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Thoughts on Gendered Language Use in the Classroom

October 22, 2024 in Education, Feminism, Gender & Sexuality | No comments

Two gendered restroom signs, slightly askew in space

I try to create an inclusive space when I teach, and that means everything from learning my students’ names (even when there are a lot of them!) to not having policies that would make people feel unwelcome (like, I don’t require students to ask me to leave the classroom for any reason; I figure they’re adults, I should treat them as such, plus such a policy might single out students with a disability or medical condition requiring them to stand and stretch their legs or visit the bathroom regularly).

This sense of trying to be an inclusive teacher also extends to how I use language, and how I encourage my students to use language in their writing and speaking. And here, too, my goal of teaching critical thinking skills creeps in, as it often does, because it turns out that being attuned to social justice concerns (those foregrounded in inclusivity practices) also correspond with acknowledging the complexity and diversity of the world around us, and responding with curiosity and empathy rather than trying to wedge everyone and everything into narrow boxes.*

All of this is why I don’t use “male” and “female” as nouns, and why I’d encourage others to give it some thought as well.

 First, the history of these words makes it clear that they have a very specific meaning and narrow usage, which I don’t think should be generalized to “hello, I am addressing a group of humans outside of a medical/reproductive context.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “female” popped up in European languages in the 1300s to mean “A person of the sex that can bear offspring; a woman or a girl.” In addition to the noun usage, female also has an adjective meaning: “That belongs to the sex which can bear offspring (contrasted with male); characteristic of or relating to this sex.” And while I’m less upset by the use of the word as an adjective, it still has that icky reproductive-connotations thing going on. And for what it’s worth, I’ll point out that there are way more entries under the adjective section of the word than the noun section of the word.

Second, I believe addressing people as males and females is potentially exclusionary. I look at all the wealth of information we have about different genders (there are more than two!) and sexes (also more than two!) and I think, why would I address people using binaristic language that’s bound to leave someone out? Maybe someone in my classroom is intersex, trans, or non-binary. Remember, according to some research estimates, around 1.7% of people have an intersex condition and around .5% of the U.S. adult population is trans so combining those facts and knowing that if I teach around 100 students every semester means I’m gonna choose less exclusionary language, even if it only helps one person in one hundred. Not all of these identities are visible to the naked eye, either, so it’s entirely possible that there are others in my classroom who don’t know they’re intersex yet (I mean, I haven’t had karyotyping done, have you?!), or they’re exploring their gender identity, or…there are so many possibilities, I’d rather err on the side of being more inclusive.

Third, as Carrie Cutler points out in a Slate article, “female” is often an adjective used to manage the meaning of a noun…when it’s assumed the noun is a broad category that usually includes men. So we’d say “female scientist” because upon hearing “scientist” one might assume we were talking about a dude scientist. And something about that just sets my teeth on edge, that we have to keep specifying that it’s a woman doing the job that used to be only done by men, and we still need modifiers to do this work instead of just assuming that women can be included in the catch-all profession of scientists.

Fourth, there are some, uh, connotations. In the Slate article linked above, the author points out the use of “female” in song lyrics (which I shan’t reprint here) to refer to sexually available women. And I think this is an equity issue: women are often discussed in terms of their sexual availability and desirability to men (let alone how we might feel about ourselves or one another!), and until men undergo the same level of objectification women do, I’m gonna be a little prickly about it. Not that feminism should be a tit-for-tat leveling of the playing field so everyone gets equally dehumanized, but these discrepancies bother me, since I don’t think any gender is more sexually anything than another.

As one researcher in STEM writes, this has professional implications too: “In a work setting, would you refer to the Vice Chancellor as a girl? Probably not, because we are accustomed to being respectful to people in senior positions. So should we extend that respect to women in other roles as well? (hint: yes)”

Some scholars go so far as to argue that gender difference (often expressed in terms of sex difference) exists in the first place to police who has access to power, and honestly, I’m not far away from this stance myself. In Sex Is As Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity by Paisley Currah, for example, it’s argued that:

In European, and, later, American legal traditions, gender difference was codified in laws designed to limit the rights and resources available to white women. From coverture to inheritance laws to the inability to vote to exemptions in the criminal sphere for marital rape, the law’s distincions illustrated how deeply patriarchal norms were incorporated into state structures. (20)

Oh, but that’s all changed, we’re sooo much better, yay feminism has done its job, you say? Currah (and I) would disagree: “gender subordination remains one of the organizing principles of domestic life, the workplace, and cultural production” (24). Why on earth would I use binaristic language that supports this historical and ongoing suborbination?!

