Blogging Pedagogy - ethics

Presenting Violence in the Classroom

Michael Roberts — Wed, 22 Jan 2014 17:22:05 +0000

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Michael Roberts

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I teach a Literature class called “Banned Books and Novel Ideas.” It is one of the most popular courses in English at the University, with eight sections being taught this semester. Undergraduates prefer this course to others, I assume, because the title suggests something controversial, risqué, or explicit about the course material. Or at least it does to me; I think that a course on banned books should explore the history of controversial literature and take the reasons for banning books seriously. To me simply celebrating our “liberal open-mindedness” in the academy seems a worthless and self-congratulatory endeavor. So when developing the syllabus for my version of this course, I decided to seriously pose the question if there are any fictional texts that should be read or seen by no one. This question led me to organizing a course full of texts that have unusually violent or graphic material that was considered too disgusting for various audiences throughout the last 400 years. This question also led me to The Human Centipede 2.

For the blissfully uninitiated, The Human Centipede is a 2010 Dutch horror film that falls in the “torture porn” sub-genre, a term applied to films that have little plot beyond the often methodical and disgusting torture of the victims. The film gained notoriety for its particularly horrific and disgusting take on the genre; you can watch the trailer here. The sequel, like most horror sequels, is more of the same, minus the originality. What led me to this particular film, though, is not just that it was banned by the British ratings board; it was that I didn’t find the banning all that disagreeable. After all, what good can come to anyone of the viewing of ritual violence and mutilation? So while I consider the film itself to be pretty worthless in terms of depth or ambiguity, I find the questions it provokes to be very worthwhile indeed.

Fear not, gentle reader; the rest of the texts in my course are not as empty or sadistic as The Human Centipede 2, but some of them may come close in terms of graphic violence, on both the page and screen. Which brings me to the subject of this blog post: how do you--or how do I--negotiate the presentation of extreme violence and brutality without offending or traumatizing students with (completely justifiable) sensitivities to violence?

I am still working on an answer. And in a way it’s a trick question; the goal of a “Banned Books” course is partially to offend, or to at least seriously consider the effects of offensiveness. What I do not want to do, of course, is bring back past traumas of students who have experienced some sort of significant violence in their lives. With a class of 20+ students, I imagine that the chances are relatively high that at least one student has some traumatic history.

To try to avoid this, I put up several warning signs at the front end of my class. The course description contains a bold Explicit Material warning, explaining the graphic nature of many of the texts we will read. I also try to set the tone on the first day of class by explaining how I was led to The Human Centipede 2 and showing the trailer for the film. Even though the trailer is “Approved for all Audiences,” I warn students of the material and give them the option to leave or look away. Afterwards, I let them know that if they have trouble watching or reading scenes of violence, to come up to me after class. I tell those students that they can have alternate assignments to the particularly explicit readings, but that this might not be the best class for them. All of these warnings are intended to give sensitive or traumatized students the chance to drop the class, or at least to let them know what they are getting into.

Interestingly, about half of the texts that I teach have a less-than-serious tone, despite the violence that they use. This is in part because I teach a unit on genre analysis of horror fiction, which typically takes gruesome pleasure in deaths and murders. I want these texts to be fun, but also want us as a class to explore the varied emotional responses to violence and the desensitizing effects of the genre. To do this I juxtapose the least serious moments of the class—horror film analysis--to the most serious: Night and Fog, a holocaust documentary. The documentary truly horrifies my students (who are, again, warned), but the comparison and contrast with horror films is usually one of the most productive discussions of the semester. The contrast between the different emotional responses forces us as a class to examine our own reactions to violence, realism, and history. It also highlights one of the running themes of the class, which is the diverse ways that literature uses disgust.

Again, I am still working through ways to deal with such graphic content in a sensitive way, but thus far my best strategy has been a general openness in the classroom about the emotional responses that the texts evoke. I want students to feel accepted (or even justified) in feeling horrified, but also for us to be able to examine how and why these reactions are provoked. And while I have had some students who have had to pass on particular videos (it’s always video, which is interesting but worthy of another post), all of them have had fruitful discussions about their own feelings and reactions to the class texts. That seems like a good start.

