Teaching First-Year Students Includes More than Disciplinary Content, Skills
I don’t want students to respect me as their teacher simply because of my status, but because I have the qualities that position represents, characteristics that they in fact respect.
I have two vivid memories of my father — one when I was an older child, the other when I was a teen.
Walking down Main Street of my hometown, my father and I stopped to talk to an adult, and when I didn’t respond with the obligatory “yes, sir,” my father slapped me hard across the face.
Years later, my father was playing in a pick-up basketball game on our home court with my teenaged friends and me. During the game, I crossed the respect line with him and he turned to once again hit me hard across the face — in front of all my friends.
I was raised that children were to be seen and not heard, and all child interaction with adults had to include “sir” and “ma’am.”
Eventually as I grew into roles of authority — teacher, coach, and parent — I took on a much different lesson than my father had intended; I am extremely informal in my clothing and speech, and I avoid formal situations like the plague (because they literally make me feel ill, triggering my anxiety).
Especially as a teacher and coach, I have always worked very hard to treat children and young people with full human dignity and respect; that is something I always wanted as a young person, and those adults who showed me that respect remain important in my life.
In short, while I think all people regardless of age should treat each other with something like respect (for our collective humanity, but not roles such as authority), I also believe that anyone in a position of authority should earn the sort of trust that comes with that authority.
I don’t want students to respect me as their teacher simply because of my status, but because I have the qualities that position represents, characteristics that they in fact respect.
As the academic year is beginning again for many of us in all levels of education, these thoughts were triggered by a Twitter thread and a powerful piece on inclusive teaching.
The thread began:
Christina V. Cedillo Perez@DrCCedillo
OK, I am set for Week 1. Just have to make some copies on Tuesday before class, but I’m excited! We’ll be discussing Hispanic vs Latino vs Latinx, as well as how to APPROPRIATELY email your prof.
And some of the replies include:
I always teach how to email your prof. There’s a site I use, even though it’s a bit formal. http://web.wellesley.edu/SocialComputing/Netiquette/netiquetteprofessor.html …
(I tell them I use emoji myself so not to worry about that.)
Oooo now I’m cuious about @Jessifer take on the Wellesley doc. I was there last year. This doc seems consistent with the climate. https://twitter.com/anneperez/status/1165751351676035073 …
(I tell them I use emoji myself so not to worry about that.)
I wish the document were about sending “your first email to a Professor.” And finished with a whole section on “watching for cues” and a section on “setting boundaries,” because inappropriate emails go both ways.
Personally, when I get emails from students, I prefer they address me like a human, not a bureaucrat. https://twitter.com/jessifer/status/1165970090623426560 …
I like this piece for teaching students the basic skill (although we have a conversation about the honorific piece, and I also tell them they are never being annoying by emailing me): https://medium.com/@lportwoodstacer/how-to-email-your-professor-without-being-annoying-af-cf64ae0e4087 …
How to Email Your Professor (without being annoying AF)
And then I added:
I agree. The whole email etiquette thing is way more complicated than usually discussed. For instance, I just received a reply from a student — no salutation, 3 exclamation points to end first sentence, 1 to end 2nd sentence. It was perfect. I feel connected to the student. https://twitter.com/Jessifer/status/1165970463014699009 …
I agree. BUT as a white male I recommend we teach our students to pay special care with women professors and any commonly marginalized groups. The “Dr” and initial formality are important for them. Helps students see unconscious bias
This exchange, I think, fits well with Sathy and Hogan’s framing of inclusive teaching:
Besides teaching content and skills in your discipline, your role is to help students learn. And not just some students. The changing demographics of higher education mean that undergraduates come to you with a wide variety of experiences, cultures, abilities, skills, and personalities. You have an opportunity to take that mix and produce a diverse set of thinkers and problem-solvers.
Teaching inclusively means embracing student diversity in all forms — race, ethnicity, gender, disability, socioeconomic background, ideology, even personality traits like introversion — as an asset. It means designing and teaching courses in ways that foster talent in all students, but especially those who come from groups traditionally underrepresented in higher education.
Since I currently teach two first-year writing seminars and typically have several first-year students in my other courses — and I have been working directly in several committees on diversity and inclusion at my university — I see a strong connection between every professor’s role in teaching beyond what the academic obligations are in each course and the discussion of students emailing professors.
