Erasmus Mundus Masters Crossways in Cultural Narratives Final Dissertation 2014-2016 Discourse, Subjectivity and Practices of Looking in Higher Education Alejandro Santaflorentina Supervisors: Dr. Clive Thomson. University of Guelph Dr. Isabelle Cases. Université de Perpignan Via Domitia I, Alejandro Santaflorentina, hereby certify that this dissertation, which is 22.822 words in length, has been written by me, that it is a record of work carried out by me, and that it has not been submitted in any previous application for a higher degree. All sentences or passages quoted in this dissertation from other people's work (with or without trivial changes) have been placed within quotation marks, and specifically acknowledged by reference to author, work and page. I understand that plagiarism – the unacknowledged use of such passages – will be considered grounds for failure in this dissertation and, if serious, in the degree programme as a whole. I also affirm that, with the exception of the specific acknowledgements, these answers are entirely my own work. Signature of candidate A. S. Perpignan, June 2016 2 CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ..................................................................................................................................... 4 INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................................................... 5 THEORETICAL APPROACH ............................................................................................................................... 8 1. The concept of the “hidden curriculum”............................................................................................ 8 2. The perspective of visual studies ......................................................................................................... 9 3. A Foucauldian lens .................................................................................................................................... 12 a. The technical capacities ..................................................................................................................... 15 b. The systems of communication ...................................................................................................... 20 c. The relationships of power ............................................................................................................... 26 CASE STUDY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF GUELPH .................................................................................... 32 1. Rethinking the technical capacities through invisible pedagogies ....................................... 32 a. Who does this classroom think we are? ...................................................................................... 33 b. Appropriation as a critical tool ....................................................................................................... 36 c. It is not as simple as that! Beyond the classroom setting .................................................... 39 2. Rethinking the systems of communication through pedagogies of touch ......................... 43 a. The interview process ........................................................................................................................ 44 b. Social status, grades and affect ....................................................................................................... 48 3. Rethinking the relationships of power through performative pedagogies....................... 59 a. Teaching as a performative act ....................................................................................................... 59 b. How much do I open the door? ....................................................................................................... 61 CONCLUSIONS ...................................................................................................................................................... 67 BIBLIOGRAPHY.................................................................................................................................................... 70 APPENDIX .............................................................................................................................................................. 74 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I thank Ingue Dengler and my siblings (Mery, Alberto, Laura and Guillermo) for helping to make the two years of my Masters experience possible. I also thank my parents and the rest of my family for all their enthusiasm and support. My heartfelt appreciation also goes to Clive Thomson, for his strong commitment to my research project and for his encouragement to work creatively and with enjoyment. I would also like to thank Aida Sanchez de Serdio Martín for helping me with the selection of the bibliography and for her ongoing support as an ‘academic mother’. My research wouldn’t have been possible without the people who participated in the interviews; I thank them for backing my project and sharing their personal experiences without expecting anything in exchange. Finally, I want to thank the staff, faculty members and students from the School of Languages and Literatures at the University of Guelph. I always felt at home studying and working in the department and will look back on my experience there as one of the most formative of my academic career to date. 4 INTRODUCTION Social inequalities are reproduced in educational institutions such as universities through taken-for-granted assumptions and practices that become invisible because they are enmeshed with what is considered common sense or normality. This is why educational research has addressed the interference of dominant interests within the curriculum as the “hidden curriculum”. Social exclusions and relationships of power are, however, not necessarily hidden. They are more often simply socially accepted or neglected. The question is, then, how do we negotiate socially what is seen or not seen in an institution. The theoretical frameworks that are used to study the visual can be particularly insightful in answering this question. The discursive effects of the institutional technologies of observation and the non-verbal aspects of socialization are characteristics of subjectivity-formation that are generally overlooked in educational research. The starting point for my research project is the idea that schooling produces subjectivity and generates social exclusions and inequalities, and, following from this, that these differences are not only produced through verbal exchanges but also through nonverbal processes. I hope to find ways to identify the role of the visual in producing these social exclusions and to contribute to the development of a visually-critical curriculum. To do so, I draw on the concept of the hidden curriculum theorized by different scholars in the field of the sociology of education over the past 40 years. I acknowledge the contributions from the field of visual culture to the study of the visual and I highlight the applicability of its findings to educational research. I take up Michel Foucault’s understanding of disciplinary power and I use an approach based in discourse analysis, in order to study the technical capacities, the systems of communication and the relationships of power in educational institutions. I borrow Elisabeth Ellsworth’s concept of “mode of address” and thus I add the perspective of the visual studies to the analysis of the technical capacities. I bring discourse analysis together with Stephanie Springgay’s 5 understanding of “inter-embodiment” and propose ways to take into account bodyknowledge in the analysis of systems of communication. Finally, I develop an analysis of power relations focused on resistance and draw both from performance theory and from Ellsworth’s idea of “manipulating students into taking responsibility”. In the second part of this dissertation, I present a case study at the University of Guelph based on the above described theoretical approach. The case study draws on my personal experience as a student/teacher/researcher. My particular status as a graduate student in the Erasmus Mundus Masters Crossways in Cultural Narratives and as a teaching assistant in an introductory Italian positions me as a student who takes his teaching practice as an object of study and as a teacher who implements and experiments with his research findings. This double position enables me to combine autoethnography (Ellis) with visual methodologies (Rose) and qualitative research interviews.1 The data from the case study are examined according to three different axes2 – the first of them being focused on technical capacities, the second on systems of communication, and the third and last on relationships of power. For each axis of analysis I offer a pedagogical approach. For the analysis of technical capacities I explore some of the technologies and activities that were part of my teaching experience and I offer “invisible pedagogies” as an approach to address the discursive aspects of our pedagogical settings. For the analysis of systems of communication, I analyze the institutional propaganda of the University of Guelph and connect it to the personal narratives of students and faculty members from the department in which I worked and studied. Together with this process of discourse analysis, I offer “pedagogies of touch” as an approach to address the role of affect and the The autoethnographic methods within this dissertation include different strategies of selfreflection – including personal narratives and fragments from the notes that I took during my teaching experience – that are used to connect my experience to the wider social processes under examination. Visual methodologies include content analysis of institutional propaganda, discourse analysis and direct observation. 2 I use the terms ‘axes’, following Michel Foucault, to refer to dynamic and intersecting structures that provide a relational framework for the analysis of power. See below, p. 14, for a fuller explanation of my use of this term. 1 6 body in the reproduction of discourse. Finally, for the analysis of relationships of power, I come back to some of my personal experiences as a teacher to offer “performative pedagogies” as an approach to address power relations and to allow for multiple subjectpositions in our teaching. All of these approaches draw on different concepts currently being used in curriculum studies within the arts, my main aim being to contribute to the development of critical perspectives in relation to the role of the visual in educational research. 7 THEORETICAL APPROACH 1. The concept of the “hidden curriculum” Educational research on the hidden curriculum has been developing since the early 1970s with the primary purpose of revealing covert political interference in the curriculum. It is generally accepted that the expression “hidden curriculum” was coined for the first time by Philip Jackson in his book Life in Classrooms (1968). As Alan Skelton notes, “initial works in hidden curriculum focused on the problematic of how schools played their part in maintaining social order and stability” (178). Authors like Philip Jackson, Talcott Parsons and Robert Dreeben inaugurated research on hidden curriculum by adopting a functionalist perspective. These authors realized that there are elements of socialization that are not part of the formal curricular content and through which students learn social norms and values. In other words, they realized that children not only go to school to learn mathematics or history, but also to learn how to behave and how to be obedient to the teacher in order to be obedient, later on, to the boss or the nation. However, these authors regarded the hidden curriculum as relatively benign and have been criticised for having a conservative position in which “the transmission and reproduction of dominant values and beliefs via the hidden curriculum is both acknowledged and accepted as a positive function of the schooling process” (Giroux 48). Further research on the hidden curriculum added more critical perspectives influenced by Marxism, feminism, critical theory, or postmodernism. These perspectives also developed the role of the hidden curriculum in reproducing class, racial, and gender inequalities. An influential examination of the process by which schools reproduce dominant interests was Schooling in Capitalist America (1976) by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis. For these authors, the hidden curriculum is the process of inculcating class behaviours through the natural and everyday features of school life. In contrast, other researchers such as Pierre Bourdieu and Basil Bernstein emphasized the mediation 8 between family/class origins and the school, and thereby gave more agency to the students, while recognizing at the same time that education is “a more or less autonomous sphere rather than simply an epiphenomenon of the relations of production” (Margolis 7). Depending on the theoretical approach, research on the hidden curriculum either emphasizes the students’ resistance and agency or gives more weight to the power of the institutions to reproduce hierarchy and to resist change. Early works within the sociology of education focused initially on primary and secondary schools and ultimately applied the concept of the hidden curriculum to the context of higher education. A more recent publication that took this approach was The Hidden Curriculum in Higher Education, edited by Eric Margolis in 2001. Apart from bringing together contributions by several scholars from different North-American institutions, a distinctive feature of this book is that rather than focusing on “curriculum”, it plays a particular attention to the concept of the “hidden”. Although some of the authors in this book have highlighted that the hidden curriculum hides “in plain sight”, thereby addressing its visual aspects, the every-day practices of looking that take place in the educational context remain overlooked in educational research. Whereas the role of language in reproducing social inequality in education has been thoroughly explored by sociolinguists, non-verbal processes have rarely been seen as determining factors in the educational experience. The aim of my research is to fill this gap in the field and to explore the possibilities of developing a visually-critical curriculum that acknowledges the fact that vision is interconnected with social norms. 