What would you do?

[ajnabieh]

[Details hopefully made abstract enough]

A student in your class says something, without intending malice, that drastically misrepresents the experience of an oppressed group of people they are not a member of, and is pretty clearly false on examination of the content of it. This statement is kind of incidental to a larger comment. (Not the example, but: "Now that gay marriage is legal, there is no discrimination against gay people; therefore, we should focus on migrants' rights, because they are really important" in the context of a conversation about migrants' rights.)

A member of the oppressed group, who has never previously spoken in class, gets a did you really say that absurdly stupid thing look on hir face, and looks directly at the professor, as if to say did I hear that right? Is zie for real?

As the professor, do you:

A) Call on the student making the face, and ask hir, "What do you think of what was just said?" and allow them to make the argument against it.
B) Let it slide, since it's tangential, and go after the main point of the argument.
C) Say something noncombative that manages to convey that the absurdly wrong thing is not true, but tries to salvage the student's point.
D) Tell the student directly that "whoa, that was a really awful thing you said, how can you believe that?"
E) Hope a student raises hir hand to tell the first student "whoa, that was a really awful thing you said, how can you believe that?"

***

I went with option C, for a variety of reasons. First, option B strikes me as the wrongest possible choice; it would tell the student making the face that the professor is not hir ally, and would allow the offensive thing to exist in the classroom as if it were true, and option E is close, since it, again, says I'm not an ally, and also runs the risk of turning into B when no one raises a hand. So the choice is A, C, or D. Option D might work for some people (I have a colleague who yells at her students when they say racist things, which, since she teaches about race, is a lot), but it's not my style; I'm not a confrontational personality. There's also the fact that I prioritize getting students comfortable with expressing opinions in my class, and being able to make arguments about our subject matter. I want them to be comfortable going out on a limb and trying to say something when they don't get the whole concept. I also want to be able to show them that, even if what they say is kind of incoherent, there's an argument or an idea within it that can be extracted.

Option A, on the other hand, would focus on getting the student making the face in a position to be able to say "what you said, it isn't true, and here's why," which is a valuable tactic and skill for someone wanting to argue back against sedimented power structures. But it would have forced hir to do it, without volunteering. It also would have said, "You, person in group X: explain the group X position on this issue." I, on the other hand, am again the ally here, and I do think that's important to show students.

So, I went with C, in the hopes of both letting the student who said the thing know that there was an idea worth salvaging in it, and in letting the student making the face know that zie wasn't alone. "Now, it's not actually true that discrimination against LGBT people has gone away, but you're saying that, if it's possible to change laws so that LGBT people get rights that had been denied to them, then we should be able to change laws to get migrants rights as well." The student who had made the face nodded vigorously, and I smiled at hir in a way that intended to say I know, can you believe it? Some people are clueless.

I'm reasonably sure that option C was the right choice for me, but I'm curious what others would have done--or if there are other options I didn't see here.

Comments

[littlebutfierce]

I think option C sounds like the right choice here, too, for all the reasons you listed.

[liv]

I think C is the right option, but that's with the benefit of hindsight. IRL I would be embarrassingly likely to choose B, which I agree is a bad choice, but sometimes I want to keep the discussion on track more than I want to fight-all-the-oppressions. In certain moods I might go with D, not as a conscious choice but because the words would come straight out of my mouth before I had time to think.

Actual experience of this: class discussion about diet and health, and clueless but well-meaning student gives an example of how people from [ethnic minority] only ever eat [stereotypical food], and that's not very balanced. There were a couple of students from [ethnic minority] backgrounds present who looked very uncomfortable, and I came straight out with "Come on, that's like saying that English people don't get enough vitamins because we only ever eat bread!" This lead to CBWM getting very embarrassed, and indeed, to my mortification the rest of the group teased her about it for weeks afterwards. So it didn't really fulfil my pedagogic goal of getting students comfortable with expressing opinions in my class, I'm afraid. Challenging CBWM in a more gentle and supportive way would have been a lot better.

I don't think A would occur to me as an option, especially not if the face-making student were someone who doesn't speak up in class much. E I agree is not much better than B, and while it would be nice if it happened, I certainly wouldn't expect it.

[azurelunatic]

I suppose "Is there anyone who would like to comment on the assertion that _____?" might work, as an invitation to the face-making student, and if no one spoke up, one could proceed as C...

[melannen]

I would do something on a continuum between C and D, depending on how comfortable I was with controlling the class* and how willing I was to have the discussion turn into "analysis of the comment" instead of what we were originally discussing.

