This paper addresses the personal demands that Teaching Assistants (TAs) encounter as they work toward nurturing critical consciousness in university tutorials. We explore two case studies that occurred during our participatory, feminist, action research project which aimed to have students collaboratively question and reflect upon their responses to critical theorizing in sociology. The scenarios that we analyze here illustrate how students’ investments in dominant ideologies around gender relations and sexuality can lead to situations that are very challenging for TAs. Our analyses reveal that, particularly in tutorial settings where students vocalize their positions, TAs personally encounter a myriad of emotional, intellectual and interpersonal considerations in response to their students’ politics. These case studies emphasize the complexities involved when teaching assistants are committed to both anti-oppressive pedagogy and critical ideologies.
The case studies that we reflectively analyze in this article arise from our collaborative work as Professor (Debra) and Teaching Assistants (Marcia and Laurel) in a teaching and learning research project that began 8 years ago in my social psychology course at York University, Toronto, Canada. Over the years (with Deborah Davidson and Ron Sheese1) my focus has been on building and understanding an environment that would successfully facilitate and enrich students’ understanding, and investment in, critical analyses of social inequalities. Megan Boler describes our central aim as educators, and the approach we encourage in our work with TAs:
…[T]he obligation of educators is not to guarantee a space that is free from hostility – an impossible and sanitizing task – but rather, to challenge oneself and one’s students to critically analyze any statements made in a classroom, especially statements that are rooted in dominant ideological values that subordinate on the basis of race, gender, class, or sexual orientation (Boler, 2005: 4).
Guided by this philosophy, our research goal aims to displace the conventional teaching and learning practices that lead students to work in competitive isolation, in favour of an approach that gets students talking about the course content, current events, and their personal lives, and that supports an analysis of that talk. Our project is inductive, inspired by our previous research2 and our intimate familiarity with student struggles around critical analyses (see Langan and Davidson, 2005).3 It represents action research, in that the selection, implementation, and adjustment of teaching strategies is contingent upon our ongoing evaluations of course events, requiring us to continually adapt the research plan in ways that we feel enhance the teaching-learning process. The feminist orientation of our project attunes us to the unequal power relations among the various participants in the research, most notably that we are particularly attentive to addressing issues of student and TA marginalization. The evaluative dimension of our research assesses whether, and to what extent, our teaching strategies achieve the goal of improving teaching-learning processes, both through an examination of final outcomes and through continuous feedback that informs subsequent stages of the project .4
Our efforts focus on changing the environment by specifically creating a welcoming space for teaching and learning. For us, traditional notions of “teacher” and “learner” are complicated – as “teachers” we are simultaneously “learners,” and similarly, students are simultaneously “learners” and “teachers.” While our formalized roles are imbued with power differences, and do not allow for us to operate in an ideal sense as equals, still, as professor and TAs, we attempt to lessen the social distance that often exists between us, and between us and the students. We strive for a classroom environment that is, for all involved, safe yet challenging, affirming yet critically questioning and analyzing.
After years of implicitly working within this worldview, Davidson, Sheese and I came to articulate five principles that guide our overall approach to teaching and learning: collaboration; caring; engagement; reflection; and deep learning. Because we believe that tutorials are sites best suited for deep learning, of particular importance to our teaching and learning research project are teams of Teaching Assistants (TAs) who collaborate in the selection, implementation and tuning of specific teaching strategies in tutorials. Collaboration emerged as a foundational principle that is necessary for the cultivation of the other four principles. The work of Barbara Thayer-Bacon (2000), a feminist philosopher of education, and our previous research (e.g., Langan and Davidson, 2005) have been particularly influential with respect to how we have prioritized collaboration. Thayer-Bacon argues that we need to re-describe ‘critical thinking,’ to highlight the creation of knowledge as a “transactive sociopolitical process with others” (Thayer-Bacon 2000: 6) wherein students are “social beings-in-relation-with-others, not…isolated individuals” (Thayer-Bacon 2003: 246).5 In a tutorial, the larger group of 25 students works first and foremost in small group configurations, where students get to know one another better and develop relationships that we have found conducive to interactive learning. TAs assume the role of facilitator in these discussions. Caring, once it is explicitly articulated as a principal, has a notable, positive influence on how all who are involved in the course relate to one another. A relational epistemology “embodies fostering caring relationships that both highlight our limitations and contextuality, and show how much we also share in common” (Thayer-Bacon, 2003: 255). We attempt to model such dialogue, for example, by searching conscientiously for the meaningful intentions behind students’ contributions and articulating these through supportive feedback, using non-verbal body language to communicate that we care about students (e.g., active listening, nodding, eye contact, smiling, moving within a tutorial room or lecture hall so that physical presence is shared among students); respecting students by being punctual, available for consultation, flexible, and true to commitments. Engagement involves our efforts to understand the different “meaning spaces” that students attribute to the university and all its associated elements and activities (Sheese, 2000). In this regard, we select and arrange course readings in a manner that suggests a conversation within the field, often heated, about purpose, meaning and importance, and we construct assignments in stages that allow students to discuss and build a point of view, with conversation and feedback at each stage (Sheese, 2000). Reflection encourages students to use the data of their own lives (either through generality or specificity as selected by them) to relate to the abstractions of the course material. For example, the use of journaling and case studies allows students to focus on a common reference point for discussions, and to depersonalize discussions until they feel comfortable to share personal relevance at whatever level they choose. Deep learning shifts the emphasis in curriculum development from breadth (comprehensive, but superficial, course content) to depth (understanding of relationships among course contents and their significance). This principle necessitates a more active learning mode to investigate course content (for example, class debates and using students’ questions or input as a framework for lecture presentations). By explaining to students how the course is guided by these five principles, and by drawing their attention to the strategies that follow from them, all involved share some familiarity with the rationale that underlies the course structure and process.