2. The perspective of visual studies In order to develop research on the hidden curriculum that deals with the construction of subjectivity in higher education with a particular focus on the agency of the gaze, I feel a 9 need to examine cultural and theoretical texts related not only to curriculum studies but also to the study of the visual. In this regard, I will use theories from different disciplines to deal particularly with the visual aspects of the educational experience. More specifically, I intend to approach the study of the visual through the perspective of visual culture, or visual studies. Visual culture is a field of study that emerged in the 1980s, predominantly in NorthAmerica and that focuses on the study of visual practices. The first dissertation on the rise of visual culture was written by Margaret Dikovitskaya in 2001. In her words, visual culture, also known as visual studies, is considered a research area that “regards the visual image as the focal point in the processes through which meaning is made in a cultural context” (1). There is no generally accepted name for the field and individual courses in visual studies can be offered in a wide range of existing departments. As James Elkins remarks, “the normal pattern is that Film Studies is the first to host studies on visual culture. The new field can also find a home in the departments of Art History, Literature, or Philosophy” (8). Authors like Dikovitskaya have tried to define the field of study and to develop “a common ground for working in the field of the visual” (2). In her book Visual Culture: The Study of the Visual after the Cultural Turn, she develops both “the theoretical underpinnings of visual studies and the institutional implications of establishing a new area of inquiry” (ibid.). In doing so, she encounters some difficulties, since “there is no consensus among its adepts with regard to its scope and objectives, definitions and methods” (ibid.). The distinctions and definitions used in the field of study differ from one scholar to another and also among institutions. The same thing happens with regard to its objects of study and other concerns, which have been summed up by Dikovitskaya, as follows: [S]ome researchers use the term visual culture or visual studies to denote new theoretical approaches in art history (Holly); some want to expand the professional territory of art 10 studies to include artifacts from all historic periods and cultures (Herbert); others emphasize the process of seeing (Mitchell) across epochs (Rodowick); while still others think of the category of visual as encompassing non-traditional media – the visual cultures not only of television and digital media (Mirzoeff) but also of science, medicine, and law (Cartwright). (64) This clarifying synthesis has been also quoted by James Elkins in Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction (2003). In his book, Elkins traces the evolution of this new field of study and notes that it is referred to with three different terminologies: cultural studies, visual culture and visual studies. These expressions are sometimes distinguished from each other, while at other times they are used interchangeably. However, as Elkins notes, cultural studies started in England in the late 1950s in association with a small number of texts published by authors like Stuart Hall, whereas visual culture is “pre-eminently an American movement and it is younger than cultural studies by several decades” (2). In fact, for Dikovitskaya, “visual studies came together in the late 1980s after the disciplines of art history, anthropology, film studies, linguistics, and comparative literature encountered poststructuralist theory and cultural studies” (1). According to her, the field of visual culture “makes use of the same social theories as cultural studies, social theories that hold that meaning is embedded not in objects but in human relations – poststructuralism, Marxist theory, semiotics, and psychoanalysis” (68). It is generally accepted that visual culture – or visual studies – is a field of study separated from cultural studies. For Elkins, indeed, the field of visual studies has to become more ambitious and, above all, more difficult; he thinks that visual culture might grow to be “the study of visual practices across all boundaries” (7). In my opinion, it is less important to define the field of study or to consolidate it as a discipline than to find successful methodologies that would account for how meanings are created through the visual. The study of the visual springs from art history, semiotics, film studies, poststructuralist theory and cultural studies, among other disciplines. I share Elkins’ opinion that it is less urgent to put together methods, subjects, and texts from 11 various disciplines as a way of establishing the field of visual culture than to encourage this new field of study to be “interdisciplinary in an ‘interesting’ sense” – in the sense that it “does not know its subjects in advance but finds them through its preoccupations” (30). It is in this sense that I aim to develop interdisciplinary research by taking advantage of different theories that serve me to address the role of the visual in education. I believe that specific concepts from the arts and the humanities provide an interesting approach to develop theory on curriculum. Notions like representation, mode of address, out-of-frame, authenticity, appropriation, intertextuality, multimodality, or performance, among others, can underline processes of socialization that usually remain invisible or unaddressed in educational research. I understand vision as interconnected with social norms and I refer to the study of the visual in a broad sense. I am not interested in the production and reception of images in particular – the pictures in textbooks or the use of PowerPoint, for instance – but rather in how meanings, practices, and subjects are created through practices of looking and not exclusively through verbal language. Undertaking visual research in education thus means to study the operations of social norms and I aim to do so using Michel Foucault’s theories as a basis. 3. A Foucauldian lens A Foucauldian perspective on the hidden curriculum would reject the possibility of finding any hidden truth. In the 1970s, Foucault develops ‘genealogy’ as a complex analysis of power that avoids the search for depth.3 “For the genealogist philosophy is over. Interpretation is not the uncovering of a hidden meaning” (Dreyfus and Rabinow, Foucault’s theories change considerably during the 1970s when he starts teaching at Collège de France. In Discipline and Punish (1975), ‘genealogy’, opposed to traditional historical method, takes precedence over ‘archaeology’, a strict analysis of discourse developed in his firsts works. He takes this first step with his essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” published in 1971. The theories that I am borrowing from Michel Foucault can be situated in this period, which includes the publication of the three volumes of The History of Sexuality (1976-84). 3 12 107). Since power, for Foucault, is not located in any conspiratorial group interests, there is no point in uncovering the final and meaningful political purposes of educational institutions. Instead, a Foucauldian perspective on the hidden curriculum would consider schools as disciplinary institutions that produce “power-knowledge”. Foucault’s conception of power invites us to focus on an analysis of the techniques and tactics that transform individuals into docile objects or meaningful subjects rather than to uncover violent or oppressive political forces masquerading under educational curricula. Without undermining the importance of all the research done on the hidden curriculum, we can see that the concept of the hidden curriculum itself can be misleading for this conception of disciplinary power because it presupposes that there is something hidden. There is nothing hidden at all, or else, everything is hidden, which is the same thing as saying that nothing is hidden. Power in the university does not reside in a group of oppressors – whether they be the teachers, the families, the markets or the economic system – who oppress the students for their own interests. Rather, power is embedded in discourse and the discourse of an educational institution rests on the production of power-knowledge. If there is a hidden curriculum at all, it is located in discourse. Discourses are hidden because they are too visible, too familiar and too close to our sight; they are hidden because all individuals participate in them. Within this conception of the hidden curriculum one should give as an object of study the ensemble of techniques and tactics that produce subjectivity. The university, as a disciplinary institution that generates representations of the world, serves political interests, classifies individuals, and assigns them different social roles, is not very different from other institutions like the state, the family or the workplace. Educational institutions exert power upon the actions of individuals and generate resistances that are, at the same time, fundamental conditions for its operation. To study disciplinary power in the university means to focus on those disciplinary practices that reduce individuals to docility. These practices are especially located in discourse. Through 13 discourse, disciplinary institutions generate power-knowledge and the individuals in these institutions come to perceive their knowledge as true and independent of social norms. This is not because the individuals have become more and more obedient, but because “an increasingly better invigilated process of adjustment has been sought after [...] between productive activities, resources of communication and the play of power relations” (219). By adjusting to one another, these three axes – i.e. the technical capacities, the systems of communication, and the relationships of power4 – constitute disciplinary power. Power relations, relationships of communication, and objective capacities should not therefore be confused. This is not to say that there is a question of three separate domains [...] It is a question of three types of relationships which in fact always overlap one another, support one another reciprocally, and use each other mutually as means to an end. (217-218) That means that disciplinary power – which produces power-knowledge and transforms individuals into subjects – is produced through the sophisticated operations and interrelations between technical capacities, systems of communication, and relationships of power. This conception of disciplinary power adds complexity to the study of the hidden curriculum. In order to study the operations of disciplinary power in higher education, I propose a methodology based on these three distinctive axes defined by Foucault, to which I add the perspective of the visual studies. To deal with the technical capacities, I suggest focusing on specific activities and technologies that can be analyzed through Elisabeth Ellsworth’s understanding of mode of address. To explore the systems of communications, I propose an analysis of the continuities and discontinuities between the institutional discourse and the personal narratives of the individuals participating in These three terms are used in the essay “The Subject and Power” written by Michel Foucault as an afterword to Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow. In the essay, Foucault considers these three axes to be constitutive of disciplinary power and he uses “relationships of power” and “power relations” interchangeably. He also refers to “systems of communication” as “relationships of communication”, “resources of communication”, and “games of communication”. Finally, “technical capacities” is also labeled as “objective capacities”, “objective abilities”, “adjustment of abilities”, “productive activities” and “finalized activities”. He also considers that all these together constitute a block of capacity-communicationpower. 4 14 the educational experience. This process of discourse analysis can be taken further by adding Stephanie Springgay’s understandings of inter-embodiment. To study the relationships of power, I suggest focusing on resistance and using performance as a tool to disrupt the social positioning that constructs individuals as subjects. Overall, my aim is to add the perspective of the visual to the study of disciplinary power in higher education with the final purpose of developing visually-critical curricula that promote an awareness of the complexity of discourse and subjectivity. In Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow’s words, “we have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries” (216). a. The technical capacities Foucault’s understanding of disciplinary power is relevant for the analysis at hand because it connects power with vision and observation. The technologies that surround us also participate in discourse and generate or mediate relations of power. To illustrate disciplinary power Foucault offers the figure of the panopticon – an ideal structure for a prison designed by Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century that consists in a central observation tower from which it is possible to observe and control the surrounding cells. These cells are placed around the tower and from them it is not possible to determine if someone is watching from the central tower. According to Foucault, this architectural form produces self-government. The possibility of being observed makes the prisoners behave regardless of whether or not there is a person observing. This power structure is conceived in a period of time that coincides with a paradigm change in the operations of power. In traditional forms of power the rulers had to make their power visible to the public while the multitudes were kept in the shadows, but “[d]isciplinary power reverses these relations. Now, it is power itself which seeks invisibility and the objects of power – those on whom operates – are made the most visible” (159). As we can see, power for 15 Foucault rests on a relationship and this relationship is determined by visibility. Coercion is thus achieved through invisible observation, through “eyes that must see without being seen” (Discipline & Punish 171). To explore how these visual relationships operate in educational contexts we can take as an example the auditorium, the university classroom par excellence. The structure of the auditorium is oriented towards a central point, where the teacher is usually located. From that point, the teacher is able to see all the students, but from the students’ perspective the range of vision is more limited, as it is not always possible to have a view of all the people in the classroom. In this setting, all the attention focuses on the central position that is supposed to be occupied by the teacher. Of course, a teacher can change this dynamic – and so can the students – by engaging in discussions or changing positions – students are sometimes asked to occupy the central position and to give oral presentations. There is always room for alteration and subversion, as the students and the teachers negotiate the class dynamics and the use of the technologies, but the setting nonetheless conditions the educational experience. For example, a student can cheat during an exam, but the structure of the auditorium would prevent them from doing it overtly. At least, they would have to find the proper angle or to sit at the back of the classroom in order to remain unnoticed. The main difference between the structure of the panopticon and the university auditorium is that in the latter the teacher is also visible and the students know when they are being watched. Still, students are always visible and this ensures that self-regulation takes place in the classroom. The biggest drawback of the structure of the auditorium is that it doesn’t allow for the possibility that knowledge circulates from the students to the students. There can be exchanges among students in the auditorium, but the students are not positioned as bearers of knowledge. Very often the chairs are attached to the desks, thereby hindering the possibility of turning the gaze to the person beside whom one is sitting. This setting 16 which is exclusively oriented towards one, unique vanishing point is reinforced by other technologies such as the projectors, the stage, the steps, or the lighting. This arrangement of the architecture – similar to that of a classic theatre – not only draws all the attention on the figure of the teacher on the stage, but also produces a particular unidirectional communication between the teacher and the students, thereby reinforcing a relationship of power between them. Of course, the auditorium is not the only classroom setting that we can find in the university, but it is a clear example of the role played by the technical capacities in producing disciplinary power in higher education. In her book School Trouble, Dobrah Youdell summarizes some of the instruments of disciplinary power described by Foucault in Discipline and Punish: The birth of the prison and provides the following examples of how these instruments can be found in schools: ’Spatial distributions’ are concerned with functional sites, enclosures and partitions, rankings and classifications, and the distribution of the bodies in and across these. We can see this in the assembly hall, the classroom and the row of desks. ‘The control of activity’ is concerned with timetabling and the