Finally, there’s the question of audience. When I’m addressing my college students, I don’t really need to say “Greetings, males and females, today in class we’re going to read…” because drawing attention to my students’ (presumed) biological sex is simply not relevant in most if any classroom settings. Is it relevant in other settings? Gotta say, I’m drawing a blank. The 2024 Paris Olympics brought the debate about biological sex traits in elite sports to the public stage, and I mostly don’t feel qualified to weigh in on it (see my response here); yes, there tend to be some distinctions between the bodies of cis men and those of cis women in terms of muscle growth, metabolic functioning, and so on, and in certain sports those differences may matter. However, I know from research (and honestly, having a lot of trans friends, whom I appreciate sharing their experiences with me) that the human body is extremely malleable and responsive to hormonal interventions, so I don’t see it as my place to weigh in on this except to urge us all to remember that bodies have so much diversity and variation beyond the element of sex, it just doesn’t make sense to me to make it a really rigid distinction unless the athletes in that sport agree on it. (and please recall, one of the boxers who fought Imane Khelif was basically like “yeah, whatever” when her biological differences were brought up, so if athletes within the sport aren’t bothered by it, I don’t see why non-athletes should be bothered by it).

Hm, okay, when are other contexts where we might wanna say “males” or “females”? Do I ever want to signal something that feels very womanhood-specific to my fellow females? Not really, because I don’t care to enter any debates on how we’re defining femaleness and womanhood. For example, if the connotation of female relates to reproductive bits, are we still calling cis women who’ve had hysterectomies females? What about trans men who started out with that kind of anatomical equipment but ditched it? I don’t see a need to get into the weeds with this sort of thing, so I’ll say what I mean: “Ugh, I’m on my period and it sucks, who can relate?!” and that gets the job done in my opinion. Or if I want to talk about experiences of having my worth tied to my perceived beauty or sexual availability, then I’ll address fellow women, noting that this leaves room for people to weigh in whether you’re cis or trans, because trans women are women and they’ve had many of the same experiences as me, whereas some people who started life with XX chromosomes and a uterus might have had similar experiences at first which then diverged if/when they transitioned to something less binary or something more masculine. I think my choice of language lets people opt in or out of these kinds of conversations as they choose, and I’m okay with that.

At the end of the day, I’m not the language police. I’m not here to grade you on every single aspect of language use, though I will point out places where I think there’s room to grow in terms of word choice, nuance, and so on. If this is a language choice that you are consciously making and you’re aware of all its implications and you still want to run with it…you do you! We can have one conversation about it in class (which has already happened this semester) and that can be it.

Also, language is constantly evolving! Maybe in 5 years this conversation will be completely irrelevant for whatever reason. That’s fine too. I’m going to make the choice that makes the most sense to me right now, based on what I know and on my desire to signal to the broadest audience possible that yes, you belong here in my classroom, and learning is for everyone.

Defending gendered language that reinforces a binary is a weird hill to die on in my opinion, but whatevs.

 

*Bit of a rant here and I didn’t want to derail myself while still getting to my main point, but holy crap, fascist and bigoted and authoritarian belief systems are so lazy. Like, they are utterly devoid of both critical thinking skills and empathy, both of which absences annoy me to no end, I mean, at least pick one of the two to go with?! Every -ism or -phobia out there is rooted in essentialist thinking, generalizations, and stereotypes that are simply not true, and if the people believing these things took like 2 seconds to look at history or at the variety of cultures and human variation around the world they’d see the mounds of evidence disproving their irrational and mean-spirited beliefs, but I guess they’re not gonna do that because a) it’d take some effort and b) they’d have to admit they were wrong, and nobody likes that, especially when you’ve made your whole identity into hating some group you think takes away your power. Oh honey, late-stage capitalism has already done that, you really think we queer people are somehow outdoing corporations in making your life miserable?! There would be far more sparkles involved if we ran this shitshow!

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Stop Asking Teachers When School Starts for Us

August 29, 2024 in Academia, Education | No comments

A stick of books by a beach shore.
Photo from Unsplash by Link Hoang.

We get it. You’re a well-meaning friend, acquaintance, or family member who is curious about how our lives are going or wanting to know when we’ll be more or less available to hang out. Perhaps you’ve got your bowl of popcorn out, preparing to watch the demise of American education (especially higher ed) and you want to know when it’s okay to tap out for a bathroom break, so you don’t miss anything spectacular.

But please, stop asking us when school starts. It’s tantamount to a personal attack at this point.

See, for many of us teachers, summer break is when we can relax and breathe again. I know I went a bit feral this summer, letting my side shave grow out and barely wearing makeup (which is worth mentioning since, without makeup, my face looks like that of a hungover 15-year-old; hardly ideal for a college professor).

Many of us are returning to hostile work environments: we can’t say gay, we can’t respect students’ pronouns and nick/names, we are told to arm ourselves because gun violence is *shrug* inevitable in schools. Granted, some of us face hostile environments at home as well, so I suppose for some teachers, returning to school in the fall is a relief.

