Blogging Pedagogy - embodiment

Self Disclosure in the Classroom

Laura Wallace — Mon, 06 Oct 2014 22:10:11 +0000

Author:

Laura Wallace

Image Credit:

bighappyfunhouse.com

Full disclosure: this blog post may include some self-disclosure.

Although my Rhetoric 309K course, Rhetoric of Confession, obviously revolved around public self-disclosures, I did not require any public self-disclosures of my students beyond whatever they chose to reveal in their Learning Record self-assessments and self-designed assignments. Nevertheless, when I tell people about the course, usually the first thing they want to know is whether any students confessed "anything weird." They seem to assume, perhaps from reading my academic work and my Tumblr, that my classroom would be a kind of group therapy session with feelings flying and uncomfortable revelations spilling out all over the place. In actuality, only a few students ever made their own confessions, and most of those happened on paper, only seen by myself and a few classmates. I told my Confession students almost nothing about myself.

Returning to the literature classroom this fall after two years of rhetoric, I was assigned to teach E314V: Gay and Lesbian Literature and Culture. Talking to professors and other graduate students who have taught identity-based courses, I heard over and over again the idea that "it's all about the text"--that we should discourage discussion of personal experience because student discussions should be grounded in the assigned texts. Focusing on the text is important for a number of reasons, but for me, the most important may be that while the text's accessibility may vary from reader to reader, if everyone in the room has read the same text, it's the object from which the discussion springs (I'll save the literary theory for another day). The text is the closest thing we have to common ground in the literature classroom. I don't want personal experience to be a bar to discussing it, nor do I want anyone to feel put on the spot because of personal experience they do or do not have. We can all read the texts and interpret them: let's start there. This is what I told my students on the first day.

I also told them I would never ask them to declare any identity labels for themselves, and that anyone in the class could be gay or straight or bisexual or pansexual or..?, anyone could be trans or cis, etc. etc. and obviously those identities inform our readings, but such disclosures are not required.

Then I told them I was going to break my own rule for two minutes. I acknowledged that, in the LGBTQ studies classroom (and other identity-based classrooms), instructors often don't explicitly identify themselves or their investments, often because they assume students will read them in certain ways. However some things aren't visible and sometimes it feels important to use our words. So I used mine, and came out as bisexual. Then I segued into some jokes and I also told them a bit about my academic work.

When I decided to come out to my students I thought I was doing it for my own comfort. At DWRL orientation, I told a friend/colleague I was planning to do it and she encouraged me, pointing out that probably most of my students have never heard someone in authority come out as bi and that it would mean something if I did. Which made it not (just) about my own comfort or credibility, but about setting a tone and creating a space. Which seems to have worked.

Although quite probably they would have anyway, several students came out in funny ways, in their info sheets on the first day, like the student who wrote "I'm also Jewish :)" or the one who just wrote, in the section where I ask if there's anything else I should know, "LGBT" with an arrow pointing to the G. A few students directly mentioned my statements, stating that they were coming out to me because I had come out to them.

Personal experience/identity has also come up in classroom discussions, with mixed results. A few examples: a student came out as straight in order to excuse her own ignorance of queer politics (and plead for enlightenment). Another student who rarely spoke in class wrote an impassioned blog post about Cherríe Moraga and the student's own experience of being Mexican American, which led her to share in class an anecdote about a friend who she believes is in the closet. Other students had opinions about this (why did she assume he was gay? because he was effeminate? etc.), which led to an interesting discussion about visibility and safety, which led us directly back to Moraga's essay, “La Güera,” which itself is a work of theory that could also be described as confessional. While at times personal anecdotes derail our conversations, and force me to ask the class, "what does this have to do with the reading?," for the most part, I've found that judicious self-disclosures by both instructor and students have made our discussions richer, helping us recognize each other as complex humans and reminding us of why we are in this classroom in the first place.

