Am I Doing This Right?

As the semester draws to a close, I have spent some time reflecting on my first semester of teaching. Here is my initial thought: by no means do I know what I’m doing. (Does anyone?) I am still in the process of figuring out who I am as an instructor and how I want to foster my classroom climate. That being said, I think that I have been doing right by my students this semester, as I am committed to their learning and empowerment. I’m not sure if this has been felt by my students, but I suppose I will find out after SPOT evals.

As a final note for this semester, I’d like to outline some of my commitments as an instructor.

1.     I am committed to the use of popular culture in the classroom.

The remarkable power of popular culture was clearly illustrated in last week’s readings. I liked Hammonds and Anderson-Lain’s description of popular culture as “cultural objects as literal manifestations of experiences that have been crafted or structured,” (p. 112). In other words, popular culture is an extension of human communication through the relationships among people as they find meaning and structure through signs and symbols. Popular culture has the power to recognize and reproduce the experiences and identities of communities of people, for better or for worse. When we use popular culture in combination with Critical Communication Pedagogy in the classroom, we give students the agency and power to name their experiences. We become student-teachers in relation to our students and give up some of the power we hold as instructors.

I saw this in my own classroom during Rhetoric and Advocacy week, after I showed my students the This is America music video, the class discussion that followed was incredibly insightful and surprising. Students who had not spoken up in class prior had raised their hands and contributed to the discussion. The discussion was exciting, I couldn’t keep up with the amount of ideas that were being shared. As an instructor, I want to experience more discussions like that with my students, and I believe popular culture is the key.

2.     I am committed to my authenticity in the classroom.

As Palmer stated, “As I teach, I project the condition of my soul onto my students, my subject, and our way of being together,” (p. 2-3). Ultimately, good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher. Palmer explained that good teaching is less related to the methods that teachers use to connect with their students and to connect their students with the subject, and more related to the degree to which the teacher knows and trusts their own selfhood, and their willingness to “make it available and vulnerable in the service of learning” (p. 11). The identity of the teacher is an integral part of the teacher’s connectedness to themselves, their subjects, and their students. When I teach in my classroom, I hope to teach with my authentic self. I hope to portray my identity and integrity in the classroom in meaningful ways, to embrace the vulnerability of teaching and my inner truth, and to connect with my students and my subject.

3.     I am committed to the empowerment of my students.

Most importantly, I am committed to the empowerment of my students. For me, this empowerment is informed by two scholars, Paulo Freire and bell hooks. As I recognize how educational systems function as systems of oppression, particularly for students, I also recognize the White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy that both my students and I live within. These structures impact students in very real ways, and to simply ignore the ways that our intersectionalities work to privilege us and oppress us, would be to ignore the very real identities, experiences, and lives of our students. As an instructor, I am committed to reducing the power I hold in the classroom in meaningful ways. I believe, as teachers, we are responsible for employing a Critical Communication Pedagogy in our classrooms, as we must continue in the fight against power and oppression. This is perhaps the most meaningful way that we can impact our students.

As a final, final, note, I would like to thank all of my fellow pedagogues, my mentors, and my students for a semester I will never forget. Thank you for listening to all of my rants, my frustrations, and my existential crises. 

Much love.

#eyeswideopen

Transforming Good Girls into Smart Women

As I started reading “Voices and Silences in Our Classrooms: Strategies for Mapping Trails Among Sex/Gender, Race, and Class” by Bell and Golombisky, their notion of the Good Girl deeply resonated with me on different levels.

In my own academic experience, I associate my own silence in the classroom to the notion of the Good Girl in combination with my ethnicity. Bell and Golombisky define the Good Girl as a white, middle-class type, containing the “cultural pressure to conform to the dominant conventional image of the ideal, perfect girl –who is always nice and good, who never hurts other people’s feelings…and who contains her feelings, especially anger.” (p. 296). Further, the pressures and consequences of this type is very different for Good Girls who are women of color. When we insert the Good Girl in academia, researchers found common themes: “white girls begin to silence themselves at adolescence, girls of color are caught in class and racial binds that make them invisible and unwelcome in the classroom, and the education system reinforces this decline.” (p. 297) When the Good Girl is faced with various forms of gender bias, “including a lower quality and quantity of classroom attention”, Good Girls begin to reside in their own silence. (p. 297)

In my own experience, I can relate to the Good Girl. Throughout my undergraduate career, I was a Good Girl. I spent my undergrad laser focused on my academic career, I rarely missed a class, wrote down every single due date in my planner, I took diligent notes, completed every assignment, and assessed every line of the syllabus. I spent most of my undergrad focused on receiving high grades and ducking my head through class. I rarely, if ever, spoke up in a classroom. And though I was deeply invested in the courses I took (mostly my comm courses) and committed to my learning, I was not confident in my own thoughts, opinions, or ideas to share them in front of an entire class. In fact, though I am speaking from past experience, I still struggle with the notion of the Good Girl in myself today. Though I am hyper-aware of the Good Girl in graduate school, I am still working and fighting to change it every time I walk into a graduate class. Reflecting upon this, I think I have made strides of improvement since my undergrad, but there is so much room for more. Put lightly (or maybe not so lightly), I pine for the confidence of a straight white man in a college classroom. But even then, I know that’s not exactly what I really want. I want the confidence of a Hispanic woman in a classroom, whatever that means for me.

Though I personally related to the Good Girl, as I was reading I also thought of several girls in my COMM 1010 class. I have some Good Girls who are white, black, and Hispanic. In particular, I find myself thinking about a group of four Hispanic girls who sit near each other in class, each of which have never spoken up in a class discussion or in front of the entire class at all. But when we do group activities in class, I speak to them one-on-one and they each share their thoughts and ideas with me. They are the quintessential Good Girl. I think as someone who can deeply relate to the Good Girl, I have a soft spot for the Good Girls in my classroom. Though I feel their pain, their discomfort, and even their complicity in the “comfort of the known” of being the Good Girl, I think I have a responsibility to encourage and empower them. I want to be able to create a classroom that invites the ideas of everyone, but specifically the Good Girls who remain silent. Bell and Golombisky describe several activities that can encourage the Good Girl to participate in class, including Think/Pair/Share, Write and Example, Make a List, and Think of Everything You Know About. These activities are easy and applicable to apply to any classroom lecture or discussion. Even further, bell and Golombisky discuss other strategies, such as “pay to talk” days and the closing ritual. In my own classroom, I am interested in applying the closing ritual to each class. Though it seems uncomfortable and awkward, I wonder how this strategy can work in COMM 1010 – does it have the power to truly encourage the Good Girls to share their smart ideas with the class?

As an instructor, I know that I want to encourage the Good Girls to share their smart ideas with the class, because I know they have them. If I can take any part in encouraging a Good Girl in her transformation into a Smart Woman, I will know that I have done something good.

#eyeswideopen