In response to the challenges of teaching critical perspectives, our pedagogical approach, until recently, can be described by the following position (taken from Langan and Davidson, 2005):6
[W]e would provide critical analyses with which people might choose new ways to make sense of, and thereby, if they wished, change, their investments. Our goal, then, was “not to rage against the systems on behalf of those who are subject to them but to lay them bare so that the nature and effectiveness of their silencing mechanisms are revealed, made visible, and thereby attenuated” (Arney, 1982: 14). Like Titus, we hoped “that they will come to view the world in a way that includes fighting inequalities” (2000: 23). While this language dilutes our roles as agents of social change, still implicit is the idea that social change is the outcome that we are working towards. Although not explicit about our agenda, implicit in the new goal is to have people “choose” to change. Lather notes that this is the central challenge of praxis-oriented research: “how to maximize self as mediator between people’s self-understandings and the need for ideology critique and transformative social action without becoming impositional ” (1991: 64, emphasis original).
As noted previously, while we are “teachers” we are just as much “learners;” our experiences and exposure to the literature on emotions in education have made us re-consider our position that “ideology critique and transformative social action must not be impositional.” In fact, I now believe that “disruptions” are integral impositions that must be orchestrated periodically during a course in order to assist effective teaching and learning – ultimately, the application of critical discourses to social relations and phenomena.7 “Disruptions” refer to the introduction of critical texts that impact student consciousness, that present a meaningful challenge to taken-for-granted understandings of societal relations. We have seen how disruptions can lead to traumatic emotional repercussions for students, which often manifest as resistance and hostility. Such responses are well-documented in the literature (e.g., the analyses of Menzies and Chunn, 1991; Bulbeck, 2001; Kitzinger and Thomas, 1995; Volmen and Ten Dam, 1998: Titus, 2000; Letherby and Marchbank, 2001; and Paquin, 2001). Our position is that we must acknowledge and work through the traumatic emotional repercussions that are experienced by students in this process. Ann Berlak makes this point:
[I]f a major purpose of teaching is the promotion of students’ abilities to receive information that is dissonant, not just congruent, with what they have learned before, then confrontation with its attendant trauma is necessary (2005: 141).
What we have come to realize through our research is that it is not only important for us to attend to students’ emotional experiences – it is equally important for us to acknowledge and deal with the emotional experiences of TAs in tutorials. In the article that follows, we hear from two of these TAs, Marcia Oliver and Laurel Atkinson, who provide an in-depth, reflective analysis of how emotions complicate teaching/learning experiences in tutorials.8
TAs occupy a particularly difficult position within the academy. At York University, when TAs are assigned to large classes, they have much closer contact with students than does the Professor in the course. The power dynamics that get played out between TA and student (and of course, TA and professor!) are influenced by a number of factors, and these present an important context to consider as we explore the emotional dimensions of the TA-student interaction. Because they are graduate students, TAs are of lower status than the Professor, still they occupy positions of power within tutorials relative to the students. At the same time, TAs are still students, albeit graduate students, and they often experience insecurities around their academic knowledge. This situation is arguably most common for women. As Megan Boler notes, “self doubt and shame are common especially to women’s experience within higher education; women who experience the ‘imposter syndrome’ and continue to be plagued with doubts regarding their intellectual authority” (1999: 3).
Our research findings reveal that women TAs experience challenges in tutorials that are very different from male TAs. Through the weekly on-line or in-person discussions that included both male and female members of the teaching team, we came to realize that students’ expectations around how TAs should “care” for them varied, in that students envisioned different responsibilities for TAs according to a TA’s gender identity. Female TAs noted numerous occasions when students had expected them to be available for either on-line or in-person consultation upon demand; provide unrealistic accommodations around the extensions of deadlines; give them the answers to questions on take home exams; and take responsibility for discussions in tutorials that were to be led by students. In describing instances like these, one female TA noted:
“Part of my frustration is with negotiating caring […] I worry that students perceive this as being synonymous with “push over” or “bird course”, and it seems that they haven’t made the connection that caring needs to be reciprocal. I have told my tutorials on several occasions to beware of making this false assumption, I have tried to explain to them that although we are perhaps offering more than what is standard in many courses (in terms of assistance, support, even understanding) we also have very high expectations for the type of learning that we are supporting (i.e. deep learning).”
During these group discussions, male TAs were surprised, and maintained that students did not demand special privileges of them, as they for female TAs. Our experiences were in keeping with those noted by Berenice Malka Fisher, who addresses how an ethic of caring is both important and problematic, specifically for women teachers, who must realize that they have to take care of themselves too (2001).
How a TA is perceived and responded to by students is also influenced by features of identity other than gender, and is complicated by the various social locations of the students (e.g., ages, races, sexual orientations, and abilities). For example, TAs are often younger than the Professor, and closer in age to the student, divesting the TA of some of his or her authority. Similarly, TAs who have racial and ethnic identifications or sexual orientations that are less valued within society often find their knowledge demeaned, or their decisions challenged. Harlow observes that “black professors’ work in the classroom is different and more complex than that of their white colleagues because negotiating a devalued racial status requires extensive emotion management” (2003: 350). This is further complicated by taking gender into account: “the black female respondents reported the effects of both gender and racial stereotypes as they worked to maintain their physical and intellectual presence in the classroom” ( Harlow, 2003: 360). In our study, TAs talk about how they negotiate their identities in tutorials, carefully managing the extent to which they “come out” and/or acknowledge the interplay between their personal identities and their critical analyses of public issues. The tendency for students who resist critical analyses to stigmatize those who endorse such challenges to the status quo is especially likely when TAs are identified as having one or more identity features that are devalued within the dominant culture. Suffice it to say that the TAs’ job of working with students on critical analyses is no easy task, and can be complicated by a number of factors that relate to their official status within the academy and their features of identity. Because they deal most closely with students, TAs are the ones who shoulder most of the students’ resistance and hostility.
