Elation. Disappointment. Affirmation. Confusion. Growth. Imagine a job where immense possibility is daily woven together with significant uncertainty. A role where your words and actions can directly lift a student’s spirits or crush their dreams. Yes, I am describing the ever-vaunted and trope-tastic, college professor. While I have not embraced tweed or elbow patches, I have wrapped my whole self around the possibilities of co-creation and inclusive, collaborative learning in the university classroom. I am deeply grateful for the trust, freedom, and opportunities teaching college students offers.  With this gift of trust comes a deep responsibility to be thoughtful, open, and ever-exploring with and from the students. My foundation of critical feminist pedagogy (hooks, 1994) informs how I structure my classes, integrate content, and assess student learning. I strive to create a classroom environment that is brave, challenging, exciting, accessible, informative, and most of all supportive of students’ needs. 

My perspective on my role in the classroom is influenced by critical, feminist, and postmodern thought on power, privilege, authority, and disruption. As an instructor, I am a co-creator of knowledge and learning in the class experience (hooks, 1994). A collaborative class can only learn more and further understanding of ideas and concepts if they are open to teaching and learning from each other. This requires a classroom to be founded on relationships (I believe we need to know each other in order to best learn from each other); rooted in critical theory (we should critique and question systems of power that create inequity; (Darder, Baltodano, & Torres, 2009; Delgado Bernal, 2002; Freire & Macedo, 2000; hooks, 1994) and postmodern thought (disruptions show us rifts in the normative which present alternative narratives; Butler, 1990; Butler, Gambetti, & Sabsay, 2016) ); and open to discourse in a brave space (Aaro & Clemens, 2013). I view each course as embarking on an exciting, and at times uncertain and uncomfortable adventure together. 

In my experience teaching leadership over a fifteen-year period, I have adopted the pedagogical tool of an experiential and co-created classroom environment. Co-learning in pedagogy is informed by bell hook’s conceptualization of “teaching to transgress” or disrupting normative authority and hierarchy in the classroom by power-sharing and collectively exploring the course content based on diverse voices offered by the readings, the students, and the teacher (hooks, 1994). Students from all marginalized populations are often disenfranchised in curriculum, through a lack of representative authors, speakers, and perspectives, as well as a likelihood for more privileged voices to overtake the conversation.  

This is further influenced by my social location as a cisgender, straight, white Woman. I lean upon critical feminist pedagogy to recognize and attempt to disrupt the power dynamics in the classroom by noticing and encouraging questioning of presumed norms. I employ a pedagogy to call out inequitable practices in the classroom and facilitate experiential learning and growth. This occurs through intentional small group work, facilitation of speaking in a thoughtful, controlled fashion, and calling in all members of the classroom to hold ourselves accountable to the disruption of norms that perpetuate the status quo instead of innovating and disrupting for leadership enactment through positive change.  Leadership is a collaborative process for creating change – I believe collective practice in creative, critical pedagogy offers a direct leadership learning experience for students to prepare as leading influencers addressing wicked problems in our larger world.  

References 

Arao, B., & Clemens, K. (2013). From safe spaces to brave spaces: A new way to frame dialogue around diversity and social justice. In L. M. Laundreman (Ed.), The art of effective facilitation: Reflections of social justice educators (pp. 132-150). Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing, LLC.  

Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble. New York, NY: Routledge. Retrieved from https://books-google-com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/books/about/Gender_Trouble.html?id=gTbbCgAAQBAJ 

Butler, J., Gambetti, Z., & Sabsay, L. (Eds.). (2016). Vulnerability in resistance (Reprint edition). Durham: Duke University Press Books. 

Darder, A., Baltodano, M., & Torres, R. D. (Eds.). (2009). The critical pedagogy reader (2nd ed). New York, NY: Routledge. 

Delgado Bernal, D. (2002). Critical race theory, Latino critical theory, and critical raced-gendered epistemologies: Recognizing students of color as holders and creators of knowledge. Qualitative Inquiry, 8(1), 105–126. https://doi.org/10.1177/107780040200800107 

Freire, P., & Macedo, D. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed, 30th anniversary edition. (M. B. Ramos, Trans.). New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic. 

hooks,  bell. (1994). Teaching to transgress. Routledge.  

The opportunity to teach and influence curriculum within two distinct, unique undergraduate leadership programs has offered me profound moments of learning and growth. I do not believe when I accepted the VTAP role five years ago I fully understood what I was signing up for - but I have relished the challenge and beauty this unique teaching role has offered. 

I've learned through teaching the exact same classes with two different audiences the relevance of affinity group spaces and the significance of identities (both mine and the students) in the classroom space. Specifically, I have been surprised and heartened to teach in an all-women-identified space through the CWC Leadership Scholars Program. Students note regularly that the effect of having a safe space to speak without fear of repercussions offers an unequalled experience in fully showing up authentically in the classroom. 

Further, through reflexive practices and research analysis, I've been able to examine how my identity as a white, middle-class woman reinforces centering whiteness in a majority-white classroom (in the PLP program). This is an uncomfortable but important data point because I must learn to notice first in order to shift that socialized practice in the dance of facilitating a leadership learning space.

See further reflection on these complexities through two different case study research projects in the Publications and Projects section.

My second key teaching reflection point relates to the importance of using the leadership classroom as a space for examining real-world, current issues. Often as educators, we pre-plan our lessons down to the minute and feel we don't have time to allow outside events to be discussed in the classroom. I believe most of my impactful and memorable classes have let the lesson plan fly out the window and instead allowed the students to guide our conversation around important current events (especially those that are happening on campus or in our direct communities). Learning leadership cannot happen inside four walls unless we also bring our world - in all its complexities - inside. 

Finally, I complete my teaching reflection with a note about showing up. I believe in a role like Faculty Director for a program, I cannot simply show up to class and then leave everything behind once we're done. I must show up with my full self consistently inside the classroom and out, and be honest about my strengths and foibles in order to truly, deeply connect with and learn from the students. I begin the first class of each quarter with a reminder to students that they are humans first - and they should never feel like being a student is primary over their own health, safety, or broader, fully human needs. Teaching is a dance accomplished in concert - with students and their myriad needs, within the current world and our roles as citizens within it, and with our own selves - continuously learning and re-learning the steps. I hope to hold space for centering growth and change in this intricate teaching dance.

Please see the Pedagogies section to learn in more depth about my efforts in teaching through curriculum and course development, student learning and evaluations, and collaborations with leadership studies colleagues in the practice of teaching.

Please see the People section to hear from students Imani, Bela, Ariana, and Cami, as well as colleagues/supervisors Linda Olson and Paul Kosemplel about their experiences with my teaching.