Teaching Strategies
2. Authenticity
CHRIS MCCULLOUGH
Introduction
It is finally time. You are given your first teaching assignment as a graduate student, or it is time to teach as part of your first job. Sure, you sat through an institutionally required training that seemed to be more about the institution not wanting to get sued than giving you ideas about teaching. You may feel unsure about what to do teaching, or even if you want to teach at all. What and how you teach might be laid out for you already, but you still have the power to decide how to present yourself as an instructor.
You may have encountered a few different instructor personalities during your time as an undergraduate. There is the instructor who struggles to make the content relatable because everyone should get it. There is the TA who is learning the material one week ahead of you because it was the class they were told to teach. You may have had the instructor like the one Robin Williams played in Dead Poets Society, who wants to inspire you to greater things. Another person you possibly have encountered is the uninspiring instructor who clearly doesn’t want to be there and whose only goal is to get you out the door at the end of class. Finally, you may have had the new instructor who is nervously going through their first experience with the class; but at least they were very personable. An instructor earns many personas. It is important to establish the type of persona you want to adopt as an instructor at the outset. Putting some thought into who you want to be as an instructor can help guide your lesson plans to better suit who you
How to cite this book chapter:
McCullough, C.T. 2022. Authenticity. In: Westfall-Rudd, D., Vengrin, C., and Elliott- Engel, J. (eds.) Teaching in the University: Learning from Graduate Students and Early-Career Faculty. Blacksburg: Virginia Tech College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. https://doi.org/10.21061/universityteaching. License: CC BY-NC 4.0.
are and help you build rapport with the students. Figuring out who you are as an instructor is an ongoing process that will take time and self-reflection.
By figuring out who you want to be, you can use pedagogies that better align with who you are.
This chapter will discuss…
• What cues instructors use to form their teaching identity.
• What it means to teach as your authentic self.
• The benefits and drawbacks of being authentic.
Forming a Teaching Identity
When I taught my first class as the instructor of record, I knew I should not lean into my personality to the fullest extent possible. I know that being funny (I am downright hilarious) is an important part of my identity. It is something I cannot escape, and I choose to embrace. In one of the most serious moments of my life, I was trying to be funny. I was in a car accident about ten years ago. After the emergency personnel cut the car door off with the jaws-of-life, they were about to cut my seat belt. I stopped them and unbuckled myself, and said, “Don’t worry, I got this.” Later, it was reported, the first responders could only laugh. In more personal settings, humor is a preference. Using humor in a professional setting is a challenge as the consequences for bad attempts are more severe. However, humor has its benefits in the classroom, such as reducing anxiety, lightening the mood, and occasionally being thought-provoking (Chiarell, 2010). I try to use this
20 | Authenticity
core part of my identity to my advantage when possible; however, I know it cannot run rampant. Using lots of sarcasm with students, for example, can hurt the instructor’s credibility (Banfield et al., 2006).
Two concepts central to this chapter are teacher identity and authenticity, each of which can fill up a textbook on their own. Within identity, there are two aspects of interest, our identity as instructors and the identity we assume when teaching. That is to say, how do we see ourselves as instructors, and what role does that play in our jobs? These aspects of identity are fluid, changing in response to the environment, and changing over time as we grow (Shelton, 2018).
Within academia, instructors are commonly split between the professional identities of researcher and instructor (Kreber, 2010). Do you see yourself as a researcher forced to teach, gaining little fulfillment from teaching? Or, do you enjoy teaching but feel like research, and administrative tasks are viewed as more important? Instructors draw on cues from different levels of the institution to help form a teaching identity. High-level cues come from the institution, the broader culture around education, research-teaching interface, and effort expected (Fanghanel, 2007). Many of these cues are out of an instructors’ control but serve to emphasize the value of teaching at the institution. Interpreting the signals of the larger institutional forces is important for understanding what is expected of you as an instructor.
Instructors can draw cues from three levels, high, mid, and personal, to get a better sense of what teaching is like at an institution (Fanghanel, 2007). Most high-level cues are out of an instructor’s control, and may offer contradictory signals. The institution may say it values teaching but offer little support and recognition for teaching effectively. There are mid-level cues to draw from within your discipline and or department (Fanghanel, 2007). Within this level, instructors can seek community with others in the department that teach similar discipline topics. New graduate student instructors at Virginia Tech can join the Academy for Graduate Teaching Assistant Excellence to learn from other graduate students at the university about their experiences teaching as a graduate student. In addition to community, instructors may also experience the strongest administrative forces that set job expectations (Kreber, 2010). Finally, at the personal-level, one’s beliefs about teaching inform our identity (Fanghanel, 2007). These would include our previous experiences as an instructor and student, our assumptions about students, and what we believe is effective. What is the goal of our teaching? Do we want to convey information or teach skills and
ideas that are beneficial outside of the classroom? While instructors teach content specific to their discipline, many see it as their duty to teach other skills like critical thinking or writing (Kreber, 2010). It is also at this level that the personal identity that we teach is formed.
The first time I was a TA, I taught an introductory insect identification lab. This lab had a reputation for being relatively easy, and most students took the class to meet general education requirements. It was a class many students knew was taught by a graduate student. This class was also an easy assignment for the TA, as the course content and schedule were already laid out. Any changes made were at the TA’s discretion, but we could not alter the course content; for example, we couldn’t change which arthropod was taught. TAs were not allowed to change the insects on quizzes, but a TA on Thursday could change the order of the questions on quizzes from earlier in the week to keep students accountable. I liked to spice up lectures with any fun or interesting media or information that I could find. For example, did you know the shiny green flies in the family Calliphoridae that bother you when enjoying a picnic are also the ones that provide the larvae used to clean wounds with maggot therapy? It felt more like acting than teaching. I enjoyed the experience, but the lack of ownership always reminded me that I was a graduate student teaching predetermined content. It felt like the student reviews were more about who you were rather than what they learned.