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A
freshman student recently stood me up. Later, she came to apologize
for having missed our meeting and explained that she had thrown
all her energy into another class because she was worried sick
that she would fail it. She had therefore confined herself to
her room for days to make sure that she lived up to the expectations
of a new assignment for that class. Her problem, she explained,
was that the professor in the other class found her thinking too
unsophisticated for college and that her vocabulary in class and
in her papers was ”simple”. The student was devastated
and didn’t know what to do to ”fix” the problem.
She believed that, though other students used fancier concepts
in class discussions, her own thinking about the themes of the
class were just as interesting and complex as theirs. She had
met with the professor to explain herself and to find out how
to fulfill the requirements of the class. At the meeting, he had
suggested that she learn two new words a day to expand her intellectual
horizon. The student was appalled and felt she was being patronized
and wronged. I too was very surprised and uncomfortable with the
professor’s advice to her and, although this might have
been poor judgment on my part, I told her so. Obviously, I didn’t
know the story from the “other” side but I wondered
if the professor failed to realize how patronizing and humiliating
his suggestion was despite what was probably good intentions to
help a student improve.
Then again, how would I have handled the situation? While I feel
that the professor’s advice is a reflection of a top-down
teaching method which seldom works to bring out students’
own thoughts and unique experiences, what would I do in a similar
situation if I truly felt that a student lacked sophistication
in her way of expressing herself? Did I just dodge the question
out of fear of hurting someone’s feelings? Or is there,
as I suspect there is, more to a discussion about academic eloquence
than whether it is appropriate to suggest that a student learns
two new words a day?
Teachers and students are obviously situated differently in the
hierarchical space within which the production and exchange of
knowledge take place in our universities --regardless of gender,
race and class -- but this particular encounter happened to be
between a white, intellectual male and a Latina woman from a poorer
part of the U.S. It therefore turned into what I, for lack of
a better term, will call a “neo-colonial” encounter.
The meeting about academic expectations was between two people
from groups which have historically been the privileged and underprivileged
respectively (socio-economically as well as educationally). I
wondered what impact such historical positioning has on whose
knowledge is being taught. Is it his (the Western world’s,
the privileged classes’, the primarily white intellectuals’)
knowledge and can it ever be “ours” (hers too)? Was
it only because educational standards were not met in this particular
situation that class, race and gender were not erased as important
markers in the meeting? Or are we incorrectly assuming that academic
discourse carries with it a mutual language and an intellectual
community, which supersedes more local languages and knowledges
stemming from the ethnic, class and gender background of students
and teachers? I suggest that meetings between students and teachers
of different backgrounds are always marked by how that difference
has and continues to play out in larger social and political contexts.
Does it matter? If so, what can we do about it?
I raise these questions not to vilify the instructor or victimize
the student but to try to think through issues which relate to
my own teaching and which may be pertinent to all teachers in
multicultural and diverse classrooms. I do this by analyzing a
recent situation where the theme of the class I taught--white
European dominance and marginalization of Muslim immigrants--was
about to be reenacted in the very classroom in which I tried to
deconstruct the hierarchy and defy easy categorizations. I found
myself (maybe) silencing one of my non-Western minority students
in a discourse, which was meant to deconstruct the dominant narrative
and provide a space for minority work. Hence, in a situation where
I made a conscious effort to be sensitive to the larger social
and political context of our diverse racial, class, gender and
religious backgrounds, my own situated identity as a teacher who
grew up in a European country intersected and interfered with
my relationship to and understanding of the student in ways I
had not anticipated.
(continued)
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