Coming to Voice: What My Students Taught Me

During the first difficult semester in graduate school when the task of aspiring to belong to the community of scholars seemed overwhelming, I came across an essay by Jennifer Lynn Fellman called “Damsels in Distress: Performing Femininities” from her book Never a Dull Moment: Teaching and the Art of Performance. In it, Fellman writes about the unsettling silence she encounters in the classes she teaches. Her students, mostly women, some of them immigrants, either speak in low and shaky voices or don’t speak at all.

This insightful and engaging essay struck a chord with me. Reading about women who can’t bring themselves to take part in class discussions because they are too timid to speak up, I felt a pang of recognition. Her female students’ voices, as Fellman writes, remain dormant, silent, or barely audible at best. Fearful to make a claim to an idea, believing that the thought doesn’t deserve to be shared with others precisely because it is theirs, the women feel uncomfortable having to respond to Fellman’s probing questions. Their shyness and insecurity prevent them from speaking up, from hearing their own voices, and from making sure others can hear them too. Perplexed with women “who refuse to speak loud enough to be heard” (88), Fellman still insists that they contribute to discussion. She purposefully calls on them even when they don’t raise their hands. After all, as she argues, making sure a student develops his or her own unique voice should be at the heart of feminist pedagogy (95). As a teacher committed to feminism and as a woman aware of gendered expectations that shape her students’ attitudes about who they are and what they are capable of, Fellman sees the college classroom as a place where women’s silence should and has to be broken.

It is not only women’s self-imposed and well practiced unobtrusiveness, however, that troubles Fellman. What she finds even more disturbing is the fact that it isn’t challenged enough by teachers who allow the women in their classes to remain silent by accepting their passivity. Instead of encouraging empowerment through self-expression, as Fellman sees it, the academy is complicit in tolerating and even encouraging a status quo that takes women’s unassuming and silent presence for granted.

To illustrate the empowering effect public speaking can have on a woman’s self-esteem and her sense of academic competence, Fellman recalls a shy Russian student who rarely participated in discussions yet wrote ones of the most insightful papers in her class. The young woman, confronted by Fellman, explained that her Slavic accent was to blame for her silence: it was embarrassing to her and as far as she could tell it was embarrassing to others too. As Katrina argued, not only had she nothing to say, but she could not even say it properly. Fellman, of course, was not convinced. She arranged a teaching assistantship for her. Katrina took it up. When she returned to Fellman at the end of the semester, she summed it up by saying that finding out that she was capable of speaking in front of a group of her peers had been the most empowering experience in her life.

Three years later, as I was preparing to teach my first class, I returned to Fellman’s essay. As much as I would like to say that the excitement about the opportunity to team-teach a class inspired me to recognize myself not in one of Fellman’s quiet students but rather in her confident teacher persona, I still identified myself with Katrina — before her transformation into an articulate teaching assistant no longer held back by her accent. And, as I was slowly realizing, in my new role as a teacher, I could no longer count on a professor to call on me. It would be my task to make sure that everyone in my class had a say. But to do that, I had to find my own voice first.

Unlike most of the students in my program, I was beginning to teach only at the end of my third year in graduate school. I doubted I had been ready before, and I still had my doubts then. Entering a classroom for the first time, I was weighed down by feelings of scholarly ineptitude and felt very uncomfortable with the thought of being asked to find myself not in the usual role of a student but that of a professor. I was also painfully aware of the virtual non-existence of anything I might refer to as my pedagogical approach.

Moreover, I was shy and I knew it would show when I taught. I remembered that as a college student, I felt uneasy when faced with timid female professors. I expected them to display all the traits a great teacher should have: intelligence, passion, and confidence. I felt disappointed when they didn’t. In addition, having spent years in the Eastern European educational system, I perceived the air of authority an instructor projected as proof of his or her credentials.

Only belatedly, as the new semester was approaching and it was my turn to step into their shoes, I began to empathize with the soft-spoken women who taught me in the past.

During the first few weeks of classes, when it was my turn to lead the discussion, my voice was trembling; I was speaking too low. I had the impression that my students couldn’t hear me. To make matters worse, I was afraid they couldn’t understand me either. As I saw it, standing in front of the group, controlling the flow of conversation, assigning homework, and grading papers, I was taking a position I had no right to and every one of my students knew it. After all, I pretended to know how to teach when I was only learning it.

