Teaching as if Learning Matters

Pedagogies of Becoming by Next-Generation Faculty

Jennifer Meta Robinson, Valerie Dean O'Loughlin, Katherine Kearns, Laura Plummer, Jennifer Meta Robinson, Valerie Dean O'Loughlin, KatherineKearns, Laura Plummer

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780253060662
• eBook ISBN: 9780253060686
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Teaching is an essential skill in becoming a faculty member in any institution of higher education. Yet how is that skill actually acquired by graduate students? Teaching as if Learning Matters collects first-person narratives from graduate students and new PhDs that explore how the skills required to teach at a college level are developed. It examines the key issues that graduate students face as they learn to teach effectively when in fact they are still learning and being taught.

Featuring contributions from over thirty graduate students from a variety of disciplines at Indiana University, Teaching as if Learning Matters allows these students to explore this topic from their own unique perspectives. They reflect on the importance of teaching to them personally and professionally, telling of both successes and struggles as they learn and embrace teaching for the first time in higher education.

PART I

MY TEACHING AND MY IDENTITY

VALERIE DEAN O’LOUGHLIN

HOW DO GRADUATE STUDENT INSTRUCTORS reconcile the multiple facets of their identities as graduate students, teachers, and researchers? And how does the social context provided by participation in teaching networks affect their development as teachers? Lee Shulman, describing teaching and teacher education, noted the “particularities” that teachers must navigate in each classroom, including learner contexts, social dynamics, and lesson construction—in other words, “what to do, how to do it, with whom, and at what pace” (Shulman 1984). Teachers must evaluate and adjust constantly. Invariably, one’s teaching identity is intertwined with these particularities and complicated further by contemporary recognition of the intersectional nature of identity.

The first section of this volume, “My Teaching and My Identity,” arose from a grounded analysis of the abstracts for proposed chapters submitted by graduate student instructors. Among them were abstracts in which the authors described the complex interaction and evolution of their identities as teachers and their struggles to reconcile a teacher identity with a more private sense of self. Relatedly, others examined how their teaching was influenced by friendships and collaborations established through their participation in teaching forums. Central to both concepts are the notions that identity matters in teaching and identity is in dialogue with social context. Taken as a whole, the section’s exploration of identity—its intersectionality and malleability—suggests that developing as a teacher and reflecting on one’s self can offer unexpected synergies.

The chapters in this section are organized with purpose based on several underlying concepts that emerged after careful readings of them: what it means to be a teacher, the influence of shared reflective teaching practices on one’s life, and the influence of teaching identity on classroom climate.

WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A TEACHER

A theme common to most of these chapters is the struggle of reconciling the intersectionality of identity. Most salient for these new professionals are the facets of one’s identity, including professional and private, teacher and researcher, student and scholar. Some grapple with whether they should project an “objective” teacher’s persona—professional, unbiased, formal, and not tied in any way to personality, belief system, socioeconomic class, or affiliation with a specific gender, ethnicity, religion, or nationality. In other words, do they represent themselves as “the third person” to appear as the formal and professional instructor (Sword 2019)? Must a graduate student instructor keep one’s personal and professional identities separate or risk being construed as unprofessional or not “teacher-like”? What happens when personal, research, and teaching identities intersect when discussing topics in the classroom that may relate to sensitive personal topics, such as gender identity or ethnicity? For example, if a teacher is also a person of color, how does that affect how they lead a discussion about the Black Lives Matter movement and the systemic racism that persists in society and the unrest that has resulted in the United States as individuals fight for change to a racially oppressive system? Should an individual who identifies as queer and gender fluid hide their identity when teaching a class about world cultures or in a political science class discussing the US Senate approving conservative Supreme Court nominees and the ramifications on the rights of LGBTQIA+ individuals? The authors present their personal stories about how this reconciliation of identities is evolving for each of them.

We open this section with Leslie Drane’s chapter about how she reconciles genuineness and professionalism. She describes that in her earliest years of teaching, she felt forced to play a part that was not authentic to her sense of herself; hence, those early years were not very enjoyable for her. As she continued in her studies and participated in teaching and learning communities, she began to embrace the fact that being “professional” and being “authentic” do not have to be antagonistic. She provides suggestions for how new instructors can reconcile their intersectional identities, and she describes how her alternative-academic (alt-ac) career as an instructional consultant provides her an opportunity to help academic instructors who may be wrestling with these dueling identities.

Natalie Christian describes her struggle to reconcile her personal, research, and teaching identities. She recalls spending most of her day just out of her depth—a jack of all trades but a master of none. Implicit is the question: how can one be seen as a teacher when one also is a (graduate) student? This feeling of self-doubt, known as “imposter syndrome” or “imposter phenomenon,” was first described by Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes in 1978 as a condition experienced by high-achieving and highly successful women who, despite their external achievements, do not internally identify as successful. They believe themselves to be frauds or imposters. Since this original observation, the term imposter syndrome has expanded to include people of all genders who experience the (common but unfounded and misplaced) feeling of being woefully unprepared and inadequate to serve in a role. In contrast, the chapters by Maureen Onyeziri and others clarify the important difference between second-guessing oneself and having others doubt one’s ability based on identity. While both Christian and Drane suffered from imposter syndrome, they found that participation in teaching communities and the development of teaching skills through pedagogy courses enabled them to forge ahead with new confidence. Through such strategies, they describe being able to develop a functional sense of a cohesive self.

