Leaving the podium physically transforms classroom power relations

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

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the author’s chapter-length argument about engaged pedagogy and bodily presence in teaching, and to embodied/tacit knowledge critiques of the ‘view from nowhere.’ — connects to: Choosing to teach closer to students rather than at a desk disrupts instructor authority; Treating the classroom as static and repeatable serves institutionalized domination — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 314; Physical classroom movement dismantles the desk’s implied hierarchy of truth — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 259 (+1 more)
• SEED: Angle for an essay: what physical movement around a teaching space signals about who is claimed to ‘work’ in the room, against the academy’s pretense that teaching is effortless.

Broader Connections

• Physical classroom movement dismantles the desk’s implied hierarchy of truth #exemplifies (0.92) — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 259
• Treating the classroom as static and repeatable serves institutionalized domination #expands (0.78) — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 314