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Monday, January 29, 2007
Reputation, Gender, and Academic Performance
Now that I’ve outlined a project, introduced my work, and started a fight, the time has come to talk about gender. I am fully aware of how conversations about gender* tend to go here. Men are thugs, women are hypersensitive, men more hypersensitive, women are cruel, men are decadently privileged, women are humorless opportunists, men are not as smart as they think they are, women don’t play by the rules, etc. (Or is that the complete set?) You will not be surprised to know that I am pretty sure all of these things are true, and are pretty regularly true in comments here. At least we all seem to agree that there has been a masculinist drift here, and that it’s not a good thing, even if we disagree about the cause for that drift.
Part of the drift has been attributed to the possibility that the stakes of participation here, especially under one’s own name, seem skewed higher for women. I am not sure why that is, except perhaps that in the sticks and stones game, names have historically hurt women quite irreparably. Men who sling mud (and get hit) seem to be able to retain (or regain) a reputation for fairness and intelligence more easily than women. I’m not a huge fan of speculative causality, but I’m guessing this has something to do with thousands of years of male control of resources, filtering down, yea, even unto our internetical relations. Maybe it’s all the warnings we received as girl-children about our “reputations.” Maybe it’s the way our academic careers are framed by the older generations as one-in-a-million chances, threatened always by the Wicked Witch of the Patriarchy who rides through our dreams, shrieking about all the womanly responsibilities we’ve shirked to have a career and the unwomanly compromises we’ve made.**
The nurturing thing goes rather deep. Aspazia sums up quite clearly how the expectation that female faculty will be “caring” and “giving” can create a pretty unreasonable amount of stress, especially for the tenure-tracked. Once you say yes, you must always say yes. And the moment you say no (to committee work, extra meetings with students, being available at all times), that reputation for warmth and generosity is gone in an instant. I’ve heard horror stories at conferences from young female teachers who suddenly, one day, lost control of a class for a whole semester because of a single moment when they needed to crack down a bit after having always played Nice Nanny.
In my own observations at several different colleges, there is another possible reputation a young woman can build, which is for being someone who fiercely refuses to be taken advantage of and rejects any gender stereotype created by students or faculty. Toughness, self-interestedness, and emotional distance are maintained at all costs. Any hint of motherliness must be eradicated. This pose has the benefit of allowing for cracks; if you accidentally show clemency or generosity, you get praised to the heavens for it. But, of course, you risk being seen as an evil harpy, which is never a desirable pre-tenure personality metaphor.
None of us can really maintain either pose all the time. Just like men, women are indeed people, with good and bad days, eccentricities, soft spots and pet peeves. But, as Aspazia suggests, women have to at least think about this pose pretty consciously lest they get sucked into a defined role. We can’t be hand-wavy on a syllabus, and the first day of class must be carefully planned. We often need to set limits with students that our male friends don’t. (Or at least, my male friends inform me that they’ve never had to set limits like “No, seriously, after teaching two classes, I have to eat lunch, alone, because I am hungry and grumpy. I need twenty minutes. Please.") I’ve heard female teachers at more upper-class schools say they have to plan their outfits carefully to match the pose (earth-mother? tough broad?) or students get distracted.
I like to deal with the pose problem by being fairly unpredictable, especially in the classroom. On the first day, I like to create a disconnect between a hyperserious lecturing persona (marching around the room, brows knitted, with a syllabus full of dire warnings and contractual obligations) and deadpan declarations of my nurturing/feeling humanity ("I will write lengthy, caring, and thoughtful comments on your work. You will read and consider those comments before you complain about your grade, lest you hurt my tender feelings"). Some students laugh; others look concerned for my mental health. But there will be days during the semester when the conversation is warm, personally engaging, and fun, and other days when I’ll need to get serious or tough. I don’t want to risk damaging a reputation I’ve built up for one by pulling the other out of nowhere. In the end, my actual behavior is pretty reliable; it’s just the pose that changes.
Thinking about why I created that first-day persona (which I employed this morning) led me to wonder what Valve readers consider their various academic poses, and whether you think about them (a) at all, and (b) in relation to your gender and sexual orientation. What about in relation to race or class? How much is invested in the maintenance of those poses (online, among faculty, in the classroom), and what seem to be the consequences of abandoning them?
* - Thanks to RP in the comments for reminding me of where this is.
** - I’m not ruling out that guys are often jerks to and about women. This goes without saying and we needn’t have a big fight in comments about who says what to whom and how comparatively nasty it is. Guys are also often jerks to each other, as are women to each other, and as women are to men. It’s the comparative effect of the taken-for-granted jerkiness that we’re concerned with here.
