scaffolded assignments created individual ethnographic responses to the key question: “What is Work”? By using meta-cognitive teaching practices and popular culture, students were able to use the guided writing activities to explore their individual notions of work, career, and passion. The article captures both the journey of the instructor and students as they make these discoveries through intentional writing activities premised on bell hook’s “pedagogies of engagement. ” 91 Journal of Pedagogy, Pluralism and Practice, Vol. 7, Iss. 1 [2015], Art. 6 https://digitalcommons.lesley. edu/jppp/vol7/iss1/6 Learning from Dirty Jobs: Reflection on Work in the Classroom Learning from Dirty Jobs: Reflections on Work in the Classroom The dilemma of work as a means to an end or as an expression of one's life passions is an issue exacerbated by class and social status. All social groups struggle with conceptual ideas of work, material needs, and how best to align those ideals and needs with the constraints of work. Alain de Botton in the Pleasures and Sorrows of Work grapples with whether work should be based on passion, purpose, pleasure, or a combination of all these ideas. And if we look to popculture for examples, we see someone like Sean Aiken in One Week Jobs wrestling with notions of work and purpose. Passion, or rather following one's passion, is integral to iconic figures like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Arianna Huffington, or Warren Buffett, who give the impression of tap dancing to work every day. In opposition to these examples, in Discovery’s Dirty Jobs, Mike Rowe argues that people who follow their passions end up broke. The program Dirty Jobs highlights careers seen by society as invisible or not warranting aspirational pursuits by those seeking a career or career interest. These jobs usually entail manual labor and are often not presented as work fueled by passion or creativity. Rowe wants work (regardless of the nature of the work) to be a place of innovation, but he sees passion as something more useful if we use it as a catalyst for innovative thinking rather than an end goal: the pursuit of passions cannot be merely for the pursuit. Introducing Rowe’s Dirty Jobs to my freshman Ethnographies of Work class, a core required general education course at an urban community college, was a pivotal moment in our semester of thinking about what comprises work. Contextualizing the reality TV show Dirty Jobs within sociological thinking about work, we questioned what appeared to be Rowe’s lighthearted attempts at various jobs and developed more substantive readings of his showcasing of unsung 92 Blake: Learning from “Dirty Jobs:” Reflection on Work in the Classroom Published by DigitalCommons@Lesley, 2015 Learning from Dirty Jobs: Reflection on Work in the Classroom and hidden jobs integral to our everyday lives. This article presents the context and pedagogy used to examine “dirty jobs,” and highlights the discoveries we made about work in the process. Ethnographies of Work, part of the College’s core curriculum and a required course for all students, invites students to interrogate their notions of work through sociological, anthropological, philosophical, and concrete ways of knowing. The official course description states: The course introduces students to sociological and anthropological perspectives on work as they investigate a range of careers. The course approaches work as a cultural system invested with meanings, norms, values, customs, behavioral expectations, and social hierarchies. Students pose key questions through the lens of ethnography in order to investigate workplaces, occupations, and career pathways in an urban context. Guided by the ethnographer's assumption that there's "always more than meets the eye," students are encouraged to uncover myths and stereotypes about the work world and gain appreciation of how and why work matters to individuals in a range of occupations. Students explore dimensions of work life in the context of contemporary dynamics of disruption, uncertainty, innovation, and diversity, and draw connections between the self and work through readings, films, interviews, and fieldwork. The centerpiece of the course is for students to compose and present ethnographic accounts of workplace relations and vocational pathways as they contemplate their own career journeys. (Guttman Community College Course Catalog, 2014) The students who take this required course are primarily first generation college students. Approximately 58% of the students at the College are female, 42% male. 52% of the students are Hispanic, 25% Black, 16% White, 7% of the students are Asian or Pacific Islander, and 1% of the students are American Indian or Native Alaskan. 