As mentioned previously, in this research project, tutorial settings are structured in ways that encourage students to be involved with one another and the course content. The approach aims to divest the TA of her/his power within the tutorial, in favour of a model that fosters more equal participation among all tutorial participants (see Langan and Davidson, 2005, on the use of small groups in tutorials). In her book, “Democratic Dialogue in Education: Troubling Speech, Disturbing Silence,” Megan Boler problematizes simplistic assumptions about how “freedom of speech,” or what we might think of as “democratic dialogue” can be achieved in classrooms “when in fact people are individually and systemically silenced as a result of their identities and/or views” (2005: vii). She cites the disparities that exist between the ideals of participatory democracy and the realities of social inequality (2005: viii) and states:
“Educators and scholars who wish to retain classrooms as public spaces of critical inquiry face a tall order. We need to continue to improve our skills in facilitating difficult and risky conversations; we must continue to theorize our ethics regarding how to engage voices so that differences are heard” (2005: x)
Boler’s analysis has helped us turn a critical eye to many of the assumptions on which our project has been founded. The point to be made here is that when students are speaking in a tutorial, the TA is faced with facilitating these discussions, and how to facilitate can be challenging for TAs. This is not because TAs find it difficult to formulate a response to student discussions, but because they see it as their responsibility to exercise caution in publicly articulating that response. Underpinning this caution is an awareness of power dynamics in the classroom, specifically TAs fear of silencing students and, in turn, creating a chilly learning environment. Our goal is to get all students talking and/or listening attentively. TAs’ major concern is that if they endorse critical analyses, they may condemn or silence students (who often endorse dominant discourses) and that this would be ‘unfair.’ There are no easy answers to the question of whether, or how, TAs should control classroom discussions. Boler makes this point in her piece, “All Speech is Not Free”:
There are no effective prescriptions for one effective pedagogy. All speech is not equal, and this fact makes for a murky terrain with no easy solution. Ironically, one of the few places we might be able to exorcise some of the roots of inequality of speech is in the classroom, as painful and messy as this process may be. Until all voices are recognized equally, we must operate within a context of historicized ethics which consciously privileges the insurrectionary and dissenting voices, sometimes at the minor cost of silencing those voices that have been permitted dominant status for the past centuries (2005: 13).
Often when TAs (and professors!) think that students have been adequately prepared to engage with critical analyses through the preparatory work that they have been doing with them in a course, their rejection of such analyses can come as a shock, and can leave even the most well-prepared teacher at a loss as to how to handle the situation. As Berlak argues, “[…] the shattering of naturalized worldviews is profoundly disorienting and painful in itself” (2005: 135). In the case studies that follow, students are in tutorials discussing what happened in the lectures that immediately preceded the tutorials. We are dealing with students’ investments in dominant ideologies around sexuality and gender relations that present a strong resistance to critical analyses.9 In these situations (and they are certainly not unusual), students’ reactions foster a myriad of emotional, intellectual, and interpersonal challenges for TAs who are invested in critical analyses. The business of working with students to get them to understand the analysis, and at least consider investing in it, is tough work for TAs.10
Case Study #1:
Disruption: Kara Gilles’ Guest Lecture on Sex Work
In 2005, toward the end of her first and second year sociology courses (175 and 150 students respectively), Professor Langan invites Kara Gilles, a Toronto sex worker and sex workers’ rights activist, to attend her classes as a guest lecturer. Kara’s CV speaks to an enviable record of funded research, lectures, conferences, workshops, published works, community activism and advocacy, consultations and policy reviews. An eloquent speaker, she uses a social constructionist analysis to argue that sex workers are seen as commodities to be controlled, both through criminalization and legalization. She locates prostitution within the broader context of labour and women’s work, and argues that sex work is a form of labour through which women can exercise self-determination, thus challenging the view that sex work is about objectification and victimization. In sum, her analyses squarely tackle the dominant, taken-for-granted assumptions about sex work and sex workers. Kara engages openly with students following her presentation, answering frankly all the questions that they raise. Marcia, a TA at that time in the second year course, met with one tutorial group immediately following Kara’s guest lecture.
Marcia’s Account of Her Tutorial Experience
The tutorial following Kara’s guest lecture has forced me to face many of my own taken for granted assumptions underlying a democratic approach to teaching. It was not only my students that were visibly upset and angry, but I too reacted in ways that were emotionally charged and combative. In this tutorial, I was confronted with a number of angry and emotionally charged students. Admittedly unprepared for such a discussion, I opened a space for students to respond to Kara’s visit. As students explained their disapproval of Kara’s analysis, I attempted to identify and challenge the taken for granted assumptions underpinning their arguments. I remember thinking and reassuring myself during the encounter that the emergent dialogue was positive and constructive, even though I was aware of my bodily reactions – shaky, nervous, constant knot in my throat, feeling flushed and heated, struggled finding words. Looking back, however, I understand that this act of reassurance aimed, on the one hand, to rationally master the impulsiveness and contradictions of my own mixture of emotions, specifically feelings of frustration, empathy, tolerance, and anger with my students, and on the other hand, to establish a sense of order and coherence to this seemingly chaotic and unproductive encounter. Although I comforted myself that this was a positive and constructive encounter, and though I encouraged myself to be patient and tolerant with the dominant discourses my students unproblematically espoused, I reacted in ways that were visibly identifiable to both myself and others. As one student commented:
Yet I felt like you were so adamant on your position and made us feel like we were wrong no matter what. Don’t get me wrong, I think you’re an amazing TA […] but by the end of tutorial I felt like it came to the point that if I didn’t agree with you then my grade would be affected because you seemed to be getting mad at me for not feeling the same way as you.
