On Being Nice
Students, especially first-year students, in their first semester have a reticence, a wariness of whether or not they belong. And most of who we lose, we lose on the front end. At the two-year level [where, according to the Community College Research Center, in 2018 55% of Hispanic undergraduates, 45% of Asian undergraduates, and 44% of Black undergraduates were enrolled] this is an issue because more likely than not students have socioeconomic stressors, and a lack of adequate resources, from mentors to scholastic preparation to language environments that facilitate their transition into college. They’ve been made to feel less confident in their identity as college students. In many cases, college, like much of their schooling, is a place where their vulnerabilities are outed and criticized. Many are dealing with all kinds of issues, and now they’re in your class, not confident that they can do the work. That they don’t belong. Then they start getting Cs and Ds and falling behind. Meanwhile the pressures of life keep on adding up, pulling them away. And maybe their teacher is being rude to them.
In Teaching Men of Color in the Community College, the authors mention “low expectations from teachers and negative stereotypes about them due to their racial/ethnic and gender affiliation” and how “students matriculate to college with negative dispositions and attitudes toward schooling” and “These concerns are in essence confirmed when students perceive faculty as unwelcoming.” Often parents and other family are not supportive of the effort, financially or emotionally. And they’re taking on debt to be there. The negative associations with education build up, or perhaps continue to build up. And meanwhile society is telling them academic success is something they must attain.
You might wonder how to connect with your students. How to get them to like you and talk to you. Sometimes you do everything you can to chat them up and nothing works, and sometimes they will follow you out of the room like the chirping birds that help Snow White hang up her laundry.
I have a breakdown of what I try to do early on – it’s a post titled “Starting the Class.”
Let me mention some things from Sonia Nieto’s book Finding Joy in Teaching Students of Diverse Backgrounds: Culturally Responsive and Socially Just Practices in U.S. Classrooms that might be useful (I’m copy-pasting three paragraphs from my review of her book). She quotes one teacher who says, “I need to know where they’re coming from. I need to know what their goals are in life” and recommends including “cultures, experiences, and histories” of different groups in a course. One teacher brings up an IEP, or Individualized Education Plan, to get and keep students on track; another asks students “to think about what they hope to be doing when they’re thirty-five”; another talks about the importance of “critical love,” which is “pushing and cajoling them, being both nurturing and demanding.” One quote stands out to a two-year teacher: “It is the number one thing that you can be as a teacher for your kids…a pipeline to other opportunities outside of the classroom.” Every semester I show my students a slideshow of campus resources, and ask them to write about some of the things that might be helpful for them personally. Every two-year campus has programs designed to replicate, as much as possible, the ocean of resources and opportunities university students are constantly immersed in. You might see my post on “College as a Course Theme” for a writing course for more ideas.
More of her strategies: devoting the last ten minutes of the day to informal chatting, learning about students’ backgrounds and incorporating them into class projects, understanding that some students are better in cooperative learning settings and some prefer to interact with an authority figure, making yourself accessible, even giving out your cell phone number. I actually do this – in my experience, texting is people’s preferred method of communication. But you likely are going to need to remind them of the hours you keep.
Nieto also stresses drawing attention to students’ talents, skills, and abilities – asset teaching. More broadly, as one teacher says, the project of education “cannot be achieved alone; all parties involved – the district, the school, the teachers, other school affiliated professionals, the community, and the parents – must have open, collaborative discussions.” Nieto, overall, calls the purpose of education “to help prepare moral beings and productive citizens” and says that “the goal of teaching is to prepare young people to make ethical life choices.” Teachers must focus on “cultivating relationships and giving students hope and another vision for the future.” Education, for everyone, should nurture “a culture of hope and happiness to replace the culture of stress and despair so common in the teaching profession today.”
I think some good questions for teachers, fundamentally, are these:
1. What did I like about school when I was a student?
2. What did teachers do that made me dislike them?
3. Do I make learning fun [not same thing as “make class fun”]?
4. Do I allow students to shape the course and teach me as it goes along?
5. Are my materials and activities engaging, or alienating?
6. How well integrated into campus life are my students?
7. Same question as above, except – how well am I integrated?
8. How committed I am to always improving what I do?
9. How do I assess student achievement? [more on this in the humongous post “Grading Equity”]