What Happens If We Don’t “Like” “Teaching”?
Dear Deems and Brena,
I was taken by our emails back and forth to each other this week, where Deems, you confessed, that while you really liked building your syllabus and creating lesson plans, you were worried that you didn’t actually like the “act” of teaching itself. I responded that I like being in front of my class, engaging with my students, and planning but I don’t necessarily always like responding to student papers. I find it stressful—trying to find something new to say on each paper that may, especially in the weekly writing responses to my essay questions, read similarly. Yet I think it’s important to engage with my students in their papers, to find their voice, to commend them for analysis that is thoughtful and to encourage them when I see they could go a step further. Perhaps it’s the former BFA writing major in me, but I feel like this act of reading and responding to student papers is just as much a part of teaching as planning and being in front of the classroom. Maybe it’s stressful too because I know that getting any writing assignments back from my professors has always been exciting for me—it’s been where I really want the feedback on my ideas. Classroom time, for me, has often seemed incidental to my learning.
Do other students feel this way? Should this act of responding to student papers ever get any less stressful? Or is it good that we have pieces of our teaching that don’t come easily? And, in a college course, how much of the learning of the material comes from our bodily engagement with students 2-3 hours a week, and how much comes from all of our pre-planning and syllabus construction?
This isn’t to say that I don’t think classroom time is important. But I do think that traumatic classroom experiences, and boring classroom experiences, are much more inhibitive of student learning our course material than a good classroom, a productive classroom, is of facilitating a student’s learning of the material. In other words, it seems like bad classrooms have a much worse effect than a good classroom has a good effect. What do you guys think? And are there parts of our teaching that we should like more than others in order to be “good” teachers?
Hey Brena and Ally,
Brena, let me start by saying that I loved reading your post. I like it when you say:
Whether a classroom should be comfortable or uncomfortable depends on what we want students to get from our class. If we expect them to absorb new knowledge, we need to make learning environment more acceptable. If we want students to learn more how to decolonize their mind, the learning process must be uncomfortable. In addition, if there are always some students disliking our teaching activities, maybe we should be glad rather than disappointed. For it tells us that our students are heterogeneous.
I emphasized your last two sentences because it takes into consideration what the students want. Different students want different things from our class, and they have very different learning abilities and pedagogical preferences to go with that. But I’m still working on finding that balance between teaching certain important concepts and truths we want our students to know, and then– a la Freire and many women of color, respecting what they want/feel/think/know.
I also want to let you know that I have actually started calling people out by name to answer my questions. I saw one of my fave professors in our department do it when the class went silent on her, and it was a good pedagogical choice. I did it too the other day. When no one would answer my question, or when the one same student was the only one responding, I asked a couple of my students by name if they were comfortable answering. And they did. And it went well.
I guess this takes me back to the conversation I was having with Ally here about the Freirian circle. My point was that the circle in itself isn’t liberatory. It’s what you do with it that matters. (And it’s obvious that Ally was doing good things with it). So similarly I guess, calling students out by name isn’t inherently bad. It’s about how you do it. And how you respond to your students after they’ve been called out.
And Ally, I can’t theorize about the difference between disrespect and dislike of our (or other people’s) pedagogies. That’s something you feel. It’s also something that, like anything else, depends on systems of power. Who has power and privilege and who doesn’t. It’s that which determines if you react and how you react, whether you have a conversation with them or not. But I agree with you, it is very important to have a community of teachers to support us and (supportively) critique us. In the end, that’s something you have to build around you. It may not consist of all the fellow instructors in your department, it could just be a small like-minded group of teachers. But you have to do it. Otherwise… poor Ally… 🙂
And yes, you got me, I do like to mention Cherrie Moraga any chance I get (hehe); but I was also thinking about how that phrase “making familia from scratch” was a good substitute to Bernice Johnson Reagon’s concept of home but that didn’t take away how important the familial aspect of coalition building is. Because it is important to me. So, basically, “home” as a noun gives the feeling of being settled. “Making families” seems more kinetic, more intergenerational, more about trial and error. But here again, I admit that I’m not just looking to make coalitions with every student I ever teach. I mean, being a pro-Palestinian, anti-occupation(s) Arab woman and coming here to teach soldiers who have been/ are going to Iraq and/or Palestine deserves a post of its own. What kind of coalitions can I build with these young men and women? Or do I want to, anyway?
