Of Earth Monsters and Adjunct Lecturers
Where other cultures have an earth mother, the Aztecs have an earth monster. Their creation myth takes all our ideas about this familiar paradigm and goes topsy-turvy. The female creature from which the earth grew doesn’t nurture her people but terrifies them and demands ritual sacrifice. Quite frankly, this image is what made me fall in love with the Aztecs. Sometimes, when I look at the bottom of an Aztec sculpture, the most common place to carve this creature, I see a lot of myself.
I’ve always been jealous of instructors who can be all earth mother with their students: caring, nurturing, and meeting their needs with warmth and kindness. Yet, while I admire it, it’s never something to which I’ve aspired. Last year, though, I realized that while I could not, and didn’t want to be, an earth mother, I was actually quite happy to be an earth monster.
We’re all faced with challenges as instructors, but I think women are faced with an extra-special obstacle. Students often want us to baby them, and get frustrated when we make demands of them in the classroom. I always wondered: how can I be warm and caring and still maintain a cool distance that communicates that I have expectations? It’s a question of balance, and I’ve always found myself on the colder end of the spectrum. My students could never tell if I was laughing at them or with them. Even I didn’t know. My responses to comments or questions were almost universally sarcastic. And more than once I heard one student say to another, “No, YOU ask her!”
While I can’t entirely change my personality (especially without some major behavior modification therapy), I realized last year that I could adapt pedagogically to melt the ice a little. I was lucky enough not to have to transform on my own, and I don’t think I ever could have. A small interdisciplinary group of students worked with me to find the land of the warm-fuzzy, and I am sure they will agree that we always challenged each other. We’re talking about dealing with me, a girl who recognized the free-write as a pedagogically valid and useful tool, but dismissed it simply because it was too “hippyish.” Between the constant cracks about having a bonfire and singing Kumbaya, I’m surprised we ever made any progress. It wasn’t their job to make me softer, but it was all of our jobs to make each other better teachers.
Part of my reticence was disciplinary. Art history is largely taught in the dark, literally. The most familiar and most used format is the good old-fashioned slide lecture, which creates what Robert Nelson calls “the performative triangle consisting of speaker, audience and image.” It’s a strange relationship, and more frequently than not, this threesome becomes a very intimate coupling of the speaker and the image. And the student is ostensibly just there to watch.
I desperately wanted to get out of this habit. Of course, when we start in the classroom we teach the way we were taught, and the pattern was very easy to slip into. I was lucky to have colleagues who wanted to help me. Because we came out of different disciplines, we couldn’t always apply each other’s ideas but just discussing a different mindset became quickly transformative. Sometimes I backslid and found myself “triangulating” for an hour at a time. I was learning quickly that it’s easy to lecture; it’s harder to give up control.
In order to clarify my own values, I wrote a teaching statement. I saw myself changing even as I wrote it, saying something about aiming to create a classroom atmosphere where students were unafraid to be vulnerable, not scared to take risks. I steered clear of that clichéd safe space thing, but it was what I meant. I knew that meant a lot of things about my teaching style had to change. I was going to have to embrace things I may have previously scorned. I was going to have to let my students talk more than me. I was going to have to take the images off the screen and put them in front of these kids and trust what they had to say.
I was terrified, since I knew I was going to have to check my sarcasm at the door as well. Suddenly, though, I realized that the classroom wasn’t all about me. This sounds obvious when someone says it aloud, but how many of us honestly see our classrooms as collaborative spaces that are created with our students, not intricate performances choreographed for them? I was boggled by the question of creating a classroom community that wasn’t about me, where I wasn’t going to consistently win the most valuable player award. How does an instructor let her students direct warmth toward other students and make them love the class not her? Can anyone’s ego handle that?
I knew I had to try. I began introducing critical pedagogy into my classroom, and slowly witnessed change. Some of it was student resistance. You know how it was easy for me to lecture? Well, it was also easier for them to listen to me than it was to actively participate in a classroom community.
But before I knew it, the classroom looked completely different. I turned on the lights. My students were getting out of their chairs to point to the images on the screen. My students were getting out of their chairs without me asking them to do so. They were drawing in their notebooks and showing each other the results. Their chairs moved more easily with each group work assignment. Students wanted to write on the whiteboard. They spoke with confidence, as if their opinions mattered. Their opinions did matter. I was eventually hearing their voices more frequently than I heard my own.
Last semester was tough for me as a teacher. I fought hard to make fundamental changes that went against the grain of the discipline and sought to embed them into my classroom, taking into account the both my own needs, as well as those of my students. I can’t say I was surprised when on the last day of class I instinctively said, with no small heaping of snark, “All right, guys, it’s our last chance to hug it out.” Students stood up to file out of the room and approached me as I quickly added “Oh, with each other, not me.” After all, don’t touch the earth monster.
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