Episode 3: Studying at the Night School Bar

A lot of people don’t want to take on $100,000 in debt to read a novel with other people, and a lot of people who take on $100,000 in debt never read a novel with other people in their university programs, you know, and that is so… sad. It is life, right? It is a space where people in that moment, feel change, and get to experience, study as joy.

Each episode, I come a little bit closer to understanding the project of Many Academies. As I listen to Lindsay Andrews, who founded the Night School Bar, a faculty collective that offers evening classes online and in person in the arts and humanities on a donation basis, and DM Spratley, faculty and chief strategy officer of the Night School Bar. I learn or, I relearn, or unlearn [laughs] that this podcast is not seeking an alternative to or exit from the University. Many Academies is emerging as a collaborative mode of scholarship that centers against the erosion, the surviving possibilities of thinking and study in relation to life in a just world. I am Lette Bragg, and today’s conversation is shaped by a notion of study taken from Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s All Incomplete, which is study as an impermanently unformed insistently informal and a performing commitment to each other, not to graduate, but instead indefinitely to accumulate an invaluable debt to each other. The Night School Bar, we could say, is a study of study.

And night school bars started in the pandemic when people were out of work, at the, at the beginning of the pandemic, when people were out of work. When people were, when rules around unemployment had not yet changed, when people were, had not gotten, when people had not gotten, any kind of, you know, governmental stipend checks…eople were and probably remained, you know, very scared… nd, the idea that we didn’t have a way to gather resources we needed made it very clear that we needed some way to, to connect and study and understand what was going on. And so the first class was, a free class that was an opportunity to think with other people about the conditions that we were living under.

And I think that that is what I that is what we mean by “study is something outside of economic motivations.” You know, this is not a credentialing institution, you know, it’s not a, it’s not designed to get people a job. And sometimes people reach out to us to, to become instructors, you know, to, to be employed as a job and we always say, you know, “Yes, and we would want to study first, you know. Like, what we really want to do is study together. So like, you know, we we, we exist as a, as a business, but we really prioritize what it means to study together and not as a means of increasing profit or increasing credentialing rate,” that kind of thing.

And it sounds amazing, like, I’m wondering how that happens. Like, how does it take place? What are the the practices that you can use to keep this as a space of study because it’s so easy to slip into other directions, right?

My pedagogical background doesn’t come out of the university, doesn’t come out of my MFA program, but rather comes out of work in the community, and adult education and practices that are, more directed toward outcomes within people’s lives and homes. And the spaces that they’re moving through: their children’s schools, the education system, right? And so I will both structure my classes offering to center experiential learning, which is really, not something that I’ve ever experienced, to be honest, when it comes to writing classes in particular—writing and literature classes are what I teach—nd there are a few common models that are often replicated, in writing programs and certainly there are people who are, pushing back against those models or creating things that are intentionally anti-racist and unique. And those models, you know, proliferate, and are very popular. And so, by creating a space where students are doing experiential learning, where they’re accessing material that I’ve curated and I’m guiding them through and I’m giving them information around, but then I am also working on teaching them how to learn through the process, and how to replicate that learning in other spaces. And this to me is work that moves forward kind of a liberation model within education, because it is not just about, accessing the resource, education or accessing the resources of expertise, but rather about replicating that resource internally for people in ways that they can go out and use without having to even rely on me to use them.

I just think there are so many creative ways and models of being in community around study together that allow people to kind of live into a full creative self and a full thinking self that even just that experience can feel incredibly liberating, especially for people who are moving through other day to day environments that are asking them to access the world through a very narrow lens that they know inherently, is not the way that they want to be living, or the way that the world should, should and can be accessed.

Yeah, beautiful. What I n- what I heard> listening to you first of all is this belief that what happens in the classroom, like there’s a bridge to our everyday life. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m hearing that the classroom has a space that is supposed to be giving us a way to think about our lives in radical ways, right? Imagine things about our lives in radical ways and so– and in that way, it’s kind of reflective but also transformational, right? We aren’t just sitting where we are, we’re like, thinking about things. But it’s a bar. So I’m like, what is the physical…? Is it a bar, or are you sitting at a bar? Or you all in a long row at the bar? Or are you like round a table and, and are people writing assignments? What do we do in the classroom space?