filling of time as well as the definition of the proper body, gesture and action. We can see this in the school timetable and the student sitting neatly at her/his desk. ‘Normalizing judgement’ compares, differentiates, categorizes and homogenizes; it corrects the correctable and excludes the irredeemable. We can see this in the ‘good’ student, the ‘gifted’ student, the student ‘suitable for treatment’, the ‘hopeless’ student and the ‘special’ student. The ‘examination’ documents individuals into cases. We can see this in school and government databases of student-by-student performance. ‘Hierarchical observation’ or ‘surveillance’ underpins these technologies – the student, teacher and school are each subject to the gaze of the next, and all are subject to the gaze of the state. (37) These and other examples can be regarded as the technical capacities that organize life in the university and produce subjectivity – we could add, for example, the formal arrangement of faculties and of departments within faculties, the control of students’ attendance, the use of student cards, the programs of study, the course outlines, and a wide variety of other technologies including digital ones such as online courses and 17 platforms. How are these technologies and activities classifying individuals and constructing them as subjects? What effects do they have on the bodies? When we explore the effects of these technical capacities, we risk falling into the trap of thinking that there is no escape from the dynamics that they produce or that, on the contrary, they depend exclusively on the use that individuals make of them. From my perspective, the creative uses of the technical capacities are more the exception than the rule; resistance is not always spontaneous. What is important for the analysis, however, is not how much control and observation the structure of the auditorium, for example, produces or how much individuals are able to resist it, but what forms of powerknowledge are being privileged. In this regard, visual studies can provide useful methodological tools, since scholars in this field have explored in depth the processes of reading and reception through which individuals make sense of visual and cultural objects. In their book Practices of looking, Martina Sturken and Lisa Cartwright explain that film theorists like Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz “drew an analogy between the early process of a child’s ego construction and the experience of film viewing, using Lacan’s concept of the mirror phase of child development” (74). According to Baudry, the setting of the cinema invites the viewer to undergo a temporary loss of ego by identifying with the cinematic apparatus. However, the idea that the viewer regresses to a childlike state is an aspect of psychoanalytic-based film theory that has been strongly criticized and contrasted with other theories of film and media spectatorship that emphasize engaged viewer practices. These theories considered, for instance, that the psychoanalytic model did not account for the specificity of racial experience or of gay, lesbian, and transgendered identities. The further proliferation of alternative film theories has developed a wide set of models that account for “the multiplicity of gazes and looks that mediate power between viewers and objects of the gaze” (93). 18 We can see how this is connected with educational practices. It is possible to draw analogies between the experience of attending a lecture and the experience of watching a film. The students’ role as ‘spectators’ can be analyzed through theories of subject formation that have been applied to cinema. It is very difficult, however, to account for the specificity of experiences and identities of all the students. I find it impossible to develop a model or set of models that could take into consideration the multiplicity of gazes and looks of a large group of students. This is why I consider it more productive, instead, to use a model that accounts for the impossibility of perfect fits between the technical capacities and the responses of individuals. A concept from film studies that has already been used in educational research is mode of address. Elisabeth Ellsworth is a film scholar who realized that many concepts from the humanities can be used to develop research in education. In her book Teaching positions (1997), she proposes to use mode of address as a methodological tool to study how our curricula position students and teachers. In her words, “we can use it to make visible and problematic the ways that all curricula and pedagogies invite their users to take up particular positions within relations of knowledge, power, and desire” (2). Mode of address is used in film theory to refer to the ways in which films construct meanings according to an ideal spectator. It points to the dynamics of social positioning that are characteristic of film viewing. What is particularly helpful from this concept is that it acknowledges the multiplicity of readings and avoids the search for perfect fits. The point is that all modes of address misfire one way or another. I never ‘am’ the ‘who’ that a pedagogical address thinks I am. But then again, I never am the ‘who’ that I think I am either [...] the pedagogical relation between a student and a teacher is a paradox. (11) By considering the pedagogical relation between students and teachers a paradox we can avoid the opposition of giving greater importance to the technical capacities or to the individuals’ resistance and creativity. The point is not to find technologies that are neutral, 19 but to acknowledge that we as educators desire to position the students in certain ways and that the students identify with or resist our gaze in multiple ways. Using the concept of mode of address we can ask ourselves when developing our curricula: How does the outline for my course position the students? Who do I think the students are when I make the decision to open or close the classroom’s door, to use or not use PowerPoint or the textbook, to change the arrangement of the chairs and tables, to decide to sit down or stand up during the class, or to allow students to leave the room during class? In asking these questions we may find new challenges. For example, when do I stop considering physical elements and activities as technical capacities that participate in discourse? Can I control students’ attendance without enacting surveillance? Is the way I dress, for instance, part of the message I transmit to the students? It seems obvious to me that anything can be analyzed because everything conveys a message. Again, we must restrain ourselves from finding any hidden truth or any easy solution. The most important is not to think that the techniques and tactics that we are using are neutral and that we do not desire to position the students socially, which is actually what educational texts tend to imply. In Elisabeth Ellsworth’s words, “By presenting themselves as desiring only understanding, educational texts address students as if the texts were from no one, with no desire to place their readers in any position except that of neutral [...] understanding” (47). The point is to give importance to the technologies that mediate our educational experience and to analyze them critically, considering the way they address the individuals but also the multiple readings that the individuals make for them, without thinking at any moment that there is a position of neutrality. b. The systems of communication As a student, I can identify that there is an institutional discourse in the university in which I study; I can adhere to it or be against it and complain about it with my friends, 20 classmates or even my teachers. I may have the feeling of learning or the feeling of not learning at all and just being obliged to jump over hoops. I may have a good reason for studying at the university, such as finding a suitable job afterwards or, on the contrary, I may say that I am studying because my parents want me to go to university or because I don’t know what else I could do. I might even be able to perceive that, as a university student, the society in which I live and the very institution in which I study assign me a social status. But I might not be able to see that I am also participating in the dissemination of an institutional discourse. As a teacher, I may want to maintain a safe professional distance from my students and ask them to address me as doctor or professor, or, conversely, I may want to make students feel at ease by making myself more approachable. I may be more or less critical of the institution in which I work; I may be more or less conscientious in acknowledging the students’ personal efforts, social backgrounds or special needs, but I might not be able to see that I am benefiting certain students more than others and that my teaching and my assessment are not objective. It would be unusual for a teacher to declare that they assign grades according to their political position, or for a student to understand that they are not studying to access knowledge but to contribute to the production of power-knowledge. It looks as though the institutional discourse has always been there and always will be, but the opposite is also true. Even if students and teachers perceive themselves as external to discourse, they are participating in the game of communications. The ways in which universities assess students’ work is probably an even more significant example of how we come to see our knowledge as true and independent from social norms. In the process of assessment we can easily see how the technical capacities, the systems of communication, and the relationships of power are intimately interconnected. The organization of the curriculum in terms of academic years, semesters, courses, midterms, and final exams, the division of the course evaluation into modules and percentages, the grading criteria, and the invigilation of examinations, among many 21 others, are activities and technologies that form a series of axes of technical capacities. These, of course, produce relationships of power – for example, teachers exercise power over the students because they determine if a student passes or fails. At the same time, these technical capacities rest on systems of communication – a numerical one for grades and a verbal one for justifying them – that categorize students’ works and classifies students as ‘good’, ‘gifted’, ‘with special needs’, ‘hopeless’ or ‘outstanding’. The functioning of the technical capacities that constitute assessment also depends on the relationships of communication between students and teachers. Through verbal language – either written or oral – the students learn to adapt to the academic language and, simultaneously, their success or failure in this process changes the relationships of power between them and their teachers, their parents, their employers, and the other students. In this section, it will be shown – following the example of assessment – that the students’ and teachers’ success depends not only on their ability to adapt to a certain language but also to a certain gaze. The criteria for grading both written assignments and examinations are supposed to be objective; they aim to identify specific characteristics that document students’ knowledge of a certain subject. However, every instructor who has graded essays knows that it is very difficult to establish the precise parameters between numerical grades and ideas expressed in an essay. No grading criteria can be objective, for obvious reasons.5 On the one hand, students who understand clearly the grading criteria have an advantage over those students who do not. On the other hand, there are always a number of factors that depend on the very personal choice of the instructor who is doing the grading. Of course, there are always useful guidelines in this regard that take into consideration aspects like the student’s understanding of the subject, critical analysis, or presentation and style. These guidelines are formulated as questions like – Is the written style clear and appropriate? Are the arguments logical and coherent? Is there clear evidence of critical I am referring to the grading criteria for student work in arts and humanities, but the same can be said for student work in Sciences, where the appearance of objectivity is even higher. 5 22 thinking and analytical insight? These questions can be useful, but the ‘good quality’ of a critical discussion or a written style cannot be measured with objective precision. I would like to question the ‘objectivity’ of the grading criteria that are common in the context of higher education by highlighting two aspects. First, as the contributions to genre studies and discourse studies have demonstrated, the quality of discursive forms is determined by the agreement among the members of disciplinary communities. As Vijay K. Bhatia notes, “genres [or discourses] are also socially constructed and are more intimately controlled by social practices. Genres are the media through which members of professional or academic communities communicate with each other” (360). Bhatia has explored how the language learners who aspire to be members of an academic community need to learn and to acquire generic conventions. The ‘good quality’ or the ‘scholarly presentation’ that are expected to be found in the written style, the analytical insight, or the coherence of a student’s essay are nothing else but the adaptation of the student’s text to specific generic conventions. As a teacher, I do not hesitate to recognize that I give higher grades – as I am expected to do – to the students who write using the proper conventions of the academic community to which I belong. There are very specific sets of rules like the MLA or Chicago style conventions that we all use and reproduce. Furthermore, generic conventions are also acquired by reading the work of other members of the community, through the continuous process of getting higher or lower grades or through being accepted or rejected from academic publications, applications for scholarships, and research funding, among other social practices. Hence, the grading criteria cannot be objective because they are a reflection of specific agreements that are socially constructed between the members of an academic community. Second, I maintain that affect also interferes in evaluation practices. The decision to give a numeric value to a set of ideas can very well go up or down a few points, depending 23 on the teacher’s knowledge of the student’s effort during the development of the course. But the teacher’s knowledge of the students’ backgrounds is determined by visual encounters. I honestly recognize that, during the assessment process, I am inclined to be a little bit more generous with the students whom I know better. This is not, in any case, because of favouritism, but because I more or less unconsciously feel the need to pay specific attention to the work of those who made the effort to show up during classes or office hours. Of course, there are techniques to avoid being affected by this aspect of the teaching situation. One can ignore the name of the student while grading essays, but it is also easy to guess the name of the author of a text when one knows the students – not only because it is sometimes possible to identify handwriting, but also because students often have a particular way of expressing their ideas or because they mention specific topics that interest them. In any case, even if the producer of a text is not recognizable, the teacher is going to grade assignments according to generic conventions and the transmission of these conventions is also influenced by the student-teacher relationship. A student who has spent significant time with the teacher during tutoring is more likely to acquire generic conventions. In my experience of grading, I realize that not only the students’ language code and their knowledge of generic conventions determine their evaluation, but also their visibility and attendance. This