Using Meditation in the (Digital) Classroom

Jenn Shapland — Wed, 13 Nov 2013 17:49:40 +0000

Author:

Jenn Shapland

Image Credit:

David Lynch Foundation

I decided to bring meditation practice into my Rhetoric and Writing class against the firm advice of nearly everyone I’d talked to about it. Most of my friends and colleagues said it sounded like a nice idea, but, “would you really want to be that teacher?” In other words, they wondered if my students would take me seriously. These are sensible concerns, but, in the curious and compensatorily over-confident spirit of teaching this class for the first time—and in a digital classroom to boot—I went for it anyway.

Each Monday and Wednesday, for the first few minutes of class, I lead the group of fourteen undergraduates through a mindfulness meditation. I base it on a practice called the Three-Minute Breathing Space. Basically, students sit in silence, eyes closed, and I ask them to focus their attention on their breathing. I vary it week to week, but usually I suggest that they become aware of the state of their physical body, their thoughts, and their current emotions. Sometimes I use the ambient noise in the room—it’s a windowless, basement classroom equipped with about thirty Mac desktops and a projector, so it has an audible hum—and draw their attention to the sounds and other background conditions that they might usually ignore. Often I refer to specifics that seem relevant on the day: the weather, the energy level in the room, the time in the semester, or even the week’s workload. It’s different every time, and some days, when I feel especially in need of a minute to collect myself before teaching a class, I play a recorded mindfulness meditation over the classroom speakers and join them.

Meditation has become an integral part of my life over the last few months. I find it helpful for overcoming anxiety, improving concentration, and finding a deliberate, accepting approach to daily experience. Because it’s been so useful to me, I thought it would be a good tool for my students to have as they approach their own anxieties about writing. I did a little research before the fall semester and discovered that mindfulness meditation has been proven to raise exam scores and improve concentration and focus in high school students, and it is used more and more frequently to create calm, attentive classroom environments. Many professors have begun to incorporate what's called contemplative pedagogy into their innovative teaching practices at the college level to encourage creativity and reduce stress. Not only that, but David Lynch is a huge fan; the image above, from his foundation's website, illustrates how unexpected it might look to have students close their eyes and sit still during class. But, recalling how exhausted and overwhelmed I tended to be during college, I figured if nothing else meditation couldn’t hurt my group of sophomores and juniors.

So far, I’ve been impressed with the results. I notice a marked difference in the way students engage with me and with one another on days when we start class by meditating. They look at me when I speak. They look at one another when they speak. The few times we haven’t meditated, the class has felt especially inattentive to me—many of them unsubtly check their phones under the table or just zone out. The omnipresent smart phone phenomenon is especially perplexing to me as an instructor in a digital classroom. It seems baldy contradictory to prohibit their access to technology when I’m also encouraging its use and promoting digital resources throughout the semester.

During one meditation, I decided to try calling their attention to their phones. As an example of feelings they might currently be experiencing, I brought up that persistent, gnawing sense of distress—mental, physical, and emotional—that they might feel when they can’t easily see or access their phones, even for the few minutes that their eyes are closed to meditate. I mentioned that they didn’t need to change this feeling, or judge it, but simply notice it if it was there. That day, not a single person in class picked up their phone for the full seventy-five minutes. I didn’t ask them not to, but calling their awareness to their own reliance on it seemed to pose some sort of challenge to them.

I’ll readily admit that this is an ongoing experiment. Teaching a class for the first time is experimental in myriad ways. I look forward to getting some mid-semester feedback from the students to hear if our daily meditation sessions are something they like or find useful. But, for now, I’m pleased with the conscientious quality of attention I have in class.

If you’re interested in using mindfulness meditation in the classroom, UT’s Center for Mental Health has a number of great resources and classes available in person and online (they offer recorded meditations online here). In addition to theirs, I like to use this downloadable set of recordings from UCLA. For my part, I’m going to continue thinking about ways that meditation can enhance learning, even though to some it might not seem like a “productive” use of time—I have a feeling that deep investments in the myth of incessant productivity (perhaps a result of late capitalist anxieties and the ensuing impact of corporate approaches to learning on the college campus?) are at the root of these unsubstantiated suspicions.