The email exchanges between students and myself following tutorial have provided me with a context to reflexively engage with this encounter, specifically with my emotional reactions during the encounter itself and with disruption and dissent in the classroom more generally. This particular encounter has shown me that my efforts to create a safe and open space for dialogical exchanges often foreclosed the display of deep emotions by redirecting confrontation to the attainment of harmony within the classroom. The visible display of anger, frustration and hostility by both my students and myself disrupted the aims of democratic arrangements and dialogue in ways that resulted in an emotional hangover comprised of feelings of guilt and remorse. The days following the encounter left a number of students and myself feeling ‘bad’ about how tutorial unfolded. Worried about how others viewed us, we attempted to clarify our positions and recover a sense of harmony between us. This is evident in a number of emails that I received after tutorial and in my response to these emails. As one student wrote:
Marcia, I do not hold any grudge or even a bad impression of you. I believe that you have been a wonderful leader and have made a lot of difference to my understanding of the course and course content. I hope that this instance does not affect the way you view me either. I would like to leave this course knowing that the relationships made in tutorial are not harmed in any way and that I have not offended you in any way and if I have, I am sorry. The discussion today was heated, and if I could do it all over again, I would be more clear on my position and cautious of my actions.
My response to this student also illustrates an apologetic and remorseful message. In clarifying my intention I wrote:
Let me start by apologizing … I can see from your email that I upset you on Thursday – that was not my intention. However, I feel that there may be some misunderstandings regarding my intentions and my approach in Thursday’s discussion. Although I understand that you have strong opinions regarding this specific discussion, my comments were meant to challenge the underlying assumptions present within your argument. I know this can be deeply upsetting at times, perhaps even threatening, to our morals, beliefs and values – to our sense of self – but my aim was to challenge the dominant discourses present within your argument rather than your personal beliefs and opinions.
Marcia’s Reflective Analysis (1 year later)
Over the past four years I have struggled emotionally and intellectually with my role as both student and teacher.11 Committed to the political project of disrupting taken for granted assumptions underlying dominant worldviews, I have aimed to create a safe and inclusive learning space for my students, wherein everyone is free to speak and every voice is valued and heard. In this process, however, I have come to understand the project of creating inclusive, egalitarian and democratic dialogue as limited, and arguably problematic, in and of itself. Democratic dialogue not only fosters “repetition that does not disrupt the common wisdom” (Berlak, 2005: 143), it also functions to suppress strong emotions and confrontation in the classroom. Dialogue is often confined to the standards of acceptable bourgeois decorum, which operates to undermine constructive forms of confrontation and conflict that emerge from intense, and often aversive, responses (hooks, 1994). Everyone is free to speak and to be heard, which means, in democratically translated terms, everyone is free to speak in ways that are respectful, sensitive, and attentive to divergent socio-cultural contexts and multiple facets of identity that constitute one’s sense of self and the selves of others. bell hooks describes the bourgeois class biases shaping pedagogical processes in the classroom:
As silence and obedience to authority were most rewarded, students learned that this was the appropriate demeanor in the classroom. Loudness, anger, emotional outbursts, and even something as seemingly innocent as unrestrained laughter were deemed unacceptable, vulgar disruptions of classroom social order (1994: 178).
It is not surprising that heated and emotional discussions in the classroom produce feelings of discomfort and alarm in those participating and witnessing the encounter. Very few educators, and I would argue students as well, receive the necessary preparation to constructively negotiate and facilitate the unexpected, emotional responses to controversial dialogue.
[E]motional reactions of students to non-traditional pedagogy have not yet received adequate scholarly attention. Too often, pedagogues enter the classroom with the intention of unsettling students by challenging them to critically analyze mainstream discourses, without adequate consideration of how they will prepare learners for the potential emotional consequences of such teaching (Wagner, 2005:262).
Had I had this training, and had I been aware of my own investments in maintaining social order in the classroom, I may have been better prepared to navigate “between exploration and confrontation” (Berlak, 2005: 141), between the unexpected reactions of my students and of myself in the tutorial following Kara’s guest lecture on sex work.
Leading up to Kara’s guest lecture, students and I had been working on identifying taken-for-granted assumptions underpinning dominant discourses of intimacy and heterosexuality (such as challenging conceptions of intimacy as monogamous and couple-oriented and sex work as a social problem rather than as a legitimate form of paid labour). Understanding that these assumptions are often invisible and very much central to our sense of selves, the course content aimed to disrupt and challenge the invisibility and centrality of such assumptions in how we make sense of our everyday lived experiences and subjectivities. Kara’s intervention was particularly challenging for students as illustrated by their reactions in one minute papers that Debra had them complete following Kara’s lecture. As one student commented:
As far as the topic goes, I would like to say that I really DO NOT believe that sex workers are in essence BAD PEOPLE or that the occupation is BAD, but I would like to think that it is my decision whether or not to believe that it is appropriate. Just because we are taught to be critical on certain issues does not mean that I MUST challenge all of them and change my mind if I strongly hold against it. Because of moral and religious aspects of my life and because of what I have been taught by family, my opinions are highly conditioned and therefore may seem opposing. Yet, I do like to think that I do not in any way judge people who do say choose sex work as their career for any reason […] For anyone, there is no right or wrong belief … people can choose to believe what they like. Yes, we should be critical of the dominant discourses and seek to challenge them, but if I don’t see the positive in some, I don’t think that I should be forced to change.
