owning our own opinions, a la lady professor

a friend who blogs recently posted about the importance of owning up to your opinions and being brave enough to take responsibility for your perspective when discussing difficult issues with people you care about (the post title is borrowed from her). this really resonated with some thoughts that have been floating around in my head lately...

this week, i had my first pre-tenure review meeting. to prepare, i had to write a narrative statement about what i've been doing for the past three years when it comes to teaching, scholarship and service to the college. one of the things they ask you to reflect on is your student evaluations. students are encouraged to write comments on the forms in addition to filling in scantron bubbles. these forms are anonymous. in general, i'm pretty pleased with how i've fared, but i had one round of evaluations that totally threw me for a loop.

i'm sure some great minds have written about how anonymity can produce vicious and harmful responses in nameless, faceless venues like online message boards and teaching evals (if you've read anything in this vein, please let me know!), but i can only speak to my experience. here's the (edited) excerpt from my narrative where i talk about this:

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My X course evaluation scores were by far the lowest that I have received over
the past two years, and I was especially disappointed that my Rapport with Students score was so low. I was taken aback by these scores and by students written comments as I felt the class went quite well based on the fact that many students often contributed to lively in-class discussions. Clearly, students had a different perception of our classroom interactions than I did. This was my second term at X College and perhaps I got overly confident about the degree to which I could question student responses in class (especially if I had the distinct impression that they had not prepared for class). From my perspective, I was challenging them to think critically. From their perspective, I was being closed-minded and hostile to their contributions. I was thoroughly disheartened by some especially negative comments I received and, in fact, found it hard to see myself in the professor they were describing.

Most disturbing was a comment from one student that was insulting and sexually explicit. I brought this particular evaluation form to the attention of Academic Affairs through a meeting with Dean X, who has a copy of the form on file. Though I was told that I could remove this form from the evaluations on record, I have chosen to include it with all the rest in the supporting materials on file.

Though this was an isolated comment, I think it speaks to a larger and significant issue I have given much thought to since this incident. I suspect that written responses of this nature are seldom if ever received by male faculty members. My interpretation of this anonymous comment is that it was a punishment for my outspokenness and the exertion of my (misplaced, at least from this student’s perspective?) authority as a woman, especially in relation to male students. As a young, female faculty member I have found it challenging to strike a balance between being perceived as a caring person and being perceived as a competent professor * . Perhaps I have tended to put too much emphasis on the latter rather than the former. Obviously, in this section of this course, students found me too harsh and, ultimately, I failed at being either caring or competent in their eyes.

My ultimate goal as a professor is to encourage student learning. I also care deeply about my students and have developed close relationships with some of them that have continued beyond their time at X College. The obvious (it seems to me) synthesis here is caring about whether or not students are learning. I do not want to champion mediocrity in my courses by ignoring students’ lack of preparedness for class or fostering an environment where all responses are equally correct. At the same time, I do want students to feel that my classroom is a place where their input is essential and valued. In the time since this section of X course, I have paid more attention to how I respond to students in and out of class and have worked at fostering an inclusive classroom environment. In general, I think that this is reflected in my evalution scores and in student comments.

My goal in this area of my teaching is to continue to work on creating an open atmosphere in my classes where active participation is encouraged. I love it when students build on each others’ ideas in class and bring the discussion to a new and interesting place, and I want to foster these experiences through positive reinforcement.

* The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning has generated interesting insights on gender in the classroom that reflect this tension between competence and caring for female faculty. Research conducted by Hall (1998--"How Big are Nonverbal Sex Differences? The Case of Smiling and Sensitivity to Nonverbal Cues." In Sex Differences and Similarities in Communication. D. J. Canary and K. Dindia, eds. pp. 155-177. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum) demonstrated that students associated professors’ tendency to smile with their degree of caring for students. While students’ perceptions of male faculty members’ competence were unaffected by the amount they smiled in the classroom, they found female faculty members who smiled more (and were, therefore, perceived to be more caring) to also be less competent.
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in general, i learned some important lessons from those negative evaluations and am a better teacher because of them. that one particularly egregious comment was probably the most challenging thing i've had to deal with, on a personal level, in my (albeit short) professional life. i felt ashamed and angry, scared and sad. i was furious that one anonymous comment, one cowardly sentence, could rattle me (an otherwise strong, smart, academic woman who understands how gendered power dynamics work) so completely. if i offended this person in the classroom, at least i did it to their face. i have no idea if the student who wrote that comment intended their words to have such a stunning effect, or if they just wrote them without much consideration for how they'd be received and forgot about them minutes later. i'll never know. did that student know that those words had power, in a lot of different ways? i'll never know. the closest i've been able to get to a rebuttal, or any kind of response, was the statement i wrote for my review. it felt good to write.

i think students should be able to anonymously evaluate their teachers, but i also know that their words, which may mean very little to them, can have lasting effects. there can be both predictable and unforseen consequences when we communicate with anonymity, when deeper motivations are unknown, when there is no accountability, when we don't have to act as members of a community (writ-large or small), and when we don't have to acknowledge that words bear power.