A few weeks ago, I went to my daughter’s open house at her high school and had a chance to meet her teachers. One teacher stood out to me from what he said about “wanting to be genuine” with his students as much as possible because that would create a more effective learning environment for them. At first, it seemed like such a strange thing to say. How could he not be genuine with them? Wasn’t he always himself? And if he wasn’t being genuine, then what was he doing?
As I started to think about it, though, I had to appreciate the honesty of his comment and admit the odd disconnect between who we are as teachers in the classroom and who we are outside of it. As much as we’d like to think that those two things, those two people, those two selves, are largely the same, it might not be the case. As with many professions, we craft or adopt a voice or a persona to meet the demands of our positions. While we are responsible for shaping our voice and embodying our role in a given situation, is our teaching persona who we “genuinely” are? Is a lawyer being genuine when they speak to a jury in a courtroom? Is a doctor being genuine when they talk to their patients in a hospital? Are they being “real” in those situations?
I want to believe, in the words of Popeye, that “I yam what I yam” and that I “yam” still me, whether I’m in the classroom or not. Who I am in that space is simply one version of me—just as I’m a different version of myself at a family gathering, my daughter’s high school open house, or even waiting in line at the DMV. The roles may shift, but the core of who I am remains constant across all those situations.
By the same token, the voice that just announced a quiz on Thursday or that told the students how to navigate our course management system doesn’t sound at all like the one that talked about basketball with my dad or commiserated with a neighbor about the increase in our taxes. In the service of my job responsibilities and course learning outcomes, do I really become someone else? In the classroom, to put it as The Fixx did in 1984, “Are we ourselves?”
In The Art of Teaching, Jay Parini is quick to dismiss these questions, since “authenticity” itself is, he argues, yet another “construction” and “[t]he notion of the ‘true’ self is […] utterly false” (2005, 59). (Don’t look now, but a philosophical rabbit hole about the nature of the self is about to open on your browser.) Be that as it may, we usually have a sense, just as my daughter’s teacher did, of when we stray too far from that “construction” that feels “right” for us and that we would, rightly or wrongly, refer to as who we are.
Probably like so many of you, I still think about my first semester of teaching and all the anxiety that went along with it. I spent weeks getting ready, thinking about what I was going to do, writing out lectures, and planning assignments. But, when I finally made my way to the classroom, everything seemed off, wrong, and unfamiliar. I had no frame of reference for who I was in that space. The nervous voice that spoke was clearly mine, but it was also one I didn’t exactly recognize. I burned through what should have been a one-hour lecture in thirty minutes, and I struggled to fill the remaining time with questions for the class. When the students didn’t answer right away, I started to answer them myself. Walking back to my car that day, I wondered why anyone would do this job or how anyone did. And I was horrified by the thought that I would have to go back and stand there—again and again and again. What had I gotten myself into?
In the weeks and months that followed, I thought about the teacher that I was supposed to be (or that I thought I was supposed to be), as compared to the teacher that I was. More than twenty years later, I still think about that. I saw other professors who knew or seemed to know exactly who they were, what they were doing, and why they were doing it. Sometimes, I talked to them about how they taught a lesson or designed a class. I also drew on the memory of past instructors and tried, at times, to work on variations of teaching techniques that I had seen them use so well.
As much as I admired how some other professors managed a class discussion or set up a group activity, my attempt to recreate their class or draw on their lesson plan always felt unnatural and forced, like a strained karaoke version of another singer’s hit. I found that I was usually more comfortable being myself, as opposed to doing a bad impression of someone else. And what I continue to work on is what makes sense for me in my class, as opposed to thinking about how someone else might handle it or what would be an effective lesson for a different professor. How do I want to present the material, and what do I want students to get out of it?
This discussion has become especially relevant in the post-pandemic years, as authenticity has emerged as a key component of the solution for many overwhelmed educators, alongside a growing focus on trauma-informed teaching practices. In a Faculty Focus piece on inclusive teaching, Jackson Christopher Bartlett recommends “threading[ing] authenticity through our courses with genuine attempts to connect with our students” (my italics, 2023). In a recent Harvard Business Publishing essay, Lan Nguyen Chaplin similarly believes that “students thrive in classrooms where their professors show vulnerability” (2024). And, as Inside Higher Ed’s Ashley Mowreader reported this past summer, SUNY Oneonta is piloting a “Pedagogy of Real Talk” program, drawn from the work of Paul Hernandez, where faculty members “share their own stories with students” as a way of building relationships and, ultimately, “increas[ing] their academic success” (2024).
If these authors are right, students aren’t just looking to be “educated by instructors,” if they ever were; they want to be taught by people. In being real, in being vulnerable, in being honest with our students about why we love our discipline, about why we got into teaching, about what we struggled with along the way, we “[show] ourselves,” in Hernandez’s words, “that we are [people] before we are teachers” (2022, 24).
As I continue to think about what that teacher said that night, especially in light of this call for authenticity, the “genuine” challenge for many, maybe all teachers in the classroom in terms of their personas and their voices is just this, to get back to who they really are. In this regard, our careers in the classroom, like our lives themselves, are about this journey of figuring ourselves out—at the front, at the back, or even in the middle of the room. And now, it’s exactly what we need to do, as both we and our students find ourselves in that room after all those experiences away from it.
Douglas L. Howard, PhD is academic chair of the English department on the Ammerman Campus at Suffolk County Community College. He is the editor of Dexter: Investigating Cutting Edge Television and co-editor of The Essential Sopranos Reader, The Gothic Other, and with David Bianculli, Television Finales.
References
Bartlett, Jackson Christopher. 2023. “Inclusive Teaching Begins with Authenticity.” Faculty Focus, January 25. https://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/equality-inclusion-and-diversity/inclusive-teaching-begins-with-authenticity/.
Chaplin, Lan Nguyen. 2024. “Why and How to Embrace Vulnerability in Your Classroom.” Harvard Business Publishing, August 22. https://hbsp.harvard.edu/inspiring-minds/why-and-how-to-embrace-vulnerability-in-your-classroom/.
Hernandez, Paul. 2022. The Pedagogy of Real Talk. 2nd ed. Corwin.
Mowreader, Ashley. 2024. “Academic Success Tip: Engage Students in Real Talk.” Inside Higher Ed, July 9. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/student-success/academic-life/2024/07/09/curriculum-asks-college-professors-use-real-life.
Parini, Jay. 2005. The Art of Teaching. Oxford University Press.