Confessions of a Teacher with Bias

Meredith Coffey — Sun, 20 Oct 2013 20:00:06 +0000

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Meredith Coffey

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alexmuse

I spent a great deal of my first year teaching Rhetoric—last year—discussing bias with my students. Time after time, I reminded them: everything you’ll read has some kind of bias, but that’s okay, because bias isn’t inherently a bad thing. Though it is, I pointed out, a thing you’ll need to take into account.

And yet, all the while, the desire to hide my own bias held tremendous sway over how I presented myself as a teacher. Around the time I began graduate school, a politically conservative friend had confessed that she had been miserable in college, in no small part due to her discomfort in political science classes at our predominantly liberal institution. In those settings, she explained, professors often declared their political attitudes in a way that alienated the few students who held other positions. Her experiences of classroom anxiety worried me; I certainly didn’t want my own students to feel uncomfortable voicing their views in class, or even worse, to suspect that I might discriminate against them! To combat this risk, I determined that the easiest fix would be to avoid revealing my political, social, and other potentially controversial beliefs.

Naïve though it may seem, this strategy seemed doable enough at first. Even when I showed clips from the 2012 presidential debates, my students readily took to arguing over which rhetorical fallacies fell flat and which were effective; they picked apart statements by all candidates with equal zeal. I bit my tongue a few times during class discussion, but for the most part I felt like I was right on track with my “neutrality.” (I was surprised to learn that they didn’t make assumptions about my beliefs based on my affiliation with a humanities department. I was even a little proud when several of them mentioned that they had no idea which presidential candidate would be getting my vote.)

Eventually, however, I began to find myself struggling with the ethics of staying so consistently silent. In the interest of student confidence, I won’t recount the specifics of my turning point here. Suffice it to say that, in a class presentation, a student took a particular stance on a controversial issue—a position s/he earnestly defended, and by no means an unusual one—but nonetheless a stance that I found deeply morally troubling. Not wanting to shame the student, and still afraid to expose my own political leanings, I offered a weak counterpoint and mostly let it go. Class discussion moved on.

As soon as I walked out of the classroom, I knew my reaction had been absolutely wrong: ethically, pedagogically, personally wrong. Almost a year later, I still regret that I didn’t enable a “teachable moment”—worse, that I chose to hope that students with whom I profoundly disagreed would feel at ease, while in the same breath I effectively cast aside concern for students with whom I profoundly agreed. As any student of Rhetoric would have guessed, my effort to create a mask to hide my bias had resulted in a mask that instead suggested I had an entirely different bias. I realized more fully what I’d been telling my students all along: the fact that I come into the classroom with bias doesn’t necessarily make me a bad source. And in this case, I very strongly felt that working with, rather than against, my own bias would have made me a better teacher.

Clearly, I had to change tracks. I spent a semester halfheartedly trying to keep any remotely sensitive topics out of class discussion, which was certainly less interesting, but I don’t deny that it required me to make fewer tough decisions.

This year, though, I’m teaching Rhetoric of Tourism, so I knew I couldn’t—and genuinely wouldn’t want to—avoid all such questions. My students are writing about cultural authenticity, the distribution of labor within the tourism industry, travel to Cuba, and all other sorts of politically sensitive, but absolutely important, problems in tourism. So I’m trying a new approach. At the beginning of the semester, amidst all the other disclaimers (no late work, three tardies count as one absence), I told my students that I planned to offer my own point of view when I felt it was important, but that they should always feel safe and encouraged to express their own takes (so long as they remained respectful!). I didn’t tell them which presidential candidate I voted for last year, but unlike my Fall 2012 students, I bet most of this group can guess. I haven’t yet seen my new strategy through to the end of the term, but I’m hopeful. And I remind myself that my students are well aware that I, like anyone else, can’t eliminate my bias altogether. After all, if they weren’t aware, I’d hardly be doing my job.