Self-Reflection in our Practices
Dear Brena and Deems,
Brena, I like what you said about having a heterogeneous classroom. Perhaps if a few people are uncomfortable, it means that we have cultivated a space, knowingly or not, where a variety of perspectives are present. Do you think this translates into the Program as a whole? Or the University? Do you think it’s okay if some other graduate students in the program dislike, or are uncomfortable with, my ideas and my pedagogy? Or does this translate into disunity? And what might be the difference between dislike of and disrespect for our work?
Maybe, like you emphasized in the difference between assimilation and coalition-building, this lies in the goal. But the goal of who, in this case? What would be the “goal” of disliking someone else’s pedagogy versus disrespecting their work?
If I dislike or disagree with someone else’s pedagogy, perhaps my goal would be to sit down and have a fruitful conversation about their classroom perspective. But if I disrespect it, perhaps my goal is resisting confrontation entirely, absolving myself of responsibility?
I’ve been struggling this week because I feel somewhat responsible, in a collective sense, for the work and pedagogy of the fellow TA’s in my department. And my hope is that my peers feel the same for me.Isn’t it the goal of an intellectual community to hold one another accountable for our ideas and practices? And to also praise one another for work well done? How can we productively do this with one another in a way that fosters, I guess ultimately, self-reflection in our practices?
This perhaps is one of the pitfalls of Deema, your advice, about thinking of the classroom space like a family. I really like what you said about this (any excuse to tie in Cherrie Moraga!) but then it makes me think about all of the ways we work and act within our families, and how we hold family members accountable, and how this is in tension with ideas of “professionalization” within the American academy. It’s hard right now for me to think about how this professionalization that keeps being touted by our department is different from individualization, which seems counter to feminist practice and a revolutionary classroom…. Maybe it’s time for me to revisit Thich Nhat Han…
Think Of It As Making Familias
“It’s like making familia from scratch
Each time all over again.
With strangers if I must.
If I must, I will.”
Cherrie Moraga (who has so much to teach us about radical pedagogy, if only she is more included in our graduate and undergraduate syllabi. If only we read her words in all their depths)
Hey Ally,
I’ve actually always thought of coalition-building as something close to making family, making home. The Moraga quote above best describes the way it feels for me (I can’t seem to find where these lines are from though!). Making new familia is both uncomfortable– as we’re adjusting to new people and a new way of life around them, and enjoyable. It’s the same as working towards intimacy is frightening and exhilarating at the same time. But it also feels right, that we’re building something good here, that we’re tying our lives and our fates together.
Before I go to my class, I try to remind myself that 20 new people have entered my life, and that I have entered theirs. My ambition is to make this encounter, which will only last for a few months, matter for much longer than that.
Back to Karey’s and your comments (Hey Karey! :)) I too wish that we could reach a point where we’re more at ease with making mistakes and disagreeing with each other in class (comfortable with being uncomfortable?) I know it’s something I want for myself as much as for my students.
And I don’t know if this is tangential, but all through the past week, I’ve been remembering how, back in my school days, we used to have this bookcase at the back of our class, not too close to the wall, so we had ample space to stand behind it, facing the board. I remember that, whenever we felt too tired of sitting down (and I grew up in a French schooling system, where we stay in the same class all day, all year, long, as teachers come and go), some of us would stand behind that bookcase, put our copybooks on it and take notes standing up. All this week I’ve been wanting my students to have such freedom to move around, to stand up and sit down whenever they want (which is a freedom that I have as a teacher). But I can also hear a voice telling me that class is where students learn to be professional, and that part of this professionalism is to discipline our bodies. Of course, a big part of it is to discipline our minds too. I think this is the issue that we keep coming back to again and again.
This is the issue that’s on my mind when, on wanting to give my students a role-playing exercise, I opt to make it a writing exercise. I choose to have them freewrite about being someone they’re not, rather than enact it with their bodies. And I think that’s the challenge for me. To be more at ease in my body, with being able to “manage” my class, and as a result, to be able to create a space for such moments where we can be awakward as we struggle to learn. Because real learning is a struggle.
Coalition and Discomfort
Hey Deems,
Perhaps because Bernice Johnson Reagon came to campus to speak this week, coalition politics has been in the forefront of my mind. The thing that always seems to resonate in my mind about Reagon’s ideas is the discomfort that comes with coalition—the idea that if we’re not uncomfortable, we’re not doing true coalition-work. Does this mean that if our classrooms are places of coalition-work (as I really hope mine can be), that they must always be uncomfortable spaces? And if so, then what is the necessary work of self-care that accompanies spending time these uncomfortable spaces? What can we do so we don’t burn out? And how can we still convince students that it’s worth it to take our classes?
