Contemplative educator Parker Palmer suggests that we teach who we are. What I take him to mean is that a whole person is standing in front of the classroom and that who we are as a person impacts how our students perceive us and respond to what we are attempting to teach.
On the one hand, there is something profound and uplifting about this insight. Palmer teaches that our character and our integrity have a deep impact on our students, offering inspiration and hope.
On the other, this line of thinking has all kinds of implications for how we interpret student evaluations of teaching. Students are quick to give a teacher the benefit of the doubt if they’ve been socialized to see that category of person as trustworthy. And students are equally quick to doubt the earned and apparent expertise of a teacher if they’ve been socialized to see that category–more often intersecting categories–of person as lacking standing as a knower.
Miranda Fricker calls this epistemic injustice, and I have argued elsewhere that epistemic injustice should influence how we think about teaching. In a world structured by all kinds of injustices, it is often the case that even the best teacher will fail to convince a student that they know what they are talking about if that student has been socialized to discount people in the teacher’s social categories.
There are certainly times I worry that I receive good course evaluations because I look like what many of my students expect a good professor to look like. And I know that many teachers receive less good teaching evaluations because they don’t look like what students have been socialized to expect a good teacher to look like.
For this reason–and others–I encourage us to think about acknowledging the ways that one’s identity can influence how students perceive expertise and effectiveness and begin talking more about good and effective teaching rather than focusing so much on whether someone is perceived to be a good teacher.
Departments can work together to define what good teaching looks like in their field. In many fields and in many courses, good teaching will mean students being invited to do engaging and demanding work. And so when offering feedback on a teacher’s effectiveness, we might focus less on the person of the teacher, and instead, look to what their teaching facilitates for students.
To close, the person we are matters a great deal in the classroom. But when we evaluate teaching effectiveness, we may need to think more intentionally about assessing the quality of teaching we observe instead of believing that some of us are just better teachers than others and seeing our evaluations as little more than sorting the “inherently good teacher” or the “natural” from those who are ineffective. Everyone can get better at teaching, and sometimes a “natural teacher” may just be someone who most looks the part to most of their students.