I want to both affirm that, but also reframe it and say that my, my personal position, you know, is that the classroom is in our everyday lives. It’s not, there’s not like a bridge between our everyday lives in the classroom. The classroom is part of our everyday lives, you know? And when I hear DM talking about teaching people how to learn, I, it’s exciting because I think that means two things for us, you know? One is that, it’s teaching people how to unlearn structures of learning, which are kind of fact based, correct answer, unrelated to the way you live in the world. And that comes from a certain model of thinking about the university. In fact, it’s people who are most deeply involved or recently involved in the university who probably require the most unlearning in that, you know, way. And there are certainly people who are involved with the university who cannot comprehend while we’re not offering certificates, you know, that that that what we’re doing doesn’t, doesn’t lend itself towards, that, that mode of, accomplishment, you know, or certification.

But this idea of, of teaching people how to learn is also something like way more basic, which is just recognizing that you’re learning all the time and that every space is a space of learning, you know. And that you can affirm the way that you were talking to somebody on the bus or like walking down the street or at the bar as spaces of study and learning. And so I think that, you know, it kind of it kind of means both, both things and just in a way of reframing what it might mean to to learn or to study. So I just kind of want to touch on those a bit. And then, I think that’s then unhelpful for thinking about the question you just asked, which is what is it? What is it like? Or maybe even, you didn’t exactly ask this, but why a bar, or something like that.

I really was thinking, as you were asking this question, you know, what it means for the classroom to be in the world, or what it means for the bar to be a space where classes has happen, or the bar as a space of learning. And I was thinking about, this book by CLR James called Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: Herman Melville and the World We Live In. And so, Sailor James is this Trinidadian like, Marxist, Trotskyist, Trotskyist philosopher, you know, and in that book he’s talking about the Herman Melville’s book Moby Dick and he talks about the ship as being kind of— he describes it as kind of a metanym of the world, right? Like it, it both is a model for it, but it’s also actually in it, you know? And so that’s that’s what I think is really nice about the, the bar is that it kind of models and, it models a way of thinking and learning together that emphasizes the everyday nature of it, the way that it happens in spaces that are not rarefied spaces for learning. And then it’s actually in the world. It’s a, it’s a place that you go all the time as part of your, a type of place that you go all the time as part of your everyday life. And so, I think, you know, it’s both a new model and a part of the world that we’re in.

Thank you so much for the, for that adjustment to what I said about the bridge, right? And to to reminding us that learning is part of the world, right, the classroom is part of the world. Yeah. So I love, I love that adjustment. I think I was also asking you about the seeds of this because you started it for a reason. So I’m wondering, like, where did this idea came from, what were the kinds of seeds that would lead to something like the night school bar?

You began the interview by reading a quote from something we wrote in December 2020. So it’s quite interesting to think back to that moment, which was, you know, what you quoted was from the origin of Night School and, and it’s, so interesting to think about where I was and we were, the people that I was, you know, the people that were involved in the the first inklings of Night School, which at that time, I think we held more of a relationship to the university and more of the founding of Night School was imagined as a resistance to or alternative to the university as it existed.

Today, I do not often think about night school in that way. You know, I really think of it as a community of learners, people who are studying. I don’t to my mind, it doesn’t bear a strong relationship to the university anymore. You know, the university is a place where some good scholarship is produced. So we’re are glad to read those books, you know, and we’re glad to talk with experts have come out of it. But it’s one site among many.

To think back to that moment as you’re kind of asking about it, I was an adjunct at a university in North Carolina for six years, and during that time I also worked with a friend to open a bar. We did it on very little, no money, very little to no money in the basement of a building downtown. And over the course of six years, I was working as an adjunct and running this bar, which meant bartending, ordering, you know, doing a bunch of back end things, very practical day to day things. But also seeing people, talking to people, having musicians and artists of all kinds come in, people wanting to do readings, we hosted a lot of community events. And I was able to think about and share what I was working on a new ways and ways that did not use a certain kind of exclusive language that weren’t very accessible. I realized the things that I was thinking about and that other people were thinking about were objects of interest and curiosity for lots of people, you know?

And so I think that there is this kind of double life that I was leading between the university, teaching and, the bar at the time, but also they were the same, they just happened in different language and different spaces, you know? And so, The, the motivation for Night School Bar as its own entity was really, kind of practical in some ways. It was bringing together the two things that I was doing, into one space.

That’s also, and that’s a, you know, that’s also a kind of, labor question there. Right? I was working in two different spaces. I was working all the time to make the two of them run. Like, how could I, you know, consolidate that labor into one place and create a thing that I cared about that also met all the different kind of aspects of what I desired.