Plus it’s not like I laze around eating bon-bons in the summer; first of all, they would definitely melt all over me in the Indiana summer heat, which is made both worse and weirder by global warming. Second, I’m pretty much always working (writing, dancing, etc.), I just get to eat lunch at home instead of meal-prepping for a week’s worth of lunches, and that is a special summer-time joy for me, since I also delight in visiting my local farmer’s markets to pick out fresh produce to cook throughout the week.

The rhythm of summertime life allows many of us the rest we so desperately need, as so many teachers are teetering on the edge of burnout. It’s been worse, of course, in the pandemic, with the pivot to online teaching (and I swear, if anyone says “pivot” to me in a regular conversation I might just scream, that’s how sick of it we are), along with the larger emotional loads we carry when our students need additional help figuring out things that are more intuitive in IRL settings, and the expectations that we do more with less that, well, teachers have basically always had put on us.

And I’m in higher ed, where at least I don’t have to buy crayons for my students out of pocket (but I’ve watched my mom and countless other teachers do so over the years). We have, however, been informed that due to budget cuts we will be responsible for moving the trash from the bins in our offices to designated trash cans around campus. This is not hugely burdensome – which I can only really say because I have minor invisible disabilities, which is not true for all my colleagues – and hopefully this new policy will lead to many riffs on the “taking out the trash” jokes; maybe while taking out the trash we can also take out neoliberalism and the eagerness to embrace AI? (my new fave rant on the matter is here, I don’t know who this person is other than a data scientist but I love their brain)

Thus, any reminder that school is starting soon is also a reminder that we teachers are tasked with the gigantically important job of helping guide our culture’s young, while not given adequate pay or supplies or support to fulfill said task. It’s a reminder that our time without grading papers and checking for plagiarism is over, and if there were ever an onerous task, trust me, it is having a policy stating that AI use in the classroom is plagiarism, but still knowing I’ll need to enforce this policy, which both is an energy drain for me and something that feels like quite a failure, given how I try so hard to give extensions on papers when requested and assert to my students that I want to read their thoughts, not stolen words that have been sifted through a mediocre sieve, like the crappiest confectioner’s sugar to go atop the world’s worst cupcake. That I still have to eat, because it’s my job.

You could contribute to these reminders, or you could just say that you hope the semester starts off well for us, and perhaps leave some wine and chocolate at our doorstop while you’re at it, since between the low pay most teachers see and the continuing attacks on academic freedom at all levels of teaching, we’re gonna need it. I’m not saying I’ve been having increasing panic attacks leading up to the start of the semester, but I’m not not saying it either.

So, thoughts and prayers please…or not, because I’m an atheist-voting, agnostic-leaning Jewish-flavored human. Let’s go with tots and pears instead, because I am a very food-motivated critter, like many both domesticated and undomesticated creatures.

Or, maybe things will be okay. I lost my ID on campus a few days ago (darn those dresses with pockets that are not very deep!), and was emailed the next day to let me know that someone found it. I met some of our incoming students and they are inquisitive, lovely humans. I am working with colleagues to design some new courses that will address lesser-known aspects of history and culture while teaching critical thinking skills, and those are some of the things I love most about my job, seeing the students reach those “aha!” moments about how complex culture is, how important it is to do good research, how much we all have yet to learn about this ridiculously cruel and and wondrous and multi-layered social world we inhabit.

In case you’re wondering, today’s the first day of classes for me. So wish me luck (and again, not gonna say no to wine), and wish all the other teachers and learners and support staff and really everyone in education good luck as well. Help us do our jobs by not traumatizing us with reminders about our jobs, maybe instead using that energy to vote in people who trust teachers and understand that there is something worth saving here.

See you on the other side of the semester, and solidarity to you, my fellow teachers.

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Removing Shame from the Dance Classroom

August 19, 2015 in Dance, Education | 7 comments

Me performing at Tribal Revolution, June 2015. Photo by Carrie Meyer.

I attended the Woodhull Summit on Sexual Freedom last weekend, and while there, took part in an excellent workshop on shame led by sex educator Charlie Glickman. As I was taking notes and live-tweeting as much of Glickman’s fantastic content as I could, I began to notice some points of overlap between shame resilience techniques and the way I teach dance.

The first point of overlap is that when we’re talking about shame, we can discuss not only what it is and how it feels, but also how it looks on the physical body. Glickman defines shame as the sense that one is a bad person, and that shaming oneself or others is often destructive, but it can also lead to positive outcomes, such as giving one an incentive to not do certain unhealthy things again. Yet the discussion of shame can go much deeper than emotion & reaction; we can also talk about the physical behaviors that embody shame.

This is where it gets really interesting to me, since I’m a huge fan of discussing embodiment. According to Glickman’s research, shame gets embodied through:

  • Looking away or breaking eye contact
  • Physical disconnection
  • Closing off one’s heart or slouching
  • Silence

If anyone has seen Amy Cuddy’s TED talk about posture, you’ll know that she basically substantiated through research a correlative relationship between posture and performance. People who hold confident “power postures” perform better on all sorts of tests and by all kinds of measures, and people who do the opposite do worse. The lower-confidence, less-powerful postures all align with shame embodied states.

