Lecture 4 and this time Prof A is looking at the Teacher
Persona. Not sure about this lecture as some of what he says is good but some
of it is quite old school.
He argues that teachers need to develop a teaching persona
that is not necessarily the same as your normal persona and that you are to a
certain extent playing a role as a teacher. As a teacher you are not a friend
or a family member but a teacher and need to keep a certain distance from your
students. Although you need to get to know your students this should be more
intellectually than socially. He goes further saying that personal friendships
with students shouldn't happen and in many instances are a form of professional
misconduct. One of his interviewees talks about his early teaching career where
as a young lecturer he wore the same sort of clothes he had done as student. The
students just saw him another member of the class. When he began dressing
differently, in his case in a tie, the students saw him differently and he was
able to create his teacher persona.
Prof A continues by saying that you set the rules and are centre
of attention. Here I think he is talking about old style formal mass lectures.
In fact one of the people he interviews challenges this and says the only rule
he has is mutual respect and that he doesn't like taking a parent role in the
classroom. Prof A later tempers his ‘you are the centre of attention and set
the rules’ argument by saying that it is perhaps more a situation of benign
inequality. He spoils this a bit by then showing a clip where he enforces his
no laptops rule and makes students print out the readings for the week. One student
makes a reasonable argument that it’s slightly ironic to insist on paper
printouts for class on the environment. He is then quite belittling of the
student in his response saying that there a more trees in America now than
there were in 1900. (A strange argument indeed! There may be more than in 1900
but surely there were more trees in America before 1492.) He said that he had resolved
the situation with humour. Some might now call this banter but it looked like
bullying to me.
Whilst I agree with the concept of the teacher persona, that
you have a particular role to play and that you are not there to be friends
with the students, I don’t agree with his you are in charge approach. In a previous
language teaching role, in the first class one for the activities was for the
class to set the rules of the class. Even though class after class produced the
same things I might have suggested, they had created them, had ownership of
them and made sure they kept to them in order for the class to run smoothly for
all of us. It also got them speaking to each other in the target language and
began developing a community within the class from the off.
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