Comments
This is a really interesting question - but I almost feel like I need my students to answer for me… ;-P I find that my students fairly consistently manage to single out for praise on evaluations, those precise areas where I feel most like I’m “faking” it: they talk about how organised the course is, for example, or how much background I have in the topic, when my perception is generally that I’ve frantically stitched things together and am barely keeping on top of the material. (Lest my self-perception seem unduly self-abnegating, I should explain that I’m generally slotted in to cover things at the last minute - in the past, this has sometimes happened on the very day classes begin to meet - and so I simply don’t have an opportunity to prepare...)
So, based on the gap between how I feel, and what I read on my evaluations, I suppose I’d have to say that I cultivate a persona of being really prepared and organised… Strangely, I think I specifically don’t project a persona of being knowledgable - I’ll generally admit quite openly what I don’t know, and ask for opinions from the class. I think, though, that this must get interpreted as some kind of strong self-confidence (as opposed to what it is, which is an acknowledgement that I kinda have no other option, if I don’t want to stand in front of the room and BS about subjects I know nothing about...) - I think this is then what translates into students’ assessment that I know the material well…
In terms of how much I think about self-presentation in the classroom: I think quite a lot about projecting my conviction that students will be able to do the required work (I tend to get handed the “hard” courses, so there’s generally a fair amount of student anxiety that needs to be processed before learning can begin).
I also had to think a lot when transitioning to teaching in Australia about how not to overwhelm everyone: compared to where I taught in the US, students at my current university are far less competitive (openly, at least), much less confident speaking in public, but also much more cynical about learning - particularly theoretical learning - and completely oblivious to hierarchy. So I find that it takes a lot more energy at the outset to convince students to invest time and attention in the course, but also that I need to tone down my energy considerably - at least with undergraduates - or they’ll hunker down and hide…
Gender intervenes in complicated ways. There is intense resentment and a sort of discourse of (male) victimisation that surrounds any explicit discussion of feminism here (or even, as I found in a course last term, attempts to talk fairly descriptively about changes to gender roles in the 20th century without this eliciting defensive responses). And there is always at least a small number of male students (?regional? - I haven’t figured this one out) who will go through entire terms with me, refusing ever to make eye contact - I never actually had this happen in the US, and haven’t worked out how to deal with it, or made up my mind whether I need to deal with it, given that it doesn’t seem to correlate with how they perform in the course…
But more than enough from me…
NP, your remark about being willing to admit you don’t know something (and the effect that has on your students’ opinions of you) reminded me of the language of “contract” I found myself using a lot today. Like you, I’m quick to say when I don’t know something or when I’m BSing because I want them to offer me the same courtesy--I won’t lie to you, so don’t lie to me. I told them today that I want them to succeed in the class and will do everything in my power to make that possible, and I therefore expect similar efforts in that direction from them. I think while students may be willing to accept a sort of “fatherly” unequal relationship with a male instructor ("You have to do X because I said so and it’s good for you"), it’s just as unhealthy as the “motherly” model of “Now sweetheart, what can I do to make you feel better?” The contract-based relationship may offer a model to replace the icky family-dynamic with something more like a good workplace model. (I here out myself as someone who thinks some things about business are not revolting.) A good boss gets good work out of workers by making the work environment tolerable and productive.
The description of your pose really saddens me. To be honest, I’m not sure I buy it completely, but that could have just been the department I studied in before (here in the UK it is much different, much more sexist). At DePaul there are so many women on the faculty, so many women grad students, and so many women undergrads (it is nearly 50/50 on all fronts, with faculty hires having the biggest gap) together with a strong emphasis on feminist philosophy that I never felt this kind of pose thing. I felt very friendly with all my profs and hung out with most of my favourites (including two women) outside the classroom at least once. Maybe they were playing the earth mother role, but I always liked to think we had a real relationship even if it was determined by teacher/student rules (which, to me, doesn’t negate the possibility of such a relationship). I guess what I’m saying is I hate poses like what you’re talking about here. They remind me of the evangelical churches I grew up in and the pose my mother took as pastor (which I really recognize in your description more than the women professors I’ve had).
Certainly I’m naïve for wanting academia to be a place of friendships.
It might be a good idea for me to talk more explicitly in terms of something like a contract concept with my students, as I do actually think in terms of something like reciprocal earned respect: I work very hard; I expect some investment from my students; I have very little patience with students who blow things off and then come pleading for help; lots of time for people who try, but can’t quite get there, etc. And I also find value in the concept of establishing essentially professional relationships (and not just with students - but I’m prone to making sharp distinctions between my private and my professional time...).