Turned out that I was doing a lot of planning around it and when the early days of the pandemic struck and bars were shut down, there was an opportunity that emerged in terms of people moving to online teaching that made it possible to try something out, in a way that did not involve, the same kind of immediate investment, you know, or, or financial capacity because it’s not, because there are a lot of back end things that we’re always having to figure out and think about. You know, it’s not just a program of study. We’re also figuring out how to pay people, how to be equitable, right? How to how the bar has people who, you know, work as laborers as well, you know, so these are all very important parts of it. So I don’t want to present it as this, like idealized thing, but there was a moment where we got to try out and see, was this really viable? Are people really out there looking for something like this? And they, and they really were.

I got in touch with Lindsay, after seeing all of the classes that Night School was offering and feeling really excited about the fact that this was something that was coming out of the Durham community and being offered on this scale. And then also hearing more and more from people in my community who were in classes, taking classes, really excited about Night School. And, reached out to Lindsay and started off teaching one class, and then came on full time and have been teaching classes and working behind the scenes and doing fundraising together.

And I think this, this work feels really, important to me as, as a poet, but also just as a person who is concerned with, justice, liberation, and, and creative practice as part of that. And so I think being able to offer those spaces to people and being able to offer those spaces to people in a way that really welcomes them into their own practice of thinking and of creativity, and of relating to and accessing literature and writing in a way that, you know, I still, I, I do know that there, there again are people in the world who are doing fantastic work around this in university settings, outside of the university settings, so not the kind of, like, you know, create, binary against the possibility of that. And, and also to name that it is less common. And so I have a lot of students who will say things about my classes or about night school in general that are things like I’ve never I’ve never experienced a class like this before in my life or I wish I had classes like this in my MFA program, I learned ten time more than I learned in a year of studying this in a university.

And that’s transformational, simply that access and experience itself. And then the ways that that moves out into the world, that moves into individual students’ practices, and, you know, many students at Night Schoolare also scholars or professors, who are taking that practice back into the classroom. But folks might take that practice back into their family or back into their work or back into their community in other ways. It really does shift things for folks. And I do think that that is directly in opposition to other educational experiences that people have had that feel evaluative and exclusive and elitist and have left them feeling that they are damaged, and that they are damaged as learners and that they maybe don’t belong.

And so to give people a space where they can experience belonging as a learner can access their inherent ability to see the world as a learner, you know, is really moving and meaningful. And then, I think, again, has had these effects on an individual level, but also on kind of a larger cultural scale.

So I’m finding very interesting this kind of contrast or this comparison that you’re both, troubling for me, which is the idea that Night School, it’s a school, but it’s not an alternative to the academy. It’s also trying to do something else with what study is>. Right, which is not only about self-improvement or it’s not only about gaining knowledge, they’d say, but it’s also about building connection or building community or finding a form of belonging or creating kinds of spaces that change our relationship to one another…right?

Yeah. I mean, I’m thinking as you’re speaking about the ways in which I think we intended or hoped at the very phrase “night school” is taken. You know, “night school” has a long history of being an educational space for people for whom more traditional full time student kind of education, you know, isn’t, isn’t possible. And I was sort of thinking in my mind, as you were talking about the ways in which I think we hope or desire, for Night School to look like community college in the best sense of both of those words [laughs] you know? This idea of, you know, producing community, being a shared space of study for community, in community and having and being, and being located in a specific community in Durham, but also creating, you know, this larger worldwide community in many ways. But also I want to just, echo how great it was to hear DM talking about, you know, this experience and really putting some, some names to I think what we hear, what we hear a lot, in really wonderful ways about what it means to produce meaning inside a classroom, to have meaningful experiences and to have that be something that is not merely an intellectual exercise, but the ways that the intellect and, and the emotion and, you know, felt experience, embodied experience all happen in the classroom and also leave the classroom, too.

I want to, add that I think, you know, there is something that can be deeply healing and empowering about learning in this way. And I’ve been I think I’ve been, as we’re talking, experiencing some internal push and pull as I’m trying to describe how Nigh School’s classes, specifically because my, education has been around writing and literature, how they differ from what is kind of the dominant model. And that’s because, there are dominant models, right? And they really do have such a strong influence. And also, I have had the privilege of moving through some really incredible black poetry spaces and working with some incredible black poets who have deeply influenced my pedagogy and my thinking in my life and just my experience of life. And so, I also, I also just want to name, you know, my experience as a learner, from black poets in particular.

