O Captain, My Captain (Immediacy and Voice)

Every Monday evening, I proctor an exam for the same course at the university. The professor for the exam I proctor is a nice guy, sweet, funny, and very professional. Every Monday, the professor would walk in with his class and inform his students to take their School or Drivers ID with them so I can take roll to confirm attendance. Today, however, the professor walks in with his class and as his students began placing their belongings in small lockers, the professor turns toward his students and said, “Guys, not today. Leave IDs here, please.”

I would say I got to know these students pretty well as they glanced toward me, with confused expressions. Personally, I had no idea what the professor was planning. As a response for them, I just shrugged. I was just as confused as they were about why the instructor insisted on his students leaving their IDs with their belongings. 

Nevertheless, I lead the students into the assigned testing room and handed each of them a scratch sheet of paper. Once everyone is seated, the professor walks into the testing room.

*Keep in mind that the following dialogue has been paraphrased for the purpose of this entry.*

“Now, I know you are all confused on why I asked you all to leave your IDs out this evening,” The professor started to say. “I bet you all are thinking “But this isn’t what we do! Dezz has to check that we are all here and not at home taking the exam!” But I got to know each of you all pretty well this semester. I know names, I recognize faces, and I even know birthdays too.”

We chuckled at his comments.

The professor warmly smiles at us.

“I’m kidding about the birthdays, but seriously, I remember your names and I recognize faces. I wouldn’t be a good teacher if I didn’t, unless I had 400 students because if that were the case I would just say ‘forget it.’ I don’t even know if I have 200 friends in real life.” The professor jokingly stated.

And once again, we laughed at his funny comment.

“Now any questions before we start the exam?” The professor asked the class.

One student raised his hand.

“Yes, (Insert Student Name Here).” He addressed to the student.

As I stood there leaning against the wall, I realized that the instructor was creating immediacy with his students, as well as myself. Witt, Schrodt, and Turman (2015) define immediacy as “a cluster of communication behaviors that enhance closeness to and nonverbal interaction with another” (p. 201) or the reducing of the “perceived physical or psychological distance between communicators” (p. 201).

As the night went on, the students began to finish their exam. Before the students left the testing center, the professor would call them over to where he was sat and asked them how they did on the exam. Most students responded positively with huge grins on their faces, most likely informing the instructor they did well on the exam. As a congrats for passing the exam, the instructor would high-five them and would dismiss them from the center. For those who did not pass, he would simply pat their backs, say something positive about them trying their best, and encouraging them to do well on the next final.  And each student that walked out for the evening would leave with smiles on their faces. 

In this case, the professor voiced in a warm, touching way that he was acquaint with us by stating he was familiar with the names and faces of his students, yet implementing humor in his speech. This would be an example of verbal immediacy. The scholars provide examples of verbal immediacy; one being “object participation (use of names)” (p. 206) can lead to “perceptions of liking and closeness, thus enhancing the teacher-student relationship” (p. 206). In the continuation of building immediacy, the instructor’s use of nonverbal communication to praise or encourage his students had an overall effect to “establish and maintain a communicative connection that enhances” their relationship.

Although a different topic, I believe the professor’s voice had much to do with establishing immediacy with his students, including with myself. As stated earlier, the professor voiced in a warm, touching way that he was acquaint with us by stating his familiarity with names and faces. His voice was not only warm, but inviting, like he was using the warmth of his voice to invite his students to build an ideal teacher/student relationship. Through this ideal relationship the professor is attempting to create through voice, this could answer the “why and how immediacy works” (p. 214).

#letsgetloud

 #letsbefriends

Fassett, D. L. & Warren, J. T. (Eds.) (2010). The sage handbook of communication and instruction (Chapter 11) Los Angeles: Sage.