This is especially true for helping students transition from high school into higher education.
My university is a selective liberal arts college with a relatively homogenous student body, often white and relatively affluent.
Although I came from a working-class background, my students tend to function in ways that would make my father proud; they are quite deferent and formal with professors.
Unlike my own upbringing, their ways of navigating adults and people in authority have more to do with spoken and unspoken rules about social capital; none the less, they tend to do the face-to-face “sir” and “ma’am” routines flawlessly.
However, these students often have limited experiences interacting with teachers through email so the concerns raised in the Twitter thread are elements of my teaching I have had to develop once I moved from teaching high school English into higher education.
Here I want to emphasize that something seemingly as superficial as teaching students how to email professors can and should be a central lesson in fostering student awareness about diversity and inclusion.
As I noted in my Twitter response, I have been properly checked in the past about my own tendency to be informal. For women, people of color, and internationals, academia often remains a constant reminder that anyone not white and male exists in marginalized spaces.
Women faculty report often that students and others seeing them in their department spaces assume these women professors to be secretarial staff; people of color have reported equally erasing experiences with similar interactions.
The micro-aggressions of sexism and racism accumulate and overwhelm over time; these experiences do not envelope the profession and lives of white males, who receive immediate deference and assumptions of “Dr.” and “professor.”
The casual email to an early-career women professor sits in these moment-by-moment micro-aggressions while white men of academia can foster low-key and informal relationships both face-to-face and through email with their students; but the latter is one more example of the advantages of privilege.
Yes, I will talk to my first-year (and all) students about emailing their professors. I will couch that in discussing, for example, that student evaluations of teaching (a process first-year students also have little or no experience with) have been shown to perpetuate sexist and racist attitudes by students and then to further entrench sexism and racism (as well as xenophobia) in the academy through tenure and promotion processes.
We will address as well respectability politics and how to navigate that against the norms of student/professor interactions.
Class session will also include exploring “Ms.” versus “Miss/Mrs.” and the rise of gender neutral, singular uses of “they” and people’s pronoun preferences.
My broad goals as a professor in all of my courses attempt to meet Sathy and Hogan’s charge that our teaching is about more than disciplinary content and skills, and that our teaching must be for all students, not simply those who already match our biases and assumptions.
For me, then, I seek to raise my students’ awareness, as opposed to seeking ways for them to acquire a set of skills that I mandate for them.
I want my students to recognize that they are always political beings, interacting with and negotiating a world driven by power dynamics (many of which are historically and inherently inequitable).
Women, people of color, and internationals — whether students or faculty — cannot take vacations from who they are and how that status fits into a world normalized as white and male.
Those of us white and male, unless we make efforts to do otherwise, can function as if our privileges do not exist; they can be invisible to us.
I have deep and personal reasons for wanting my students to interact with me in informal ways that include all of us treating everyone with dignity and kindness. I still shudder a bit at “sir” and even “Dr. Thomas.”
Ultimately, I am not asking my students to adopt some mandate or even to take on a veneer with their professors. I am introducing my students to greater awareness about how all humans interact and how those interactions conform to (or resist) conventional assumptions — norms that are likely to be inequitable, likely to perpetuate sexism, racism, and xenophobia unless everyone becomes aware and actively resists those norms.
All of this, I think, speaks to the first “common question” about (resistance to) inclusive teaching answered by Sathy and Hogan:
I don’t teach about diversity. What does diversity have to do with my course, and why should I care?
Some instructors make the mistake of equating inclusive teaching with introducing current events or “diversity issues” into, say, a math course. Of course you should offer diverse content, texts, guest speakers, and so on, where they’re relevant, and there’s been plenty of talk about that in academe. But when we talk about teaching inclusively, we choose to focus on the teaching methods that apply to all courses.
In short, all students and their teachers are always navigating political spaces in the formal classroom, and all teachers at every level are obligated to teach inclusively because of that reality.
The first-year student often walks, speaks, and writes through their lives thoughtlessly. My role as their professor is to give them the opportunity to pause, step back, and begin again with purpose and awareness — as a human who wants and deserves their humanity dignity and as a human seeking to live their lives in ways that honor that in everyone else.