Another student expresses something similar:
Listen I just wanted to talk to you about what happened in tutorial today. I really felt like my opinions were being shut down in many ways just because they were the opinions associated with the dominant discourse. I know that you want us to challenge this and that’s what I like about this course but I just didn’t want to challenge this issue because I felt a certain way about it for a reason and my reasons aren’t necessarily because that’s what I’ve been taught […] I love how everyone got opinionated on the issue and that a debate went on because that’s how tutorial[s] are supposed to be but I felt like no matter what I said you thought I was wrong which I don’t think is fair because everyone is entitled to their position on any issue.
We find at the center of both these narratives, expressions of emotion and feeling – specifically expressions of anger, frustration, and discomfort with counter-discourses that challenge deep-seated taken-for-granted assumptions underpinning personal beliefs and values. The challenges Kara’s lecture presented to some members of the class were particularly intense for a number of reasons: not only did Kara challenge assumptions about intimacy, heterosexuality and paid labour (assumptions that are fundamental to conceptions of self) but she also challenged assumptions about acceptable class ‘content’ and acceptable ‘authority’ or ‘expert’ knowledge figures. Enter stereotypes - Kara did not look or speak like one might assume when thinking of a ‘sex worker’. Using sophisticated theoretical discourse and a decontstructionist method, Kara challenged students to see themselves holding internalized rigid heterosexist messages about romantic love, intimacy, “legitimate” types of families and kinds of work. The challenge to question cherished beliefs, as Boler notes, “is not one all students readily accept” (1999:186), as already indicated by some students’ responses.
Our tutorial encounter, and the emails exchanged post-tutorial, frame emotions as occurrences that are “natural” and private – occurrences that exist outside political and critical inquiry – as seen in the previous remark “everyone is entitled to their position on any issue”. Drawing on the work of Boler, part of my challenge now is to understand and work with an understanding of emotions as relational, collaboratively formed and embedded in power relations (Boler, 1999: 103); admittedly a rather difficult challenge to put into practice. It involves a rethinking and a reframing of my own deep-seated assumptions that, although identifiable in theory, are not easily put into practice in critical teaching moments. So although Boler argues that “a pedagogy that recognizes emotions as central to the domains of cognition and morality need not preclude intellectual rigor or critical inquiry” (1999: 110), one of my central problematics is to identify within my own pedagogical approach how the structures of academia and academic rigor construct emotion and reason, feeling and intellect in dichotomous relations, wherein rational thought processes are valued and prioritized. In my post-tutorial responses to these students, I use these dichotomies and privilege reason over emotion to urge students to exercise “self-control” by drawing a distinction between their normative opinion (rooted in their emotions) and critical analyses (detached intellectual rigor). My email to these students states:
My aim on Thursday was to challenge the moral superiority and judgement that I saw/heard in both Monday’s lecture and in tutorial … When dialogue is reduced to normative claims/opinions and objective of critical and constructive thinking disappears, it is not surprising that we feel personally violated and offended. This is why I attempted many times to return our focus to rethinking dominant discourses of intimacy, heterosexuality […] and paid labour – away from personal beliefs and values – hoping that this would reframe our discussion and minimize students’ resistance to different perspectives concerning sex work.
Looking back at my words, I am frustrated with how I dealt with our encounter. My students expressed that they felt like they were not being heard. Instead of focusing my attention on the power relations that guided my response and judgments, I attempted to control the situation by reminding my students of “classroom etiquette” (as developed at the very beginning of the course when we collaboratively decided on appropriate conduct in the classroom) and by encouraging students to “focus on the course material” and “the objectives of the course.” I did not see at that time, that these strategies simply aimed to re-establish myself as authority figure, as “expert”, and expressed an emotional response that was largely defensive and – by the end – angry.
One student comments: “[My classmate] and I both left the class really emotional and upset because we felt like we weren’t allowed to feel the way we felt just because of the idea that everything needs to be challenged and we were worried that you hated us because of it.” While I saw myself as simply encouraging critical reflection and inquiry, students felt profoundly threatened and shut down. Boler reminds us that “an educator’s invitation to transformative action and change may well be perceived either as a threat of felt or literal loss” (1999: 194). Students’ subjectivities and identities, and admittedly mine as well, are invested in dominant and contradictory discourses. When dominant discourses are challenged, emotional reactions are central to how we, as both students and teachers, negotiate our subjectivities and our place in the world with others. When emotions emerge in the classroom, they present a powerful and valuable teaching tool - one that can disrupt naturalized worldviews that partly constitute a sense of self. At the time, however, I was unable to see how we were bound to different ideological commitments and I was unable to see how our emotional reactions presented obstacles that prevented listening to and witnessing each others’ counter-positions. The emergent power struggle reduced complex and emotionally charged issues to an either/or and right/wrong situation. Uniting a pedagogy of discomfort with a politics of listening that is attentive to “what it is that one doesn’t want to know”(Boler 1999: 200) demands that we, as both students and teachers, be attentive and receptive to emotions as “part of critical and ethical inquiry” (Williams 1977 cited in Boler:23). This particular tutorial experience has forced me to rethink my own pedagogical approach and assumptions, specifically in attending to the pain and disorientation that can arise when certain things that are taken as “natural” and “self-evident” are called into question and turned inside-out (also see Berlak, 2005: 135). It has also alarmed me to the often-overlooked pedagogical task of practicing emotional epistemologies that are collective, rather than individual, projects in the classroom.
