LiberalArtsOnline Volume 2, Number 5
April 2002
by Jo Ellen Parker
President
Great Lakes Colleges Association
Not too long ago, I attended a workshop for college professors who wanted to work on being better teachers. In particular, they had come together to learn more about who today's college students are and how best to reach them. Some of the professors were very young, trying things out for the first time. Others, more senior, were fighting off burnout.
Most were clearly having fun being students again. They came to sessions in shorts and polo shirts, sundresses and jeans, sandals and socks, with pads and pencils at the ready. And they were clearly eager to be good students: they sat attentively and asked engaged questions and made notes on their handouts. They did everything their instructors asked with energy and good humor. They were star pupils, which is, after all, how they got to be professors in the first place.
But I was struck by the way this class of college teachers differed from any class of college students I've ever seen. First off, none of the professors had facial piercings or purple hair, no midriffs were exposed, and nobody was dressed entirely in black. More significantly, however, the professors in the workshop appeared overwhelmingly white. All observed middle-class conventions of dress and speech and adopted American conventions of directness and informality. No one was coping with a visible impairment, no one was wearing a religious headcovering, no one required a sign language interpreter.
Of course, one would not expect a group of highly-educated, successful professionals to resemble a group of college students. They should, presumably, look older, more successful, more conventional, more focused. But the fact is that on many campuses teachers and students look less like each other now than ever before. Now differences of race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, class, and sexuality are visible on every campus, if not in every classroom.
Being a good professor is therefore different from what it was a hundred, or even fifty, years ago. In those days, the trick was to communicate the methods and materials of a discipline to students who were younger, to novices. The challenge was to address complex information to people who were at an earlier developmental stage than oneself -- hard enough, even when all concerned represented the educated class of white male Americans.
But now being a good professor means being able to address people who may, for example, be older than oneself, or who grew up in nations unfamiliar to most Americans, or whose religious ideas are foreign. Professors, in order to be good at their jobs, must now be prepared to encounter racial, ethnic, and sexual differences which their own educations did not address. And, importantly, this is true for all professors, whatever their personal identities -- professors of color, for example, encounter the diversity of students differently from their white colleagues, certainly, but just as constantly.
So college teaching, long understood as a cross-generational exercise within a culture, is now an exercise in cross-cultural communication. Some critics of multiculturalism seem to think that diversity is something liberal faculty impose on students. What I see, however -- what I saw in this workshop, for example -- is faculty trying desperately to catch up with their students. Far from imposing multiculturalism, frankly, they are simply trying to remain relevant.
LiberalArtsOnline is an occasional email essay on the liberal arts, provided as a public service of the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts.
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The comments published in LiberalArtsOnline reflect the opinions of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the Center of Inquiry or Wabash College. Comments may be quoted or republished in full, with attribution to the author, LiberalArtsOnline, and the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts.