|
Articles Conference Reviews |
2007L22HumphriesL.22: “Taboo Teaching: Race, Authority, and Evil in the College Classroom” Chair: Christopher Weaver, William Paterson University, Wayne, NJ. Speakers:
Because two of the four panelists spoke about the use of readings from critical cultural studies (CCS), while the other two speakers presented on two different topics, this panel focused more on the effect of cultural studies in the composition classroom. This delighted me because I had faced negative student evaluations because of cultural studies readings. The panel was predicated on the idea that despite the de jure protection of academic freedom, some topics, such as the notion of the academy being evil, seemed de facto off-limits in the classroom. Before I review the CCS presentation, a mention of Prof. Jackson’s presentation is warranted. Jackson announced a change in her presentation title from “Reconsidering Authority in the Classroom,” to that cited above. Her presentation focused entirely on student to faculty communication email, a subject that vexes faculty. The situation was her counseling a student to withdraw from her class, and he, despite his trouble in class, was resisting that action. The taboo part must have been for the instructor to exert power that clearly determines what will happen with the student’s academic pursuits. Students are supposed to be independent actors. She explained how the persona of the student changed as the email relationship developed. The changes in language of the salutation and utterances in the body of the email showed the student’s increasing awareness of audience, that is, his growing awareness of the professor and her power. The humor of the situation as it unfolded in the correspondence showed that audience is not static; audience can be two-fold and dynamic. Ian Marshall and David Borkowski’s presentation, “White Privilege and Racial Identity: Two College Professors Contemplate Their Classrooms” focused on how race, class and gender reading materials affect the instructor. David Borkowski is white. Ian Marshall is a Jamaican, but his nationality surely takes a back seat to his skin color, which is brown. Marshall and Borkowski presented in the creative form of a script. The back and forth dialogue was engaging but difficult to take notes from, so I apologize in advance for any transposition of comments from one speaker to the other. In the script, Marshall and Borkowski recounted how the topic of their presentation came about: Borkowski stopped into Marshall’s office in the English department of William Patterson University in New Jersey to say hello. Marshall was uncharacteristically somber (i.e. in the dumps). Inquiring about that, Borkowski learned that Marshall had received back his student evaluations of teaching his literature-based composition class. Borkowski teaches the same course. The course includes instructional units designed around the subjects such as racism (this is easy to understand because Paula Rothenberg, the editor of Race, Class and Gender in the United States, the seventh edition of which is being issued this year by Worth Publishing, was a professor at Paterson University from 1989 – 2006. I used this text in fall 2006). The course considers work such as Toni Morrison’s literary essay, “Playing in the Dark,” and Charles Chesnutt’s short story, “The Wife of his Youth.” Marshall was dismayed to read that a student had called him “Mr. Race Man.” The comment stung. The student’s characterizing Marshall out of his professor role and characterizing Marshall into a category more general and certainly more pejorative, prompted Marshall and Borkowski to explore the idea of the role of teacher personal characteristics, especially race. Borkowski said that he recognizes that issues of class and race are touchy subjects, so he tries for a funky and loose style in his approach. He has noticed how the content influences physical relationships in the classroom: depending on the instructional content, women students move forward to sit in the front of the class, and men students move back to sit in the rear of the class. In other exhibits of student reaction, Borkowski said a black male student who was pleased with the day’s class instruction, offered Borkowski a modification of the hand shake known as “skin” and “high fives.” Borowski said his white male students congratulated him when the instructional unit subject was white privilege. Borkowski’s interpretation of student behavior is that black and white students view white skin as neutral. And therefore as a white person, he is better able to present taboo topics without a negative backlash on himself. He sees himself in the position of middle man. This is his white privilege. Color determines if an instructor can be in the middle between students and intellectual activity about critical cultural studies; the black teacher’s position appears to be fixed, and it is not in the middle. But, Borowski admitted, white or no, students are generally uncomfortable discussing race. It is one of those “elephant in the room” issues in the class. Marshall and Borkowski’s presentation engaged me with its anecdotes about the effect of cultural studies literature on students and what the resultant student evaluations of teaching mean for the instructor. I related the “White Privilege and Racial Identity” presentation to my colleagues and it generated much spirited discussion during the conference. I was also motivated to research when I returned home to Lansing, Michigan. By that measure, the presentation was entirely successful. The most recent discussion, albeit brief, of student evaluations of teaching appears to be in Tracey Baker’s article, “Boredom in the Composition Classroom,” (TETYC, May 2003). Therein she quoted Stephen Brookfield’s perception that student evaluations are “satisfaction indexes – measures of how much people liked us” (408). By such a definition, the moniker, “Mr. Race Man,” causes us to ask more questions. One question is, is “Mr. Race Man” a term of endearment? It can be when used by members of the same race to appreciate efforts made to advance the interests of the race. An example is when Marcus Garvey stomped the streets of New York in early in the 20th century to publicly speak to the interests of Negroes in the United States. Marshall did not delineate the demographics of his students, and to be fair, it is unlikely he knew who the particular student was. Most institutions allow students to submit their evaluations of teaching anonymously. His concern about the moniker shows he interprets “Mr. Race Man” as a measure of low affection for Marshall at class completion. This is no small concern since institutions, including my own, use student evaluations of teaching as one tool in personnel decisions. Marshall and Borkowski’s presentation proffered the idea that the race of the professor coupled with race material in a non-race based course effects teaching success and some practices. They did not explore the question of whether the student evaluation was an accurate reflection of student success in composition. In presenting material on racism, Marshall said the black professor is perceived to have a position of self-interest. Marshall said professors of color are restricted in the content they can present. The characterization of the professor matters in the classroom and leads to the idea of teacher subjectivity; the teacher becomes the subject, or at least a characteristic of the teacher is the subject along side the reading material, and this poses a problem for the instructor. Comments? |