Case Study #2:
Disruption: The Video, Reframing the Montreal Massacre
In her first year sociology course, Professor Langan frequently demonstrates how gender inequality intersects with other forms of inequality. About 1/3 of the way through the course she shows a video entitled Reframing the Montreal Massacre. Prior to the events that are described below, Langan had not used the video intentionally for the purposes of “disruption” in class, but the experience of her TA, Laurel Atkinson, has shed light on the disruptive potential of the video. The video provides a critical analysis of the way in which the murders of the fourteen women at L’Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal in 1989 was treated by the mainstream media. The argument is that these media representations serve to perpetuate dominant views of women as silent and obedient. Langan alerts students to pertinent sociological concepts and questions that they should consider as they watch the video, and she engages in a debriefing lecture following the video, clarifying the analysis and engaging with students around their questions. Laurel, a TA in the first year course, met with two different tutorial groups, following that lecture time slot.
Laurel Atkinson’s Account of Her Tutorial Experience
My WebCT posting to our teaching team’s discussion forum, and the e-mail exchanges that followed, describe how the disruption in lecture affected both me and my students.
( Web CT posting)
Subject: gender inequality tutorial covert nightmare from hell
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Message no. 45Author: Laurel Atkinson (hummock) Date: Tuesday, November 15, 2005 6:11am
Laurel’s Reflective Analysis (5 months later…..)
After the WebCT posting, I contacted Debra by e-mail and told her that I really needed to talk to her in person about the tutorial described above. We met the following day, shared ideas, and Debra offered personal insights into dealing with students’ emotional responses to critical analyses. She didn’t try to problem solve for me; nor did she discount my feelings as hysterical. I asked: How can you go on doing what you do, day after day, knowing that you are up against such a hateful backlash? Where is the benefit?
As feminist (both environmentalist and anti-racist) teachers, we often say to ourselves that education is the key; that making space for unheard voices is the answer and, following this, everything else will simply fall into place. But after my tutorial, I felt like this could never be the solution. Up until then, I thought that through teaching I was contributing to fighting for feminist rights and ideals in our society, albeit in a small way. In bearing witness to this education myth, I was left wondering if my path of living and teaching feminist pedagogy was actually ineffective, obsolete, and of no concern to students. Debra’s thoughts and counsel on this came back to time – I can’t expect to turn over everybody after a one-hour tutorial. Difficult concepts, ones that are counter-status quo, take time to take root.
For the rest of the semester, I ran my tutorials pretty much the same as I did before. I found, however, that I shied away from discussing topics that could be too controversial for me to have felt that I could handle in a non-emotional way. We didn’t discuss the recent Muslim cartoon controversy, because I didn’t want to get emotionally entangled in Islamaphobia. I know that this is not because I felt intellectually inept to run a tutorial on such subject matter; I just feared losing self control of my emotions in front of my students. I treated them like they were a pack of wolves that could smell fear a mile away, and I had to assert my dominance by truly being fearless. I feared losing control over my body in class: crying, turning red, or raising my voice in anger would have been equivalent to showing weakness in an educational system that values an intellect divorced from a body.
In working toward challenging and changing students’ consciousness about structural inequalities, I know it’s not enough for me to rely on time or the support of a system of like-minded educators and feminists. As Debra has reminded me, there is the very real possibility that students may choose not to invest in discourses that are critical of the status quo, some/many will instead rely on the doctrine of individualism as the solution to transforming structural inequalities (Langan and Davidson, 2005). I challenge our standard educational practices which say that simply reading about a new concept is enough to truly understand anti-oppression issues. I want my students to be as emotionally affected as I have been; I want them to feel something – anything – whether it be shame, anger, or rage. My desire to emotionally engage my students is rooted in my belief that being emotional is tantamount to truly understanding anti-oppression discourses. I also believe that emotion has value in the classroom also because it allows us to embody an experience and therefore truly understand it.
However, our current model of education dichotomizes reason and emotion, and this has implications for how I am viewed by the students if I show emotion when in the role of rational teacher. A teacher who is seen as emotional is not seen as rational, and rationality is valued while emotions are not. As a teacher then, I have little room in which to engage students in a discussion which allows for my emotional responses. In my reflections posted on WebCT, I highlighted this frustration by saying, “I have to stay very ‘unemotional’ and ‘rational’ --- i have to live in the white/western/male way of doing things because to do otherwise would be to ‘give in’ to those stereotypes of the raving feminist.” I was concerned that the students would see me, the emotional feminist woman, as an inadequate teacher. Women are already positioned as ‘more emotional’ and ‘less rational’ than their male counterparts; we are already seen as being less able than male teachers. Hence, my anger and frustrations over not being able to intellectually penetrate dominant ideological positions on the topic of gender inequality were compounded by the fact that my emotional response to this threatened to devalue me as a teacher, even more so than was already the case by virtue of the fact that I am a woman (see Davidson and Langan, 2006, for an elaboration of how features of identity conflate to devalue women teachers).
Ann Berlak challenges our standard educational system, saying that the answers to students’ critical engagement in anti-racist discourses “have less to do with ensuring opportunities for students from disempowered groups to speak, or for particular viewpoints to be spoken, than with trauma, erasure, mourning, and expression of feeling in the classroom” (2005: 123). She asks us to question previous educational systems of simple conversation and introducing new concepts. At first glance, Berlak’s theory is difficult to accept because it challenges our taken-for-granted pedagogical assumptions of avoiding causing trauma at all costs. Berlak maintains that students will never truly understand the pervasiveness and gravity of racism by learning about it in a detached, unemotional way: it must be made emotional because it is emotional. Berlak too believes that expressing emotions about a human experience means that students begin to ‘get it,’ and also that those who buy into the dominant discourse have a duty to experience the trauma that is only experienced by oppressed groups To Berlak, the costs of (re)living a trauma are outweighed by the benefit that such a collective and emotional experience can offer. The risk, and potential problem with this model, is that the trauma may be (re)lived only by the oppressed groups. This happened in my tutorial: I experienced an emotional response, relieved the trauma of my own past experiences of violence in an insulated way, and was not able to collectively share my emotions.