A Note on bell hooks and Pain

 I must admit that I am writing this post from a place of pain; not physical pain, but a kind of pain similar to that which bell hooks (1994) described as the result of “giving up old ways of thinking and knowing and learning new approaches” (p. 43). I have felt the pain that comes with newfound distance with one’s old worldview years ago during my undergraduate career; the pain I am feeling now is slightly different—it stems from the silencing of my voice by my family members, from their unwillingness to endure any of that pain with me. In the wake of this most recent Thanksgiving holiday, I have found myself thinking a lot about bell hooks’ (1994) Teaching to Transgress. I’m not sure why, because it has most certainly always been present, but more than ever I saw white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy (WSCP) at work in the days I spent at home and felt so overwhelmingly suffocated and isolated by it.

In trying to reconcile the silencing I experienced while at home, I’ve returned to hooks’ (1994) call to theorize our experiences. She wrote, “Personal testimony, personal experience, is such fertile ground for the production of liberatory feminist theory because it usually forms the base of our theory making” (p. 70). This view of what it means to theorize encourages me in the sense that I feel empowered to coax my own voice out of the corner to which my family has banished it. That, within myself, I have the power to uplift my voice through the process of theorizing is liberating indeed. Moreover, both Freire’s (1970) and hooks’ (1994) assurance that the act of theorizing is an integral part of praxis mollifies my pervasive desire to constantly act and urges me to prop my feet up for awhile. I’m thankful for this because I need a break from the battle I’ve been fighting with my family and WSCP.

I liken theorizing to propping my feet up not to diminish the difficulty of theorizing about our experience. hooks said, “It is not easy to name our pain, to theorize from that location” (p. 74). I feel this more than ever right now, and it is because of my intense experience of this pain that I am writing this post as a reminder of two things: 1) we must remember to be sympathetic to the pain our students may feel as a result of the material we expose them to and 2) we hold a very special position through which we can accompany those students who bear the pain of theorizing their experience as a result of the material we expose them to. This accompaniment, this willingness to stand with and by our students, is in itself a feminist act.

References

Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York, NY: Bloomsbury.

hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. New                    York, NY: Routledge.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

Teaching across cultures: A 3010 TA attempts CCP

Teaching across cultures: A 3010 TA attempts CCP

I believe I was destined to be a TA for COMM 3010 at UNT due primarily to my freakish skills in the areas of grammar, spelling, punctuation, sentence structure, word choice, capitalization, and, of course, APA formatting and style. My new mantra is “Once a 3010 TA, always a 3010 TA” because once your mind has been transformed by the mysterious powers of APA writing, you can never go back to your old ways.

For example, in just the first sentence of the previous paragraph, I made the following errors:

·      “I believe I was destined to be” sounds too much like a cliché. Academic writing only.

·      “I was destined” uses passive voice AND is an ‘agent of action’ error. If you can add the phrase “by zombies” to the end of a phrase, that signals passive voice. If the phrase lacks a human agent, it’s an agent of action error. Who destined me? The mystical deities of APA?

·      Instead of using the abbreviations “TA” and “COMM 3010”, I should have spelled out the words those abbreviations stand for: “teaching assistant” and “Communication Perspectives”.

·      “due primarily to” is a split infinitive. An infinitive looks like this: to read, to cook, to drive. For my fellow Spanish-speakers who might be reading this, we know infinitives in the following forms: bailar, comer, morir. (I hope y’all can appreciate the multiple reasons I purposely chose those particular words.)

·      “my freakish skills” is a colloquialism. Again, not academic enough to be in an APA paper.

Author’s note: I’d like to take this opportunity to declare myself exempt from writing in APA for the entirety of this blog post. Moving on.

Many people I know are brilliant creative writers who use paper instead of a canvas, words instead of watercolors, and a pen instead of a paintbrush.

…or, if you live in the year 2004 or later…

a word processing program instead of a canvas, words instead of watercolors, and a keyboard instead of a paintbrush.

In contrast, my writing skills shine through in a very different context—the dry, lifeless writing used by researchers of the social sciences who get published in academic periodicals which are read only by other researchers of the social sciences because the majority of the population doesn’t even know these periodicals exist.

There are at least nine prepositions in that sentence.

And here’s a quick meme-type image that shows the movie clip playing in my head right now. Yes, I put the image together and yes, I’m pretty proud of it.