Community and the Rhetoric Classroom

Eric Detweiler — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 03:02:08 +0000

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Eric Detweiler

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Culture Mass

Jeff Winger is Socrates’ worst nightmare. As an former lawyer disbarred for having a phony bachelor’s degree, and whose central skill on the NBC sitcom Community is manipulating others’ emotions with his words, Jeff bears out almost all of the concerns Socrates expresses in the Phaedrus and Gorgias about what can happen when training and skill in rhetoric is divorced from a strong moral code.

Quick context before I get back to talking about Jeff’s sophistic wiles (and, eventually, pedagogy—I promise): Community is a show about the increasingly unrealistic/delightful adventures of a community-college study group, and Jeff is one of the show’s and group’s central characters. He’s back in school to replace the fake degree mentioned above, and is usually—though not always—a raging narcissist.

As a narcissist, he frequently uses his abilities in judicial speech to make his own life easier: talking his groupmates into giving him extra help on class projects or tests, talking the dean into giving him credit for made-up courses. And his groupmates, ever more aware of his proclivity, venture observations about Jeff that sound strikingly similar to the observations ventured by the Greek sophists’ contemporaries. Jeff “always [knows] what to say and always [knows] when to slap the table” (“Contemporary American Poultry”); thus—like Gorgias’ audiences—his listeners are “willing but not forcibly made slaves” by his words (Plato, Philebus 58a). When he finds it difficult to compose a wedding toast, his friend Annie is skeptical, observing, “You once convinced [someone] that turtlenecks were made of turtles’ necks.” Jeff concurs, noting, “My superpower is being able to assume any position that suits my purpose” (“Urban Matrimony”). Jeff Winger: 21^st-century master of the dissoi logoi.

And then there’s Britta. Another member of the study group, she alternates between playing Jeff’s antagonist, love interest, and conscience. If Jeff’s superpower is speaking well in support of whatever position serves his purposes, Britta’s is being dubbed “the worst” as she alienates friends and strangers alike with her frequently off-putting commitment to social causes (consider montage #1).

In one episode, as the other characters talk excitedly about the delicious nature of their college cafeteria’s chicken fingers, she proudly declares, “I wouldn’t know. I’m a vegetarian. And if you guys knew how they treated the animals you’re eating, you would eat then even faster just to put the out of their misery. And then you would throw up” (“Contemporary”). By the time her speech shifts gears into a pathetic—and not in the classical sense—lament over her pet cat’s health problems, the rest of the group has gone from rolling their eyes to literally sprinting for the door, dashing toward the promise of a coveted chicken finger. In short, Britta Perry is a supremely ineffective rhetor. But—perhaps not coincidentally—Britta is also the moral center of the show.

Why, you might ask, is this relevant to a blog that is not (yet) a Community fanblog? Because, for me, Jeff and Britta serve as frequent reminders of the diversity of students and student attitudes I am likely to encounter as a rhetoric instructor. There are Jeffs, who might see a rhetoric course as an easy “A,” a chance to show off skills they already possess on the way to the meaningless, bureaucratic credential of a college degree. And there are Brittas, who might actually be better at empathizing with and considering the perspectives of the marginalized, but aren’t skilled at considering their peers’ perspectives in a way that will persuade said peers to take seriously the plights of the marginalized. (And, of course, there are Abeds, Annies, Changs, Pierces, Shirleys, and Troys, but this is a blog post—not a dissertation chapter [yet].) Strong persuasive skills with little ethical support, strong ethical character with little rhetorical savvy, and all point in between.

As a teacher of rhetoric, my tendency is often to valorize the Brittas and dread the Jeffs, feeling—like Socrates—that effective rhetorical instruction without an explicit focus on ethical content risks creating narcissistic manipulators. Despite the excess of credit such a worry likely grants to a one-semester first-year rhetoric course, it’s a worry that pesters me every time a student offers an inadvertently xenophobic comment in a class discussion.

My inclination with such comments is often to jump in with a brief counter-declamation, one that demonstrates—for instance—why men aren’t innately superior to women as college professors. But, in my more reflective moments, I wonder if I’m giving the student-communities I facilitate too little credit. After all, it’s rarely the teachers on Community who effect change in the study-group characters—the students effect change in each other. When Jeff gives persuasive speeches intended to prevent the group’s fragmentation, he doesn’t do so because he’s received in-class ethical instruction. It’s because the sense of community engendered by the group has fostered in him a sense of ethical responsibility for its members’ well-being (cue montage #2).