The next time I am confronted with an emotionally-charged educational setting, I know that I will be better prepared. At the very least, I now know that students erect steadfast barriers which protect themselves from engaging in critical discourses – the same discourses about which I feel so passionately. This is, and will continue to be, difficult for me to accept. I still haven’t resolved how I feel about becoming emotional in the classroom. If students allowed themselves to demonstrate emotions and feeling, getting more personally involved in concepts, perhaps I would feel more comfortable doing the same. Nobody should feel silenced in the classroom, including the teacher.
As these case studies and other data from our research demonstrate, tutorials are sites in which students and TAs experience, and in some cases express, a range of emotions. Such accounts raise the question of how emotions should, or should not, be addressed during classroom discussions. This question is one that has seldomly been addressed in the literature, and that until now was not specifically addressed in our research. Educational locations, particularly in higher education, are expected to be environments of rationality, not emotionality, and as Laurel acknowledges, the ideology that we, as teachers, should act only in rational ways when faced with emotionally charged situations, is highly problematic, and reflects pervasive Western discourses on the appropriate ‘place’ of emotions in social life. In her book, Feeling Power, Megan Boler argues that
[a] primary goal of education is to discipline young people’s social and moral values and behaviors. This moral conduct is inextricably tied to emotional control. Although social control is directed at all who participate in education – teachers, administrators, and students – discourses of emotion in education are most consistently present and visible in relation to women (1999: 30-31).
Both Marcia and Laurel’s accounts speak to the ways in which they felt obliged to control a public display of their emotions, and for good reason. The findings of our research show that students respond most negatively to women TAs who express emotion in tutorials, especially if the emotions expressed are related to challenging the status quo. The condemnation that tends to characterize students’ responses to the emotional expressions of a female TA typically is seen in disparaging remarks about who the TA is as an individual. Boler notes this trend:
To support the dominant discourses of rationality and the exclusion of women from the public sphere, emotions have been consistently individualized and privatized. Emotions are assigned as women’s dirty work, and then used against her as an accusation of her inferior irrationality (1999:43).
What does this all mean for TAs and their work in tutorials? We believe that “[u]ntil we develop pedagogies that invite emotions as part of critical and ethical inquiry, our resistance to the pervasive Western discourses of emotions may well remain “embryonic” (Williams 1977 in Boler, 1999: 23). Why is it important to challenge dominant discourses that individualize emotions and relegate emotional expression to the margins of academic life? Boler addresses this question:
I see education as a means to challenge rigid patterns of thinking that perpetuate injustice and instead encourage flexible analytic skills, which include the ability to self-reflectively evaluate the complex relations of power and emotion. As an educator I understand my role to be not merely to teach critical thinking, but to teach critical thinking that seeks to transform consciousness […] (1999: 157).
The experiences of Marcia and Laurel underscore the necessity to address emotions in an explicit way. So how shall we deal with emotions in the classroom, both ours and our students? We are not going to, nor do we want to, eliminate emotions from teaching and learning processes, but this requires a creative approach that attempts to bridge the deeply entrenched and taken-for-granted divide between emotion and critical inquiry. Our position is that we need to construct a framework for discussions, a systematic approach that can be used as we work with students in unpacking the complex ways disruptions in the classroom, and tutorial discussions that follow, feel. This must be a collective process, we should not think of it as being up to each of us to do the work individually – TAs will need to take the lead in modeling this approach, but students must become engaged participants as well.
Still attentive to the many complicating issues that we recognize with respect to our quest for “democratic dialogue,” we turn our attention now to considering a series of steps for structuring the way dialogue unfolds within the classroom. What has inspired our thinking is our recently emerging analysis around an important distinction between “critical thinking” and “critical discourse.” Richard A. Lynch provides a useful definition of “critical thinking:”
Perhaps most fundamentally, good critical thinking entails what we might describe as an attitude of “reflective openness and challenge.” What I mean here is a willingness to genuinely consider new perspectives – to try to understand them from the inside – and at least for a little while, to step outside one’s own views and acknowledge that one’s perspectives, assumptions, and outlook are vulnerable, perhaps even mistaken, or incomplete. A critical thinker is willing to turn that criticism upon these new approaches and herself, and sometimes even to change what she’s doing or what she believes in light of these critical insights. This core attitude may in fact be what makes critical thinking ‘critical’ – without it, critical thinking becomes a hollow shell, a mere analytic tool applied to externally determined ends (2003).
As we reflect upon our focus in this research, we recognize that we often (mis)used the phrase “critical thinking” to refer also to students’ investments in critical discourses, rather than as an orientation that allows for the consideration of new perspectives (or “critical discourses”), or as Lynch states as “an attitude of ‘reflective openness and challenge.’” The separation of the notion of consideration (of discourses, of oneself) from the notion of investment in critical discourses helps us to plan how to deal with emotions in teaching and learning. We do not want to eliminate emotion from the teaching process, but we do want to locate where and how emotion is most likely to manifest as we model for students a critical orientation. One can engage in critical thinking, and be upset by having one’s “perspectives, assumptions, and outlook(s)” (Lynch, 2003) challenged. The presentation of critical discourse, as enacted through the video and guest lecture “disruptions”, challenged students’ views and students weren’t instructed on how to separate their 1) opinion/reaction to what was communicated from 2) an analysis of what was communicated (i.e., an articulation of what they were ‘from the inside’) 3) from an analysis of why they (the students) were responding to the disruptions in the ways that they were (to turn the criticism upon oneself, to engage in a reflexive analysis of oneself and one’s reaction – to answer why one reacts in the way that one does). We now recognize the need for a framework for discussions that will guide students and TAs in a deconstruction of the emotional and intellectual elements stimulated by the disruption. This would involve separating, explicitly, an identification of TAs’ and individual students’ opinions/reactions to the disruption, from an analysis of the substantive content of the disruption, from a consideration of why the disruption engendered the opinions/reactions that it did. Such a framework ensures a space to acknowledge and talk about emotions as part of scholarly work, and it draws attention to how students are positioned, emotionally and intellectually, in relation to the various theoretical orientations to the substantive foci of the course. A systematic approach to critical thinking in tutorials will provide a foundation for nurturing students’ investments in critical discourses, a fourth ‘step’ whose elaboration lies beyond the scope of this paper. Our reflections in this article have helped us to deal with our emotions as teachers who purposefully impose and reinforce the dissemination and interrogation of critical discourses in our classrooms. We have acknowledged and analyzed the emotional dimensions of our work with students, and in so doing developed a way of enhancing educational experiences through explicitly working with our own, and our students’, emotional responses to disruptions. Deconstructing these aspects of the collective experiences of teachers and learners is imperative if we are to engage students and support them in the contemplation of, and potential investment in, critical discourses.