All this is to say that I know my strengths. For the most part, these strengths are pretty straightforward and useful only in certain contexts. For example, when it comes to grading 3010 papers, I only have to look to the 6^th edition of the APA manual to prove what’s right and wrong. However, when it comes to my blog post theme—teaching across cultures—things are not so simple.

When I think about my experiences an instructor this semester, I recall often feeling defeated. When I first envisioned my classroom, I pictured something like this:

Or this:

But at the end of the semester, I feel more like this:

Or, more accurately, this:

I care deeply about my students, but I believe that as their instructor, I haven’t entirely done them justice. (get it? critical communication pedagogy is dedicated to social justice… you get it.)

Today in my COMM 1010 classes, my students and I discussed topics like hegemony, power, oppression, privilege, mediated representations of cultural groups, and stereotypes. Nothing particularly catastrophic happened, but still, these class meetings did not go as I had hoped. Over the course of the day, I have replayed those conversations over and over again in my mind, trying to figure out where I went wrong and what I could have done better. I fear that as a heterosexual white woman, my undeniable privilege got in the way of my ability to talk openly with my students about these seemingly abstract topics that necessarily involve touchy subjects.

Bell & Golombisky (2004) noted the inherent risks involved in entering these kinds of dialogues.

“To discuss women, race, class, and voice is to ‘enter a difficult conversation’…We do so with much trepidation and, again, much potential for misunderstanding” (Bell & Golombisky, 2004, p. 295-304).

Increasing my emotions this morning was the absence of a specific student. A few weeks ago, this student told another TA in our department that she thinks I’m hilarious, but she notices that when I make jokes in class, no one laughs. She said that even though our class is a tough crowd, she can tell I try hard to be a good teacher and how much I love comm studies. I can’t explain how joyful it made me feel to hear this report. In this casual conversation which she probably hasn’t thought twice about, this student unknowingly became my classroom ally. To my dismay, she wasn’t in class today. When I surveyed the room, my trusty ally wasn’t there. And I felt anxious.

I navigated today’s discussions on hegemony and privilege attempting to expose these painful realities so as to increase my students’ understanding of their world. We talked about the difference between individual and systemic discrimination, how one person can be simultaneously awarded and refused privilege based on the intersectionality of their different cultural identities, and how barriers to communication perpetuate oppressive hegemonic systems. I hoped to embody my idealistic vision of “teaching across cultures” as I tried to allow space for everyone’s voice without essentializing or tokenizing. I attempted a dynamic discussion balanced by a respect for the seriousness of these topics as well as lighthearted moments to ease the tension. I hoped to communicate the very real operation of hegemony and privilege in our everyday lives.

It’s probably important to note that these goals are at about Pedagogy Level 7 and I’m currently sitting closer to Pedagogy Level 2. I know I’m sounding forlorn here, so I’ll take a cue from another pop culture gem—Bridesmaids—and remember that at this point, I’ve got "nowhere to go but up!"

"Positive message!"

As I wrap up this blog post, I have to hearken back to the wisdom of my pedagogy idol, bell hooks, who reminds us that, while difficult, learning to enact critical, transformative pedagogy that values a culturally diverse classroom is essential in order to provide a liberatory education.

  

“Nor should our collective commitment to cultural diversity change because we have not yet devised and implemented perfect strategies for them. To create a culturally diverse academy we must commit ourselves fully. 

Learning from other movements for social change, from civil rights and feminist liberation efforts, we must accept the protracted nature of our struggle and be willing to remain both patient and vigilant. To commit ourselves to the work of transforming the academy so that it will be a place where cultural diversity informs every aspect of our learning, we must embrace struggle and sacrifice. We cannot be easily discouraged. We cannot despair when there is conflict. 

Our solidarity must be affirmed by shared belief in a spirit of intellectual openness that celebrates diversity, welcomes dissent, and rejoices in collective dedication to truth.” (hooks, 1994, p. 33)

(LLP)

#teachingacrosscultures

Bell, E., & Golombisky, K. (2004). Voices and silences in our classrooms: Strategies for mapping trails among sex/gender, race, and class. Women’s Studies in Communication, 27(3), 294-329. doi:10.1080/07491409.2004.10162478

hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. New York:

Routledge.