I think that maybe this relates a little bit to Karey’s concerns. As a teacher of kids, does this discomfort still apply? Is the risk of discomfort more okay in a college classroom than in a classroom with younger (read: vulnerable) bodies?
I don’t mean to just pose questions—I think it’s just reflective of the kind of mood I am in. And I hope these questions don’t seem too obvious–right now, they seem complicated to me.
I think about the ways in which some students, as Karey pointed out, are going to be uncomfortable from the get-go because of cultural differences around learning and movement. Where do we get these ideas about how to learn? And are the ideas still relevant? How do we know what ideas from THE ENLIGHTENMENT (I always think this term is ironic…) we should hold on to. Then, of course, there are all the different kinds of learning that no matter how much you mix it up (in-class free-writes, large group discussion, small group discussion, role playing activities etc) some students are going to be uncomfortable or at least not like aspects of class. And what’s the difference between dislike and discomfort?
Is the discomfort that stems from the learning environment a kind of coalition-building itself? For instance, if students, in Karey’s example, from the Dominican are given chances to move around and ask questions without judgment in the American classroom, are other students in the classroom, in their own working toward accepting this, forming coalitions? Are they doing cross-cultural work? But if it were to work the other way around—with Dominican kids taking on a more reserved verbal and body language—we would call this assimilation, yes? So what, as pedagogical theorists, can we say are the distinct differences between asking our students to work with the discomfort of coalition versus asking our students, in their discomfort, assimilate? How can coalition, as a concept and as an act, help us resist assimilation?
Bodies in the Classroom
Dear Deems,
I want to start by honoring what you said about how your subject position (Arab woman in the United States) affects how you see yourself, or how your students see you, in the classroom. It has been important for me to understand how my white American privilege in an American University classroom enables me to trust my students to recognize the knowledge I bring in. I don’t feel as if I need to take up a visual position of authority because I am usually the oldest person in the room (read: I stick out in that way, but it’s a valued standpoint, older = wiser, teacherly) and almost always the whitest (I actually mean this in a very literal sense and the more figurative). And because I teach Women’s Health, I think my subject position as a woman helps me, too. While I do think that sometimes my sexuality, which I choose to reveal casually in references and anecdotes from my personal life (a pedagogical decision for another post, perhaps!) might cause distrust when I address topics of intercourse or pregnancy or other assumed-heterosexual subject matter, in general, that distrust of me, and my body, isn’t pervasive in the course as a whole. In other words, I can walk into a classroom and my body, in and of itself, assumes the position of authority. Your body, as a brown-skinned woman with an accent from the Middle East, can garner (unfortunately) distrust from students (or worse).
This is where I, as a person with white privilege, need to work so that students can recognize how both their individual prejudice and the institutionally racist (classist, sexist, ablest) stuctures contribute to their reactions of whose knowledge gets valued in the classroom. Of whose body gets to create knowledge.
I think, to address your question more specifically, Deems, about our responsibility as teachers to recognize physical bodies in the classroom, I have to think back to the work and classroom of one of my mentors, Becky Thompson. In her white antiracism course I took as part of my MA degree, she consistently fought against how orality is privileged in the University. A huge part of her classroom was about being able to see each other as we engage in difficult conversations. She often would have us stop mid conversation and think about where our bodies were, how we were physically reacting. She would ask about what our physical responses meant and how those responses can bring about a different or enhanced understanding of the material. And what was so important for me to understand, as a white working class woman who grew up in a community of color, was that orality, as a way to demonstrate knowing, is a white European middle class and able-bodied construct. And I realized that while I learned to speak, and speak well in the classroom, in that process, I have adapted kinds of communication that don’t work very well when I go home.
I’ve started bringing my home self back into the classroom, honoring my body language instead of suppressing it. With Disability Studies as part of my work in Women’s Studies, this recognition of bodies seems increasingly important. But in order for bodies to be recognized, I need to see my students and my students need to see me. And because of privileges associated with gender, race, class, language, and able-bodiedness, we all have different ways to negotiate how we can be seen. Long way of responding: maybe the Freirian circle doesn’t work all the time after all. What are some other ways that we can create a radical classroom? How can we resist the oppressive physical structures that furniture so often creates?
Pedagogies for the Revolution 