This is where teaching belly dance comes in. Specifically, I teach American Tribal Style® Belly Dance, wherein posture is supremely important. We borrow a lot from flamenco, which accounts for some of our uplifted posture, and ultimately, much of the dance form’s overall aesthetic emphasizes lifted lines, which you can see in the photo of me performing that’s at the top of this blog post. By merely teaching this dance form, and by constantly reminding my students to maintain their posture, I’m helping them with a small mental hack to improve their emotional states. It might be a tiny thing in the context of their lives, and I don’t have peer-reviewed research to back this up, but I believe that I’m doing something to combat shame-induced posture and thereby contributing a little bit of positivity to my dance students’ lives.

The second point of overlap has to do with my teaching practices. There are a number of things that feed shame, such as unspoken rules, bigotry, and unhealthy hierarchy. Guess which things I don’t allow in my dance classes? I make all of my classroom rules explicit, and I do so with gentle humor, like when I correct someone’s “I can’t!”speech to a phrase of “I can’t…yet.” (example: “I can’t shimmy!” “If you’re going to say ‘I can’t’ remember to throw a ‘yet’ in there, so you can’t shimmy yet, but you will.”) I don’t let my students get away with body-shaming statements, even when they sound completely innocuous because they’re so dang common in our culture. I encourage an open learning environment by constantly asking if they have questions, and always making it safe to ask, or to take time for self-care, or really, anything they need.

It might sound like I run a loosey-goosey dance class but believe me, my dance students learn. They drill. They achieve really wonderful things. I try to tell them how proud I am of them, in blog posts like this one and in person.

I’ve felt shame in the dance classroom before, and it’s no fun. I try to structure my dance classes in such a way that my students will rarely go to that place, and if they do, hopefully we can work through it together to get somewhere useful. As Glickman noted in his presentation, not all shame is bad; it can be an adaptive response, depending on how you handle it and what you draw from the experience of it. It’s my hope that if shame ever surfaces in my dance classroom, we’ll work with it and through it together.

The final point I’d like to make is that shame is about disconnection, and its opposites (love, growth, healing, and community) are about connection, emotional and otherwise. My teaching style encourages a sense of trust in the dance classroom: in fellow students, in me, and in the wonderful improvisational dance language we practice together. In a broad sense, my hope is that by teaching a style of dance that gently pushes students into connecting with one another through eye contact and trust (because as a follower you have to trust the leader giving the cues for the next move, and when you lead, you have to trust the followers to be synced up with you), I’m paving the way for connection rather than disconnection, for empathy and love rather than shame.

I know that the sense of connection I found through tribal dance has benefited me in innumerable ways, including saving my life during a rough patch. This discussion of shame vs. connection is still a little abstract, and again, I don’t have empirical studies to back me up here. But when I see my dance students returning session after session and sticking with the style, I see them blossoming and incrementally becoming more trusting of each other when they dance, and more confident in general.

Sometimes people remark on how I do such disparate things in my life – writing, folklore, sex education, dance – and this is one example of how everything ties together. I went to a sexual freedom conference, attended a fantastic panel on shame, and realized that my dance teaching style is implicitly geared toward removing shame from the dance classroom in order to foster connection, confidence, and caring. How cool is that?!

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Reflecting on New & Old Identities

June 23, 2015 in Education, Gender & Sexuality | 2 comments

Dressed for the academic classroom, posed in front of my voluminous bookshelves.

I’ve had this website for a few years now, and the tagline at the top of the site has always been: “Jeana Jorgensen, PhD. Folklorist, Writer, Dancer.”

Now that’s changed.

The three main words haven’t changed. I may not be seeking full-time employment in academia anymore, but I haven’t stopped being a folklore scholar. In fact, just last month I attended a small working symposium on digital trends in fairy-tale scholarship. I’m a little cranky (to put it mildly) in the general direction of academia right now… but being a folklorist is too ingrained into my identity for me to ever give up identifying as such. It influences how I understand the world around me, how I learn, and how I teach.

Similarly, I’ve been dancing for over half my life, and I plan to dance for the rest of it. I now direct a professional troupe, Indy Tribal, and I’ve learned tons from my students about trust and teaching. Dance is somewhere between a hobby that pays for itself (YAY) and an all-consuming passion, and as such it’s an essential part of my identity.

I’ve grappled more with the title of “writer” than the previous two. I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was in 4th grade, but I gave up writing fiction and poetry (my primary two loves) in favor of nailing nonfiction skills in grad school. And it worked. I wrote and published a lot. Recently, though, I’ve been getting back into the idea of writing more for pleasure, and returning to some of my early ideas about writing. But no matter what I’m writing, or for which audience, writing has been a constant in my life. I write for myself in the form of journals; I write for various blogs; I write endless to-do lists; I write scholarly articles. It’s a part of me at this point.