Onyeziri faces multiple challenges as both an international student (who must compare and adjust undergraduate teaching practices between her native Nigeria and the United States) and a teaching assistant of color—a minority at our midwestern institution. When she first began teaching, she struggled with wanting to be an empathetic teacher but also garner respect among students (and she understood that instructors of color were less likely to be regarded with respect). Surprisingly, she met resistance to her empathetic instruction from fellow graduate student instructors, illustrating that sometimes it is we the teachers, and not necessarily the students, who create the larger challenges. She also discusses how being a teacher of color did not necessarily give her the advantage she thought it would in relating to and helping her students of color and that her dual identity of teacher and person of color was a challenge to balance—one she is still in the process of figuring out.

Our perspectives on identity and equity may be challenged in the classroom, both as students and teachers. Francesca Williamson describes how her first experiences as a female graduate student instructor of color challenged her vision of equity in the classroom. She moved from a position of silence to openly discussing these narratives and relating to students with shared narratives. The work of Eve Tuck, a Native American who has written extensively about the concern of using “damage-centered” vocabulary to describe one’s community, has influenced Williamson and her concept of identity to this day.

SHARED REFLECTIVE TEACHING EXPERIENCES INFLUENCE OTHER ASPECTS OF ONE’S LIFE

Another theme that emerged from many of these chapters was how shared reflective teaching experiences could lead to the development of long-term communities. A shared reflective teaching experience may take the form of, for example, participation in a graduate student learning community (GSLC) on the scholarship of teaching and learning, engagement in a multidisciplinary forum about how to make teaching and learning visible, or enrollment in a graduate pedagogy class. How do we see communities bloom from these shared reflective teaching experiences? In what ways are the communities based on profession, as well as friendship? These communities may develop, persist, and ground a participant well after the initial shared reflective teaching experience. Drane and Christian briefly discuss how their experiences with a GSLC and graduate pedagogy courses, respectively, influenced the development and reconciliation of their identities.

In addition, the joint chapter by Keely Cassidy, Laura Clapper, and Alyssa Lederer describes how their shared reflective teaching experience in a multidisciplinary GSLC, Paths to the Professoriate, led to a long-term friendship and pedagogical community. The coauthors study within very different disciplines and perhaps would not have crossed paths in their graduate careers. However, the GSLC allowed them to experience the value in multidisciplinary discussions of pedagogy. And well after the learning community’s term had ended, the coauthors continue to meet regularly and consult each other about various teaching questions and quandaries. Just as importantly, the friendships and personal connections they established through the learning community have provided stability, camaraderie, and compassion that might not otherwise have come to fruition.

While Sarah Keesom, Jacquelyn Petzold, and Lisa Wiltbank all work within the same graduate discipline of biology, their shared experience in the Science Education Assessment (SEA) Scholars program (a discipline-based GSLC) also fostered collaboration and friendship that might not have been available to them otherwise. These coauthors recognized the collaborative nature of bench-research programs, but it wasn’t until their participation in SEA Scholars that they fully appreciated the potential of collaboration in teaching. This discipline-based GSLC provided the authors with a space to focus on teaching and education research and work with like-minded colleagues with a similar appreciation for teaching. Even after graduation, as the three pursue various academic or alt-ac careers, they still communicate regularly as a result of this shared reflective teaching experience.

INFLUENCE OF TEACHING IDENTITY ON CLASSROOM CLIMATE

A final theme that arose was the influence of identity (specifically, one’s identity as a teacher) on actions and atmosphere in the classroom. How is one’s identity as a teacher a further, complicating particularity in teaching (Shulman 1984)? For example, does identity as a quiet, diminutive female teacher introduce different student interactions, opportunities, and obstacles than a different mix of factors? Many of the authors in section 1 touch on this issue, and it is a major focus of the final chapter in this section. Andrew Koke begins his chapter by recognizing his white male privilege and how it seems to afford him a degree of control. However, Koke found that his personality dampened the lively interaction and engagement he wanted to see in his classroom. As a result, he adjusted his performance of teacherly identity from “sage on the stage” to facilitator, willingly ceding some control so his students would take more responsibility for their learning. Not satisfied with casual observations about how he was coming across, Koke methodically analyzes four sections of his course to gauge the effectiveness of these adjustments to his teaching. Even as Koke has transitioned to an alt-ac position, he still teaches and incorporates what he learned from this initial scholarly teaching activity.

