“There is also a tendency to link identities with beliefs.”

YES. I really enjoyed your post. I wanted to quote the above part because I agree that students have a tendency to do this, and I always struggle with how to handle that. (I think teachers struggle with this too, sometimes, for that matter.) You do a great job of explaining how you handled that, and you’ve given me some strategies to think about, so I thank you.

As far as students go, it seems that part of their identities=beliefs assertions seem to involve age and experience… but even when I taught community college, I had adult students state that I “must be a liberal” because I have all these tattoos. Eh. (Really, I think I must be a liberal because even though I am a cisgender hetero-lady, I am lucky to have been pretty good at empathy from a young age. I also had a mother who was willing to let me reject of a lot of the binaries that society wants to push on us, but anyway…)

I try to do my best to let my students be in charge of what they acknowledge about themselves, and how/if/when they do it. Mostly I hope it’s gone okay; I hope they think so too. As it has turned out, I’ve had a girl ask to pray in my classroom where she felt safe, and a student officially out himself to me because I had treated him “just like everyone else” all semester. I’ve had students who were homeless that opened up about those experiences, impacting me and the rest of the class with a lot of new knowledge. While some situations have gone more smoothly than others, I just hope I’m always that kind of teacher that all students feel like they can approach. You seem like you probably encourage your students to be that way too.

(Also, I love the thought experiment animals you mentioned in class.)

Hey Maria, I really liked your post this week. I think I’ll make my own inventory!

LikeLiked by 1 person

I remember when I taught my first class. I thought I die of a heart attack I was so anxious all the time about the class, what students thought, etc. It’s good to share.

Hey I really liked your instructional video and it’s self referentiality.

YES YES YES to your post, and to these two things in particular: “…and my teaching style is drawn largely from instinct and personal experience as opposed to formal training in education. I mainly looked back at my own experience as a student, adopted practices used by my own professors that I thought effectively aided my learning process, and stayed away from those that I felt were not helpful”

&

“I value respect, and as a teacher, I feel that it is not something that I am entitled to just because I am the person of authority standing in front, with the power to make or break a GPA. It is something that I earn as I show students that they are people who I respect as well.”

I will never understand how some people teach without reflecting back on their own experiences as students. I’ll also never understand why some teachers demand authority without making the rhetorical moves to earn it.

It sounds like you and I have some similarities with teaching. I’m glad I’m not the only one tries to be true to who they are while also remembering how the past plays a part in all this!

I think tacking between traditional and non-traditional ways of teaching is fundamental since it constitutes the epistemology which we test and retest our methodologies to build a solid pathway. We also need to repair and rebuild if necessary. Thank you for this very useful analogy.

Thank you very much for this insightful post. I have not been taught been in different cultural contexts besides my current experience in the USA; however, I came to appreciate the value of honest feedback and creative thinking skills in different educational experiences. This experience actually motivated me to become a teacher and set a model for the teacher I want to become.

LikeLiked by 1 person

I love your metaphor of comparing how our intellectual processes to cooking by ourselves at home. That is a unique and reasonable metaphor attracts foodie like me. I agree that “Cooking is both an art and a responsibility for a chef, like teaching is to a teacher.” We would like to engrave our students into something unique and artistic, we would like to gain more knowledge like different recipes, then create our own based on those in our kitchen (classroom) and share them with our students. That was some of my thinking of extending your metaphor. Great job for coming up with such a cool metaphor! Thank you for sharing!
P.S. I love pictures you chose for this blog. Artistic looking.

Thank you for sharing this experience. As a person who is still trying to find her teaching voice, I believe we do need to break the ice for making more space for creativity. I really liked the visual you used in your blog. We need to be more mindful about the barriers we intentionally/unintentionally place in our teaching process.