Now, however, I’m adding the tagline of (Sex) Educator to this website. I have a separate site devoted to my sex education work, but I want this site, which is my main web presence, to reflect that this is a part of my identity too.

See, I didn’t set out to become an educator of any sort, let alone a sex educator, but it’s evolved into a huge part of my identity, and it’s time I recognized that.

I’ve become a person who will have a conversation about rape culture with just about anyone, in the hopes that even though it’s an emotionally fatiguing topic, maybe someone will reach a new understanding of it. I’ve decided to keep adjuncting in large part because even though it’s exploitative labor, I love teaching too much to remove that venue from my life. I teach dance two and sometimes three nights a week, much to the consternation of my life partner and anyone else who likes to see me socially, because I just can’t get enough of it. I educate on gender and sexuality topics for little to no pay more than I should, not just because I’m still establishing myself in the field and am taking those pay-in-prestige opportunities for exposure (mixed bag because of undecutting, I know), but also because  this knowledge is too damn important to not be sharing at every chance.

This is why I’ve added “Educator” to the site tagline, with “Sex” in parentheses. I’m an educator who also happens to be a sex educator. I love making knowledge and concepts accessible and relevant… and I’m particularly good at unpacking the tangled mess of gender, sex, and sexuality, thanks in part to my upbringing. At one time, with only a few years of sex education blogging under my belt, I balked at calling myself a sex educator. Now? I embrace the title.

Anyway, I’m still deciding if I visually like the addition of (Sex) Educator to my website header, but I’m probably going to keep some version of it. It’s been neat reflecting on the process of getting here!

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The Rockstar Vacation Dilemma

May 12, 2015 in Education, Travel | 2 comments

Me and my husband at the Nelson-Atkins Art Museum in Kansas City. Photo by my friend Joe.

Me and my husband at the Nelson-Atkins Art Museum in Kansas City (a.k.a. proof that I go on vacations that are non-work-related). Photo by J. Wilson.

I don’t vacation well. I’m a bit of a workaholic, so as much as I love travel and meeting new people and seeing new places, it’s hard for me to really, truly interact with the new places and people. I think I’ve figured out part of why this is.

As an academic/belly dancer/sex educator/writer hybrid, I do a lot of things that people think are awesome (hence the tongue-in-cheek “rockstar” title of this post). People want to talk to me and hear about my life, and in turn, I want to hear about their lives in the context of what I do. Whether it’s chatting about favorite fairy tales, discussing sexual norms, or ruminating on the meaning of art and performance, I often find myself in conversations about things that I love and excel at… which are also things that I do for a living.

I realized while at an event this weekend that I had trouble getting into vacation mode because I was either in educator mode or in ethnographer mode, and really I just wanted to relax. When I told people that I study sex or that I teach folklore, they tended to get really excited and either want to launch into stories and jokes from their own lives, or ask me questions in order to get insight into my life and my research. I’m generally happy to have these conversations with folks, but I have trouble navigating between these headspaces and whatever it is I’m supposed to be doing and feeling while on vacation.

I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining that my life is just sooo interesting and people are sooo interested in hearing about it. Rather, it’s that I teach and write as a vocation, and after a while I get sick of hearing my own voice. I interpret cultural artifacts as both a creator (artist/dancer/writer) and as a scholar, and it’s hard to turn that off in my head. I get that being in the moment, with no analytical internal voice, is difficult for many of us academics… but there’s something more to this. Sometimes I’m bored with myself, and I’m tired of talking about what I do. Yet because one of the main things I study is sex, people can’t seem to get enough of my perspective on it. Same goes for fairy tales.

I suspect that this kind of interaction is tiresome for me because as an educator, I spend a lot of time framing topics for people, giving them an overview before going into more detail, and so on. Sometimes I just want to take a break from that. And a lot of the time, I’d rather be the one learning than the one teaching! But in many of situations where I find myself traveling and trying to relax, I’m one of the most knowledgeable people around (yeah, I know how arrogant that sounds), so it’s hard to find someone to teach me. And while everyone’s an expert on their own life, if I try to just listen and learn about that person, I have trouble turning off my analytical brain. So whether I’m doing the talking or the listening, it feels like I’m going to feel kinda burned out and bummed out no matter what.

Hopefully this’ll resolve itself with a mental shift, but I’m curious to hear from other rockstars in their respective fields: how do you tackle this issue when trying to vacation? Do you just clam up about what you do in the rest of your life? Do you try to find some other way to engage people? I need some solutions, because I’m running out of ideas on how to relax around people.

The Pros and Cons of Small Classes

April 29, 2015 in Dance, Education | No comments

In both the academic classroom and the dance classroom, I’ve noticed that small class sizes present unique challenges and rewards.

