By Dr. Josef Vice

Sharing our authentic selves with students can make us feel vulnerable, but it’s one strategy for ensuring equity in our classrooms and supporting our students’ identity development and writing skills. This blog post explores strategies teachers can implement to support all students in their quest to have their voices heard and to achieve their academic goals.

No one seems to have done the math, but if the average college teacher’s career is around 30 years, and they teach at least 100 students per term, two terms a year, that means they directly impact the lives of at least 6,000 students. The online instructor teaching four or five terms a year may see double that. No doubt, we all hope that every student succeeds in our classes. We know, though, that the academic, financial, and other life challenges our students face don’t always allow this to be realized. That shouldn’t, of course, stop us from encouraging our students to embrace these challenges and even see failure as an opportunity to learn, grow, and realize their dreams.

Do we, though, give ourselves, as teachers, the grace and opportunity to grow from our own failures? Hobbs (2023) reminds us that even what he calls “preventable failures,” stemming from inexperience, “poor decision making,” or the hesitance to seek alternative ways to meet the needs of our students (para. 4), offer us the chance to embrace the very learning process we hope our students will welcome. One of my biggest teaching failures occurred some 17 years ago, when I was three years into teaching online. In their prewriting for a persuasive essay assignment in a second-term College Composition course, the student I failed proposed that the government should support transgender rights, a topic personally relevant to them, as a transgender woman. I suggested, in what I thought was supportive feedback, that they were on the right track but that focusing on a specific transgender right, with a specific action the government should take, would be more successful.

What this student, one of the first students in my classes with the courage to share their transgender identity, heard, though, was that I thought their topic was inappropriate. They felt I was silencing them, and even complained to my then-supervisor, suggesting I was homophobic and uncaring. They emailed me, questioning my knowledge of the topic and asking how I could possibly offer anyone advice on writing when I, clearly, was not a good writer. They promised to sue me and get me fired. I felt angry and even vulnerable, and in turn, filed a Student Code of Conduct violation. How could I be homophobic, I thought. After all, I am a gay man. I couldn’t be uncaring. I wanted this student to succeed, and all I had done was encourage them to limit their topic.

In the end, this student apologized, saying that they had overreacted. They limited the topic and wrote one of the strongest first-year papers I have read, earning an A in the course. Even so, I still failed this student. It took me years of soul-searching to recognize that this failure came from my own poor decision-making, but this experience now informs how I teach, reminding me that creating an equitable learning environment means sharing my authentic self so that students, in turn, do the same.

At the time, I didn’t do that. I wasn’t open and honest with the student. I didn’t say that I thought they were brave for sharing their identity. I didn’t tell them who I am. I didn’t share my experience in the 1980s with starting the first LGBT+ student group at Auburn University. I didn’t say, I understand your frustration and desire to make things better. I hid my authentic self, out of fear of outing myself and losing my other students’ respect.

Strayhorn (2019) notes that students develop a sense of belonging and achieve academic success only if they feel what we say to them shows we believe who they are or what they have to say is important. Our historically minoritized students bring with them the long-term effects of the traumas inflicted upon them by society; how we interact with them determines whether we reinforce these traumas or help them manage them.

First-year writing courses offer us, as teachers, an amazing opportunity. Studies (Kumari & Theilan, 2020; Shapiro, 2020) note that these classes, and our interaction with our students, including how we respond to their writing, impact our students’ construction of self. Research indicates that LGBTQIA2S+ students, for example, hesitate to write about their lived experiences because they fear that their instructors will be biased against them and their grades will reflect this (Sims, 2021).

What can we do then, to be more aware of what students bring to our classes, and how can we better support these students both in what they write about and how we grade their writing?

1. Be more honest with who you are and share your successes and failures. Students don’t need our perfection. When I started telling my students about my failed attempts at writing a dissertation before finally getting it done at 60, this told them that no matter who they are, how old they are, or what their past failures have been, this is their second chance, their opportunity to write their success story.
2. Create a welcoming environment. I started sharing my pronouns, mention my husband and our child in my course Instructor Information, and tell students that I am the faculty advisor for our Student Pride Affinity Group; this signals to my students that my class is a safe space and that I embrace who they are.
3. Be more cognizant of who our students are and what they have experienced. They may not like their first-year writing courses because they have been “redlined” in the past–their perception of writing teachers may be that we are rigid, grammar-obsessed, and that we only mark what they have done “wrong” in their papers. Concentrating on what they do well is a good start, but helping them find topics that are meaningful to them can make a huge difference in their ability to recognize that they, too, are writers, with something valuable to say.
4. Be aware of your own biases. We all have them. But grade by the rubric and check biases at the door. Focusing on how they argue their position and helping them find logical support for that position, as well as encouraging them to see the complexities of the issue, even if you disagree with their position entirely, can go a long way, as can focusing on what students can do even better next time.
5. Give students grace. Know that if they come out swinging, it’s because they likely have never had the chance to share their honest thoughts in writing before and that they are, like all of us, exposing their soft underside to us and feel vulnerable. Show them that you understand.

Our students’ failures should not define them, but our own failures can help us re-define ourselves as the more supportive and effective teachers we can be, teachers who show students that they are seen, heard, and valued.

References

Hobbs, W. (2023, March 27). Teachers deserve the chance to learn from failure. EducationWeek. https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/opinion-teachers-deserve-the-chance-to-learn-from-failure/2023/03

Kumari, A., & Theilen, B. M. (2020). English 150: Writing as inquiry–explorations of identity and privilege. Composition Studies, 48(3), 70-82. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1282930.pdf

Shapiro, S. (2020). Inclusive pedagogy in the academic writing classroom: Cultivating communities of belonging. Journal of Academic Writing, 10(1), 154-164. https://doi.org/10.18552/joaw.v10i1.607

Sims, R. E. (2021). Investigating culturally responsive teaching practices in first-year composition. [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. Purdue University. https://doi.org/10.25394/PGS.13755307.v1

Strayhorn, T. (2019). College students’ sense of belonging: A key to educational success for all students (2 ed.). Taylor and Francis. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781315297293