Embodying a Controversy

Axel Bohmann — Sun, 01 Sep 2013 05:00:00 +0000

Author:

Axel Bohmann

Image Credit:

Art E. Rial | Body Worlds 3: The Thinker

This summer, my parents asked me to review an article they were writing for a handbook on systemic counselling. The topic was using the body as a resource as well as an agent in problem-solving strategies and decision-making. Mom and Dad wrote the interaction between cognition and embodiment (and their fundamental inseparability), the bi-directionality of psycho-somatic processes, etc. All of which I felt was very interesting, but at the time seemed slightly too obvious to really excite me. But as I think about my teaching this semester, I keep coming back to the issue of embodiment and I realize that, yes, I have been aware of it for quite some time but, admittedly, have failed to … well, embody what I knew.

An example from the rhetoric classes I teach (it's intermediate level this semester, but I speak mostly from my past experience with introductory courses). In these, each student has to select a controversy to map, analyze chosen positions in depth, and finally take her own stance. One of the key realizations I want students to make is that a controversy is much more multi-faceted than “pro and con.” To that end, my students get to use a number of tools for visualizing the relationships between individual stakeholders when they work towards mapping their controversy (color coding, mind mapping, etc.). Students typically find these quite helpful.

Yet as they begin defining and verbalizing their own position, I've noticed there often is a relapse into the two-camps model. And I as the instructor am probably not innocent in that regard. An exercise I've been doing at the beginning of Unit 3 (constructing arguments) serves as a good example: this is only a slight variation of the split-the-class-in-half-then-debate exercise I am familiar with from high school. There are three groups and each gets assigned one position in a given controversy, usually with the third group mediating between the first two. They get into three different corners of the room and rhetorically batter away at each other (well, there is a reflection part to it, too, but that just as an aside). I think it's quite telling that the third group often ends up aligning more or less with one of the first two and feels like they argue that group's point only less decidedly.

The problem is that this splitting up into distinct blocks with predetermined position glosses over a lot of the nuances students have learned to identify when mapping and analyzing controversies. It presents positions as fairly unitary and static, and puts direct argumentative confrontation center stage.

This semester I hope to use space, movement, gaze and posture in better ways to help students navigate their controversies with more flexibly and elegantly. I'm not sure about the exact details yet, but I am thinking about smaller group exercises where each individual has an assigned set of basic beliefs and a goal expressed in proxemic terms (e.g. “try to get Kim to stand as closely to you as possible” or “separate Max and Kabriesha as far from each other as possible”). I would probably have each group member put forth an argument in turn and have everybody else react to this argument physically (by moving away from/towards others, directing their gaze one particular way, etc.). The goal would be for students to see that their arguments influence everybody in the controversy, even the ones that do not move, since the constellation inevitably gets altered. Also, this could be really helpful in getting them to think about navigating multiple audiences: convincing one group without agitating another, for instance.

Posture, For One and All!

Prentice — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 15:19:25 +0000

Author:

Chris Ortiz y Prentice

Image Credit:

John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (1934)

You don’t have to be a dyed-in-the-wool empirist to believe that we must learn how to move and hold our bodies. Yet who among us learned anything about posture at school?

Not I, at any rate, although maybe that’s because I went to public school in the United States. We had P.E. (Physical Education), presumably under the theory that students are better able to concentrate in class if they run around a bit from time to time. Yes, like a great many, I was forced from Middle School through High School to go through the usual routine of locker room, stretching, running, and back to locker room, a ritual that amounted to little more than a daily opportunity for social-jockeying and hazing. That is to be expected, of course, and can be chalked up to “social skills,” but we weren’t learning the first thing about, for instance, strength, flexibility, speed, agility, nutrition, breathing, relaxation, musculature, injuries: in short, any of the well developed canon of learning which pertains to the body and its betterment. (Perhaps the P.E. teachers thought we were learning about all that in “Health” class; but where I went to school they might as well have called it “Pictures of STDs” class.)