And beginning to understand her groupmates is one thing that helps Britta better communicate the import of social causes.

Obviously Community is artificial (but hey, so are Plato’s dialogues), so its merit as a ground for reflecting on one’s teaching practices might be doubtful. At the very least, however, I do find it helpful as a reminder of how potent a persuasive influence students can have on each other, and a check on my occasional urges to assume ethical caveats in the classroom must come from the teacher. Perhaps I instead need to leave more time for my students to respond to and complicate each other’s perspectives, myself learning to ask questions that effectively open spaces for ethical inter-student communities, rather than tending towards Socratic monologues that seek to impose morality from above.

Works Cited

"Contemporary American Poultry." Community: The Complete First Season. Sony, 2010. DVD.

Plato. Gorgias. Trans. Donald J. Zeyl. Indianapolis IN: Hackett, 1987. Print.

Plato. Phaedrus. Trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1995. Print.

Plato. Philebus. The Older Sophists. Ed. Rosamund Kent Sprague. 1972. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2001. 39. Print.

"Urban Matrimony and the Sandwich Arts." Community. Hulu. 2012. Web. 1 Apr. 2012.

Trust Me, I'm a Teacher: Some Reflections on Teacher-Student Power Relations

Eric Detweiler — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:43:50 +0000

Author:

Eric Detweiler

Image Credit:

Randall Monroe

Let me immediately note that I’m not intending to demonstrate universal truths with the following anecdotes. My intent is just to share a couple of particular rhetorical situations and the reflections to which they’ve led.

I was 22 years old on my first day as a college instructor, wearing a tie for the first time in years and resigned to the fact that I looked maybe 18 in the right light. I was excited as well as nervous, probably breaking a state record with how fast I covered the syllabus before asking the students if they had any questions. And right out of the gate I got this inquiry, asked dryly and pointedly:

“How does it make you feel that some of your students are the same age as you?”

I don’t remember if I had explicitly stated my age or if this student was conjecturing, but my response ran something like this (the exact quotation was, unfortunately, not recorded for posterity):

“Well, if my qualifications for teaching this class were based on my age, I’d have reason to be concerned. Since those qualifications are presumably based on me having a more thorough knowledge of writing strategies than those of you enrolled in this course, however, I don’t think our relative ages should be a factor."

One more anecdote before I get down to business: Starting with my fourth semester as a teacher, I had the chance to adjunct at a historically black university. I loved the experience and the students, but much of my first semester there teetered on the end of disaster. I had less than 50% attendance on some days, and my students and I frequently talked straight past each other in “discussions” of course readings. On a day when I had especially low attendance, I made an off-the-cuff remark about my intention to crack down in the future to end such disorder. In response, one of my students—a regular visitor to my office hours who rarely hesitated to speak her mind—pointed out something that seems obvious in hindsight: Given America’s history of deeply troubled power relations between white individuals (myself) and black individuals (all but one of my students), perhaps harsher discipline was not what was needed. Indeed, as she noted, such talk on my part could be perceived as deeply offensive if phrased thoughtlessly, only serving to disaffect students even more.

With that revelation ever-present in my mind, my second year at that university went much differently. I found myself constantly working to diffuse and diffract the power inherent in the position of “instructor” back to my students. Of course I still worked within the institutional constraints of grades, assessed student papers, and lectured at times. But I found myself posing more questions in the margins of papers rather than making fixed statements about needed revisions. I waited longer before assuming a class discussion was stalled. This led to a lot of anxious laughter on my students’ parts, but also caused them to take more control over the content and direction of discussions. In general, I tried harder not to presume I knew where my students were coming from.

From the very inception of my teaching career, then, I’ve been faced with and intrigued by the complications inherent in the power relationship(s) between teachers and students. As I’ve dug through the articles and books surrounding composition studies and rhetorical studies, however, I’ve found a dearth of formal materials on the vagaries and variables of that relationship. To be clear, there’s plenty of great material on what we might teach in writing courses (just consider debates between expressivists, current-traditionalists, social-epistemic compositionists, and advocates of rhetorical theory). There’s also a lot of material on how to teach—how directive or nondirective a writing teacher should be, whether or not to provide models, methods of assessing student writing, etc. What I’m interested in is how we position ourselves/are positioned as teachers relative to our students.

