Abstract
Academia talks a good game about valuing classroom charisma, but the real focus for professors remains on research production and publication. How, then, are graduate students to learn how to teach? Students share their experiences in wading into the deep end of the lecture hall.
Keywords
You’ve spent your years in graduate school learning how to conduct meticulous research, construct professional articles, and debate lofty theories with your colleagues and professors. Piece of cake, right? But then you face a challenge you’re not prepared for: a room full of undergraduates staring at you, expecting you to fill their heads with your sociological wisdom. No matter how prepared you feel, the first class you teach as a graduate instructor has the potential to send you into an identity crisis, leaving you asking “What kind of teacher am I?” and, more importantly, “How am I supposed to teach while I’m still a student?” No matter how much you value teaching or look forward to connecting with students, you also know that you’re not supposed to let teaching distract you from the primary objective of graduate school: research.
Departments pay lip service to the importance of teaching, but faculty know research is the “real work.”
The dilemma of how to become an effective graduate instructor while still maintaining a research agenda stems from a larger contradiction within the discipline of sociology: teaching is essential to the profession but holds a devalued position compared to research. This tension contributes to what sociologist Jodi O’Brien calls the “schizophrenic state of academe.” Departments pay lip service to the importance of teaching, but faculty members know that research is the “real work.” Graduate students pick up on this “schizophrenic state” as we learn to model ourselves after exemplary theorists and researchers, and we notice that great teachers are rarely elevated to the same status. Despite calls by sociologists like Edward L. Kain to understand teaching and research as mutually reinforcing, graduate students and junior faculty continue to internalize the idea that teaching is something to work on in private. Publications, grants, and research are the accomplishments to share proudly with colleagues and administrators.
As sociologist Helen Moore argues, the academic model that doctoral students encounter at their PhD-granting institutions is limiting, because they will often end up taking positions in departments that are quite different from those in which they “trained.” New faculty members often find they must fulfill an assortment of tasks—in addition to research and publishing—that they may not have encountered in graduate school. This tension increasingly hits graduates students even before they transition out of their doctoral programs, as the responsibility for teaching falls more and more on the shoulders of students and adjunct faculty. Dealing with this tension—that we must learn to be good teachers even as teaching is devalued—led our group to reflect on how we can develop strategies for becoming effective educators while still fulfilling our duties as graduate students.
Adopting the Instructor Status
When we thought back to the professors who had influenced us as undergraduates, they had PhDs and years of experience teaching. As starting graduate student instructors, we knew we did not yet have the expertise or credentials to legitimize our new position of authority. Meeting our classroom goals would require developing strategies to create a teaching personae that allowed each of us to feel comfortable, confident, and effective in our new role.
Developing a teaching persona was easier said than done, however. Because of our dual status as both students and instructors, many of us felt pressure to demonstrate our knowledge and legitimacy by providing students with as much information as possible. To accomplish this, some of us prepared meticulously for each class session; we wrote lengthy lecture notes and created dense PowerPoint presentations. “Being prepared” became an obsessive goal that we chased continuously. Soon, though, our pedagogy produced apathy. Our students began to expect us to fill the entire class with these dry lectures; they checked out even as we locked in on our goals. Many of us felt inauthentic as we failed to connect with students and create the classroom environments we’d envisioned. Clearly, this knowledge-driven approach wasn’t working.
When we graduate student instructors talked to each other, though, we recognized that we had a valuable asset in constructing effective teaching personas: our passion for sociology. We had dedicated ourselves to graduate school because of our love for the discipline, but in the classroom, we’d been so concerned with demonstrating our knowledge and authority we’d failed to show our passion. With time and reflection, we realized that what stood out about our own favorite professors hadn’t been their credentials; it was how they’d made sociology their own, teaching in a way that drew on their particular skills, personalities, and interests. Following their lead and talking to each other about the challenges we were facing allowed us to develop diverse ways of performing authority. Beyond the formal style we had initially adopted, we were able to develop teaching personas that better reflected who we were: passionate students just like those in front of us.
One author, for example, found that personal anecdotes helped students understand sociological theory while creating a relaxed and collaborative classroom environment. He now begins each session of his class with a “question of the day,” and students share funny stories that relate to the topic at hand—perhaps “bad first dates” for a discussion of Goffman’s work on impression management or “worst day at your job” when talking about Marx’s understanding of alienation. These talks help make the theories tangible and relevant. Each of us found that, when we developed a teaching persona that emphasized who we were as both a scholar and a person, we became more comfortable exercising authority and more confident in our interactions with students.
Corey Fields
Negotiating and Embracing Our Student Status
Even as we developed confidence as instructors by developing our teaching personas, we still had to negotiate being students. Teaching while still in graduate school means learning to occupy both positions and recognizing how living in this tension shapes us as educators. While the specific challenges of graduate school can pull new instructors away from their teaching duties, graduate student instructors’ transitional position gives them unique resources: a support network of fellow instructors and personal insight into the lives of their students.