is why I consider that methodologies of discourse analysis in educational research should also take into consideration the perspective of visual studies. Within the different currents focused on the study of discourse, researchers in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) have provided a useful lens through which to look at the relationships between individuals and discourse in educational institutions. An increasing number of educational researchers are turning to CDA as a useful set of approaches with which to undertake research in education. Most of the studies, however, tend to focus 24 exclusively on the verbal aspects of discourse. As Rebecca Rogers et al. state, “CDA has been seriously critiqued for failing to address interactional or dialogic texts and focusing instead primarily on written texts” (376). Conversely, visual studies provide methodological tools that take into account the non-verbal processes of subject-formation. However, Stephanie Springgay has pointed out that most researchers in the field of visual culture also fail to address the role of the body in socialization. The pervasiveness of visual culture in education has continued to privilege the visual over other sensory experiences and has not included any inquiry into how visual culture impacts, mediates, and creates body knowledge. Moreover, it fails to account for bodied encounters in the production of meaning making. (4) Her theories and her use of Merleau Ponty’s concept of intercorporeality or inter- embodiment allow us to study the connections between disciplinary power and systems of communication in the context of “bodied encounters”. Generic conventions are shared between students and teachers through visual encounters and social practices that depend on the body. Even in online teaching students need to spend hours in front of a computer and the time that they spend exchanging with the teacher or with other students – who also sit in front of the screen and are often able to “listen” and to “see” each other through audiovisual technologies – determines their experience and acquisition of generic conventions. To maintain an appearance of objectivity, however, the university tends to ignore the social processes of production and transmission of generic conventions through bodied encounters. As will be shown in the interviews in the second part of this dissertation, students know that their success depends on their capacity to adapt to the teachers’ gaze – i.e. to know what the teachers are “looking” for. That is a social process that is usually neglected in educational discourse and in which the body has a fundamental role. 25 c. The relationships of power The analysis of power relations is perhaps the most complex of the three axes that we have delimited as objects of analysis. An aspect that needs to be clarified is that by studying the technical capacities and the systems of communication we are also studying relationships of power. These three axes are not to be understood as separate elements but as interconnected processes that are inextricably-linked; what changes from one to the other is our focus. In the first section we focused on the role of technical capacities like the auditorium in reproducing certain forms of power-knowledge and favouring specific relationships of power. In the second section we focused on both the verbal and the nonverbal communications that take place between individuals during assessment. Assessment is actually a technique, a carefully designed form of control and classification that produces power relations, but we focused on the exchanges between individuals, which include bodied encounters and the transmission of codes and linguistic conventions. In this third section our focus is on resistance. Definitions of power and resistance Power is, for Foucault, the ability of individuals to act upon the actions of others: “what defines a relationship of power is that it is a mode of action which does not act directly and immediately on others. Instead, it acts upon their actions: an action upon an action, on existing actions or on those which may arise in the present or the future” (Dreyfus and Rabinow 220). According to Kevin Jon Heller, “power and resistance are, for Foucault, ontologically correlative terms” (99), in the sense that “power can be designated as ‘resistance’ depending upon the perspective from which the power-relation is judged” (ibid.). Resistance refers, for Foucault, to the forms of power of those who have less power within the structure of a given disciplinary institution – i.e. the prisoners, the patients or 26 the students. According to him, all struggles against power relations “attack not so much ‘such or such’ institution of power, or group, or elite, or class, but rather a technique, a form of power. [...] It is a form of power which makes individuals subjects” (Dreyfus and Rabinow 212). Hence, in order to understand what power relations are about in an institution like the university it is necessary to investigate the forms of resistance and the attempts made to dissociate them. The desire to remain passive during classes or, on the contrary, the desire to participate more actively than expected and to express opinions that contradict those of the teacher are examples of students’ resistance. From the teachers’ perspective, we can also find multiple forms of resistance to the ways in which teachers are positioned by the mechanisms of the institution – allowing students to assign their own grades or to submit their work after deadlines; addressing aspects of the social and political life that are not part of the course content; engaging in strikes against educational laws that affect the labor conditions and the rights of the people working and studying at the university. The university, as a disciplinary institution, can be understood as an ensemble of techniques that transforms the individuals into subjects, but the effect of these techniques also depends on the capacity of the individuals to exercise power and to resist it. In Foucault’s words, “power relations are both intentional and non-subjective” (The History of Sexuality 94). This means that individuals exercise power with the intention of modifying other people’s actions and that, at the same time, their subjectivity is not external and separated from the already-existing power relations. According to Heller, this has been misunderstood by most Foucault scholars, who have focused more on the idea that power relations, for Foucault, are non-subjective, thereby overlooking his insistence on the intentionality. Foucault considers that individuals are both the subjects and the objects of power, which doesn’t mean that they are powerless or not able to resist. “Although all subject-positions are ‘subjected’ to discourses that temporally and ontologically precede them, the inevitable multiplicity of those discourses ensures that 27 subjectification invariably produces structurally incompatible (i.e., hegemonic and counter-hegemonic) subject positions” (Heller 94). Foucault’s understanding of power thus allows for subject-positions that are counter-hegemonic, but doesn’t consider these to be in a position of exteriority in relation to power. Consequently, to investigate power relations in the university through this perspective would mean being skeptical with regard to the possibility of a liberating pedagogy. Foucault invites us to focus on resistance and on the attempts to change our subject-positions, but he does not imply that we can get to a point at which we are free from reproducing power relations. The repressive hypothesis One of my favourite songs by Pink Floyd is Another Brick in the Wall, from their famous concept album released in 1979 and adapted for a musical film of the same title, The Wall, directed by Alan Parker in 1982. Both the song and its film version represent students protesting against their abusive teachers and the song seems to me to be a strong statement against schooling. Ironically, I know a lot of teachers who – like me – really love that song, probably because they see themselves as being alternative teachers who don’t exert power upon the students in the way that is represented in the song. In my opinion, Pink Floyd’s song epitomizes what Foucault conceptualizes in Volume 1 of History of Sexuality as the “repressive hypothesis” – that is, to think that power is repressive and that it is exerted from above and upon the oppressed. Considering power as an oppressive force may lead to the search for liberation. But the promise of liberation is always threatened by the construction of new power relationships. Many pedagogues have criticised traditional schooling. The anti-schooling movement – Ivan Illych being a major reference – is probably the main example of this, but it is far from being the only one. In fact, the most cited and acclaimed pedagogues are usually critical of traditional schooling. According to Foucault, however, the incitement to talk about repression and liberation 28 only reproduces power by means of displacement. He has defined this tendency as the “enunciator’s payoffs”, which he defines as follows. “[T]he ‘enunciator’s payoffs’ [sic] assure to whoever speaks by means of ‘anti-repressive’ theory, which he himself is helping to develop. These conditions explain the fact that ‘anti-repressive’ discourse should be a genre that circulates with such obstinacy between university auditorium and analytic couch.” (“On Infantile Sexuality” 12-13) This is one of the paradoxes of power in education. Educational institutions reproduce power relations and, at the same time, they also trigger the desire of some individuals to resist power and to change the very same institutions to which they belong and in which they participate. Some people concerned with pedagogy seek for and work for the development of anti-repressive educational practices. For Foucault, however, “[a] society without power relations can only be an abstraction” (Dreyfus and Rabinow 223). In Foucault’s understanding of power, the threat of any anti-repressive theory is that it may help to spread power itself, since “power needs resistance as one of its fundamental conditions of operation. It is through the articulation of points of resistance that power spreads through the social field. But it is also, of course, through resistance that power is disrupted” (147). Taking into account this understanding of power makes me sceptical of the possibility of an anti-repressive pedagogy and encourages me to seek an analysis of power relations that focuses less on the meaning and on the intentions of the individuals and more on specific practices and techniques. It also invites me to reflect on my own proximity and personal relationship with discourse. However, the hypothesis that the liberating pedagogies emerging from repressive pedagogies are nonetheless condemned to fail can be disempowering. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick notes that, “[r]ather than working outside of it, however, Volume 1, like much of Foucault’s earlier work, might be better described as propagating the repressive hypothesis even more broadly by means of displacement, multiplication and 29 hypostatization” (11). James Penney is also very critical of Foucault’s conception of power and argues that “Foucault’s idea of power tries to persuade us that our oppression stems not from forces we can trace to specific socioeconomic, legislative and juridical structures, but from power as such” (10). In my opinion, the scholars who find Foucault’s theories disempowering do so precisely because they believe that Foucault doesn’t provide specific solutions; Foucault’s aim, rather, is to add complexity to the study of power, which doesn’t mean that there is no room for political action. Heller considers that “an extremely pessimistic interpretation of Foucault’s work has become increasingly common” (105) and offers a different interpretation of Foucault’s understanding of power and resistance – one which is not dystopian and allows for counter-hegemonic subject-positions and for the possibility of freedom. Following on Heller’s interpretation, I consider that, rather than being cynical and nihilistic, Foucault’s conception of power can be deployed for the purposes of an engaged and critical analysis of educational institutions. This is clear in the following quotation in which he talks explicitly about pedagogic institutions: Let us take something that has been the object of criticism, often justified: the pedagogic institution. I don’t see where evil is in the practice of someone who, in a given game of truth, knowing more than another, tells him what he must do, teaches him, transmits knowledge to him, communicates skills to him. The problem is rather to know how you are to avoid in these practices [...] the effects of domination which will make a child subject to the arbitrary and useless authority of a teacher. (qtd. in Heller 103) What is thus important for Foucault is “how power is used: is it used to increase the freedom of others, or to capture them in relations of domination?” (Heller 103-104). I consider that, as affirmed by Foucault, “resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power” (95). Such a view encourages us to resist power relations while, at the same time, remaining critical of our position. In other words, it stimulates us to use power to increase the freedom of others and to consider this as a continuous process of 30 negotiation rather than as an end. In the last section of the following case study, by focusing on how power is used, I develop the idea of teaching as a “performative” act. 31 CASE STUDY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF GUELPH 1. Rethinking the technical capacities through invisible pedagogies Next Tuesday I will start the seminars that I am teaching. I have taught in the past (private lessons, workshops, lectures) but this is the first time I will be teaching my own seminars in the University during a whole semester. I have imagined many times how my very first class was going to be. I have always done this, even though I would never have guessed that it was going to be an Italian class. When I was in high school, or during the first years of my bachelor’s degree, I used to imagine myself giving an engaging lecture, talking with the students about all the things we usually don’t learn and all the mistakes that teachers usually make. I basically imagined myself as the perfect teacher. Now that the time to teach my first class has come I am excited and motivated, but I see everything differently. What is important to me now is to see what mistakes I make and why, because I know that I am going to make some. I actually don’t really care about making mistakes, but rather about being able to trace how conscious I am of the mistakes I make and the effect that they have on the students. I am not interested in not reproducing power but rather in being able to notice exactly how I am reproducing it. I am sceptical of an ideal pedagogy or a horizontal pedagogy, but I am committed to experimenting with an aware pedagogy. Tomorrow I will introduce myself to the students and explain to them why teaching is important to me and what I want to learn from this experience that we are going to share. I will also encourage the students to introduce themselves and to feel responsible for their own learning process and for the class dynamic. We will start learning basic words in Italian, starting from their already acquired knowledge. We will also practice these words and phrases by sharing dynamics. I will try to memorize all the names and faces by writing them down on a sheet of paper. Today I will also search the internet some tips to memorize names. I will also take care of the arrangement of the chairs and the tables, the lights, the projector, the sound equipment and all the invisible pedagogies. Maybe I will play some relaxing music. This is what I wrote in my notebook the day before starting my teaching experience at the University of Guelph. From September to December, 