As I get ready to teach a new class at a new university, I find myself reflecting on my teaching practices over the past several decades. The course, “Music and Identity in the Americas,” obviously prompts self-reflection, for me now and for my students once we get going. It is also a bit of a conundrum. I am creating, starting from nothing, a course with “identity” in the title. My identity is necessarily centered in such a context because I am the person making decisions about structure and content. At the same time, I am among the academics who do not believe the instructor is the center of a course (bizarrely, many professors working in higher education still haven’t reached this conclusion, at least not in practice).
I have been in this position before, teaching transnational feminism, African-American history, and world music, among other courses, as a cisgender, White man. To make these classes valuable and enlightening for my students I am required to find ways to decenter myself, even as I am the author of the course. There are several ways to do this, but I continuously seek new approaches because as the instructor of record, there is no way to fully remove my power and privilege. I wield the grade book and the syllabus.
I am qualified to teach these courses, and teaching is one of the few areas of my life in which I am fully confident in my skill, but talking about experiences that are not my own requires some additional work. That additional work is hugely valuable to me, though, as it provides me with a rare opportunity to constantly build my capacity for compassion, which has incredible benefits for my life in general. Practicing empathy, knowing you are never done learning how to be in the world, and genuinely seeking to learn from other people are not just ethically correct; they make life demonstrably happier.
My good friend is an authority in restorative practices in education. On the first day of my transnational feminism course a few years ago, I asked her to do class introductions using a restorative circle. That way, the first voice and authority students experienced were hers, and even her perceived authority was immediately tamped down through the restorative practice. It’s a risky gambit, as the students had to reconcile for themselves that the random White dude sitting in the room was, in fact, the instructor, and the person welcoming them would not be back. I had to weigh the possibility that students would question why I was there in the first place, why she wasn’t the instructor, and why I had planned something a bit more elaborate than the typical first-day syllabus review and get-to-know-you questions. It could have started the semester with a breach of trust. It could have minimized me, rather than decentering me, and left the classroom structureless to the point of irrelevance.
It was risky, but it worked better than I had expected. Unlike my friend, I am not an expert in restorative practices, but we were able to adapt the circle principle to discussions of readings, current events, and research plans. The circle helped me, at least in one, limited way, to decenter myself and get closer to parity in social power.
I have also found clever (at least to me) ways to tell students I don’t care about their grades without actually telling them I don’t care about their grades. This is a risky strategy, too, because grades matter to them, even if I know they serve no purpose within the context of most of my courses. They are a quantitative measure of qualitative knowledge, which is self-evidently absurd, but those quantitative measures are tied to funding, clout, and depending on students’ chosen careers, the ability to get a job. “Take the class seriously and you won’t need to worry about your grade” can be read by some students as liberation, while others might take it as permission to show up but not try. It often comes as a shock when I do, in fact, fail students, as I do every semester. I’m not blowing smoke. The first part of the sentence has as much meaning as the second part of the sentence. I need a better sentence, I suppose, and I have varied the approach according to my subjective reading of the distinct culture of an individual classroom. I teach cultural studies and writing. I need a better sentence.
These things make teaching harder. I’ve been doing this for a long time now, with the grey hair to show for it, but I need the humility to know I still don’t know anything. Mid-to-late August is equally terrifying and exciting. In my life, it always has been this way. A new academic year is an opportunity to radically change practices if needed. Despite the societal disrespect, political bullshit, lack of a livable wage, and cultural acceptance of anyone and everyone telling teachers what to do regardless of their complete ignorance of the art of education, I feel very fortunate to have these moments of psychic scrubbing. They are built into my work life, which is pretty nice when you think about it.
“Music and Identity” is causing substantial stress right now. It’s productive stress, and I’m glad to have it.