Many of us found that embracing (rather than minimizing) our graduate student status provided an effective way to connect with our students. Because we are in graduate school, many students seek our advice about choosing a career path or continuing their education. For those debating entering graduate school or the work force, we are well positioned to share our thoughts on both paths, including how to select a graduate program and what can be done with a degree in sociology. Rather than allow our relative inexperience with teaching to constrain us, we use our shared student status as a resource in teaching and mentoring undergraduates. We can build bridges between our students and ourselves.
While embracing our own student status was helpful as we moved into the instructor role, we also learned to recognize the strategy’s limitations. Graduate education is designed to be an academic and professional challenge, and many of us entered our first classroom expecting our students to engage with the material in the way we did in graduate school. Having been immersed in the culture of professional academia, we designed our first classes assuming we would be teaching dedicated, academically-oriented students—like us! Effectively, we were far enough removed from our inauspicious academic beginnings that we unintentionally universalized our student experiences to the experiences of all students.
So, it was a shock when we found students in our first classes who had trouble writing papers or identifying the main points of a reading. Even more disconcerting was how many of our students didn’t seem to care. Academia seemed distant to them, unrelated to their lives and goals. Recalling that our passion for sociology was initially kindled by our interest in social life, we turned to real-world examples to make sociology relevant and meaningful for our students. For instance, when teaching Race and Ethnic Relations, one of the authors uses current media controversies to let students see sociological theory in action. Shifting between lecturing on a theory and having students apply that theory to current events or their own lives made a vast difference in piquing their interest in sociology, just as it had done for us when we were undergraduates.
Corey Fields
Learning to negotiate and embrace our student status also meant taking advantage of the built-in support network of other graduate students. Many of our fellow instructors had already traveled this road and developed strategies for negotiating classroom difficulties. These served as models for what we could do. Through conversations with our peer-network, we were able to collectively work out solutions and strategies to common concerns that drew on our combined experience and our shared knowledge. As sociologists, we knew that structural power and privilege factor greatly into students’ readiness for college, as well as their ability to navigate educational institutions, as demonstrated in the work of scholars like Annette Lareau. By sharing stories with each other, we came to see that what can initially look like a student’s lack of commitment or effort may actually reflect different approaches to education that emerge out of varied backgrounds and goals. These insights, and the strategies to deal with them, became apparent when we took the time to collectively discuss our experiences, concerns, and goals as new instructors with our network of colleagues.
Good Teachers are Lifelong Learners
Developing strategies to be effective teachers while in graduate school has been a challenge, but it has also proven to be an essential part of our professionalization. In particular, learning how to construct our teaching personas and connect with our students (and each other) has made clear three problems with devaluing teaching in our discipline. First, we have come to reject the separation of teaching and research as a false dichotomy. Becoming effective teachers has not distracted us from our scholarship. Rather, becoming effective teachers has made us better scholars. In the classroom, we make new connections, find the appropriate words and examples to bring our research to life, and practice our ability to communicate clearly. We hope to carry what we have learned as graduate student instructors into our careers as faculty members, because good teachers are lifelong students. An effective teacher combines the ongoing discoveries she makes about the social world with her ability to share those findings with a variety of audiences.
Corey Fields
Second, teaching is what keeps the discipline alive. All of us were brought into sociology as undergraduates by teachers who inspired us. Sociology does not have the mainstream exposure that some academic disciplines enjoy, so we cannot assume students will find sociology on their own. Rather, quality sociology educators represent the public face of the discipline to undergraduates, and we must strive to be effective ambassadors. The students who take sociology classes today will be the voters, policy makers, and agenda setters of tomorrow, so teachers who can effectively communicate the value of sociology to students are essential for the continued funding and relevance of our discipline.
Finally, teaching is necessary. Most graduate students who secure academic positions will be required to teach, even those who secure jobs at research-oriented universities. Knowing that teaching can make us better scholars, that we represent the public face of sociology to our students, and that teaching is required of most academics means that we owe it to our students, the discipline, and ourselves to be the best educators we can be.
As Edward L. Kain notes, it is not enough for teachers to recognize that teaching and research are mutually reinforcing. Rather, universities must recognize and support this reality. Sociology departments can take a number of steps to provide institutional support to make the transition from graduate student to instructor more manageable. Because we found that our peer networks emerged as an important resource when we began teaching, we recommend that departments encourage collaboration among graduate student instructors, including ongoing workshops for new teachers. By creating designated spaces and times for graduate students to come together to solve problems and share teaching experiences, departments can help create cultures that recognize the importance of teaching and support graduate students. Departments also can encourage collaboration between beginning and advanced graduate student instructors by implementing formal peer mentorship programs that pair the two. Such relationships will provide novice teachers with an accessible resource for teaching-related questions, as well as an opportunity to learn the “backstage” work that goes into teaching. Advanced students can benefit from these relationships as well: being mentors now will help to prepare them for future roles as faculty members.
Learning to be a teacher is an ongoing process. We believe that developing institutional support for preparing graduate students to teach is an important step for the discipline as a whole. Support for graduate student instructors will result in improved undergraduate education, graduate students who are better prepared to fulfill their professional responsibilities, and faculty members who find more support as they balance their important research, teaching, and service duties.