Should feminist teachers talk about feminism? And should we show emotion about it?

[JeanneTheRabidFeminist]

I'm really interested in this topic of how feminism and teaching should interact.

Recently, there's been a thread where we've ended up talking about how feminists who teach English Lit (which is my subject) ought to teach. It's tricky to work out, because there's personal ideology, and also (obviously) there's a feminist theory of lit crit. I imagine the same is true of other subjects - so you could be teaching feminist theory without teaching about your own beliefs.

We also got onto the subject of whether or not teachers should show personal emotions - eg., being upset when discussing rape. I'm really conflicted about this, as I know emotion has gendered connotations, but I also think seeing someone who's teaching you getting upset is not great.

Related to this, off MN I've been talking to a friend about trigger warnings, and she's really concerned that these have a bad effect on free debate, and that you shouldn't have them in a lecture context. I disagree quite strongly, but it's the same issue of how on earth we cope with the fact that some teaching is going to raise emotional issues.

What do you think? How would you feel about someone getting emotional while teaching?

I think it would probably make a big difference that you are dealing with adult students, and we are dealing with children. And their parents who start threads on MN

Yes. I don't have to deal with the parents, or worry about what their ideologies might be!

And we have trigger warnings because they're allowed to not turn up, whereas I am guessing that at school, if a student has suffered some kind of trauma, they can't easily opt out of a lesson without special measures in place? Or how do you deal with that?

Well... We are generally pretty sensitive, and some discussion goes on when we know we are teaching students who might be affected on a personal level by the subject matter. When cystic fibrosis was on the GCSE spec I made sure I talked to one of my students in advance, as I knew she had family who had died of the condition.

I also teach psychology, which can throw up issues. Teaching attachment to students who have lost parents or are adopted, gender with a trans student in the class, psychopathology with students with various MH issues...

That must be really difficult. I think I'd want to be very neutral and un-emotional in those contexts, too - especially about attachment.

I'm not sure why (and this may be wrong of me), but I am wondering if it's the same with everything. I never have shown emotion about violence, but I'm beginning to second-guess why I don't, and whether it almost gives the impression that I'm untouched by what we're reading about?

The best bit of learning psychology, for me, was critical social psychology. Acknowledging the subjectivity that is (according to that perspective) inevitable. Having struggled with taking a scientific approach to psychology (after a previous science education), it felt quite liberating to do a reflexive analysis.

And I absolutely do treat topics differently (reflexive...). Naturally, I am not neutral about many of the topics I teach. I always present all the necessary perspectives/theories. I try to remain clearly even-handed on those which I think could cause real distress to my students (and I would include attachment and trans issues with a trans student in the class in that). Other aspects of gender, I tread less carefully. But I challenge homophobic or sexist comments and sanction them routinely (not always popular with parents...), not just when they are relevant to the subject of the lesson.

Veering right away from professional training & terminology, of which I have none ... Let's say some young men hang out together, watching YouPorn or whatever it is they watch, and making the kind of crass remarks you might expect about the young women around them. It's all gender identity building, macho bonding, group forming, being 'bad', and we hope they'll find a less repulsive form of maleness very soon. Perhaps one of them's recently had a sexual experience with one of the girls, bragged about it, and they've all picked over his embellished tale with gleeful bad language.

The buzzer goes and they trot back into class. There, they are asked to analyse a passage detailing sexual assault. The teacher suggests the victim has been poorly treated, highlighting language that seeks to sexually objectify her and to trivialise her experience. It is very similar to the language the young men have just been using amongst themselves. They feel uncomfortable.

Should the teacher anticipate this and, if so, how should she address it?

I'm sure this looks like a bunch of assumptions about the other thread. It crossed my mind - we don't know the ins & outs of that story - but it is, in fact, something I've been thinking about since talking with my friend about Curley's Wife. She challenged her students' thoughts very successfully, imo - but her students expressed those thoughts. She hadn't gone in there expecting silent resentment, and I don't know what she'd have done if she'd found it.

Just hopping over from my original thread over muddy the waters by reading this discussion.

I do bring it in to teaching, sometimes it is part of the teaching (equality and diveristy) sometimes it is just to make them think ie an IT class where a student wanted a mock interview to go on to an IT course and I asked him about the first computer programmer and he replied with, "I don't know who he was" which led on to a discussion of Ada Lovelace and then the reason computers are 'de bugged'.

Back to equality and diversity, one of my lessons puts students in groups and gives them items, some clothing others things like a tea set, and then have to write a mental image of the person from the items.

Sometimes I do it with just shoes/boots, I'm yet to have a class guess they are all mine. I think it is part of a teacher's job to to challenge assumptions and to get students to be more open minded (I teach teenagers, many have had their minds closed by GCSE - not a slight at teachers, you do what you can to get students through GCSE and it is an exam, you don't have the luxury of all course work that I do).

I teach English Lit, and definitely make no attempt to remain neutral on the subject of feminism (or on the subject of opposing any form of discrimination, etc). I state openly to the students that I am a feminist.