2015, I taught weekly seminars in an introductory Italian course for two groups of twenty to twenty-five undergraduate students. Throughout this experience, I took weekly notes in my notebook and continuously reflected on my teaching performance. In the above transcription of my notes, we can see that when I started teaching my seminars I was aware of the impossibility of undertaking a pedagogy that could address all the students equally. I had already started my research project and had in mind some of the critical tools that I explore in this dissertation. Now that I am looking back on my pedagogical experience I would like to identify some aspects that I overlooked. In this section, I focus on the 32 activities and technologies that were part of our pedagogical experience and analyze how I dealt with them and which of them I consider to be neutral. Since I cannot account for the multiple readings that my students made of all the technical capacities that were part of the course experience, I build on my direct observation during the semester and a retrospective critical analysis (six months later) and I also consider carefully all the feedback that the students gave me in their written evaluations at the middle and at the end of the semester. First, I analyze the classroom setting where our seminars took place and I offer “appropriation” as a tool for altering our relations with the technical capacities. Second, I focus on the online platform (CourseLink, University of Guelph) that mediated our educational experience. a. Who does this classroom think we are? According to Ellsworth’s understanding of teaching as a structure of address, “educational discourses and practices are filled with conscious and unconscious assumptions and desires about the who that a curriculum or pedagogy is addressed to” (58). Following on this idea, Maria Acaso, a professor in the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, offered the question “Who does this chair think you are?” as a tool to reflect on the multiple ways in which the pedagogical spaces and their physical elements position us as subjects. She used this question as the title for a series of seminars on the work of Elisabeth Ellsworth and the artist Jaime Kruse that took place in Madrid and Barcelona in April, 2010. These seminars constituted Ellsworth’s first visit to Spain and were mainly focused on her work Teaching Positions (1997), translated into Spanish in 2005 (Akal). Two years after the seminars, Maria Acaso published Pedagogías invisibles: El espacio del aula como discurso (2012), which draws on semiotics to analyze some of the microdiscourses conveyed in educational spaces and her book is particularly inspired by Ellsworth’s theories. A research group also named Pedagogías invisibles was 33 created by Maria Acaso together with a group of students and researchers after the experience of the seminars with Ellsworth. Acaso and her research group’s understanding of “invisible pedagogies” is connected with what has been theorized in the field of sociology as the hidden curriculum, but with some differences. Whereas the hidden curriculum focuses on the macropolitical intentions of educational institutions, the invisible pedagogies point towards the micropolitical practices of educators. What both concepts have in common is that they reflect on the discursive aspects of the educational practice, including its physical elements, and on how meaning is created beyond what is visible or what is made explicit in the curriculum. The invisible pedagogies, however, are oriented towards the praxis; they are an invitation to address the invisible in our teaching. Acaso’s question (Who does this chair think you are?) helps us to reflect on the mode of address of the technical capacities that characterizes our teaching experience. It is formulated in a way that is particularly useful to understand that there are no neutral objects. It is obvious that a chair doesn’t think, but it has been designed according to a preconceived idea of what its uses and its users should be. In other words, the question assumes that all objects have a mode of address and since modes of address always misconstrue the subjects in one way or another – what the chair thinks I am is not exactly what I am – we can take advantage of this realization in order to position ourselves differently. By asking “Who does this classroom think we are?” I explain, in this section, my relation with the classroom setting in which our seminars took place and I focus on some of the invisible pedagogies that were part of the teaching experience. Before I started my seminars I went to see the classroom in which classes were going to take place. I did this with my colleague, Helga, a teaching assistant like me, who was going to teach the same seminars for two different groups of students. I remember that we were disappointed at how small and unwelcoming the classrooms that had been assigned to us were. They didn’t have any windows and they looked gray and claustrophobic because 34 they had no natural light. We both went to see the secretary in our department immediately and kindly asked her to provide us with other rooms, but this wasn’t possible. Once I accepted that classroom 112 in the MacNaughton building was the classroom were my seminars were going to take place, I started to try to find ways to make it more welcoming. The classroom’s architect didn’t consider that a window to the exterior world was necessary and assumed that the focus of the students’ attention should be the projection screen and the long blackboard (which covered the full-length of the front wall of the classroom) toward which all the chairs were oriented. All the chairs in the classroom were facing the same direction (i.e., the blackboard), except for the teacher’s, which was slightly different from the others and was placed so that it faced the students’ chairs and was behind the only table at the front of the classroom. I decided not to sit on that chair and to put the table aside, so that I would always be standing in front of the students. This was a way to remove a physical barrier between the students and me in order to facilitate interaction, but I find it important to note that by standing up while they were sitting down I was making a difference between my position and theirs. In any case, removing the table that was supposed to be occupied by the teacher helped to establish a face-to-face relationship with the students and encouraged discussion and participation. I also came up with the idea of playing music. Although it could be a bit distracting for the students, I thought that it would help to create a cozier environment. I guessed that for a generation born during the digital era it wouldn’t be a problem for the students to pay attention to different stimuli at the same time and, in fact, it wasn’t. In the middle of the semester, I gave the students a sheet of paper in which they were asked to write down what activities they wanted to keep or discontinue or what new activities they could suggest during the seminars. It was an idea that was mentioned during the training session for teaching assistants which had taken place before the start of the semester and I 35 decided to try this because I felt the need to have some feedback from the students. The students weren’t asked to identify themselves, so all the comments were anonymous, which allowed for honest critiques without any conflict of interest. In their feedback most of the students pointed out that playing background music was one of the things that they wanted to keep. Only one student complained about it because they thought it was too loud. What I did in order to satisfy everyone was to keep playing music at class but to turn the volume down a bit. Apart from keeping the morning group awake and creating a relaxing work atmosphere, the music also became a medium for communication. In every seminar I played an album by a different Italian band. This was a way of exposing the students to Italian culture and sometimes I related the music to my personal experience in Italy and even to the historical context of the chosen album. I also invited students to participate in this daily ritual and to suggest other Italian music selections that we could play in class. Some of them asked me to play music from Italian pop bands that I didn’t know. They engaged in an interaction that was beyond the requirements of the course and that transformed the classroom into a communal space. I think that both my personal enthusiasm for the Italian music and my willingness to share a common experience explain why some students indicated, in the course evaluation, that they looked forward each week to their seminars with me.6 b. Appropriation as a critical tool My taking into consideration the invisible pedagogies of the classroom helped create a relaxed atmosphere for our work. By changing and manipulating the classroom setting we became familiar with it and we generated a successful group dynamic. What I can see now, nonetheless, in retrospect, is that many aspects of the classroom setting remained See the students’ evaluation of my teaching in Appendix, in which a student points out that the seminars “were the thing I looked forward to during the week” and some of them refer explicitly to the “classroom environment” and the music. 6 36 unaddressed. I became used to my personal way of arranging the classroom to the extent that I didn’t explore or experiment with any other uses of its physical elements. Moreover, I didn’t encourage the students to participate fully in this process. In the afternoon group, the students would place the chairs in a semicircle around the blackboard in order to face each other during the class discussions. I allowed this and other uses of the space, but I never asked the students to think critically about the discursive elements of the classroom. Once I arranged a use of the space of the classroom that felt comfortable for all of us, I stopped allowing for other possibilities. This is why I think that when exploring the discursive aspects of the technical capacities in our pedagogies, it is important to maintain a tension between making familiar the unfamiliar and making unfamiliar the familiar in our relation to objects. The first process helps us to feel at ease and to adapt the technical capacities to our needs. At some point, however, we become too familiar with the technical capacities and the uses that we make of them and we risk failing to see the discourses that we are reproducing. This is the moment in which we need to step back and create some distance in order to open creative processes of resignification. These relations of familiarity and unfamiliarity with objects can be understood through Heidegger’s distinction between two different attitudes towards the objects of the world – “present-at-hand” as opposed to “ready-to-hand”. In Curriculum and the Cultural Body, Yvonne Gaudelius and Charles Garoian explain these two terms as follows. Present-to-hand is the tool that is broken, different, or new. It is the foregrounded object laid bare for critical examination and creative re-presentation. In marked contrast to this, ready-to-hand is the tool that becomes part of our being, a familiar object that is known, assumed, and taken for granted by us through our routine use of it. (9) Objects and their uses that are part of our routine thus become assumed and are taken for granted, but this naturalized relation to objects can be disrupted by interference. “Interference disrupts and transforms the dualism that distinguishes the body from 37 technological, pedagogical, curricular systems into a dialectical play or performance” (10). Instead of reiterating pedagogical practices and relations with objects that reproduce the social norms, a performative use of the technical capacities opens up a wide variety of creative possibilities by rendering the objects ready-to-hand present-to-hand and the invisible in the classroom visible. In this regard, we can find in the arts multiple examples of resignification of objects and cultural texts – such as parody, appropriation or the ready-made – that can be a source of inspiration for exploring performative uses of the space of the classroom. In chapter 2, “Viewers Make Meaning”, of Practices of Looking: An introduction to visual culture, Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright explain that “appropriation” can be understood in a broad sense as a form of oppositional reading. Artists have used different forms of appropriation by borrowing images and by changing their original meaning or by recreating, in their artworks, some of the icons of art history. Moreover, “forms of appropriation for political empowering can also be found at the level of language. Social movements often take terms that are considered to be derogatory and re-use them in empowering ways. This process is called trans-coding” (63). Sturken and Cartwright also consider as other forms of appropriation the concept of “bricolage” theorized by anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and the strategy of “textual poaching” defined by cultural theorist Michel de Certeau. By understanding appropriation as a form of oppositional reading we can use it to change our relation to objects, including the technical capacities that are part of our teaching experience. Even the most familiar object, such as the chair, can easily become unfamiliar through appropriation. Appropriation can also be a way to engage students in thinking critically about the classroom space and physical elements. I suggest using appropriation as an artistic and critical tool to instantiate a tension between familiarity and unfamiliarity in relation to the discursive aspects of the space of the classroom. Once we have identified the technologies that mediate our teaching experience and have asked ourselves how they are positioning us (Who do they 38 think we are?) we can experiment, through appropriation, with the multiple oppositional readings that we can make of them. c. It is not as simple as that! Beyond the classroom setting Sometimes, however, the manipulation and appropriation of the technical capacities don’t have the effect that we desire. We can place all the chairs in a circle and still not be able to engage in discussions. We can ask the students to give themselves a grade and not be able to empower them. We can incorporate social networks in our teaching and not be able to innovate at all. This is, in part, because there are deeply rooted dynamics and practices that go beyond the use that we make of the technical capacities. When we change our pedagogical practices and yet don’t achieve the effect that we desire, we tend to think that our students are not ready for more democratic, active, or creative ways of doing things. From my experience as a student/teacher I can say that this is not true – it sounds to me like an easy excuse to keep doing the same things and to refrain from experimenting. What is more likely is that, although we have adopted new practices, our focus remains the same. It would be too easy if we could generate completely different dynamics simply by incorporating new elements into our pedagogies. The truth is that the technical capacities that transform individuals into subjects do not end outside the space of the classroom. The whole educational institution is positioning the students and conveying ideas of who they are and what is expected from them. One can change the classroom setting by putting all the chairs into a circle in the hope of creating less hierarchical exchanges among the students, but one is condemned to fail, if there is still an unconscious discrimination between the “brilliant” and “not so brilliant” students. Evaluation of students is also a technical capacity and it has a big impact on all subjects involved in the educational experience, given that evaluation is generally perceived as the educational institution’s most important goal. If our curricula are focused on grades, our 39 pedagogies are going