And, from a social theoretic perspective, I tend to support the idea that there was some value to all this dissolving of family and communal ties… ;-P
Great post! Unfortunately, I do think that men often have an easier time establishing authority in the classroom without rubbing any students the wrong way. I know, though, that in my department everyone understands this dynamic well, and our appointments committee factors it into their deliberations.
Matt, I wonder if “authority” is really the thing that’s the problem. I’ve never had a moment’s fear that I won’t walk into the classroom and just have the authority, but I do think certain of the prof-student relationships that have been modeled for me by the previous generation haven’t necessarily been the most fruitful for getting work done.
APS seems pretty sure “good” profs (or profs he likes) don’t have poses, but I think everyone ends up having a describable kind of relationship with students; it’s just that women get made particularly paranoid about our ability to keep them. It may be that older professors of both genders worried about me when I was walking into the classroom for the first time, a very young-looking curly-haired midwesterner, but I got all kinds of conflicting advice from concerned parties. “Wear a skirt!” “Don’t wear skirts!” “Show up early and make converation!” “Be five minutes late the first day!” “Don’t write on the board!” “Write everything on the board!” “Don’t give them an inch!” “Let them love you!” It’s enough to make a first-timer pretty paranoid.
Of course, I found out that it wasn’t that hard. It’s pretty easy to show students that you’re smart and reasonable. But I kept thinking back on prof-student relationships that I found inspired me to do my best work, and they were never the men who insulted me or the women who expected me to love them, and students try to make you into one or the other. The thing I do on the first day is different enough from what they’ve seen before that they can’t pigeonhole me as someone who won’t care about technicalities or who can be buttered up. It’s business, but business between humans.
This is what I get for sneaking into my parents’ library when I was eight and reading The One-Minute Manager.
Carrie is, of course, right that all professors have a pose. All humans wear masks, especially in professional settings. It’s why we don’t come to class in our pajamas, while our students often do. At the same time, the undergrad-in-pajamas is also wearing a uniform that reads “I’m too cool for school.” I think it was Frank Zappa who once told the smug hippies in his audience, “Don’t kid yourselves. We’re all wearing uniforms.”
At the same time, I’m not sure that the advice Carrie received as a first-time teacher was due to her gender. That is, of course the specific pieces of advice were gendered, but the “manic and contradictory advice” phenomenon is felt by beginning college instructors across the board.
One reason our profs give us weird advice is that they themselves never really *learned* how to teach, and they often think they’ve developed some magical tips by correlating their good days with their outfits or board-writing habits. So I was told to sit on the head table, not behind it; to make eye-contact (and not, because men shouldn’t make eye contact with female students); to wear a suit, to wear a sports jacket, to wear jeans, to never wear jeans.
All this is simply a testament to the fact that graduate students need a REAL pedagogy class or classes, dealing with instruction and behavioral management.
In the end, a professional in pajamas does better than an imposter in a suit.
Indeed, Luther, the one reason I was able to ignore the content (if not the existence) of all that contradictory advice was because I had full-semester, full-credit courses in rhetorical theory and pedagogical theory, as well as a job tutoring and a graduate student instructor to shadow, all during the semester before I got to the classroom. At the time, I thought it was a little much, but now that I’m teaching in CUNY, where the student population is unbelievably heterogenous (in terms of skill, comfort with the language, and religious and political affiliations, especially), all of that training has come to my aid, and in a way that advice like “wear a skirt” would never be able to.
That said, it’s pretty shocking just how much of pedagogical theory is about building a better, more effective classroom not through assignments and policies, but through careful analysis of the interpersonal relations one develops with a class. I remember reading one book all about how the writing instructor must come to terms with the sexual complexities of his relationship with students. Everyone in my pedagogy class agreed that thinking about that kind of stuff at all is a self-fulfilling prophecy of total disaster. I told a friend teaching math about this book, and she used it as proof that English professors are the most ridiculous and self-absorbed people on earth. This is potentially true.
Since I began teaching full-time, I’ve never had any students challenge my authority, and I’ve only infrequently felt that my students might be responding to me differently because I’m female (and I’ve taught a very heterogeneous student population, too): yes, there’s the annoying way that a particular student keeps calling me “Ms.” rather than “Dr.” And yes, there are those students with life problems who seem to expect more accomodation from me than they expect from my male colleagues. But they’re rare.
In general, my stategy is similar to yours, Carrie: I have very tough policies and I don’t hesitate to convey my impatience when a class isn’t shaping up. I’m known as a very hard grader. But in class, on the average day? We have a lot of fun. I’m wacky and enthusiastic and colloquial and my students laught a lot and participate a lot. I alternate, in other words, between being serious/demanding and being (or appearing) totally relaxed and funny. But the only time that I’m “motherly” is when I’ve heard murmurings of discontent with a particularly hard text, and I take the time to say, “I know that many of you are finding this hard. I know it’s hard. But I make no apologies for that: English is hard. Math is hard. Chemistry is hard. This particular work is going to require extra effort from you--but I know that you can all do it. And if you work at it, it *will* get easier, and you’ll be a better thinker and writer at the end of this course.”