One of the innumerable things I didn’t think a whit about until I got into my twenties, then, was posture. By the time I became aware of mine, it was atrocious.

How did it get so bad?

As a book-inclined and myopic child of middle class parents, I spent a lot of time inside, pouring over a desk, and then later, leaning in towards a computer. In High School, I did endless math exercises sitting on the couch with the book on my lap. Looking out over the classroom, my instructors must have seen row after row of slumped-shoulders, pooched out tummies, and c-shaped backs, all like mine. I wonder if they gave it a second thought.

No doubt the government hesitates to weigh in on such personal and therefore political issues as proper posture, but I see no reason why professional educators should not take on teaching students about fitness. It’s a specialized subject, experience doesn’t necessarily impart it to you, and neither do your parents.

Now, what accounts for this oversight, not to say repression, of students’ bodies in U.S. institutions of public education? Our dirty minds, no doubt, and a dread of any accusation of improper physical contact between adults and youths. Probably you could describe the entire social apparatus of modern-day public schools -- rules, organizational hierarchies, classroom practices, et al. -- as the protection of the adults from the students' sexualities, and vice versa.

That’s a big reason, and it explains some of the assumptions that undergird postwar social institutions, theories, and technologies.

The personal computer is a prime example.

Computers were developed according to a Cartesian dualism in which the cognitive brain is entirely disassociated from the fleshy body. This dualism complements nicely the mortification of the body central to influential Judeo-Christian traditions. Pair Cartesian dualism with Christian mortification and you have the unconscious mindset, I would wager, of the mostly engineers who sat around in air-conditioned rooms in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, inventing computers. (The Silicon Valley crowd has a cool image, nowadays, but I ask you: is the iPad embodied computing? Or is it just a touch-screen?)

In a word, computers, like the (U.S.) public schools, are made for myopic, seated, hunch-shouldered, data-fetishists. No chance for improper contact between brains in jars, is there?

Once upon a time, though, posture was taught. “Your carriage, Madam!” -- a title only history could provide -- is an illustrated handbook published in the 1930s. It smacks of blue blood and patriarchy, of course, but flipping through its pages, I’m struck with the good sense of several of its illustrations and even some of its advice.

You had to be one of the “ornamental sex,” it would appear, to be taught “carriage” in the 1930s. And no doubt, you were learning carriage when you could have been learning mathematics, a boy’s subject. But when the middle-class threw out the bath water, is it possible they paid too little heed to the baby? If so, it’s too bad because holding oneself in a position of balance and strength (or as the 1930s could put it, “grace” and “action”) should not be the exclusive province of a by-gone elite.

And in fact, middle class people are starting to recognize the deleterious effects of their bad posture. The standing desk strikes me as a healthier and more embodied practice of working inside.

We need to teach posture to children in the public schools. Now, I know that means overcoming quite a lot. If you’ve read this far, I can imagine the doubts quickly populating your mind. You’re thinking I’m naïve. Middle School and High School is a jungle: drugs, guns, and teen pregnancy are today’s concerns. Posture, for better or worse, is a word for yester-year.

Would I have learned posture even if my high school phys-ed instructors had taught me how to stretch -- and I mean really taught it, as a good practical yoga teacher does, with words and demonstration, and without needing to touch you? Certainly I would not have done anything to open myself to the shame tactics of the other boys. My teachers reckoned on this and had thoroughly reconciled themselves to the fact that we had dirty minds and were little hellions. And they were right. We would have jeered and giggled. We were too cool for school.

But, you know, maybe later that night, in the privacy of my own room, I might have tried out a downward dog. Teaching, day in day out, has got to be one of the hardest professions because it requires unflagging idealism. If one student is listening, then it’s worth teaching, isn’t it?