Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock
Honing one’s unique voice as an educator is among the more challenging dimensions of a professor’s role. In his book “The Art of Teaching,” Dr. Jay Parini noted that “teachers, like writers, also need to invent and cultivate a voice, one that serves their personal needs as well as the material at hand, one that feels authentic. It should also take into account the nature of the students who are being addressed, their background in the subject, and their disposition as a class, which is not always easy to gauge. It takes a good deal of time, as well as experimentation, to find this voice, in teaching as in writing.”
Professors refine their teaching voice over the course of their careers. But what part of this is natural, and what part of it is performative? How might it benefit an educator to lean into the performative and assume a teaching persona to achieve certain course goals? Here’s what to consider.
Recognizing Your Natural Voice
The threads of a professor’s persona run through the communications they share with students during lectures, office hours, written communications, student evaluations, etc. This persona is informed by how professors present themselves: how they dress, the jokes they tell, the jokes they laugh at, the examples they cite, the readings they assign, etc. “Looking back at the start of my own teaching career, I see now that I made lots of choices that were designed to shape my teaching persona, but I did so in haphazard ways. A more deliberate effort to think about who I wanted to be in the classroom might have saved me a lot of anxiety during those first few years of teaching,” wrote Dr. James M. Lang, author and professor at the University of Notre Dame’s Kaneb Center for Teaching Excellence.
Whether deliberately crafted or not, students regularly absorb clues their professors drop about who they are and how they feel about their subject matter, their institution, and their students. Students look to these clues to assess what is expected of them, how to engage in class, and how to relate with their professors. Developing a teaching persona can be a strategic way to mindfully shape one’s classroom presence to achieve desired outcomes.
Cultivating a Strategic Teaching Persona
Purposefully cultivating a teaching persona can start simply, with an awareness of how you want your students to feel in your class, how you want them to interact with each other, and how you want them to engage with you. “The point of thinking about ourselves in teaching mode as opposed to other ways of being in our lives is to be intentional and explicit about who you want to be in any particular teaching environment,” explained Dr. Vialla Hartfield-Mendez, director of engaged learning for the Center for Faculty Development and Excellence at Emory University (EmoryUniversity CFDE, 2018, 0:53).
If you are aiming to assure students that they can find a sense of belonging, comfort, and support in your course, you can mindfully cultivate a warm, inclusive persona. If you want to inspire them to be enthusiastic about your subject matter by playing up an affection for grammar, statistics, or logic, you can infuse that as well. “[I]f we want students to love our disciplines — or particular texts, thinkers, theories, or ideas — as we do, then we should not hesitate to let them see our own devotion to those intellectual pursuits,” Lang pointed out. “When we demonstrate enthusiasm for the subject matter of our courses, we may inspire our students to enthusiasm. When we display a generous and welcoming attitude toward student comments in our class, we may inspire students to treat each other with greater respect in their discussions.”
Highlight your values through your teaching persona, mirroring how you are inviting students to exist in the space you’ve created in your classroom. “Good teaching encompasses many elements such as well-crafted syllabi, thoughtful uses of different pedagogical approaches, meaningful feedback for students, but awareness of one’s own positionality and one’s engagement with students is one of the elements,” Hartfield-Mendez explained (EmoryUniversity CFDE, 2018, 1:02).
An Empathetic Design
A teaching persona doesn’t have to be an extravagant mask to be an effective device. It can simply involve playing up some parts of your professional self to better serve the classroom environment you want to foster. If you’re teaching a first-semester workshop comprised of freshmen, a coaching persona may prove effective. Rather than highlighting academic accomplishments, it may make sense to introduce yourself by discussing how higher education has enhanced your life. Sharing pictures of your family, pets, or even yourself as an undergrad may make you more approachable to students. On the other hand, if you’re teaching a senior capstone course, this is an opportunity to adopt a sage-like persona, emphasizing academic accomplishments and connections in the field.
Consider how you would like students to feel in your classroom: safe, accepted, challenged, inspired, driven, etc. Then think through the academic goals that you have for your students — what are the outcomes that they should take from your class? Shape your teaching persona around these goals. “Think about matching the discipline or the learning objective or the demand that you have of students with the self that you’re presenting,” noted Dr. Pamela Scully, director for the Center for Faculty Development and Excellence at Emory University (EmoryUniversity CFDE, 2018, 2:16).
Scully shared the example that if you want students to be open and responsive in class, be the first volunteer to take that risk. If your course is more formal in structure, on the other hand, assume a persona that matches this expectation when taking the lead.
“So if you run a discussion session in which you hope to encourage your students to explore the family dynamics in their lives in light of a set of sociological principles, then you should model that behavior for them with some public reflections on your own family dynamics,” Lang pointed out. “If, on the other hand, you expect dispassionate analysis of case studies, then keep the focus on the texts and ideas, and keep yourself in the background.”
Consider viewing your teaching persona as a mentorship or coaching device, mirroring for students how you would like them to engage and participate in your course.
A Student-Focused Voice
Adopting a teaching persona can foster a connection with your students and create an environment that is centered around your goals and theirs. It can also be an ongoing way to experiment with your teaching voice. “While I have had more than a half-dozen years to find a teaching face that feels comfortable to me, I’m still not sure I have settled on one yet,” Lang pointed out. “Some days in the classroom I want to be the laid-back, sit-on-the-edge-of-the-desk seminar leader, and sometimes I want to be a fiery orator, making converts to the religion of the written word. I wonder whether I have to settle on just one. Is there anything wrong with presenting different faces to my students?”
