What Happens in the Classroom No Longer Stays in the Classroom. What Does That Mean for Teaching?

Professors have long complained about RateMyProfessors.com. The website — on which anyone can review an instructor for the entire internet to see — seems to take all the problems of colleges’ official student course evaluations and combine them with all the problems of sites like Yelp. In particular: Its chili-pepper rating, which commenters could use to indicate that a professor was “hot,” struck many observers as an exaggerated example of the sexism that pervades conventional evaluations. So the site’s recent decision to drop the pepper was a victory for its critics.

But the chili pepper, offensive as it might have been, seems rather quaint in 2018. Professors now stand up in front of a classroom with bigger concerns than students’ assessments of their attractiveness in search results. They worry that students might surreptitiously record them, that their decontextualized comments could wind up on Fox News, go viral, damage their reputations, or even cost them their jobs.

But RateMyProfessors played an important role in that dramatic raising of the stakes. It made what happens in the classroom — traditionally a space that’s cordoned off from the world, if not exactly private — available for public scrutiny. Its very purpose is holding professors up to be judged.

The possibility of judgment and its potential consequences now hover over instructors as they teach. How do professors go about the often messy art of teaching when they know the wider world could be peering in?

“None of us teach without the risk of full public exposure,” says Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia.

There has always been the potential, Vaidhyanathan says, for misunderstandings to crop up between students and their professors, especially when professors “teach controversial subjects or use unorthodox teaching methods.” But the college classroom is designed to facilitate working through such misunderstandings. The internet is not.

At its best, a classroom is a community in which people have gathered for a shared, albeit temporary, project. In a course, professors and students meet in person, over time, and in a context they develop together. There are ground rules. Someone is in charge. Time and effort are devoted to understanding not only what someone said, but also what they were trying to say.

So a professor can push students, make them uncomfortable, or play devil’s advocate for pedagogical reasons, Vaidhyanathan says. A professor can even have an off day and say something inconsiderate in haste. All of that is manageable in the “ebb and flow of a whole course,” he says.

But everything changes, Vaidhyanathan says, once a comment is “frozen in digital form.” And if that frozen comment or a stealthily recorded video from the classroom is removed from its context and quoted on Fox News or the like, any sense of a shared community vanishes. As Vaidhyanathan says, “that can create a cascade of harassment and can threaten a career.”

‘We’re Not Talking to Everyone’

Few academics seek wider fame. “The vast majority of professors don’t go into the professoriate to be public intellectuals,” says Rey Junco, a senior researcher at Tufts University’s Tisch College of Civic Life. Even when it comes to their research, he says, most professors prefer to keep their work close to the vest until they’re ready to publish. Academic culture is quieter than many outsiders might imagine.

Already the classroom requires professors to speak before an audience — something not all of them are naturally comfortable with, says Dominic J. Voge, senior associate director of the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning at Princeton University. But a class is a very specific audience, he adds, and good professors teach with that in mind. “If I’m going to be an effective teacher,” he says, “I need to tailor the course content to the people in the room.”

Professors don’t talk to a class of students in the same way they’d talk with their colleagues, Voge says. They might not even talk to one class in the same way they’d talk to another. And they certainly don’t lay out their own absolute positions as they might in explicitly public comments.

In fact, plenty of courses and teaching techniques require articulating positions with which a professor disagrees. It’s a kind of speaking that is more similar to an actor playing a role than a politician laying out a campaign platform. That’s probably clear to the people in the room, but it might not be to outsiders who later hear what was said there.

“We’re not talking to everyone,” Voge says. “So when you broadcast that message to everyone, that’s not who it was designed for.”

Yet broadcasting a professor’s words to everyone is remarkably easy. Martha S. Jones remembers the first time it came to her attention that a student had written about her course on his blog. It was probably a decade ago now, says Jones, a professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University, and she was more amused than anything else.

Then, a few years later, Jones decided to audit a course. She knew some of the graduate students enrolled in it, and was invited to join their online chat group, which ran during class. Jones declined. For many years now, she has taught with an awareness that anything she says to students could become public, and that there’s probably a backchannel conversation happening somewhere. “Students’ capacity to comment outside the bounds we define,” she says, “are now multifold.”

When students publicize what happens in class, the results are sometimes harmless, even comical. In other cases, there are real consequences.

Either way, there have been enough controversies over professors’ comments that colleges should be prepared for the possibility. But as Tressie McMillan Cottom, an assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University, has written, most colleges want their professors to engage publicly, yet the institutions remain “woefully underprepared” to “deal with the reality of public scholarship, public intellectuals, or public engagement.”

On top of that, as she wrote elsewhere, the line between public and private spaces is contested and in flux. Is social media a public space or a private one? What about the classroom?

‘Rehearsal Space’ for Students

Before the digital age, information had a much more limited reach, even if it wasn’t completely private. Take student newspapers, which used to have a pretty defined readership but are now online, says L.D. Burnett, who will be a visiting assistant professor of history at Tarleton State University, in Texas, starting this fall.

“Students often historically have driven local campus issues into the national conversation,” a phenomenon she has researched. But now they can do so much more quickly — and with the aid of outside actors, like Campus Reform, that are eager to find examples of higher ed overstepping its bounds. At her previous university, Burnett would “lurk” on the student Reddit page and would sometimes learn important information that was only later revealed in official channels.

It’s not just politically charged comments or culture-war flaps that can wind up in the national news, either. Any scandal, tragedy, or mismanagement has the same potential. The challenge for colleges now, Burnett says, is: “How do we deal with the virality of everyday life?”

That dynamic has made Burnett think carefully about her classroom electronics policy, which she updates regularly. Every so often, Burnett says, there’s a dust-up about such policies, typically focused on whether students should be allowed to use their laptops in class. Burnett’s policy comes at the issue rather differently. She forbids photography, audio or video recordings, or live-streaming of any sort.

The policy, Burnett says, is not about protecting her from students. It’s about protecting students’ classroom experience from the dark side of the internet. The “collective extreme onlineness of everyone makes all of us open to surveillance,” Burnett says.

But surveillance doesn’t affect all students in the same way. Students in marginalized populations have often been scrutinized all their lives, Burnett says. For white students, the idea that their privacy could be compromised might be new. Students can’t be sure of what extra harm their classmates might face if their whereabouts or actions were publicized, Burnett tells them. For all they know, the person sitting in the next seat is being harassed, or has a protective order.

Professors aren’t the only ones who can find themselves in a social-media tsunami. None of us are further than one ill-considered or misunderstood comment away from a particular and unsought sort of fame. Sometimes it takes much less than that. Students, too, are navigating that reality.

“I want my classroom to be the one place,” Burnett says, where “students know they won’t unwillingly be part of someone’s snarky narrative.”

The classroom, Burnett has written, is “rehearsal space”: a place where students can work through ideas that are not yet ready to be shared with the wider world. “College is very fraught,” she says. “Just going to college puts students in a different environment than whatever intellectual environment they grew up in.” No one’s likely to navigate that transition flawlessly, and the freedom to make mistakes is a necessary condition for learning.

Burnett’s classroom, she says, is set apart for the study of history. “This can be a refuge,” she says, “for just a little while, from the pressing concerns of the present.” When class lets out, students can resume their digital lives, and all the risk that comes with them.

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.