Benefits

  • More time to engage with each student. In dance, this means more posture and technique corrections for everyone. In college, this means getting to interact directly with each student more.
  • The class material can be paced and arranged differently if it suits everyone. Due to the fractal nature of American Tribal Style® Belly Dance, it’s possible to alternate between focusing on the individual movements or on the group structures of the dance in a given lesson. That gives me a lot of flexibility as an instructor, and with a small class of students, I can tailor the lesson to their level and their needs. Similarly, I can redirect a lesson plan in the academic classroom if a small-ish group of students has done the prep work and is ready to go to a new place.
  • I get to know each student better, both as individuals and in the context of their needs in the classroom. In dance classes, this means I can keep track of who has which injuries, who needs special attention to posture, and so on. In the academic classroom, this helps me remember everyone’s disciplinary background and call on them by name (because learning a new class’s names at the start of every semester can be tough!).

Challenges

  • When people don’t want to participate, a small class can stall. This is worse in the academic classroom than the dance classroom, I think, because in dance classes I can always come up with more drills and more ways to practice. In the college classroom, it’s hard to get people to talk if they don’t want to talk, and if there are fewer potential talkers, well, it’s more likely that there’ll be awkward silence.
  • Sometimes I talk too much. Because of the above point, where a class can stall if there are fewer people contributing, I might get nervous and go off on a tangent or rant. In my Trust and Teaching post, I talk about how teaching should always be about the students’ needs, not mine, but I sometimes lose sight of that in anxiety-inducing situations.
  • It can feel like there are too many possibilities for what to cover, and then I feel paralyzed with indecision. If I’ve got a small, smart group that’s doing the work, and we can talk about anything, then how do we choose what to talk about?

Overall, I enjoy teaching small classes, even though they present some distinct challenges. I feel like the personal engagement between instructor and student is part of the reason why face-to-face education (as opposed to online education) is effective. Small classes afford more of that engagement, so I’ll usually take a small class over a big class, challenges be damned!

***

Well, between this and my Taboo Topics in the Classroom post, that makes 2 teaching-related blog posts this month! I guess with the semester winding down at my university, I’ve got teaching on the brain. I had a really wonderful class full of very bright and engaged students this semester, so maybe this is my way of processing some of the learning I did alongside them.

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Taboo Topics in the Classroom

April 23, 2015 in Academia, Education, Gender & Sexuality | 1 comment

This file was shared under a Creative Commons Attribution image from Wikimedia Commons. Thanks to user Stefan-Xp for sharing it.

Over at my sex education blog, Sex Ed with Dr. Jeana, I have a post called Syphilis in the Social Sciences Classroom. In it, I describe the ways in which syphilis has proved to be a relevant STI for me to bring into my anthropology and gender studies classes.

For all the silence around STIs today in the U.S., you’d think STIs were a taboo topic – and for many they are. As I’ve already discussed, teaching sex education is not the same as encouraging sex, despite the claims of those who believe that teaching about something is the same thing as endorsing it. Add in the (unwarranted) shame and stigma of admitting that you’ve got an STI, or are even interested in learning more (“for a friend,” right?) and it becomes clear that simply talking about STIs is a revolutionary act in many contexts.

I’ve taught plenty of taboo topics (non-monogamy, BDSM, trauma, Freud, feminism) in my college classes, and while there’s no magic trick to getting it right, I’ve found a couple of things that tend to work well for me. Here are some of my favorite strategies:

  • Explicitly acknowledge that teaching about a topic is not the same as endorsing it. This is one example of how I’ll often use verbal communication to the point where it seems way too obvious to even bother saying, which is why I go ahead and say it anyway. I’d much rather sound a tad silly than risk misunderstanding.
  • When introducing the topic, ask students what their impression of the topic is. Perhaps we old fogies are clinging to taboos of our day, while our students might be pretty well over something. Or maybe they’ll shed some light on an aspect of the topic that hadn’t occurred to us.
  • Try to find that balance between acknowledging that a topic is controversial, and introducing it as just another thing people do, hence worthy of scholarly attention. Take, for instance, my approach to kink in the classroom in my blog post And Then I Brought Up Flesh Hooks. Normalizing human sexual behavior – especially when it’s been stigmatized – is a huge mission of mine as a sex educator and an educator in general, and thus I try to talk about things in a not-terribly sensationalistic way. Again, if people are doing it, it’s worthy of study (from the hybrid social sciences/humanities perspective that I’ve come to as an interdisciplinary folklorist and gender studies scholar).
  • Give students time to respond to the topic in a less-structured way, such as journaling, doing an in-class writing prompt, or talking in pairs. Allowing them to process their feelings in some forum other than talking in front of the whole group, or having to answer directed questions from you, can be beneficial.
  • Frame the conversation with a set of rules, boundaries, or guidelines for respectful discussion. I like to remind my students that it’s okay to disagree with me, with the reading/texts, and even with each other, so long as they do it politely. In certain conversations I’ll emphasize that no one’s required to share anything about their personal lives, but only to engage with the material as it’s handled in the class. The way I do this, it’s less about creating a “safe space” where everyone feels 100% comfortable and nurtured all the time, but rather creating a space where people feel supported in speaking up, and where it’s okay to challenge and be challenged.
  • Divide students into groups and have them debate different facets of the topic. Again, this might bring up ideas and issues that I haven’t even considered.
  • Give them an opportunity to make up classroom credit if a topic proves to be triggering or emotionally activating. This might be listening to a podcast, reviewing a blog post, watching a TED talk, or something along those lines. Since I deal with sexual topics a lot in my classroom, I tend to have a lot of these options floating around my brain at any given moment, in case somebody needs to pass on participating.