to address the students as if the only thing that matters is that they get high grades. I can relate this to my teaching experience. The above page from my course website (on the CourseLink platform) gives the list of the names of my students. This representation is exactly what I saw the very first time that I came to know them, before I met them in person in the classroom. These lines of text on a screen are not my students, but they form a classification system that can be confused with reality if we see it as mirroring the students. CourseLink, in this case, as with any other online platform, functions as one of the technical capacities – in this case a clear technology of observation – through which the teachers and the students look and are looked at. We are so used to these technologies that we don’t even think about their pedagogical and political implications. It may seem obvious to say that these technologies determine our educational experience, but we don’t spend much time thinking about why we decide to represent or to observe the students and the teachers in certain ways and not in others. This technology of observation in 40 particular favours a general look at the students as a homogenised group. The features of the students that are considered relevant to visualize are first and last name, student id, email and grade. What is probably more interesting, however, is what is missing – not only their stories, their faces, their feelings, their interests and their lives, but also other aspects that are crucial for the learning experience. For example, the students’ previous knowledge about the course content, their cultural capital or their class background, their goals in relation to the course – a student who wants to learn Italian to become a translator needs a different approach from that of the student who is studying accounting, for instance – their personal satisfaction with the course, their interaction with other students and with the teacher, or the distance between what they knew at the beginning of the course and what they know at the end. This kind of information would represent the students very differently. Of course, it can be argued that it would be complicated to visualize or collect all this information. As a researcher and not an online platform developer my job is to analyze these tools, not to create them, but, as far as I know, technology is not that limited. Social networks like twitter already offer the possibility of visualizing user interactions, so perhaps we need to extend discoveries in the broader field of social media to the area of pedagogical technologies. In my opinion, if the technologies that we use in the university focus mainly on grades, it is because grades are in fact the main focus of our curricula. I regularly checked the CourseLink platform during the course to make sure that my students were doing well. I compared the grades of the students in the morning group with those of the ones in the afternoon group and both of them with the ones of Helga’s groups because the platform allowed me to do that. The only way to measure – through CourseLink – if they were learning was to check if they were getting high grades. I really cared about my students’ grades even though I didn’t want that to be my main focus, but I probably wasn’t as aware of this concern as I thought I was. 41 The course outline, the textbook and the course content were particularly focused on grammar. A language, needless to say, is much more than grammar and grammar shouldn’t be taken as a neutral set of rules. As part of our analysis of the systems of communication, it would be interesting to explore the forms of power-knowledge that the textbook privileged. Using discourse analysis, it would be possible to identify the multiple ways in which a national idea of Italy is constructed in the textbook – and even a national idea of Canada, given that the textbook is designed specifically for Canadian students. It would be possible to identify what discourses in relation to gender, race and class are reproduced. But because of the length-restrictions of this MA dissertation, I leave this topic for other researchers. What is interesting to me, as part of this section, is to trace how I addressed the course content – delimited by the textbook and the course outline – as well as how I positioned myself in relation to it and how I positioned the students by my way of mediating the course materials. The truth is that I never used the textbook during the seminars. I always prepared activities that were related to the content that the students were exploring in the lectures, but I never used or referred to the textbook. Basically, I helped the students to understand the concepts that they were dealing with and not to understand the textbook. The seminars, however, were still focused mainly on grammar, as the textbook was. Most of the students complained, on the evaluation in the middle of the semester (the anonymous Keep-Stop-Start exercise), that the seminars were too focussed on grammar exercises.7 They asked me for more sentence composition, more talking and more cultural review. In other words, they were asking for something that they could relate to and use in the world outside the classroom. They probably wanted to speak to their “nonni”, to write emails to their Italian friends, or to know more about the culture that they were embracing – perhaps with the desire to travel to Italy in the near future. I acknowledged what they were asking me and I started speaking more and more Italian in class and I replaced some of the weekly written quizzes with short oral tests. I Note that in the students’ evaluation of my teaching in Appendix, the only unsigned comment complains precisely about this. 7 42 basically did what they asked me to do and with my best intentions, but I realize now that the way in which I did this was perhaps counterproductive. The point is that I encouraged them to speak but I was assigning them a mark for that, which, ultimately, was in one way or another based on grammar. I was focused on their grades – as I was when I checked CourseLink every week – and not on the actual speaking. By giving them higher and lower marks I was classifying them into talented or not so talented speakers, thereby losing the focus on expressivity and on the act of communicating freely. Of course, I took into consideration in my grading criteria oral comprehension, the personal effort to communicate and the creativity, but I didn’t manage to avoid the dynamic of competition and the focus on grammar. We know that we can communicate without perfect grammar. But by evaluating their speaking I was indirectly evaluating their grammar, which depended on their already acquired abilities. By not using the textbook and by encouraging the students to speak, as we have seen in our example, we can negotiate the way in which we are positioned by institutional mechanisms. But if the focus remains the same – grading grammar – the attempt to change the dynamic is condemned to fail. 2. Rethinking the systems of communication through pedagogies of touch In this section I focus on the systems of communication that operated in the educational context in which I was teaching and studying. I explore the continuities and discontinuities between the institutional discourse of the University of Guelph (UoG) and the personal narratives of the students and faculty members in the School of Languages and Literatures (SOLAL) from the same institution. I draw on discourse analysis of the institutional propaganda, the codes of conduct and the rules of academic integrity of the University of Guelph and connect them to the narratives and experiences provided by the 43 participants in the qualitative research interviews that I undertook at the end of the 2015 fall semester. a. The interview process After completing the Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans Course on Research Ethics (TCPS 2: CORE) and after submitting a 33page application, I received, on November 23, 2015, approval from the Research Ethics Board at the University of Guelph to undertake research involving human participants. Preparing and submitting this application, as well as responding to a request for additional information, were very time-consuming activities during a period of two months, through the fall of 2015. I did benefit greatly, however, from this experience, in so far as it gave me insight into another aspect of the university's administrative machinery and discourses. My research consisted of semi-structured qualitative interviews with students and faculty members in SOLAL, for the primary purpose of eliciting narratives and personal experiences regarding their social status, their experience in grading and their relationships with other students and faculty members. The size of the pool from which I drew participants was not very big considering that SOLAL included, at that time, 20 faculty members, 8 sessionals, 26 graduate students (including me) and 6 international interns, as well as 22 undergraduate students enrolled in the European Studies program.8 From a total of 82 possible participants I managed to recruit 20 for my study. The 20 participants include 3 undergraduate students, 9 graduate students, 2 international interns, and 6 faculty members (including sessional instructors). The number of Undergraduate students from very different areas of study and departments take courses in SOLAL, but for my research I decided to contact only the students officially enrolled in the program of European Studies. Other undergraduate programs offered by SOLAL include Classical Studies, German Studies, Italian Studies, Hispanic Studies and Études Françaises. 8 44 participants interviewed is sufficient for the purpose of my study for two reasons: first, the number represents almost a quarter of the population under study; second, because the aim of my research is not to quantify data but to identify common narratives and experiences and to relate them to the institutional discourses. Underlining the omissions Since one of the goals of my research is to address the reproduction of social exclusions, I find it crucial to underline an obvious omission. I didn’t include in this study any member of the office staff. I realized this after I had already submitted my application to the Research Ethics Board and I didn’t have time to correct the omission. Even though I had a very close relationship with the office staff, I excluded them from participating in the interviews, as if they were not part of the processes of socialization that I am studying. It is important to underline this because, although my project has an ethical dimension, it still reproduces certain social exclusions. By acknowledging this omission, I maintain that any similar or further study should also include the staff members, as they obviously participate in the reproduction of discourse and power relations that take place in the department. Population under study and social risks I limited my research to the SOLAL department community for two main reasons: first, because my research also uses autoethnographic research methods, it made sense to investigate the department with which I was directly involved; second, the results of my research may be beneficial for the members of SOLAL since this dissertation will be publicly accessible once it is completed and a copy of it will be provided to the department. This decision, however, also implied some social risks for the participants 45 since they might say things that are unsupported or unpopular with colleagues or with people to whom they report. To mitigate this risk we adopted different strategies.9 First, the participants were recruited privately and individually by email and were asked for voluntary participation with no direct benefit to them. Second, the interviews took place in a separate building from the one where the SOLAL offices are located, in order to assure that participants didn’t encounter each other during the interview process. Finally, the participants’ names were replaced with fake names and any directly or indirectly identifying information was erased or anonymized during the transcription process – all the information given by the participants was initially recorded by audio and then deleted after being transcribed. Methodology My purpose is to elicit common narratives from the participants during the interviews and to connect their stories with other narratives that are present in the institutional propaganda and norms. Needless to say, this is a strategy among many other possible ones for an analysis of the systems of communication that operate in the university, which include a wide variety of oral and written texts produced by its members. Although Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) in general and Wodak’s Discourse Historical Approach (DHA) have deeply inspired my research project, I wish to note that my methodology doesn’t fit entirely with either of these approaches. In order to carry out research using the DHA method, I would need to define a clear problematic and focus on particular topics, utterances and “nominations” (Reisigl and Wodak). Rather, I am interested in the social relationships between students and faculty members and in how these relationships are mediated by discourse. I use a questionnaire that is divided into three sections and that The research group responsible of these decisions includes my supervisor, Clive Thomson, as the principal investigator and me, Alejandro Santaflorentina, as the student investigator. 9 46 contains open-ended questions. The questions in the first section seek to illicit information about the informant’s perception of their social status and their expectations in regards to their academic career. The ways in which the participants present themselves while answering these questions are compared to the ways in which the institution represents them. The questions in the second section are oriented towards the informant’s experience of assessing and being assessed and towards their opinions of the limitations of the grading system. These experiences are contrasted to the ways in which the university presents academic integrity. Finally, the questions in the third section relate to the codes of sociability and the relationships between the members of the community under study, which are then compared to the university rules of conduct. I considered the option of showing the visual and textual materials that I analyze in this section to the participants during the interview process, but I ultimately discarded this option because I thought that this approach would constrain the conversation and would not allow for more spontaneous and open exchanges. This means that all the connections that I establish between the oral data and the visual and textual materials of analysis are posterior to the interview process. Materials of analysis The institutional discourse is disseminated in multiple ways. The university produces official texts directed towards people both inside the campus – as is the case with internal communications to members of the community – and outside – in the form of propaganda or external reports. I have chosen the University of Guelph 2016 handbook (henceforth “the handbook”) as material to be analyzed because it is one of the main items used by UoG for external propaganda purposes. It is an expensively designed, full-colour, glossy publication of almost 90 pages and it is used primarily as a recruiting tool at events like the Ontario University Fair. The Ontario University Fair is a three-day event that takes 47 place every year, in October, at the Toronto Convention Centre, where representatives of UoG – generally one professor for each area of study as well as students – promote the programs offered by the institution in order to attract both potential students and their parents. I think that the handbook provides a clear idea of how the University of Guelph presents itself to the public. The handbook is complemented, of course, by materials like the official website and other forms of propaganda. Other materials that I take into consideration are the 2016-2017 Undergraduate Calendar and the 2016-2017 Graduate Calendar – which include documents outlining students’ rights and responsibilities – and the Academic Integrity page from the UoG website. b. Social status, grades and affect The University of Guelph 2016 handbook has been carefully designed to be inclusive. Diversity and multiculturalism seem to be used as selling points or commercial hooks. The very first page includes a letter by the president, Franco J. Vaccarino, in which he underlines that “our community is one of religious breadth and racial and ethnic diversity.” This idea is certainly reinforced by the calculated display of photographs of students and of other members of the community, all of whom represent a wide range of ethnic and religious backgrounds. From all the member profiles in the handbook that include a picture and the name of the person, I have counted exactly 11 men and 11 women. These profiles include surnames with Canadian, American, British, Irish, SouthAfrican, Arab, Asian, Greek, Indian, Italian, Jamaican and Ukrainian origins – showing the diversity of the Canadian population in general and of the UoG’s community in particular.10 With the exception of the two representatives from the Aboriginal Resource Centre and the Office of Diversity and Human Rights, all the profiles are those of students. These very diverse and gender-equal profiles contrast, nevertheless, with the fact that the current 10 The origins of the 22 surnames within the handbook have been researched using ©Forebears. 