How we perceive ourselves, how we think we are perceived by others, whether a teaching persona seems to fit us, whether it offers opportunities we want to pursue or constrains us from them, how we learn to be ourselves in diverse communities—all these questions are taken up by the authors in this section. Their most fundamental contribution to the field of graduate student development may be their sense of the malleability of identity—of identity as a construction that we can work on and change to better suit our needs.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Clance, Pauline R., and Suzanne A. Imes. 1978. “The Impostor Phenomenon in High Achieving Women: Dynamics and Therapeutic Intervention.” Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice 15 (3): 241–247.

Shulman, Lee S. 1984. “The Practical and the Eclectic: A Deliberation on Teaching and Educational Research.” Curriculum Inquiry 14 (2): 183–200.

Sword, Helen. 2019. “The First Person.” Teaching & Learning Inquiry 7 (1): 182–190.

ONE

DEATH STUDIES AND LEARNING COMMUNITIES

Rethinking Professionalism

LESLIE E. DRANE

I WALK INTO THE EMPTY classroom on a Tuesday morning, set down my bag, and load up my PowerPoint for the day. I click through the slides, making sure everything looks to be in order for my 100-level course, Global Perspectives of Death. My students begin trickling inside; the morning people give an exuberant “hello!” while the majority walk in with eyes still half asleep and hands clutching coffee cups. When the clock tower chimes in the distance, I close the door and, with a jubilant “good morning,” start explaining that we will continue discussing cremation practices and customs. I begin by asking a volunteer to write on the board while her classmates recall the concepts we have learned on the topic thus far. A student in the front explains how the Ganges River is used as a famous crematory location, and then a person describes the usage of a cremulator (a device used to pulverize bone fragments into powder). I ask students to talk in small groups about how cremation may be handled in the future, especially as environmental issues become more widespread. While I walk around the classroom, listening to their thoughts and occasionally interjecting, I reflect on how comfortable I feel in this setting and how foreign teaching seemed just four years ago.

I should be more upfront. I feel confident teaching, but I have not always felt that way. My career is now in instructional consulting, and as part of my job, I regularly meet with instructors to talk about a facet of their teaching and offer evidence-based advice. Consulting with instructors has provided the space for me to reflect on my own teaching development. In the past, I struggled with a self-created dichotomy between “genuineness” and “professionalism.” I understand genuineness as being true to oneself, which includes occasionally sharing personal insights, emotions, and experiences. This goes against my previous ideas of professionalism, in which one holds all the power, acts confidently while never showing feelings, and always sticks to class topics “by the book.” Because of this dichotomy, I often left teaching feeling a sense of imposter syndrome. First identified as “imposter phenomenon” for high-achieving women who do not identify as successful, imposter syndrome now aptly applies to individuals of all genders who fail to recognize their achievements and instead focus on the fear that their peers perceive them as frauds. Through the help of a learning community, I worked through my previous understandings of what it means to be professional and recognized the importance of demonstrating personality in the classroom. Upon teaching my first class independently, I felt confident integrating my ideas about genuineness and professionalism.

When I entered academia and began teaching, I received multiple and often opposing opinions on what it means to be professional. I was told tales of students being silent or aggressive; mentors warned that these student actions would likely be amplified since I was a young woman. Genuinely meaning well, many people shared recommendations: “Act with authority.” “Make fewer jokes.” “Demand respect on the first day.” With these snippets of advice, I created the ideal professional instructor in my mind. This instructor paces the classroom, covering abundant material; the only sound is his voice and the scratch of pens as the students rush to write down his brilliant musings.

On the one hand, I understand where this advice comes from. Since my students and I are often similar in age, I sometimes get treated like a peer. Students have asked where I like to go drinking or initiate a fist bump when they do well on an exam. On the other hand, what does it mean to be a professional? What is a professional body? This advice has caused me to cling to the clichéd idea of the sixty-year-old white man lecturing in front of the classroom in (can it be truly?) a tweed jacket with elbow patches. Well-intentioned mentors tell graduate students that we must be professional in the classroom. For some, like me, this may translate into “act like that white, sixty-year-old man.” When we are pushed to fill a role we simply cannot and equate that with professionalism, we entangle disingenuous feelings with being an instructor.

As a graduate student instructor, I started teaching with these conflicting thoughts and emotions. I attempted to fill this unachievable aesthetic of what I thought it meant to be a professional. I did not enjoy my first year of teaching because I felt like I was acting in a play but had failed to read the script. I continually questioned myself. Was I doing the right thing? Saying the right words? Was I messing everything up? These feelings intensified when I worked in archaeological field schools, where students and supervisors not only labored together but also lived with one another. During this time, the line between professional and personal blurred, as it was impossible to “act” like this type of professional 24/7. For example, during one archaeological field school, a family member became extremely ill. In a typical classroom, I likely would not mention the incident and instead would focus on finishing the daily lesson. However, as the field school is a type of six-week lesson, it was impossible not to share my anxieties and emotions with others, including my students.

During my next five semesters of teachin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. My Teaching and My Identity
• Part II. My Students and My Classroom
• Part III. My Teaching and My Field
• Part IV. My Journey to My Postgraduate Life
• Epilogue
• Editor and Contributor Biographies
• Index