What would you do?
Mar. 1st, 2012 03:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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.
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.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-02 01:25 am (UTC)