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Engaging Feminist Pedagogy to Rewrite Authority in the Classroom
The Role of Embodiment in Establishing Authority: Application and Practice
Introduction
Throughout my first year as a new graduate teaching assistant (GTA), I often questioned how to address my presence as an instructor and as a young woman in a relatively unstable position in academia. I see instructor presence as synonymous with ethos and persona—how I present myself to a classroom (how I want students to see me) and how my students will see me based on external factors that may be out of my control, like gender/gender presentation, age, and university position. Transitioning from student to teacher is difficult enough without considering the inherent instability and liminality of working as a teaching assistant in graduate school, as many scholars have noted; William J. Macauley Jr. calls the rhetoric and composition TAship a “liminal space” (4) and Jessica Restaino refers to the position of graduate students as a “middle space” (53). Simultaneously, instructors and GTAs whose embodiments include other or additional marginalized identities are likely to experience more challenges in feeling respected by their students or even their institutions.
My liminality as a GTA affects my use of authority in the first-year composition (FYC) classroom—more specifically, my tenuous position as a GTA can create a disconnect between who I am as a student and who I want to be as a teacher. I acknowledge that my presence as a white, cisgender woman has positively impacted my experience in academia and contributed to a sense of credibility from my students but what does this look and feel like for GTAs with further marginalized identities? Elizabeth Ellsworth refers to these instructors with marginalized identities as the “Inappropriate Other”: one who does not fulfill the role of white, male authority in the classroom (321). How can the “Inappropriate Other” be the authority in an FYC classroom in a student-centered way? What if grasping authority could be liberating? Because there is not enough scholarship on how GTAs specifically can use progressive pedagogies to empower themselves and their students, my article aims to unpack how institutionally Othered, or “Inappropriate Other,” GTAs can use feminist-pedagogy-informed notions of positive authority and embodied approaches to instruction to feel more confident in the classroom despite liminal institutional positionalities.1
To illustrate my claim, first, I briefly detail scholarship about feminist pedagogy. Then I draw attention to a gap in the literature on how GTAs can apply this pedagogy to their teaching to address identity in the classroom. Next, I discuss my approach to rewriting authority as a form of credibility embraced by feminist teacher-scholars; instead of authoritarianism as a negative force in the classroom that alienates both students and teachers, GTAs can embrace authority as a positive extension of their experiences. Lastly, I touch on how shifting authority to include the Othered instructor is done through both feminist pedagogies and embodiment. With the addition of teaching strategies, I offer recommendations on how GTAs can bring their whole selves into their teaching to validate their—and all—identities as instructors and leaders worthy of respect.
[1] I have most heavily relied on feminist pedagogical practices to inform my approach to teaching, but I feel this framework would be remiss without acknowledging part of feminist pedagogy’s history and roots in critical pedagogy and how many of the practices in feminist pedagogy (like positionality and embodiment) also overlap with queer pedagogical teachings. My argument will only touch on aspects of critical and queer pedagogies as they inform, support, or bolster the larger feminist pedagogical practices I focus on.