Power Dynamics in Pedagogy

two of my former students demoing projects they did for our electricity unit in conceptual physics.

My time as a debater trained me to constantly analyze patterns of thought and assumption, even my own.  In the years I've spent (more than a decade, now) judging policy debates, I'm constantly drawn to search for trends in my decisions and perspectives over time.  Do I vote more often for one side of the resolution than the other?  Do I favor certain schools?  Do my decisions demonstrate bias against any particular demographic?  I haven't actually crunched the numbers. Perhaps one day I'll go back and take a rigorous look at the data, but at the very least what I can tell you from this thought experiment and a collection of other experiences I've had as a professional educator is that the transfer of knowledge and skills is not a totally neutral experience.

Like any communicative relationship that exists between human beings, the countless interactions between teacher and student, peer and peer in the educational process are influenced by the culture, history and power structures in which we are all inextricably entangled.  Since this month we're discussing the p-word (look to the top of the right column of the blog if you're confused about what I'm referring to), I thought this would be a suitable moment to reflect on the ways that gender influence the educational space.

The Soft Bigotry of Diminished Expectations

My more liberal readers will hopefully forgive the allusion to one of the more eloquent turns of phrase ever slapped together by George W.'s speech writers.  It's a question I've considered many times - do my academic and/or behavioral expectations shift when I consider female students versus their male peers?  I primarily teach AP Sciences, feeder courses for college majors where women are significantly underrepresented.  It's difficult to articulate a definitive answer to that question; in a post that will come early next week, I'll elaborate more thoroughly when I get into strategies for breaking down patriarchy, but suffice to say that I think that it's unproductive to apply labels to individuals, and much more useful to analyze particular actions.  I'm certain there are times when my viewpoint and to some extent my baseline for judging a student has been informed in subtle ways by societal norms attached to their gender.  I've definitely associated students' personalities with various gendered archetypes in the process of getting to know them and understand them, and that by itself inscribes some patriarchal norms onto those students.

A stereotype exists in the modern world that women are weaker in S.T.E.M. fields, either because those fields are inherently less appealing to them or because they are inherently less skilled in those disciplines.  Various people, some of them extremely prestigious, have ascribed various biological explanations to reinforce this stereotype.  For instance, the year I was graduating high school, then-Harvard University President Larry Summers, a fellow that had previously served as Clinton's treasury secretary and who would go on to become one of Obama's top economic advisors (#ThanksObama), made a long argument at a public address that women were conclusively worse at science than men at that said fact had been established by studies in behavioral genetics.  To even begin to unpack what's erroneous about his conclusions will require an entirely new blog post (come back tomorrow to read all about it!); if you read some of the anecdotes from Summers' address what you'll see is that his conclusions only come close to plausibility when viewed through the patriarchal lens that privileges typically male perspectives and devalues female perspectives.

I don't really know yet where this contemplative road leads us.  But I can say that I feel it's incumbent on all educator to work to build and practice intentional, metacognitive awareness.  I don't know if it's possible to unpack and neutralize all of the loaded assumptions we carry into the classroom with us, but I do know that discovering and challenging those assumptions is a necessary prerequisite.

Withering Under the Pitiless Gaze

This problem of loaded assumptions is complicated by the fact that not only do these assumptions exist, but most people, particularly the people that are disadvantaged by them, are acutely aware that they exist.  Which is to say that many female students are aware to some extent that they might be assessed differently than their classmates who remembered to bring their Y-chromosomes to school.  The insidious consequences of this fact manifest themselves in many ways.  Female students may be less likely to answer questions or to volunteer to participate than assertive male students.  Many self-identify as being weaker in math and science, having internalized the negative messages about themselves that have been pounded into them by the ascendant zeitgeist.  We won't even get into the differences between the ways the bodies of male and female students are treated differently and the ways that even younger female students are sexualized.

The natural consequence of such an environment is a desire to seek quarantine.  Most all-girls schools and secondary schools specifically market themselves as opportunities for female students to excel without the added complications that come with the baggage of patriarchy.

Deep down in my soul, I'd really like to believe that we can find a better way to live than dividing ourselves up into homogenous units because we can't figure out how to live together in heterogeneous groups without damaging each other.  It's a pessimist's strategy, one that invests in the idea that our messed up social relations are irreparable.  I'd like to believe the way forward is for oppressed groups to help the oppressors learn to see the world through other peoples' eyes.  But I'm not the one that 's being told by society that I'm just not as good at things as the other 50% of the population and my body and emotions are really only optimized to nurture infants.  So I'm not in a position to judge any female's decisions.

I'll close this one with a personal anecdote that I recently learned about my own mother.  When she was born, her father was at the hospital, and he was heard to say just as she entered the world, "Not another damn girl!", just before he stomped out.  She grew up being told time and again that she wasn't capable, that should couldn't handle complicated mechanical tasks like driving a standard transmission (which she learned to do), that she wasn't smart (even though she was the valedictorian of both her high school and college graduating classes).  And despite all of those clear validations of her worth from external institutions, despite going on to earn a masters' degree and become a professional accountant and then educator, she still to this day struggles with a devastating sense of personal inadequacy.  Because sometimes poisonous seeds that get planted too deep are incredibly difficult to root out.

That's what we're dealing with here, people.