Blogging Pedagogy - bias

Teaching to a Hostile Audience, Or, When Your Revolution Class is Full of Counterrevolutionaries

Regina Mills — Mon, 03 Mar 2014 06:00:00 +0000

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Regina Marie Mills

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This semester has been interesting, particularly because I am always comparing my Fall course on revolution to my summer course on the same topic. My perception of my summer class can be boiled down to one line: “if Communists were fighting for equal rights for women, the end of child labor, and against exploitation of the poor, then why is it so bad to call yourself a Communist?” This line (remembered to the best of my ability) came from a summer semester student and showed the open-mindedness and general willingness to see the inequality, poverty, and contradictions in the US and the world. Of course, we discussed after this sentiment how the history of practiced/attempted communism must make one question the theory, but the ability for my summer students to read sympathetically, first trying to understand the argument then offering criticism, has generally set apart my summer students from the fall.

However, the composition of students in my courses between summer and fall have also been staggering. The majority of my summer class was composed of first-generation college students from low-income or rural areas, and only a few students were white. In my fall class, only a few students are not white. Only 3 claim to have come from impoverished families. I am unsure how many are first-generation college students. In addition, the number of students in my class who are libertarian or staunchly conservative is staggering. I often wonder if they misread my class as “Rhetoric of the Ron Paul Revolution.”

It has taken a while for my students to learn to read generously, since, despite my best efforts, finding conservative/counterrevolutionary texts has been difficult. They are either too long to excerpt, too difficult (particularly since many have older language), or merely newspaper editorials, without the same history or rigor as many revolutionary texts. I have stuck to Locke, the Declaration of Independence, the Confederacy secession documents, and the Second Vermont Republic’s manifestos. However, the list of radical or leftist manifestos seems never-ending, and the class definitely skews to that side.

Teaching to a hostile audience has thus been even harder because I know what teaching to a sympathetic one is. However, it has also been helpful. It has helped me realize that many colleges are full of conservative people (just like my undergrad alma mater was), those who fight for the status quo (or “tradition” as it is affectionately called) either actively or through attitudes of apathy, and those who fight for change I don't agree with. But this mirrors the current world we live in. It is more realistic that those of us who want change will be faced with hostility, and it requires me to up my teaching game, which I think I have, as I have gotten more comfortable with my students and experimented with different teaching methods. For example, I just facilitated a student-led discussion of Tavis Smiley and Cornel West’s “The Poverty Manifesto.” Students brought in the questions, and I merely picked some to help them guide their conversations. I was not allowed to respond, and the students had to talk to each other, not me. I will admit, it was incredibly difficult to stay silent, but I heard from students who I had only heard from a few times (if any) this semester.

Another thing I have learned from teaching a class of counterrevolutionaries is that I don’t need to hide my beliefs, bite my tongue, and allow the sanctification of “neutrality” and “objectivity” to be an excuse I hide behind to not speak up to opinions that hurt the classroom dynamic and go against my ethics. After all, my students don’t. I am a person, too, not a teaching robot. This issue is particularly hard for me, having so recently taught in a public high school where you are constantly required to pretend to be neutral and act like you feel passionately about nothing, giving the idea that all ideas are equally valid (when this is clearly not the case). However, as one of my good friends discussed with me when writing this post, public school and university are not the same. Students pay for the privilege of college and the opportunity to hear the thoughts marinated upon by motivated students and scholars, so I don’t need to succumb to “neutrality.”

Of course, I also have to be careful about the power that comes with the title “instructor” and work to show my students that though I have opinions, those opinions will not lead to lower grades for those who don’t hold the same opinions. I think my move to the Learning Record next semester will help this. I would talk more about the scourge of “neutrality” but I think my colleague Meredith’s recent post will suffice.

The last thing I have learned from teaching to a hostile audience is that the strategies we teach in rhetoric matter. It is true what I tell my students: we grow from having our ideas challenged, by defending our ideas, and by having the humility to realize when some of our arguments fall short. As my students begin to compile their manifestos on topics as varied as when/if a country has a responsibility to respond to genocide, fighting rape culture in India, gun rights, and reforming the tax system, I hope that I see their arguments targeted towards convincing a hostile audience. Then they’ll finally know what it’s felt like for me since August 28th.

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.