Blogging Pedagogy - race

Dealing with Discomfort in Classroom Discussions

Kate Stevenson — Mon, 03 Nov 2014 19:16:31 +0000

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Image Credit:

Miami Classroom by Fredler Brave, from Wikipedia

Looking through the tags on Blogging Pedagogy earlier this semester, Rhiannon Goad’s lone post tagged “trans*” jumped out at me. In my experience, graduate students talk a lot amongst ourselves about uncomfortable, uncertain, or potentially hurtful situations we encounter in our classrooms, but we don’t often write about them or discuss them with our faculty mentors. If you’re like me, Rhiannon’s post may not have brought up memories of experiences with trans* students specifically, but it probably brought up at least one memory of a difficult to navigate situation involving a fraught topic like race, gender, or sexuality in our classrooms. Thinking back on my own teaching experiences, I wonder when we as instructors should intervene in these situations, and how we can keep our classrooms feeling as safe as possible for all of our students while also keeping our discussions open and honest.

I can think of one good example of a classroom incidents when I had to decide whether or not to intervene because of something that a student said during a discussion. While we were talking about a novel assigned in a British literature course, one of my students raised her hand and described a character using a string of offensive words. Half of the class turned to stare at her; the other half looked down at their books, squirming awkwardly. At first, I froze too. Should I call this student out on her offensive statement? Should I continue the discussion as if nothing happened? Should I start a discussion about the terminology that’s acceptable in this classroom? Finally, I asked her to "clarify" what she had said, and under the disapproving gaze of her classmates, she used different words. Later I wondered: Did I do enough to make the classroom feel safe for my other students? Should I have confronted this student about the repercussions of what she said? Should I have spoken to her in class or outside of class? Should I have followed up with some discussion about what we all heard?

When possible, I try not to intervene in classroom discussions, especially with older, more talkative students like the ones in my current rhetoric class. Teaching the Rhetoric of Tourism, race and gender are common topics of discussion; students deserve the space to resolve disagreements and fully discuss "awkward" topics amongst themselves. And obviously, all of our students cannot be completely comfortable with what is said in the classroom one hundred percent of the time. But what are some things we can do to make our classrooms feel safe(r), in Rhiannon’s words, for most of our students most of the time?

1. Model the language that we want to see used in our classrooms. This means discouraging the use of derogatory language as well as correcting incorrect language. This has been especially important in my Rhetoric of Tourism classroom, where my students often come across inflammatory and offensive texts and grapple with how to describe other people's often bigoted opinions.

2. Admit that there are problems with race, gender, and sexuality that merit discussion. My students are fond of referring to racism as something that “used to happen” or that was an issue “back in the day,” and they tend to avoid mention of sexuality at all costs. As instructors, we can interrogate the tendency to avoid these issues instead of letting them be swept under the rug, and use current examples to remind our students that discrimination is not a thing of the past.

3. Hold everyone accountable. We all want to avoid confrontation with our students, but that doesn’t mean we have to let them get away with insensitive comments. When a student says something offensive or makes a generalization, question them: “Why do you say that?” “What makes you think so?” or even simply, “Always?” “Everyone?” can be effective ways to coax students into reflecting on their beliefs and experiences.

4. This means holding yourself accountable, too. Was I projecting some of my own discomfort and fear of confrontation onto my students in the literature classroom? Undoubtedly. It’s just as important to keep a dialogue open with ourselves as with our students, about what our own conscious or subconscious prejudices are, what we feel particularly emotional about, and what makes us uncomfortable and why.

5. Work on your own demeanor. As we’ve all experienced, discussions about topics like race, gender, and sexuality can quickly change the atmosphere of a classroom from relaxed to incredibly fraught. We should do our best to project openness and trust, not anxiety. We can try to model the behavior we’d like to see your students exhibit towards each other.

The Convenience of Teaching Difficult Texts

Scott Garbacz — Thu, 06 Mar 2014 12:58:50 +0000

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Scott Garbacz is a doctoral candidate in medieval literature. His dissertation looks at how medieval students were taught to conceptualize and create literature, using many insights from contemporary cognitive psychology and neuroscience.

Image Credit:

Jimmy Brown (jumpingjimmyjava) at Flickr.

My classroom tends to feature a lot of group and class discussion. This semester's first novel was Salmon Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, a 576-page tome full of complex allusions to recent Indian politics, the foundation of Islam, and the Western literary canon. The second book is Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, a slim 216-page novel dealing with Jim Crow era America. Unexpectly, I'm finding that Rushdie, not Morrison, most encourages classroom discussion.

The contrast is counterintuitive, especially since my students preferred Morrison's work and (as demonstrated through in-class polls) found it much easier to relate to Morrison's characters. Where students could immediately understand Morrison's goal of depicting the self-loathing created by a racist culture, Rushdie's celebration of the immigrant experience of hybridity, impurity, and transformations was much harder for students to wrap their minds around. Morrison's realistic style allowed students to think about the experience of others, whereas Rushdie's magical realist aesthetic often perplexed students. Topping it all off was the religious element; Morrison's depiction of the role of Christianity in American culture felt infinitely more familiar to students than Rushdie's complex intimacy with and antagonism towards a form of Islam most students have experienced only through the lens of action movies and news reports.