1. Deborah Davidson is completing her Ph.D. at York University and has worked with Langan over the past 8 years, both as a TA, and as the Research Director for the project described here. Ron Sheese is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at York University, former Director of the Centre for the Support of Teaching at York, and with Langan, a co- Principal Investigator on this project.
2. A central theme in the literature is that regardless of the efforts of feminist teachers to have students appreciate how social structures perpetuate inequality and relate to their own lives, for most students the oppressive structures of society remain vague. While they acknowledge the feminist goals of equality, students also seem to have little or no interest in examining the barriers to achieving equality even after they have been exposed to feminist analyses of structural inequality. The predominant view is that the feminist ‘fight’ has been won, so that it is now up to the individual to take advantage of opportunities for equality (e.g., Budgeon, 2001). The persistence of individualistic ideologies among students is well documented, as is the presence of contradictions in discourse on (in)equality (e.g., Langan, 2001; Wetherell, Stiven, and Potter, 1987; Volman and Ten Dam, 1998).
3. The data include transcripts of e-mail communications; written and audio-taped field notes from our participant observation; students’ written assignments; audio tapes of focus group discussions among TAs; anonymous course evaluations; unstructured questionnaire responses elicited in tutorials.
4. The data include transcripts of e-mail communications; written and audio-taped field notes from our participant observation; students’ written assignments; audio tapes of focus group discussions among TAs; anonymous course evaluations; unstructured questionnaire responses elicited in tutorials.
5. Our understanding of the individual as socially constituted in relation with others is influenced by various theoretical challenges to the commonly held belief that there is “an inborn individualism within each person” (Rossiter, 1988:212). For our purposes here, subjectivity or one’s sense of self is seen as socially constructed; shaped, in part, by historically specific social influences, such as concrete material conditions, intersubjective relations with others, discourses, and social structures at the level of socio-cultural, economic, political institutions. Resisting the slippery slope of determinism, our approach in understanding subjectivity fits within larger theoretical efforts to grasp both the enabling and constraining effects of social phenomena in constituting a sense of self that is experienced, and arguably taken for granted, as essential, fixed, and purely individual.
6. As we reflect upon the position we articulated in Langan and Davidson (2005), we are struck by how the messiness of emotions has been omitted in our articulation of how we approach working with students.
7. Disruptions in our project have not always been intentionally planned. In Case Study #1, the disruption was planned; a controversial guest lecturer was brought in to ‘bring home’ a critical analysis of sex work. In the second case, the disruption was unplanned; we showed a video that provided a critical analysis of how gender inequality is perpetuated via media representations. The video evoked a response that we did not anticipate. In the lecture hall, during the discussion that followed the video, students appeared to be united in their disavowal of the critical analysis. Many students voiced opposing opinions and analyses, and since there was no debate from other students, we assumed that the silence of others reflected a consensual resistance to the video’s critical analysis. As we learned the next year when we individually, and privately, surveyed the students following the controversial guest lecturer (see endnote 9), students who are silent during a discussion most often are not in invested in dominant discourses like those who publicly reinforce dominant discourses.
8. Marcia Oliver has worked on this project for the past two years, and Laurel Atkinson for the past year. They have been part of a larger team of TAs, this past year numbering 14, a wonderfully spirited, talented, and caring group of colleagues!
9. The vast majority of the students in the lecture discussion following Kara Gilles guest lecture appeared to resent the fact that class time had been used for this guest speaker. Furthermore, they also appeared to remain invested in dominant discourses of sex work as deviant and immoral. Yet, when asked to respond individually, and privately to the same question, we found that it was the majority of students who thought the use of class time was good. Approximately 80% in each of the two classes said that they thought having Kara guest lecture was an appropriate use of the class time (one minute papers, March 2005). Furthermore, 33%-40% showed at least some investment in critical discourses that were in keeping with Kara’s position on the topic of sex work (28% were very invested, while 5-12% were somewhat invested). What appeared to be the case, therefore, differed depending on whether people were asked publicly, or privately, for their position on the lecture.
10. Students have to do emotion work because of lecture and tutorial discussions too, of course. Even when students become critically invested, there are emotional prices to be paid. I think of the one student who approached me after class recently (March 2006), extremely agitated and confused about how to manage the critical analyses to which he had become so deeply committed. “Everywhere I look, everything I do, is now affected by how I have learned to be critical – I can’t escape it. It’s driving me crazy! You have lots of experience, Professor Langan, how do you carry on? How can you live a world where every day you see the injustices, how do you manage this?”
11. In addition to working with Debra Langan as a TA on the teaching/learning research project for the past two years, I also worked with her during two years prior to that, on different courses at York University.
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