This last subject seems only tangentially addressed in scholarly work in the fields of English studies, left primarily to education scholars or left off the page/screen altogether.[1] As two excellent recent posts on this very blog attest—I can say “excellent” since I didn’t write them—addressing college-writing classrooms’ particular power dynamics is often reserved for informal conversations between new instructors (“Using Embarrassment”) or dealt with by isolated instructors coping with specific classroom exigencies (“Learning to Let Go”).

As a result, a lot of discourse on the subject is left to common sense and guesswork. For instance, “As a young instructor, the only way to win my students respect is to be a rigorous taskmaster and swiftly undercut rebellion.” Or, alternatively, “In order to mitigate the potential fallout from the inevitable screw-ups during my first semester of teaching, I’ll be a pushover to grant students as few potential gripes as possible.” Both these positions may have practical merit in particular pedagogical situations, but remain simplistic.

There are two frameworks, one in rhetoric and one in composition, that seem potentially fruitful for thinking the student-teacher relation through more carefully. On the rhetoric side, there’s the concept of “ethos.” Many of us teach ethos every semester. I talk with students about how to analyze its use in argumentative texts and how to construct their own ethos in particular rhetorical situations. We look at politicians’ ethos, journalists’ ethos, situated ethos and invented ethos. But my thinking about my own ethos is often cursory (e.g. should I wear jeans or dress pants to teach in today?), especially after the first few weeks of the semester.

On the composition side, there’s the inherent interest in power relations present in the progeny of social-epistemic pedagogy. If we see the composition classroom as a place to encourage students to become more active and engaged democratic citizens, we may try to make visible naturalized power structures, crafting writing assignments in which students analyze and challenge authoritarian discourses, conventional political wisdom, etc. But what are we reflecting in our own teaching practices? What about the assumptions about authority present in the classroom?

In other words, though the framework for thinking through how we position ourselves as instructors in our classrooms may already be present in our pedagogy, the everyday nature of our relationship to our classrooms and our students may lead us to exempt our own subject positions from critical consideration and analysis. But what better, more readily accessible way to make the content of our pedagogy concrete than to apply it to the situational power structures present in our own classrooms?

Most of my comments above are in their nascent stages, and thus may be muddled. To end, then, a few specific questions that might emerge from these considerations:

What unspoken commonplaces underlie the ethos I craft for myself as a teacher (e.g. “teachers should appear professional,” “it’s better to appear too lenient rather than too strict,” etc.)?
Is the traditional teacher-student binary worth challenging? If so, how should/might/do I challenge it in my classes?
Are my comments on student papers intended to be authoritative or dialogic? How are my students reading my comments?
What archetypal relationships bleed over into how I understand my relationship to students (e.g. parent-child, coach-player, sage-disciple, peer-peer)?
What assumptions might my students have about the “proper” roles for college instructors and students, and what might be the origins of their assumptions (e.g. parents, older siblings/friends, popular culture texts, former teachers)?
How might students’ assumptions shift with their perceptions of individual embodied teachers (i.e. how they see the teacher as marked in terms of sex, gender, class privilege, race, age, etc.), and how should we shift/resist shifting our individual ethos in response to such perceptions?
Is my expertise limited to the forms and methods of “composed”/”rhetorical” discourse, or should I also be an expert on particular content(s)?
Can a willingness to give up one’s authority as a teacher result in a paradoxical reclamation of authority based on students’ perception of your confident humility (I’m cribbing from “Using Embarrassment” here)?

What I’ve read is of course limited, and you may know of some eminent scholar whose thoughtful work on this subject renders this post moot. If so, do share!

[1] There are some texts that address this subject—Peter Elbow’s Writing without Teachers is one controversial example, and there are stray articles like Marshall Gregory’s “Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Teacherly Ethos” from the seminal issue of Pedagogy. And, of course, there’s Plato’s good old-fashioned Socratic method.