At risk of being snarky, I’m sure it helps that I have white, middle-class privilege and thus can bring up certain topics without being seen as too offensive. At the same time, being a woman means I probably come across as nurturing and supportive when I don’t necessarily think of myself that way, which may help students feel more comfortable during difficult discussions. I’m not thrilled about these areas of privilege, but I have to acknowledge them, and I might as well try to use my privilege to benefit others, by creating unique educational opportunities.

I’ve never had anyone tell me not to teach a topic, or that I was being too controversial, or that I would be penalized for anything I taught. But I’m sure there’s a first time for everything. In the end, I try to keep in mind that teaching is less about my experience (as much as I might feel like a bad-ass for handling touchy topics with grace) and more about the students’ experiences, and that helps me navigate some of these tricky subjects. In the end, if it doesn’t benefit them, why am I doing it?

What about you? How do you handle taboo topics in the classroom?

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Trust and Teaching

April 11, 2014 in Dance, Education | No comments

Teaching at the Winter Bazaar (March 2014); Photo by Curtis Claspell

I didn’t enter dance or academia expecting to love teaching, but I’ve found myself teaching dance and teaching college-levels classes for almost a decade now each, and enjoying both opportunities a bunch. The more I teach dance, though, the more I find it necessary to reflect on the role of the teacher, and what kind of trust she must build with her students.

Perhaps the academic classroom is so structured that this question didn’t really enter my mind until I began building a dance community that has me teaching and rehearsing multiple days a week. Being in sustained contact with my dance students, both in person and online, has been a unique experience. And it’s not that I don’t adore and benefit from contact with my college students, but there are many boundaries there that don’t exist with my dance students. I socialize with my dance students, and even party and (gasp) drink with them. They’ve been to my home, and I’ve been to many of their homes, for practices, craft nights, movie nights, and so on. We carpool to events. We’ve worn each other’s costumes for performances, and gifted each other costume items and snacks and caffeinated beverages. Very few of these activities would be appropriate for me to pursue with my college students, but I don’t feel they cross a line with my dance students. In part this is because dance in our community is a hobby (whereas one’s college performance arguably has a more “real” impact on one’s life), and in part this is because the student-teacher relationship in a dance context is often less power-laden than the student-teacher relationship in an academic context.

The interesting – and unique – thing that’s happening to me in the dance classroom these days is that I’m having to ask my students to put immense amounts of trust in me, and I’m struggling to prove myself worthy of that trust daily. Belly dance is intimately connected to body image, which for many women in American culture, is a fraught topic. One of the major reasons I perform belly dance is to challenge expectations about ideal feminine beauty. So, the first challenge I face in asking students to trust me is that I’m basically saying, You are beautiful as you are, and you will be beautiful when you dance. We receive so many mixed messages from our capitalist culture that I’m not surprised that this message might be hard to swallow.

Since I’m trying to build a community based on the radical notion that women’s bodies in motion are beautiful, regardless of one’s age or build, I have to ask my students to trust me when I tell them that they can do this. American Tribal Style® Belly Dance is particularly well-suited to making women look good when they dance, in large part thanks to the richly layered and customizable costumes. For some women, just taking that first step and signing up for a belly dance style requires trust. For others, taking classes is fine, but then baring their bellies (which I don’t require) or dancing in front of others is what’s tough. In order to encourage them to take a chance on me as an instructor, I try to cultivate an upbeat, cheerful teacher persona. I encourage questions and I never shame anyone for not picking up on a move right away, or needing to ask the same technique question again, or whatever. Shame has no place in the belly dance classroom, or any classroom, really.

(on a related note, though written in reference to the academic classroom, I agree with this professor’s statement: “Education is about students. It is about caring for them, pushing them, helping them, working with them rather than against them. Take a good long look at your reasons for being in higher ed. If students are not at the center, you are doing it wrong.”

