Interesting! I actually also hit Hegel and his master-slave dialogue while thinking about Freire’s Pedagogy of the Opppressed, but I ended up going with Kant for my post.

Yes, I think the best take home message from this reading is thinking of teaching as a way to enhance the personal growth of the students, and not just content delivery on any given subject. And now, thinking about it again, this brings me to the German school system in which students are divided in casts based on academic performance. Certainly a reactionary system that ensures societies’ economic productivity. However, if critical thinking becomes the norm in society, we may need to prepare to deal with a lot of frustration that may come from individuals with a well-rounded mind that have to spend their life pounding nails or scrubbing toilets to make a living. My country is currently taking several spoonfulls of this bitter medicine.

Hi Yesim and Rabih. Since Rabih brought up the topic of older generations teaching younger generations, and since Yesim followed up on it, I’d thought I’d give my two cents.

I believe that we shouldn’t fear having a sense of education as partly being older generations passing down the batton to younger generations. I don’t think critical pedagogy should eliminate from our classroom that apprenticeship and role model system that Yesim mentions. I actually think that system has been fundamental to human societies’ evolution. Renovating our pedagogy should not be tossing out of the window everything we have been doing so far, but rather incorporating new approches to teaching with whatever is worth preserving from the old system. Tearing everything apart to start completely anew may be risky.

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Hi Yesim and Rabih. Since Rabih brought up the topic of older generations teaching younger generations, and since Yesim followed up on it, I’d thought I’d give my two cents.

I believe that we shouldn’t fear having a sense of education as partly being older generations passing down the batton to younger generations. I don’t think critical pedagogy should eliminate from our classroom that apprenticeship and role model system that Yesim mentions. I actually think that system has been fundamental to human societies’ evolution. Renovating our pedagogy should not be tossing out of the window everything we have been doing so far, but rather incorporating new approches to teaching with whatever is worth preserving from the old system. Tearing everything apart to start completely anew may be risky.

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Going back to the article about the experiment on the relationship between sales and diversity, one caveat I see is that the project took place in the USA, obviously a very diverse country racially speaking. So it makes sense that when a company caters its products and/or advertising to the whole demographic pool and not just to a section of it (even if it is the largest section), its sales increase. That is the same reasoning behind multinational corporations wanting a diverse make-up of their staff: so that they can adequately target the different makets. I would be interested, however, in seeing the results of this same experiment in a country with a very homogeneous population. I doubt we would get the same results.

Looking for a connection of this topic with higher education, one of the main benefits I see of having a diverse student and faculty pool is that we are educating generations of people in being accustomed to interacting with other people who are very much unlike them. Even those who are reluctant to mingle with “others”, may end up being somewhat permeable to changing their perceptions and biases (even if only slightly), just out of everyday exposure to the ones that are different. I always say that everybody in the world should live for at least a couple of years as an expat to broaden their perspective of the world.

It is interesting your perception of Puerto Rico as being homogeneous racially speaking. I have always consider most countries around the Caribbean as very heterogeneous due to the varied influences they received. Perhaps your perception comes because of the high degree of miscegenation and because race has never been as much of an issue is the Spanish speaking Americas as opposed to the USA?

Something in my personal experience that relates to the background of your post is that, the more I interact with people of different racial and national backgrounds, the least I perceive them as black or oriental or even mixed, but rather I see them as John, Louise or Matt. So I think that as Universities become more and more of a melting pot, with students from all over the world, there is a chance that biases with loosen grip a bit.

I like your approach. As we read in Vedantam’s article “The hidden Brain”, we all have a racial bias (and other types of biases) through unconscious messages. So checking on ourselves to see if the choices we are making are based on bias or not makes perfect sense to me. One questions that comes to me, however, is that sometimes perhaps we may not be able to judge if our decision is based on bias or on “data”. That bias can be such a part of our own thinking processes that we may not see the forest for the trees.

I remember when I did the TA workshop a couple of years ago, one of the presenters told a story of her first teaching experiences. Overall, she wanted her students to like her. That was her first approach to who to be in the classroom. She wanted her students to think of her as someone “cool”. But later on she got to the point where what she really had to expect from the students was respect. I think most teachers/instructors/professors start out with similar concerns in their first teaching experiences. I too wanted my students to like me. But there are times when discipline needs to kick in and then some of them will stop liking you. I am still trying to figure that part out, how to discipline when it is needed while avoiding too much resentment on the student side. But afterall, and as some others have already commented, be yourself, use the trial and error method to see what works and what doesn’t for you in the classroom and, if you are humorous, tell some jokes. For example, today in my class most students were not very engaged in the begining. However, after I made an spontaneous joke, a spark lit up the students and the mood was so much better for the rest of the class. So if you are the humorous type, use it to your own advantage (and ultimately, the student’s advantage). That’s my two cents now that I am starting to slowly find some of my teaching self.

This is an interesting way to look at teaching. I believe a lot of acting techniques and skills can be applied to teaching, specially in the arena of keeping students engaged. However, and as you imply in your post, there is a fine line between acting and losing focus and not being genuine, which ultimately can lead us to considering ourselves the center of the class. Balancing content, delivery and being genuine can be tricky and has been a struggle for me since I started TAing.

When we watch a movie or see a play, we all have certain expectations from the actors. In the same way, students also have expectaions from professors or instructors (sometimes legitimate, sometimes infunded), and as an instructor, it can be very hard to meet those expectations and at the same time be true to your teaching philosophy.

Thanks for this post. I am also a foreigner here in the US and I remember my anxiety two years ago when I had to TA for the first time. My biggest issue in the begining was that I would get extremely self-conscious of my foreign accent, which would in turn make me more nervous and I ended up speaking even faster. I think this links with this week’s topic of accepting your own nature to become a good teacher. I can try to speak slower and ennunciate better so that students are more comfortable with my accent, byst after all, I am going to have an accent, so I better don’t let it take over my entire teaching mood.

I am also reading Palmer’s “The courage to teach”, in which he offers some helpful hints on using our identity as a tool to become better teachers. Another book that I enjoyed reading this summer is “What the best college teachers do”, by Ken Bain. It was very helpful to me to learn why some great professors are great.

Hi Molly,

Thanks for your comment. I have learned a couple of things from my mentor in regards to combining students’ individual circumstances and meeting the overall goal of the classroom: one thing I do know is to ask students on the first day of class what they feel is their strongest aptitude within the context of the class, what they can contribute with to the overall progress of the course. Another thing I ask them on that first day is to tell me what their expectations for that course are. I have them write these thoughts on a piece of paper that they hand to me in class. It is not a lot, but I think it helps them position themselves within the context of the course, and it helps me to somewhat cater the class to their needs. I have a small class, so it is fairly easy to do. I also encourage them to share stories they may have from past jobs or internships that could relate to circumstances of the course.

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