Ultimately, I think that being tough is what permits me to be funny and casual in the classroom--and vice versa. I imagine, too, that my appearance is another reason why I don’t get challenged: I have a low voice and a short, efficient haircut, and although I read as feminine--makeup, skirts, high heels--it’s a professional-world feminity; everything I wear would be appropriate in a law office.
None of these decisions about my “classroom style” have been totally conscious, but none of them have been totally unconscious, either--I think that we all feel our way into something that works and that we’re comfortable with.
I have come to think of the issue somewhat phenomenologically, in that teaching, like writing, involves strategies of withholding and revelation, concealment and display. That is, professionally, personally, and pedagogically, we are all, and always, considering what information to put forward, when, and how. The stakes for women in regulating those processes are, well – whether or not they are higher, they certainly are different.
But while teaching and writing are linked via these processes, I would sort out teaching phenomena from those of blogging, in that the options for classroom (self-)presentation (related to wardrobe, tone of voice, etc., as you note, Carrie) are distinct from those related to online self-fashioning; our objectives differ, and the audiences differ, too, thus making for a different set of rhetorical coordinates.
In the classroom, there’s a body, and a body that matters—and matters differently, to different students. In this respect, Carrie, your strategy to be “unpredictable” appears to meet head-on the contradictory (and ultimately unpredictable) ways our students may perceive us. That is, at any given time in our students’ eyes, we are professor, mother, confessor, lover, fox, shrew, therapist, old maid, etc., etc., etc.
Is it possible to *render a fully coherent persona? *Male or female? I sorta doubt it, which frees us up (well, it’s freed me up) to focus on the rhetorical possibilities in the presentation of whatever material I hope to cover on a given day, and my objectives in presenting it.
Overall, the “contract” model – especially conceiving the syllabus as a contract, and laying it out as such on the first day of class—does function to spell out the essential terms of engagement, and what’s expected of both parties. It’s a way of being out there and up front – and thus control the discourse—at the beginning of a process that is variable and that will unfold, in various ways, over the course of a course.
But just as we’re given to meta-blogging, I myself am also prone to meta-teaching, and to citing the vicissitudes of gender and authority in the course of teaching, as they usefully relate to the course material itself: noting, for example, when I taught Queen Elizabeth’s speeches, how their rhetorical preoccupations relate to gender dynamics in the classroom, and thus making plain that as I reflect on these things, students should, too. . . (and that “it is not meet that the feet should rule the head”!).
As for blogging and meta-blogging, I recently wrote someone (Scott Kaufman, I think) on the masculinist slant of the Valve, and mused – *stupidly, I later realized – whether bloggers could be gendered according to those who tend to “blogjournal” (i.e. the model of blog as diary), and those who engage in the “discussion of ideas.” Stupid. Mea culpa (forgive me, Scott, and women of all blogging stripes).
Rather, in my own case, I realized that I myself am less interested in “blogjournaling” because I am otherwise consumed with gender-related/constrained activities. In the course of trying to write this very post, I have been tending to my asthmatic daughter, a husband laid out by a back injury, and figuring out how my son can go to his speech therapy today while I teach Jonson’s “To Penshurst.” I prefer not to diary because online is the one place where I can not “be all that” (indeed be disembodied!), or even think about it. In that respect, my gender identity does construct my online persona, only in relief, or in the negative; and choosing not to use a pseudonym forms part of that desire to occasionally inhabit some part of “Gwynn Dujardin” that isn’t materially constrained by gender roles and expectations.
Only, of course, to read the Valve. . . ! (speaking of regulating the flow . . .)
As for whether we women are taken seriously (enough), here and elsewhere, I just read through the series of comments following “Kostko Throws Down.” Yikes.
I keep thinking of an old article by Lisa Jardine, on the paradox for early modern women trained in humanist learning (I think the article was called “Shakespeare’s Learned Heroines”). Jardine observed that as humanist learning required and foregrounded the display of erudition, humanism was problematic for women, for whom any interest in (book) learning was perceived as a desire for (carnal) knowledge, and any form of self-display tantamount to (sexual) self-exhibition.
I don’t think that’s what’s going on here (!), but seeing as Carrie’s perceived “desire for respectability” has been through the mill, thought I’d throw it out there.
For now, though, I’ve got to go teach Jonson’s “To Penshurst.”