Choosing to teach closer to students rather than at a desk disrupts instructor authority

Evidence

When you leave the podium and walk around, suddenly the way you smell, the way you move become very apparent to your students. Also, you bring with you a certain kind of potential, though not guaranteed, for a certain kind of face-to-face relationship and respect for “what I say” and “what you say.” Student and professor are looking at each other. And as we come physically close, suddenly what I have to say is not coming from behind this invisible line, this wall of demarcation that implies anything that from this side of the desk is gold, is truth, or that everything said out there is merely for my consideration, that the only possible way I can respond is by saying “good,” “right,” and so on. As people move around it becomes more evident that we work in the classroom. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 259 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

It is as though we are to imagine that knowledge is this rich creamy pudding students should consume and be nourished by, but not that the process of gestation should also be pleasurable. As a teacher working to develop liberatory pedagogy I am discouraged when I encounter students who believe if the re’s a different practice they can be less committed, less disciplined. I think our fear of losing students’ respect has discouraged many professors from trying new teaching practices. Instead, some of us think, “I must return to the traditional way of doing it, otherwise I don’t get the respect, and the students don’t get the education they deserve because they don’t listen.” When I was a student, I embraced any professor who wanted to create more progressive teaching practices. I still remember the excitement I felt when I took my first class where the teacher wanted to change how we sat, where we moved from sitting in rows to a circle where we could look at one another. That change forced us to recognize one another’s presence. We couldn’t sleepwalk our way to knowledge. Nowadays, there are times when students resist sitting in a circle. They devalue that shift, because fundamentally, they don’t want to be participants. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 274 (#expands, via linked claim)

To enter classroom settings in colleges and universities with the will to share the desire to encourage excitement, was to transgress. Not only did it require movement beyond accepted boundaries, but excitement could not be generated without a full recognition of the fact that there could never be an absolute set agenda governing teaching practices. Agendas had to be flexible, had to allow for spontaneous shifts in direction. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 24 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Modern teachers exchange personalized classroom power for bureaucratic rule-bound authority — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 491; Leaving the podium physically transforms classroom power relations — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 259; Fear of losing student respect drives professors back to traditional teaching — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 274 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Leaving the podium physically transforms classroom power relations #corroborates (0.92) — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 259
• Fear of losing student respect drives professors back to traditional teaching #expands (0.85) — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 274
• Generating classroom excitement requires abandoning fixed agendas and fixed authority #corroborates (0.84) — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 24
• Professors’ fear of losing control blocks any class critique in the classroom #corroborates (0.80) — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 377
• Modern teachers exchange personalized classroom power for bureaucratic rule-bound authority #qualifies (0.75) — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America, 491