I’m thinking about the first Cave Canem workshop that I ever went to and it felt so incredibly healing and it was led by Aria D. Matthews and I just learned… I, I echo things that I’ve heard from night school students. I learned so much in that space. And it was short and I felt incredibly full and have carried lessons around how to teach and how to learn and how to talk about writing since then from her work. And, you know, I like, sobbed like a baby. It felt so healing. And I think that that is, you know, if, if, if we can offer students a taste of that, it is something that changes people for the long term, right? And gives them, a space of opening that affects everything. I, I know that in my experience, working with black poets has affected everything in my life, who I am as a person. And so I imagine that, that accessing the spaces that are alternative to the dominant model and getting to experience study in this way, for our students, I hope can offer some of that, too.

The the push and pull you describe, I mean, I feel it too, right? And I think I’ve felt it throughout this, this interview between the university, which does produce good stuff, and we all kind of we came of that to some degree, right. And, and it offers, it offers some sort of life to some degree, right? It’s not like there’s not this binary, as you both say, and it offers us something. And then the dominant structure, there’s also this, this pull away from it that happens. And so one of the things that I struggle with and I imagine other people struggle with, is where does the push and pull still, so that you’re able to find a way through that gives you something, steady or something that you can create. You know, it’s just it’s so hard.

I feel like the major healing change for me over the past few years and or a major healing change for me over the past few years of moving away from a certain kind of belief about the specialness, you know, of the academic space or that a university was the main place where people really studied, and the things that I was studying were things I wanted to communicate outside, but it really required a very special kind of like language and a really special set of people to read and I needed to recognize a certain set of names. You know, all of that is something that that I moved away from in in two ways. And one was doing a lot of teaching, you know, and doing a lot of teaching to people who were not specialists in the field that I was working in. But the other way, really, and this is kind of the point I want to make here is really, really diving into, the long and important and critical philosophical history of Marxism and economic critique of the university. And I, and, and I, you know, in the larger, broader economic critique that situates the university as part of the system.

And so, you know, I feel like I want to go back to this idea of the push and pull and say, you know, that so much of the push and pull is about the sort of ideological, you know, function of a belief in a certain kind of rarefied space of study, right, that is meant to maintain a certain kind of professional and not expert, you know, but professional, status and purpose, right, for people who work in universities.

And I think that, you know, the push and pull that I often feel is that do these things happen in the university? Absolutely. You know, and and do I want to, are there some pieces of what what happens in university teaching and university study that I want to reproduce outside? Yes, absolutely. But there is this larger economic function that keeps people really tied to a sense that this is their profession, right? It is a labor of love to work in the university, and that they therefore have to submit to a certain kind of low wage, degraded pay. People are working obviously very, very hard to unionize and strike and strategize, and think about what it means to resist this in the university. But I, but also, you know, it’s a real struggle for many, many people.

It’s very hard to get people who should be on the— if you’re, if you’re an adjunct, it’s very hard to get people who should be on the same page as you, right, those colleagues that you have who are tenured and tenure track to right, to think in the same way about it. And so I know that this is not like a warm and fuzzy way of thinking about it but for me, it’s like so crucial to think about the way that this fits into larger economic structures and the ways that larger economic structures prevent people from thinking that they can stu-that they can study together. That study is something that they have a right to as like a person who wants to make meaning in their world.

I’m thinking about, I mean, [laughs] I’m thinking about my own student debt, right? And the cost of, accessing, just from graduate school, the cost of accessing the writing program. And I’m, I’m thinking about students that we have both just just kind of the gift of having students who are willing to come into this space who have had negative experiences in the education system or who have not gotten to have the experience in the education system that they wanted because of abuse, not not wanting to being able to take on huge amounts of debt. Students who, have gotten to have that experience, and who are coming in, and ready to show up in the room as co-learners where everyone. Students who have access to more economic resources and, are like paying a higher rate on the sliding scale knowing that it gives access to more people to these classes. I’m just thinking about all of the the people who are coming through or coming into Night School, and working on building this as a community.

And I’m also thinking about, you know, I’m just still sitting with the question around the importance of these spaces, and how they can shift life and thinking for folks. And the fact that they do that for me as well, right? That classes that I have taught at night school, just are, are building this cumulative base of knowledge and change that is ever evolving and ever expanding because of the students who are coming into class and what they’re willing to share, how they’re willing to participate and show up.

To learn more about Night School Bar, to enroll in a class, to make a donation, please visit nightschoolbar.com. Thank you Sebastian Bauer for the music. Thank you JD for the art. Thank you Aydelotte Foundation for your support. Thank you for listening.