Yet if Rushdie alienated students in a number of ways, I was surprised at one feature that kept drawing students into a richer appreciation of his work. Again and again, Rushdie questions the foundations of his own position, performing a sort of postmodern self-deconstruction. Students recognized echoes of Rushdie's own experience in figures ranging from the rich atheist who joins reluctantly in Ayesha's magical pilgrimage to the poet Baal who mocks the prophet Mohommad. Yet they also saw that each of these figures was interrogated by the text itself. The rich atheist offers to fly people on their pilgrimage to Mecca--but only a few, because he can't afford to take everyone. The prophet Baal writes beautiful, irreverent, and human verses--but in the face of despotism, he retreats away from political verse and writes nearly-meaningless love stories. When students saw that Rushdie was willing to criticize himself, it opened up class discussion; if the author himself was willing to argue both sides of a complex issue, why shouldn't students join in the fray?

Toni Morrison, on the other hand, is easier to understand but much, much harder to criticize. My mostly white students follow her depiction of black culture in Lorain, Ohio during the 1940's and can recognize both the horrors and consolations that such a life can provide, but they have neither the knowledge nor the life experiences to challenge Morrison's portrayal. Similarly, they can recognize (especially after my leading questions and mini-lectures) Morrison's ubiquitous theme of the importance of recognizing fellow human faces and resisting dehumanizing narratives, but Morrison’s arguments are so powerful that students feel they can do nothing but assent to her claims, at least for the purposes of this class. The book presents an odd paradox. Students seem to legitimately enjoy it, following its emotional twists and turns and working hard to understand its diverse cast of characters. Students even seem to be capable of understanding Morrison’s depiction of the relationship between stories we take in passively and attitudes that can drive out lives. Yet, in a way that wasn’t true of The Satanic Verses, students find it difficult to talk about The Bluest Eye—that is, to express the sort of varying opinions that brought Rushdie’s work to life in the classroom.

The afterward to The Bluest Eye may provide some antidote to this difficulty, though I haven’t introduced it to my students yet in order to preserve their sense of surprise at the story's development. In the afterward, Toni Morrison does dramatize some of the difficult decisions she has to make as an author, and in particular some issues around her complicated and deeply considered representation of sexual violence. Yet of course that conversation brings its own landmines, and so I try to at least limit the amount of time spent discussing such sensitive issues. In the meantime, the two books stand as an important reminder of a counterintuitive truth: that works which students find easy to understand are not necessarily easy to discuss, and that sometimes works that seem to be immensely challenging may, in the classroom, be far easier to teach than we would immediately think.

On Grammar Pedagogy; or, Stop: Grammar Time

Foley — Sun, 14 Jul 2013 05:00:00 +0000

Author:

Marjorie Foley

Image Credit:

via Jamison Koehler

Never before have I spent an entire class period talking about grammar, but I decided that this semester I would try it to see what my students thought about being taught grammar and being graded on grammar (the first of which I never do unless asked by a student for one-on-one help, the second which I only do if grammar severely impacts my ability to understand their papers). I had my students read three articles: Joseph Williams' "The Phenomenology of Error," (a selection from) David Foster Wallace's "Tense Present" a.k.a. "Authority and American Usage," and Christian Lander's Stuff White People Like #99: Grammar. If you've never read these articles, here's a brief description: Williams argues that there are levels of error--some we notice, some we don't, and that it all depends on who's doing the writing. He ends by saying that he deliberately made 100 mistakes in "The Phenomenology of Error," none of which I noticed, and only one of which was noticed by a student. The selection from DFW was his advice to students who speak Standard Black English (his phrasing, not AAVE) instead of Standard Written (White) English, telling them that they have to learn SWE to be successful even though it's racist and classist and the whole shebang. SWPL echoes DFW's views that grammar is racist, particularly with this claim: "It is in their blood not only to use perfect grammar but also to spend significant portions of time pointing out the errors of others," sarcastically asserting that the whiteness of the speaker determines grammar's perfection. We had a lot of fun with this combination. I had tacked DFW and SWPL on as an afterthought, but I'm glad I did. About a quarter of the students completely misread Williams as a grammar Nazi, but they really liked the other two selections. While many of my students thought that grammar was the most important thing to know about writing, most of them took pretty quickly to the ideas expressed in all three of these works--grammar is dependent on the speaker and the listener OR the writer and the reader. What works in one place will not work in another. My African-American students were quiet for the first portion of the class, but one finally spoke up about David Foster Wallace: She said that just because she spoke SBE didn't mean that she was so dumb that she would write a paper in SBE and hand it in. Thinking on this, I wonder (as always) if DFW was right to say what he did to his SBE students, but for different reasons than before--he may have very much oversimplified the problem. Lastly, the combination of all three articles showed them different styles of writing about the same topic, which was great.

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