Further, since practicing belly dance often comes with the hope of eventually performing it, I’m having to ask my students to trust me when it comes to evaluating their readiness to perform. This is where it gets really tricky. I’ve hopefully established that they can trust me to be their teacher and to build up their confidence… but now I have to objectively evaluate whether they’ve mastered a certain skill-set enough to confidently perform it on stage. Performing introduces so many variables that dancers must be comfortable with the basic movements. If that stuff isn’t committed to muscle memory, there’s so much that can go wrong. It’s never, like, catastrophic when someone forgets or messes up a move on stage, but I try to prevent that from happening because it can be unpleasant, and I’d prefer for my dancers to associate pleasant memories with dancing.

So the weird duality I’m noticing here is that I have to ask them to trust me enough that I can be responsible both for building up their confidence, and for gently criticizing their shortcomings. I try to approach this tension with an air of humility; after all, I’m not perfect either. Goodness knows I could always use more practice, and when I’m traveling to a city where there’s another certified ATS® teacher, I try to go in for classes so that I can get technique corrections or new ideas.

Hopefully my students recognize my intentions and trust me, and hopefully they understand that when I correct them, it’s all in service of building their confidence back up again when they can grasp a concept correctly. Getting us all dancing together – which takes a ton of work! – in turn builds the community. And the stronger and more loving our community is, the better we are as dancers, and as people. Seeing my dance students flourish in this community is one of the most amazing things I’ve ever experienced, and so muddling through the cognitive dissonance of how to build students up while encouraging them to better is well worth it.

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Teaching Relevance

August 31, 2013 in Education, Gender & Sexuality | No comments

The first week of classes has passed, and I find myself excited that my students are excited. And I think I figured out one major reason they’re excited – I spent a lot of time in the first day of both my classes emphasizing the relevance of what we’d be learning this semester.

In my folklore class, I made sure to talk about preconceptions about folklore, which people tend to associate with quaint, old-timey things. Of course I gave my students some updated definitions of folklore (folklore as expressive culture, as artistic communication in small groups, as creativity in everyday life), and in our discussion, they seemed intrigued by the fact that we’d be studying contemporary communities alongside the historical dimensions of folklore in the Midwest (which is the topic of the course).

In my gender studies class, I spoke about how our culture gives people crummy and/or incomplete models for understanding, communicating about, and analyzing relationships. You can blame Hollywood (I do, in part) or other areas of the media, or the patriarchy, or any number of the things, but the fact remains: we don’t learn good relationship communication skills. And part of the reason I’m teaching this class on monogamous and non-monogamous relationships is to fix that. Yes, we’ll study things that seem exotic by some counts (marriage in other cultures, same-sex relationships, polyamory and swinging, sex work, etc.) but the point is to start a dialogue about the diversity of human relationships as scholars … and maybe also get some take-home pointers about communication and consent and all that good stuff.

The other factor here, in my humble opinion, is that I was really excited on the first day of both classes too. I think that came through when I spoke to my students, and asked their opinions, and got them involved in discussions. I care about the topics I’m teaching, which must help in some fashion… but I think relevance is a major factor as well. I think a good teacher can and should make any topic relevant to the lives of her students. Some topics might require a greater stretch than others, sure, but relevance has been on my mind lately, and since I was pleased to find it a positive force in both my classes, I thought I would mention it here while also scrambling to come up with a good topic for my 2nd post of the month before the month trickles away from me.

Relevance. I dig it. More thoughts on this later, perhaps.

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Reframing How We View Education

February 23, 2013 in Digital Humanities, Education, Ideas | 4 comments

I’ve posted in the past about how we in America value education (or don’t, as the case more often is). I’m still concerned about this issue – not least because, having obtained a Ph.D., I’m likely going to spend at least some of my life working in the field of education. I also think of the recent image making its way around Facebook, with an American taxpayer explaining that he doesn’t mind his tax money going to education because he doesn’t want to live in a nation of idiots. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: as a supposedly democratic society, we are shooting ourselves in the collective feet if we don’t have a well-educated populace with critical thinking skills and a knowledge of history and the humanities as well as technical, informational skill sets like those offered by STEM.

Recently, a fellow blogger reached out to me about a graphic she helped create, which illustrates how the education system in Finland frames its approach differently:

Please Include Attribution to OnlineClasses.org With This Graphic Finnish Education Infographic

Since I’m into data visualization and other strategies brought to the forefront by the digital humanities movement, I thought I’d share this graphic with my readers. It dramatically illustrates what we’re doing differently in the U.S., and suggests that some of our specific behaviors (devaluing teachers and “play” time, overemphasizing standardized testing) are not working and need to be addressed.

For a striking contrast, check out this public radio discussion of higher education in California (thanks to my dad, who sent me the link). The experiences and needs of the students and teachers took a backseat to discussions of tuition and technology – which are certainly important, but I fear that continuing to commodify education will have negative effects for both teachers and students.

At this point, as a recent Ph.D. still finding my way in the world, I feel a bit powerless to make sure that positive changes are happening in our education system. At the very least, though I can blog about these issues and hope to inspire the sorts of discussions and reevaluations that might eventually lead to change.