Calling Cards: Theory and Practice in the Study of Race, Gender, and Culture

Chapter 10: Pretenders on the Throne: Gender, Race, and Authority in the Composition Classroom

Chapter 10 Pretenders on the Throne GENDER, RACE, AND AUTHORITY IN THE COMPOSITION CLASSROOM Amanda Espinosa-Aguilar INTRODUCTION During the last two decades, a growing number of scholars in rhetoric and composition have focused their research on examining the influence of race, gender, and culture on English studies and teaching. Several others (e.g., Bruffee 1984; Murray 1969; Elbow 1973), have addressed such issues by promoting collaborative learning and shared classroom authority as methods for opening new space to allow for diverse voices. These approaches, generally referred to as critical pedagogies or liberatory pedagogies (Freire 1970; hooks 1994; Shor 1996), have contributed to a paradigm shift in educational practices from teachercentered pedagogies to student-centered ones. For the most part, the impact of this shift on students has been positive in enabling traditionally disenfranchised students (working class, minority, GBLT, etc.) to navigate academia more easily. At the core of these practices is the assumption that authority in classrooms should be shared, a strategy that has typically helped students to feel empowered, to have a clearer 147 148 Amanda Espinosa-Aguilar sense of their own agency, and to operate confidently as learners. Missing still from our research, however, is attention to the impact of these strategies on the teachers who use them, and especially when the sharing of authority fails. After five years of applying critical pedagogy in my own teaching, I have not experienced the success generally proclaimed by others. Instead, I have come to understand from a very personal perspective an important point made by Don Dippo and Steven Gelb (1991) in criticizing proponents of shared authority. They observed that those who promoted sharing classroom authority (e.g., Bruffee, Murray, Elbow) are white males who, given typical classroom dynamics, are the least likely to have their authority questioned in the first place. Academics (typically white, male, and older) whose authority is established because they already embody normed expectations about authority have fewer factors to balance and ultimately less difficulty democratizing their classrooms. This observation raises the question of what happens when the professor is not a white male? My experiences as a female faculty of color offer a different perspective. In my view, success with liberatory pedagogies is linked to the extent to which a professor is perceived to hold authority. In my case, despite my holding the position of professor, as a woman of color, authority is not automatically granted for me, and using an approach that often requires me to relinquish what little authority I command can be a problem. Many studies (e.g., Bauer 1990; Ellsworth 1989) have shown that women already come into the classroom facing students who disrespect them more than men. For example, Joan Gallos (1995) summarizes the experiences of numerous female faculty when she notes that male students are prone to “calling [female faculty] derogatory names, throwing objects at them during lectures, informing them that they hated being ‘stuck by the schedule’ in a section taught by a woman, [or] commenting publicly in inappropriate ways about the woman’s appearance and more” (66). Challenges to authority are exacerbated when the woman is also a member of a historically underrepresented group. This essay, then, explores some of the problems that can occur when the person who is using liberatory pedagogy is a woman of color, and it serves as a cautionary tale especially for faculty who have not yet been tenured. A QUESTION OF AUTHORITY In my first tenure-track job I practiced liberatory pedagogy by including many student-centered activities in my lessons. The more I brought activities into the classroom that required active student involvement, 149 Pretenders on the Throne the more the students challenged my methods. For example, one strategy that I used was having a range of voices represented among the readings that I chose in order to extend the frames of reference for the voices that my students might choose in their own essays. When I assigned both James Baldwin’s “A Talk to Teachers” and Malcolm X’s “My First Conk” in the same class, I received a number of evaluations noting that the readings were boring, not relevant, a waste of time, of questionable value, lacked connection to the course goals, or “not what I was used to.” In other words, the students resisted seeing anything “appropriate ” about these materials and responded with vitriolic evaluations. They did not want to be...