Disclosure in the classroom
This is my first post of the new year. I have already posted my new year’s resolutions, which I made early. I also posted my goals for the rest of the break. I am obviously full of hope.
I have drifted to the personal on my blog which is something I initially wanted to avoid. Over the past decade, the boundary between personal and public has consistently eroded, an observation made by many. Now that displaying ourselves is de rigeur, thanks especially to Facebook and Twitter, I feel less guilty about doing it.
I know in class my students enjoy when I disclose to them. There’s an art to disclosing appropriately in the classroom, one that has taken me years to master. It’s ironic to me that I disclose less and less as the world around me expects more and more. I realized this when I read an article on faculty and Facebook. According to this article, being Facebook friends with your students makes you have more immediacy (i.e., being approachable and accessible) to them. Yet, students also expect some distance, even on Facebook, and over-disclosure gets creepy. I am Facebook friends with a number of BRCC students and I found myself realizing one day that they have access to my perverse, radical, and often publicly unacceptable thoughts and attitudes. The reverse is true as well.
In reflecting on this, I realized that I didn’t care if my women’s studies students at USF knew this stuff about me. I didn’t care if most of my LSU students knew this stuff about me. For former grad students, it goes without saying that I didn’t care. But for BRCC students, I was uncomfortable. In that moment I realized that I changed my teaching persona rather dramatically at BRCC.
Ok, so I actually do disclose to students regularly in the interpersonal classes, but only in what I think are “appropriate” ways, i.e., the story is relevant to the immediate topic in class. I don’t disclose much of anything in the public speaking class, which has lead students to perceive me as being stoic (at least according to one student’s comments on the teacher evaluations). Quite ironic, I think.
I’m not entirely sure why this change occurred. In fact, I’m sort of flummoxed by it. So I intend to loosen up a bit in the public speaking class and I intend to relax a little more in my other classes and see what happens. This is not necessarily a goal or a resolution, just a thought about how the year might unfold.
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“access to my perverse, radical, and often publicly unacceptable thoughts and attitudes.” As a former student (LOL), it was that disclosure that allowed you to be real. Knowing that you were *real* and had much the same or at least similar experiences that we did, became more of a positive challenge. You were the professor/friend. The professor that expected much, and we were the students who wanted to live up to that expectation. I understand that having boundaries with students is healthy, at the same time… where is the line between a healthy boundary and a cut-off from the world professor? There have been 3 professors in my life that I would have killed myself for, study wise… and they were the profs with whom I was the closest. It was because I was allowed into the “inner sanctuary of brilliance” that really caused me to want to succeed even more in their classroom. Professors are models of what their students can be. Once the student is allowed to see the reality of the prof, the reality of the student can come to fruition… :) Between you, my Hebrew prof, and Dr. emilie townes…. I had a lot of work and expectations to which i wanted meet. Check out emilie…you two have similar teaching styles.