48 president and all the former presidents of UoG are white men. In any case, there is no doubt that these profiles show the institution’s intention to present itself as committed to being inclusive. I observe, however, that there is no representative of a student with disabilities. I could, of course, ask if the diversity represented in the handbook corresponds to the real experience of the community. This is a question that is beyond the scope of my dissertation and one I am not in a position to answer. Unfortunately, I didn’t include a specific question about diversity in my questionnaire, but most of the participants – including internationals – expressed indirectly that they felt welcome on campus and that they did not experience discrimination. Most of the participants mentioned, however, without being directly asked by me, that they felt in an inferior status compared to students and faculty members from other departments. When asked about her social status, Sarah gave the following reply. I guess that as a professor of the arts I am finding lately that there is a lot of discourse about the lack of usefulness of the arts and that is a shame. […] So, first question: ‘what do you do?’ Ok, so usually that gets kind of respect and then: ‘what do you teach?’ And when I start saying what I teach sometimes there is a little less respect for that. Some undergraduate students, like Cynthia, also expressed that “people who are in computer sciences or engineering kind of have a little bit of better status because they are considered to get better jobs and get more money.” If we look at the statistics on the second page in the handbook we can see that almost a third of the students in the university are enrolled in a Bachelor of Arts program. On the comprehensive list of programs of study that are described on pages 26 to 67, the BA program appears in first position and there is certainly, no indication that it is of less relevance than the others. In the president’s ‘welcome’ text on the first page of the handbook, he acknowledges the contribution of all areas of research in the university and his first reference is to research in the arts. He provides examples of research in the arts and humanities (“publishing poetry that helps us understand what it means to live in poverty”), in agriculture 49 (“introducing a new crop variety that will help feed the world”), in the sciences (“discovering the gene responsible for a debilitating disease”) and in education (“finding ways to reduce schoolyard bullying”). His good intentions would seem, in my view, to reflect a lack of familiarity with some of the disciplines, since the example provided for the arts is not particularly representative of the research being done in this area. There is a similar aspect when we look at the five successful research stories that are highlighted on the third page of the handbook. We can see that most of them relate to research in sciences, even though it is not specified from which department the stories come. An examination of rocks from Mars, an invention to prevent iron deficiency in rural Cambodia, the digitization of DNA samples, and the discovery of natural pain control for pets are research stories that could be located within the disciplines of science, nutrition and agriculture. The only story mentioned that could come from research done in the arts relates to “addressing the ‘daughter deficit’”, which seems nonetheless more connected to the social sciences. The only clear reference to research done in the arts and humanities is thus “publishing poetry”, which suggests a lack of awareness on the president’s part. The result is a lack of promotion of research in the arts. On the third page of the handbook, the amount of money invested in annual research funding is highlighted in bold letters as one of the university’s most important achievements. Together with the percentages of first-year students who return for their second year and of students employed after graduation, the annual research funding is clearly one of the central claims that are designed to attract prospective students. There is no pie chart, however, that would indicate the amount of funding assigned to particular areas of research; this information is only accessible on the university website. From the total amount of $139 million in research funds listed for the year, 1 May, 2015 to 30 April, 2016, the figure for the College of Arts was $950,440.00 (almost a million). Among the different departments within the College of Arts, SOLAL shows the lowest amount 50 ($900.00) within departments in the College of Arts and within the whole university. We can speculate that this figure contributes to the perception that the Arts have an inferior social status among the university community members. Of course, the inferior status of the arts and humanities is connected to a hierarchy that is generalized in the academic world beyond the University of Guelph. As Monica, a faculty member, explains, the humanities are suffering across the country. “None of the Ph.D. students coming out of the faculties of humanities are getting jobs and the ones who are getting sessionals jobs are the ones who are lucky.” This situation has a direct effect on the students’ perception of their future. Although, according to the handbook, 91.3% of students are employed six months after graduation, Megan confesses that she doesn’t know if her undergraduate program will help her to find a job. I don’t know if it will to be honest. I mean, it would be nice to say I am an alumni from the University of Guelph, I graduated and stuff... I like to brag about it I guess ‘I go to this University, I have the best professors and stuff’ but whether that is going to help me in the future I am not sure. Megan acknowledges the prestige that comes with having a diploma, but she is not sure whether this will increase her possibilities of finding a job. This is a common concern among the students that I interviewed. The uncertainty in regards to their future employment pushes some students to further their education with a Masters degree as a way to increase the chances of finding a job. Natalia, graduate student, puts it as follows. “In my field it is kind of hard to get a job if you just have an undergraduate degree. Now I think that mostly all over the world, and in Canada too, an undergraduate degree is the new high school.” Improving the chance to get a better job is also the reason why Carla decided to enrol in her Masters program. “If the Masters had been successful for me I would expect to have a higher paid job than the job I did before I had my Masters.” When the interviewees are asked about the perception of their social status most of them relate it to economic factors. Vivian explains that some people think that studying for a Masters 51 degree, as she is doing, is actually useless. “Some people would say why would you spend probably $40,000.00 on ‘what?’ when you could have been working here as a receptionist doing this and already pay your own house or something, you know?” For Lucia, becoming an international intern teaching at the university is only considered an upgrade in her career by people inside the university. “My mother, for example, she surely thinks that is an upgrade, but when we talk about it financially it is surely not an upgrade, it is a downgrade.” The concern for finding a well paid job after graduation also pushes the students to compete for high grades, as they consider that employers may be looking at their academic results. Some students declare that they don’t compare their grades with the ones that other students get and that they try to be competitive only with themselves. This is the case of Megan, who considers asking other students about their grades to be a bit rude. “I kind of compare it to talking about money, you are not going to go to your friend like ‘how much are you making?’” I find this connection of grades with money to be very revealing because it shows that grades distinguish students at a symbolic level. According to Carla, all students compares their grades with the ones that their classmates get and “it would be a complete lie if anyone said they didn’t.” She also thinks that students somehow see grades as defining themselves. “If you say ‘Is this person more intelligent than me?’ there is no proof, whereas a grade in our mind is proof of our intelligence, whether this is correct or not. So we believe that this defines us.” This should come as no surprise since grades actually define students’ admission to university programs. As stated in the “Admission Requirements” in the 2016-2017 Graduate Calendar, for admission to a Master’s program “the applicant must have achieved a grade average of at least 70% (B-) in the last four semesters of study.” The importance that both the students and the institution assign to grades, however, seems to be disconnected from what the teachers define as the features of excellence in a 52 student. Amanda, for instance, doesn’t connect excellence with grades. “I wouldn’t say that excellence is defined by grades, but I would say that excellence, especially in the classroom, is defined by how you interact with others.” In their answers to my questionnaire, the teachers agree and consider excellence to be connected with attention and interaction. For Sarah, the features of excellence in a student are “curiosity, rigour and attention to detail.” Monica considers to be excellent “a student who wants to be challenged, a student who is watching you, listening to you.” And Laura says that an excellent student is “a student who is visibly engaged, who does the preparation but goes beyond that and takes the material given and becomes creative with that material.” Most of the teachers claim they don’t consider that grades define students, but they refer to students’ engagement and attention, which are features that determine the grades that the students get. The second resolution of the “Grading Procedures” in the 2016-2017 Undergraduate Calendar states that “instructors must use evaluation criteria which measure quality of performance and not merely activity.” What it is not specified, however, is how it is possible, for instructors, to measure the “quality” of students’ performance. For Monica, this quality is manifested when the students “show that what has been ignited is there to stay”, which still sounds to me as a very difficult thing to trace. “When I see that kind of sparkle in the eyes of the student who is interested in developing further knowledge [...] then I know that I have an excellent student.” I find it interesting that Monica and some professors refer to students’ engagement as something that can be seen. When they can see it, teachers generally take students’ effort into consideration in their assessment. Monica explains, however, that she makes a big effort to be as objective as possible in her grading criteria. When it comes to essays, she doesn’t look at the names and doesn’t grade them before she has read them all. I do take effort into consideration. I do that, but separately from. When I am marking essays it is only on the merit of that particular essay. If I have to reward effort there 53 is a specific percentage for class attendance, participation and overall effort in general and of course that goes in that particular assessment, not in the essay. I won’t penalize a student who of course comes to my course and already has a good level of the subject I teach. I can’t penalize them and reward another one who has a lower level but is putting more effort; I can’t, so when it comes to the essay I assess the essay. Carla, who grades essays as a teaching assistant, also tries to be as objective as possible in her grading, but confesses being affected by the fact that sometimes she knows that the students put in a lot of effort. If I know they tried, they come to office hours, they sit at the front of the lecture hall, they put their hands up during the lectures, even stupid things like that they smile at me when I am in the classroom, obviously that makes me more sympathetic towards that person because they are showing that they are pleased to see me, pleased to be in the lecture or pleased to be studying, rather than a person that sits at the back, plays with their phone during the whole lecture. In that sense I have judged their submission also based on that, but luckily I don’t know all my students names [...] That keeps me more objective. Conversely, Sarah knows all the names of her students, but also acknowledges that the fact that a student comes to office hours and puts in a lot of effort affects her grading. Yeah, I think that definitely affects your grading. I mean, I would try to sort of be aware of that as an instructor and not allow it too much, but I think it does affect especially when you see effort and when you see students coming. That is a good thing so in some cases I would give the benefit of the doubt or give a slightly higher grade that reflects that too. On the contrary, not showing interest can affect students’ grades negatively. Laura explains it as follows. “I feel guilty if I perceive that I am not being objective, but I don’t have a hard time being a bit harsh with people who show lack of interest.” Sarah used to be worried about the grades that her students get when she started teaching, but now considers that sometimes students deserve lower grades. “When I see that students get lower grades often they deserve it because they are not often in class and at this point I don’t get upset about that anymore.” Students are also aware of the fact that showing 54 effort affects their grades. Megan recognizes that she is very happy with her academic results and adds the following comments. I enjoy the professor knowing my name [...] With even a hundred students classes your professor is not going to know your name unless you go up and introduce yourself and even ask for a problem or just say ‘hi, hello, I am in class and I look forward to this’ is better than just sitting back and not saying a word. Making themselves visible to the teachers is actually reported by some of the students as being the key to getting high grades. Of course, it is not the only one. Cynthia considers that “there is no, like, consistent grading criteria for all the professors; it is kind of what they feel you should do.” She describes her strategy to getting high grades as follows. “Knowing