Some of the best things I learned in college discussion sections were with teachers who were willing to take up a comment like that and let the class turn into an hour-long moderated argument on the comment instead of what we were supposed to be studying. On the other hand, sometimes you really, really have to stay with the syllabus and can't spare the classtime, and making a quick note that it's not okay and moving on immediately is the right thing to do.

*with the note that the classes I'm in lately have been mostly 13-year-olds and controlling them has a different meaning, and the last time I was in this situation it involved somebody announcing that anybody who liked a particular musician was 'gay'.

[esmenet]

If I were the face-making student I would have been hoping for option A, since I am one of those people who enjoys telling others that they are a) wrong and b) acting like jerks, stop that—while also being unlikely to speak up about problematic-but-not-horrible stuff if I think the teacher and the rest of the class won't listen to what I'm saying. But C is probably the right choice as the teacher.

[wendelah1]

What if the face-making student had been someone not a member of an oppressed group, or at least not the one in question? Would that make a difference in your willingness to try (A)?

I know (C) is the best choice; knowing myself, I probably would have gone with (D). My face would have revealed my disdain either way. I'm not a good actor.

[notthemarimba]

I would go with C as well. It's hard when you're put on the spot like that, but I think you did the right thing.

[yasaman]

Go with something between C and D. Hell, I've had professors who have said, "Well that is just totally and completely untrue for many reasons too lengthy to get into right now, and if you would like to discuss it further, come to my office hours."

I've been the student asked to do A, and while I usually have no problem with sharing my opinions and experiences, there are some times and some environments where I have no desire to get into it. If the student isn't speaking up, especially if they are otherwise happy to contribute to discussion, there's probably a decent reason why they're not speaking up now.

[jae]

That is the choice I would make, too. Shaming is never the best educational choice, I think.

-J

[liseuse]

I would go for C. I don't think that shaming the student is a good idea, and also I am so ridiculously non-combative that I wouldn't be able to do so anyway. I might quietly ask them to see me after class as they were leaving, so I could go for a form of D. And I would be really really hoping for E to happen, but then I'd have to try and make it into a nice negotiated discussion, so part of me would also be hoping the rest of the students would just be wtfacing at the other student.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm glad you're reflecting on this, and hope you're also talking about it with colleagues IRL, since they may have insights into the campus culture on your particular campus and have likely navigated scenarios like this within that specific culture.

That said, since you're on the job market and it takes zero seconds to connect your name to this site, I'd be cautious about blogging about students and colleagues. While your current colleagues are clearly not the target audience here, consider that you may want their help in your job search; your post about spousal hires, or even your comment in this post about the colleague who teaches about race, are not likely to be genuinely anonymous to folks in such a small community and might provoke ill will. Students will (or have) read this. And for search committees, many would think twice about hiring someone who is going to write so freely about sensitive issues like this.

[ajnabieh]

So, I hope it's OK with the person who wrote this that I unscreened it, because I wanted to reply to its argument directly.

First, in case there's any confusion: the reason it takes "zero seconds" to connect my name to this site is that I write here under my legal name. I give my institutional affiliation at multiple points. I include this blog on both my CV and in my cover letters for jobs. What I'm doing as ajnabieh is something I consider part of my professional work. This is the blog of Emily Regan Wills, and no one should be confused about that.

Second, I thought very hard about what I chose to write in this post, and how I chose to write it. My presentation of it is intentional. First, I did not give any specific details about the incident: not which of my classes this occurred in or what the content of the class was, not the genders, races, or other relevant identities of the student, and not the content of the comment. While the incident would be recognizable to one of the other people in the room at the time (or maybe not--who knows), that's as far as it goes. Second, I wrote this as a general question about my teaching, not about anything related to students. I attempted to show as much respect as possible for both students involved in the exchange--the one who, probably inadvertently, offended another, and the one who was offended. Both of them are equal members of the classroom community, and both are treated as such in my description. My priority here is on how I should act in a situation like this, not anybody else.

Third, I wrote this with the intention that hiring committees might see it. I did so because this is the teacher I want them to see: someone who is committed to her students' empowerment as political speakers, who is interested in being an ally to disenfranchised groups of all stripes but not interested in her classroom being an environment of shaming or attack, and someone who is critically reflective on her own work. This blog post is a public performance. Search committees, if you are looking? This is who I am.

Fourth, on the concept of "sensitive issues"--I tend to think the issues my research focuses on (things like state surveillance, the systematic disenfranchisement of communities in contemporary politics, the politics of political engagement around Palestinian rights, etc--are substantially more sensitive than a question of how to handle classroom conflict.