Our Body, Our Message

Our Body, Our Message

As the authority figure in the classroom, students immediately begin to perceive your ideology beyond the subject matter you are teaching them, consciously or unconsciously, because this is human. Your identity matters. How you project, inspect, deflect, or protect your identity is also important—especially when teaching subjects that are not openly concerned with social issues.

All subjects are inherently concerned with social issues, despite our possible unwillingness to acknowledge more than basic objective content.

Here are questions and examples of which we can be more conscious in our identities roles within a classroom:

How can we refashion the image of what someone within a certain field looks like if we do not address how it appears from the outsiders (our students) who want to enter into it?

A biology teacher can cover gender and sex in a way that makes a student think more complexly but clearly on its nuances with regard to genes and chromosomes. They can address typical versus atypical expressions of biological sex—break away from the idea of “normal” binary explanations.

A biology teacher can discuss hormones and gender roles. How do hormones drive our social beliefs of a man, woman or a transgendered person? These kinds of questions are part of our society—to ignore them as a teacher may be a missed opportunity to validate their necessity in lessening discrimination.

A geography teacher can cover the racial makeup of a population and the impact of the region’s industry and social class structures on different racial groups. Who has claimed the land and what impacts has that claim are fascinating—but how is it messaged in the classroom? How does the teacher address how his-her-their own body is perceived within that scope of study? 

How does one’s socio-political ideologies impact teaching? Are you conscious of your messaging? Do you avoid, deny, or actively seek to tear down the typical perceptions of the collective identity markers that make up “you”?  Do you perform (again, purposely or unconsciously) “masculine” as a female? Do you perform “effeminate” as a man—especially as a straight man?

Most of faculty are white, as statistics is a blunt truth. How do you reconcile where you fit in those statistics? If you are white, how much do you think about your whiteness and how it impacts who feels permission to participate in your class? If you are straight and male, too, how do you take advantage of that power—or look to “give that power back” to reach more of your students or to get them to see that your acknowledgment of privilege is a small act of equity, a starting place?

How does your physical body identity impact your daily teaching? How is this addressed within your curriculum design, your lectures, your assignments? How much does it inform your explanations for how communication will play out in diverse encounters in the workplace, or in other social settings?

Do your students know your struggles to get where you are, in front of them? Give them hope, give them perspective—whether you have struggled or you have floated. Students are eager to learn what they, too, are going to have to endure to find success. 

Remember: some aspect of who you are can impact a student in multiple directions. 

How do we overcome societal problems of mental health stigma? How do we end systemic racism and gender discrimination? 

How do we untie our own prejudices from political beliefs? How can we make social progress a desire of people and not parties?