I also very much show emotion in response to texts - if a certain text or situation we are discussing makes me feel sad, angry, etc, why would I not share that? It is always a controlled emotion - I don't sob on the floor or howl my rage at the ceiling (not saying these are inappropriate responses in and of themselves, but they might make classroom management tricky!) As a teacher I think my role in the students' moral development is a more important one than my role in teaching them to analyse texts (not that the two are extricable). So I need to role model being someone who feels moral shock, outrage etc.

Hi saffron. Thanks for coming over - I just figured your original thread would descend into pontificating otherwise!

need - obviously, that would be bizarre!

I don't have much of a curriculum - there are a couple of set texts but mostly I pick my own - and I find it interesting how students react. At right at the opposite end of things, my friend teaches reception at primary school, and did once or twice get comments about reading 'too many girl books' to them.

lovely -yes, that puts it well, I think that's how I feel. Useful distinction between being emotional and modelling it in a controlled way.

gallic - so how did your friend cope with it?

I have once or twice known that I must be teaching against a conversation going on outside class, but it actually happens less than I expected. I ended up lecturing about race and violence on the day after the Canada shootings, which were then being reported as a possible act of Islamic terrorism. I was meant to be talking about the stereotype of the 'evil Muslim'! So I started out by acknowledging this was difficult, and trailed off as they all looked blank.

Jeanne, my friend challenged their judgements with questions like:- She was only 15 (or whatever she was) when this smooth chap with the flash car turned up and told her she was too good for this town. She'd never been anywhere, seen anyone as sophisticated as him. OK, he was a slimeball but different from everything in her life. What do you think he told her? Did he mean it? What did he really want? How do you think she saw him, and what did she believe?

The information is in the text, in her words. She was asking them to see through her 'filter' and evaluate what really happened. It changed their perception of her. Critical reading is about not taking things at face value, isn't it?

Sorry, too many 'she's in that post! Problem with a nameless character and a nameless teacher
My friend was asking the class to see through Curley's Wife's 'filter'.

Oh, I like that - so she was re-drawing the story for them so they could see it properly?

I agree, critical reading definitely about that.

It'd be a great creative writing exercise, wouldn't it? To write Curley's wife's story.

Lol at the blank stares wrt current affairs!

It would be, Jeanne, yes! :)

i don't know very much about this (i'm not a teacher), but i do remember an english teacher saying that we could view the fiction author themselves as an "unreliable witness" even though they have created the story, in the same way as you would an account of something to be used as historical evidence. i realise this isn't anything revelatory to anyone here, but it helped my thinking and analysis as a teenager

Oh, yes, I find the 'unreliable witness' idea useful.

I think a lot of what we do with feminism is really closely related to lit crit - we basically treat the patriarchy as an unreliable witness that isn't going to be explicit about its own motivations.

I think what is difficult about actually doing that analysis, is what it says about our perceptions of who is being truthful. If you have a story that's not about anything terribly upsetting, it's easy enough to say 'ooh, look, the narrator here isn't reliable'. TV shows do it all the time - I'm watching Bones at the moment, and it often shows a witness describing what happened, intercut with scenes of what they describe, as if to verify that this is the real storyline. And then later, we'll find out it isn't.

But when it's something like rape, if you're the teacher and you say 'of course, the narrator isn't a reliable witness', that's going against our cultural expectations of who's likely to lie about rape.

Oddly, I had a really polarized class discussion about Pride and Prejudice once. I'm not sure why, but roughly half of them thought that when Lizzie first refuses Darcy, she's just flirting and trying it on, and she fully expects him to propose again. I was really out of sympathy with this (partly because I think the text doesn't quite support it and partly because I suspected this was a narrative they'd imposed because they were reading Austen as chicklit where you do expect the characters to marry). But we ended up discussing it for ages.

And, actually, that is making me think again about emotion, because that discussion got quite heated.

Someone on the other thread (gallic?) raised the question, are some types of emotion more acceptable than others?

I think that's interesting. I have a feeling that we do, subconsciously, accept certain types of emotional response as being more ok in a classroom than others.

jeanne, in my case it isn't subconscious, I purposely avoid getting sad/upset in front of my students. I'm fine with happy, calm, annoyed, disappointed, excited, probably more. But I don't want them to see what actually hurts me though - I feel I need to maintain more control than that.

Oh, no, that's not what I meant.

I also purposely avoid getting upset.

But I wondered whether, subconsciously, most of us have a sense of which emotions are more and less acceptable anyway? Eg., anger might be seen as more masculine and more acceptable than sorrow? I don't know.

Possibly. Like a teacher who gets angry and shouts loads might be considered more acceptable than a teacher who cried (even as a one off).

Yes, exactly.

I'm not so sure. Moments when teachers were visibly upset - like the one who cried about Aberfan - are burned in my memory. I'd bet everyone who was a child in my class remembers it. Teachers shouting, though - meh. They were always at it.

We remember the funny ones, too, don't we, and the science experiments that went wrong?