The relationship between professors and students can feel adversarial, with instructors creating rules and students following them, or not. Jesse Stommel offers a different approach: Start by trusting students.
Stommel, a senior lecturer in digital studies at the University of Mary Washington, tweeted that phrase out with the hashtag #4wordpedagogy, a few years back, kicking off a far-reaching — and continuing — discussion about how professors see their work in the classroom.
Trusting students informs both Stommel’s teaching and his advocacy. It’s why he doesn’t grade students, for instance, instead championing “ungrading.” It’s why he vehemently disagrees with the whole premise of Turnitin, the controversial plagiarism-detection service. It’s why he wants professors to think twice before they make jokes at students’ expense.
Stommel, a co-author of An Urgency of Teachers: The Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy (Hybrid Pedagogy, 2018) and a co-founder of the faculty-development event Digital Pedagogy Lab, recently returned to the classroom full time after several years of running Mary Washington’s Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies. He spoke with The Chronicle about how professors bring a “full, complicated self” to the classroom, why he thinks students are marginalized, and whether colleges have really gotten serious about teaching.
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Ten years ago, the student-success conversation was largely about student affairs and financial aid. Now administrators seem to be talking more about the classroom. So are colleges taking teaching more seriously?
There’s a conversation that’s pushing in that direction, but I don’t know that I’ve seen it get there yet. There are some specific markers that I would look for. Are graduate students getting adequate training in teaching and pedagogy? We’re not there yet. Are faculty members getting the support they need before they’re put in the classroom? We’re not there yet. We’re still at a point where more than 50 percent of teachers in higher education are receiving little to no training in pedagogy. Why aren’t there departments of higher-education pedagogy? Why aren’t there for-credit classes being offered in higher-education teaching and learning?
Your career path has been a little unconventional. You thought about leaving graduate school, did leave the University of Wisconsin at Madison quite publicly, and more recently moved from running the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies at Mary Washington back to teaching full-time. How have you gotten where you are?
I knew I wanted to be a higher-education teacher, and I knew that I wanted my focus to be on higher-education pedagogy. When I was in graduate school, you weren’t supposed to say that you wanted to work at a teaching institution. At various points in my career, when I said my focus is higher-education pedagogy, people would say, “No, what’s your field? What’s your discipline?” And I would say, “No, no, that is my discipline.” But I didn’t feel like I could write a dissertation on higher-education pedagogy. When I went on the job market for the first time, I didn’t feel like I could say my research focus was higher-education pedagogy. I mean for one, there wouldn’t have been a single job ad for me to respond to.
And so it’s less that I’ve gone all over the place, and it’s more that there really isn’t a place for people whose focus is higher-education pedagogy. It’s really online that I’ve found a community: people like me who felt like they were the only person at their institution who focused on what they focused on. When I started using Twitter pretty seriously, I started to realize: Oh, I’m not alone in this. There are lots of other people around the world who are doing this work. Over the years, I’ve found a network of people working together to stir conversation around teaching and learning in higher ed.
What’s different about teaching full-time this time around?
The last time I was a full-time teacher, the things that people were concerned about were different.
I knew this was happening because I’ve done a lot of research on precarity and the increase in the adjunct and contingent-labor work force. But even among full-time faculty, tenure-track, and tenured faculty, there’s a sense of precarity. A sense of, “Are our institutions going to still exist? Are we still going to exist?” It’s different to know something is happening in an abstract way and actually to feel the pulse of the room and realize, wow, teachers feel incredibly precarious.
That’s an interesting observation given my question of whether colleges are paying more attention to teaching. Honestly — I don’t think this is true across the board, there are a lot of great institutions doing a lot of great things — but I think some of the attention to teaching and learning is a kind of lip-service.
I’ve never been at an institution where I felt like students were not marginalized.
How much have higher-ed faculty salaries changed over the years? How many more full-time lines are institutions creating for teachers? How much more faculty-development support are institutions offering? Most of those things are in fact decreasing as institutions talk about an increased focus on those things.
You’ve summarized your pedagogy as “start by trusting students.” How did you arrive at that?
There’s a lot of talk in faculty development about best practices. But every teacher teaches at a different institution, they teach different students, they’re a different body in the classroom, and so the idea of best practices seems flawed to me. Instead I think about best philosophies. That’s really where “start by trusting students” came from. That looks different for different teachers in different classrooms, but it is a place to put your foot as you enter a classroom.
What does it look like for you?
When I was a 23-year-old teacher, I was so close to having been an undergrad student myself that it meant being able to sit with them as one of them. I still try to sit with them as one of them. But that looks very different as a 43-year-old man with a two-and-a-half-year-old baby.
Bringing myself fully to the classroom actually takes more deliberate effort on my part. I remember the first time that a student told me that as an openly gay teacher, I was a role model to them. I had never made an effort to come out in the classroom. I had never made an effort to be a gay teacher — I just was honest about who I was. Now that I have a two-and-a-half-year-old adopted baby, and me and my husband are pushing her around campus in the stroller, I just am in the classroom. Bringing that full, complicated self to the classroom means divulging personal stuff in some cases, or just recognizing that I bring all that stuff with me whether I divulge that or not.
Professors who want a more human connection with their students sometimes worry that it could come at the expense of not being taken seriously, especially if they’re young or a woman or part of a marginalized group. Does that concern you? What would you say to someone who was worried about that?
What it means to bring your full self to the classroom is very different for an able-bodied white man and a disabled, person-of-color, queer faculty member. What self is even safe to bring is different.
I kind of turn that question on its head a little bit, and I’d ask: What are our responsibilities to our students? Students are one of the least-privileged groups at institutions. I know there’s a whole dialogue about students being snowflakes, or students having all this power in the system — that students are customers and the customer is always right. But I’ve never been at an institution where I felt like students were not marginalized. As much as the work of teaching is precarious, being a student is even more precarious.
How does seeing students as precarious, rather than entitled, change the way you interact with them?
Our system is set up to create a hierarchy where I’m the person with the knowledge, and I’m going to impart that knowledge, and then I’m going to grade students and rank them against one another. So even if it comes naturally to me, personally, it still takes an effort for me to see a student and feel awe, see a student and feel wonder. Be genuinely curious about what they think about things. Allow them to change my mind about our subject matter — or about anything.
You’ve mentioned your daughter. How has having a young child changed the way you think about teaching and learning?
When I look at her, I see learning happening constantly. I’m not sure if that’s something that we lose or something that we stop sharing so openly. I’ve started to think about the importance of making learning visible. Allowing students to make mistakes visible, allowing them to make confusion visible.
So many of our credentialing, marking, grading, evaluation schemes are about measuring how much a person knows. Education is not about valorizing knowing, it’s not valorizing having the learning be done; it should be about valorizing not knowing and being able to sit in the space of not knowing comfortably. That’s what she’s so good at.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Beckie Supiano writes about teaching, learning, and the human interactions that shape them. Follow her on Twitter @becksup, or drop her a line at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.