76% of the students in the College are 19 years or younger. Students live in all 5 Boroughs of New York City and 77% of them receive financial aid (Guttman Community College Fast Facts 2013). The classroom was reflective of the demographics of the College. 93 Journal of Pedagogy, Pluralism and Practice, Vol. 7, Iss. 1 [2015], Art. 6 https://digitalcommons.lesley. edu/jppp/vol7/iss1/6 Learning from Dirty Jobs: Reflection on Work in the Classroom In this iteration of Ethnographies of Work I, the class engages academic concepts and grapples with the question of what constitutes work by sifting through the narratives of everyday workers. Students investigate personal stories of work presented through their own experiences and debate the lives of workers in publications such as Gig: Americans Talk About their Jobs, a compilation of first-person stories of work edited by John Bowe, Marisa Bowe, and Sabin Streeter. Critical reading and analysis lead to questions about the value of lifelong pursuits and engaging passions and whether or not work can be a place of daily innovation and transformation. Students write short responses to probing questions such as: if you could do one thing, what would that be? Can work, and the pleasures of work, be sustainable? These sorts of self-reflective questions force participants – students and instructor alike – to think about passions, dreams, and talents, and how these align, or fail to align, with careers. As an instructor, I absorb students’ narratives about their dreams, expressions of anxieties, and pessimistic declarations that they will never get to their dreams. Producing such anxieties was never my intent, and it did not occur to me that a semester that started off with excerpts from ethnographers such as Margaret Mead and William Wright would end up in a deeply personal place, a place where I felt as vulnerable as my students. bell hooks refers to this place and space in a teacher’s development in Teaching to Transgress. hooks writes, “teachers must be actively committed to a process of self-actualization that promotes their own wellbeing if they are to teach in a manner that empowers students” (hooks, 1994). In what follows, I outline the course’s sequence of reading, writing and research assignments, and describe the semester’s most important moments: from traditional, academic sociological readings, contrast with ethnographic, personalized pieces from Gig; middle (reality TV, interviews, op-ed pieces from the New York Times); to the messy dichotomy set up when students began to use the materials to 94 Blake: Learning from “Dirty Jobs:” Reflection on Work in the Classroom Published by DigitalCommons@Lesley, 2015 Learning from Dirty Jobs: Reflection on Work in the Classroom investigate their own goals and where they see themselves entering the workforce post AA and AAS degree and beyond. The semester began with excerpts from Mitchell Duneier’s Sidewalks and long discussions characterizing homeless booksellers on the streets of New York’s Greenwich Village as workers with their own social codes and protocols. Next, we read excerpts from Gig, profiles of nurses, social workers, CEOs, poultry workers, crime scene cleaners and systems administrators, among others, along with excerpts from the New York Times series “Corner Office. ” Through essays on work excerpted from This I Believe, such as “A Goal of Service to Human Kind” and “Unleashing the Power of Creativity,” we considered the repetitiveness of assembly line jobs, the abuse and harsh conditions faced by undocumented workers, and the hidden world of underage labor. We also considered the marginalization of certain types of jobs and questioned why students’ aspirational goals shunned the notions of dirty jobs. Dirty jobs, such as shrimper, pest controller, sewer inspector, strawberry harvester, asphalt paver, car wash attendant, sanitation worker, road kill cleaner, portable toilet cleaner, crab fishermen, coal miner, embalmer, and crime scene cleaner were relegated to work classified as a means to an end; the students noted that these jobs had limited room for innovation or engaging passions. The class grappled with the idea that some socioeconomic groups are confined to this sort of work. However, many students pointed out that a dirty job could be high paying or gratifying. One student spoke of her father’s job as a fishmonger in the Hunts Point Fish Market in Bronx, NY and how that job sustained her family or a the story of a daughter who through the class interview assignment never understood why her father became an electrician or another student grappling with her mother’s job as a sidewalk vendor harassed by the police where the sales of the day directly impacted the monthly income for the household. As students began to share their 95 Journal of