And yet, the students in my evening class, most of them women, were kind and supportive. Of course, nothing happened the way I had expected it. Still, my students were a wonderful group to work with. What I found striking, however, was that just as I didn’t emanate Fellman’s natural confidence and lacked her outspokenness, my female students differed from the “damsels in distress” she was encountering in her classes. From the beginning, they didn’t hesitate to speak up. To my astonishment, they raised their hands when I posed a question. Even more thrilling was the fact that they were asking me for answers and trusted I would provide them! In my classroom, then, the characteristics Fellman attributes to herself and her students were reversed. It was not the students who had to be encouraged to speak up; it was I, their professor, who had to learn to raise her voice loud enough to be heard.

A few of the women in my class stood out in particular.

Jennifer, in her early twenties, was extremely bright and articulate. Every time she raised her hand, I could count on her great insights that would take the discussion in an unexpected and exciting direction. I admired her unwavering confidence and her willingness to test her ideas on her fellow students. Jennifer was open enough to engage in dialogue with someone else, but she never doubted the worth of her own thoughts on a subject.

Luz, on the other hand, was a mature woman, an activist committed to equal rights, well aware of her own powerful presence. She was unapologetic about her ambition to finally get a diploma after decades of being held back from college by the necessity to raise and then support a family. I watched with awe the interaction between Luz and the younger women in the class: even if I was not doing a great job as a mentor, Luz certainly did.

To me, an insecure and overwhelmed adjunct instructor, these women were a revelation: they were outspoken, confident, and intellectually curious. Instead of obsessing over their gaps in knowledge, which, I admit, became my personal preoccupation in graduate school, they took in new things and simply added them to what they already knew.

They were not embarrassed at having to ask a question about the meaning of a word or a passage that sounded particularly confusing. They knew they were learning and that learning had the strange propensity to simultaneously make you smarter and more aware of your own ignorance. But for them, these new discoveries and the changes in their perception of some issues, were the thrill of the learning process. Their attitude reminded me of the unabashedly sincere intellectual excitement that led me to pursue a graduate degree in the first place, but which was somehow lost when I became busy making sure I could keep up with the demands of the graduate-level coursework. Watching my students and listening to their conversations, I remembered my undergraduate enthusiasm and I wanted it back.

Slowly, as the weeks passed by, I spoke less and less hesitantly. No longer frantically focused on what I would have to say next, I was able to follow my students’ arguments more carefully. Consequently, my comments were more in tune with their train of thought. Gradually, my emerging sense of ease made everyone more comfortable too. I noticed that those few students whose faces were betraying the combination of fear and excitement I knew so well myself — the desire to say something and the simultaneous conviction that whatever you want to say does not matter — were becoming more actively engaged in discussions. They were speaking up more often, joining me in my own efforts to overcome shyness and inhibiting self-doubts.

But how exactly was my nurturing and non-threatening way of being a teacher fit in the paradigm of feminist pedagogy set up by Fellman?

No matter how hard I worked on it, I doubt I managed to project the confidence that would inspire the women in my class to take up challenges in their own lives. They would not learn just by observing me that a loud voice makes a person’s presence known and impossible to ignore.

Yet, the point was, they did not need to learn it from me: they already knew it.

So, just as Fellman came to define the goals of feminist pedagogy based on her classroom interactions with students, after my first semester as a teacher, I have also arrived at my tentative teaching philosophy.

Comparing Fellman’s students with mine and noting the different problems and obstacles these two groups of women faced, I came to the conclusion that feminist pedagogy should, first of all, be responsive to our students’ needs that may not be identical depending on the contexts in which we teach. What was a challenge for Fellman didn’t present a problem in my classroom. Instead of having to draw out my students’ voices, my task as a teacher was to make sure their engaged curiosity and commitment to learning would translate into their academic success.

What I have come to refer to as “situated feminist pedagogy,” then, questions the viability of universal and generalized principles of what constitutes good teaching practices. I argue instead that we should teach our students what they need to be taught, constantly reassessing our preconceptions about our roles and tasks as teachers.

One of the important insights my first semester of teaching led to was the recognition that teaching and learning are reciprocal processes. The teacher and student roles are not static. The flow of knowledge is not unidirectional. We learn as we teach, and we teach as we learn. The other important lesson I took away from my students was that the multiplicity of voices, the conversations they form, and the exchange of ideas that takes place through them is all that teaching, learning and intellectual pursuit should be about.

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