what your professors expect, because I had different professors who have widely different expectations and so knowing what they expect is really important to tailoring your work and tailoring how you study and all that.” Caroline is even more specific. For her, the key is “regurgitating what the professors want you to say. I mean, finding out what they want to hear and saying that.” These descriptions match with Carla’s perspective as a graduate student. “Understanding the system, knowing the rules, knowing what is wanted of you” is what she sees as the key for getting higher grades and this is probably why, as a teaching assistant, she considers that the students’ knowledge of a specific style system is more important than the content of their works. I think it is more important. Specially as someone who is grading essays in a field that I don’t know, because I cannot tell you if the content is correct or not, so I am not really even reading the content. [...] We can’t verify all the information; it would take us an hour to mark one essay. [...] So, in that case, if we got to evaluate the work we have to look at the referencing system, the structure, and how well they fit into this framework of expectation. We can see from all these personal experiences that making one’s effort visible for the teacher and knowing what the teachers expect from students are crucial, for the students, to be academically successful. At the same time, these relationships between students and teachers also depend on the number of students per class and on the social abilities of the 55 teacher. Some teachers are confident that they know all their students’ names while others, like Laura, admit that they are not very good at matching names and faces. “Faces I remember, but the names I really get mixed up. I just don’t retain them very well and I apologize with my students because I have a hard time remembering their names.” When asked about how they remember the students’ names, some teachers explain that they have developed their own techniques – for example, to apply a little bit of narrative to a name. Without being directly asked, some of them also confess using social networks like Facebook when they cannot picture the face of a student. Carmen cannot contain a laugh when she explains the following. “I have done Facebook. I think we have all done that. At least if there is a person who sent us an email we would check Facebook. I am not even sure if that is fine, but that helped a lot.” Sarah also recognizes having used Facebook. “There is sometimes that moment of ‘who is that student on my list?’ Well, I will look them up on Facebook and I won’t add them but then if there is a photo I am like ‘hurray, now I know who it is.’” Student-teacher relationships also develop gradually as the students move through the academic years. Most of the teachers recognize that they have a closer relationship with graduate students and final-year undergraduate students. For Sarah, “4th year undergraduate it is not all that different than graduate students, but definitely you have a different relationship with a graduate student. They are entering the profession so we see them more as colleagues.” Laura expresses the same idea as follows. “From 3rd and 4th year undergraduates if I have a student often and they engage the relationship builds up, but with graduate students there is more of a peer relationship really.” These experiences correspond to the ones of graduate students, like Carla, who expresses that professors have a more direct and friendly relationship with graduates than with undergraduates. We are on first name terms, I suppose that is the same for some undergraduates but I don’t know, I mean we work with them; we are their colleagues, we are correcting essays. I suppose that in the hierarchy of the University as a grad student you are sort of bridging the gap between the professors and the undergrads. 56 These relationships are fundamental for the students’ academic success because they help them not only to understand the system and acquire an academic language, but also to feel morally supported. During the interviews, many professors reported stories of students in need of support. I have had students coming to my office and being upset about personal issues and breakups and things like that. I just again try to be a little bit motherly and you know ‘this is something that happens’ and reassuring. When it goes beyond that I think I am really lucky that we have different services on campus so I would refer people to student counseling services and things like that. This personal experience of Sarah is very similar to that of the other teachers. Monica has noticed that she attracts especially young women students who come to her office to talk to her. “Perhaps because after all there is a certain kindness from me, there is the fact that I want them to do well and that I care about their overall well being.” Some students expressed an appreciation towards the teachers who are supportive of them. It is not just younger students who seek their teachers for support; Caroline is a mature student and explains as follows how important the support of her teacher is for her. She has been very supportive and very helpful, and she believes that I can do this and often I don´t believe that I can do this. Like, I will be dragging myself around for weeks and ‘Why am I putting myself through this? I don´t belong here.’ and then I go talk to her for an hour and I come out thinking ‘Oh, there is so much opportunity here, I can do this!’ So she really helps me just by believing that I am a good student. Overall, the personal stories that the participants shared with me show aspects of socialization inside the campus that are absent in the institutional discourse. Students see themselves defined by their grades and by their chances to succeed in their professional career, as the institutional discourse actually defines them. What really counts in getting higher grades, however, is their capacity to interact with teachers and other students. Making oneself visible to the teacher and understanding what the teacher is looking for is generally the key for a student to achieving higher grades. I am aware that making such an 57 observation may be problematic because it can be seen as undermining the objectivity that the institutional discourse promotes. Furthermore, making this point from research undertaken in arts can be seen as reinforcing the idea that the arts and humanities are less rigorous than the “pure” sciences. My purpose is precisely the opposite. The same lack of objectivity can be found in any other research area because the situation that I am describing, as explored by Bhatia, is characteristic of disciplinary communities in general. As a system that is socially legitimated to evaluate students’ knowledge of specific subjects and to upgrade their social status, the university has to maintain an appearance of neutrality and to hide the fact that progress is defined primarily by social interaction. I see this as an invitation to understand that knowledge is produced through bodied encounters, as posited in Stephanie Springgay’s conception of inter-embodiment. Springgay draws on the approach of feminist scholar Gail Weiss who emphasizes “that experience of being embodied is never a private affair, but is always already mediated by our continual interactions with other human and non-human bodies” (qtd. in Springgay 22). Instead of ignoring these bodied encounters we can claim them as producers of knowledge. The institutional discourse, however, generally overlooks social interaction because it is perceived as challenging generic integrity. The Golden Rules of Academic Integrity from the University of Guelph include rules like the following. Know where the boundaries are set in group-work projects. Do not collaborate on the writing of a paper when each member of the group is required to submit her/his own individual paper unless otherwise instructed. What all these rules have in common is that they understand knowledge as a private resource that belongs to autonomous subjects. Academic integrity considers that words, ideas and data belong to the members of disciplinary communities and that the power to innovate is accessible only for insiders, who – knowing what is conventionally available to the community – further their own ideas by building on what is already familiar. Interembodiment challenges this understanding because it “poses that the construction of the 58 body and the production of body knowledge is not created within a single, autonomous subject (body), but rather that body knowledge and bodies are created in the intermingling and encounters between bodies” (Springgay 22). Engaging in a conversation triggered by open-ended questions allowed students and faculty members to share with me their embodied experiences. These experiences of social interaction emphasize an access to knowledge that goes beyond the verbal. Instead of neglecting these interactions, we can reaffirm them in our pedagogical practice through the practice of pedagogies of touch. Feminist theories of touch promote alternative ways to understand relations with others in teaching and learning. “While vision is premised on the separation of the subject and object, creating a rational autonomous subject, as a contact sense touch offers contiguous access to an object” (21). The pedagogies of touch are thus an invitation to understand access to knowledge as a social interaction that depends on bodied encounters. The appearance of objectivity of the grading system and the academic integrity hide social differences that are reproduced through social interaction. By acknowledging the bodied encounters, pedagogies of touch promote an ethics based on interaction. Through this perspective teachers are challenged to understand the relational aspects of their pedagogical practice as a political ground. 3. Rethinking the relationships of power through performative pedagogies a. Teaching as a performative act In Teaching positions, Elisabeth Ellsworth borrows from Brenda Marshall the idea of “manipulating students into taking responsibility” (150). She conceives this paradox as opening up possibilities of understanding teaching as a performance that go beyond the idea of the teacher as empowering the students by using her/his own power, by giving up her/his authority or “by practicing reciprocal dialogical relations that equalize power 59 relations among teachers and students” (151). Instead, the paradox of manipulating students into taking responsibility invites us to situate our pedagogies in order to understand what can be ethically meaningful and for whom in a given context. In Ellsworth’s words: For pedagogy to be performative, that is, for teachers to paradoxically manipulate the students into a position of taking responsibility for the meanings and knowledge they construct, it must be situated within its specifics of time and place. It must be related to the network of relations and ‘ethical obligations’ (Readings, 1996, p.57) that make meaningful what will count in the context as the taking on of responsibility. Performative pedagogies only life, therefore, is in relation to its context and moment. (160) Performative pedagogies should therefore always be situated and focused on the process. For whom is this particular pedagogical practice empowering in this context? For whom is it not empowering? How much are the subjects who are participating in this particular teaching experience aware of the relationships of power that surround them and in which they participate? The emphasis on the “performative” and not on the “liberating” or the “anti-repressive” aspects of our pedagogies prevents us from thinking that we can step outside of power relations. The term “performative” is borrowed by Judith Butler from J.L. Austin’s speech act theory and it is described as follows. “Within speech act theory, a performative is that discursive practice that enacts or produces that which it names” (Bodies That Matter, xxi). Butler uses this term to describe how notions like gender are constructed through the repetition of social norms. Butler’s theory of “performativity” thus allows for the subversion of these categories that are constructed as real by means of being performed while acknowledging that subversion is not easy and does not lead to freedom – “Performativity has to do with repetition, very often with the repetition of oppressive and painful gender norms to force them to resignify. This is not freedom, but a question of how to work the trap that one is inevitably in” (Kotz and Butler). 60 What positions the subjects in the teaching experience is a structure of relationships in which each individual performs one’s role. Feminist pedagogue bell hooks sees the classroom as both a source of constraint and a potential source of liberation and considers that “teaching is a performative act. And it is that aspect of our work that offers the space for change, invention, spontaneous shifts, that can serve as a catalyst drawing out the unique elements in each classroom” (11). In her book Teaching for freedom (1994), she encourages teachers to create a “community of learners together” by positioning themselves as learners. While she positions herself as a learner in her pedagogical practice, she is aware that this doesn’t make her step outside of power relations. I am also not suggesting that I don’t have more power. And I am not trying to say we’re all equal here. I am trying to say that we are all equal here to the extent that we are equally committed to creating a learning context. (153) Considering teaching as performative situates our pedagogies within a context of power relations that can be subverted and transgressed, but this prevents us from thinking that we are able to avoid such relations. In shifting from anti-repressive pedagogy to performative pedagogy, educators should address and be aware of the position of power that they have. We should focus on how we use power to subvert the norms that we perform by means of repetition. In Foucault’s words: [T]he problem is not one of trying to dissolve [power relations] in the utopia of perfectly transparent communication, but to give one’s self the rules of law, the techniques of management, and also the ethics, the ethos, the practice of the self, which would allow these games of power to be played with a minimum of domination. (qtd. in Heller 104-105) b. How much do I open the door? There is an element that I didn’t consider before starting my teaching experience and that turned out to be very relevant. It is the simple act of leaving the classroom door open or closed. In my very first class I felt the need to close the door. I realized later that I was 61 afraid of the possibility that someone could hear me or see me conducting the class. It was one of my first times teaching in English and my very first time teaching Italian, so I was afraid of being judged. As Maria Acaso describes in Pedagogías invisibles, the act of closing the door or leaving it open is part of the invisible pedagogies that we negotiate in our teaching. Closing the door may convey the message that the classroom is a closed space in which everything that happens inside stays inside. On the contrary, leaving the door open may suggest that the classroom is a space in dialogue with the exterior world, where the inside is connected to the outside and vice versa. I would like to use the element of the door as a metaphor of the educator’s position in relation to the exterior world of the class. To let the exterior world come into the classroom means to position oneself politically. The fact that one can be being watched, as we have seen through Foucault’s theory of panopticism, transforms power relations and produces self-government. Picture a class in a public space, or being registered on video. To be observed means to some extent to be exposed and to lose power and control. This power relation, however, can be disrupted if the one observed is actually looking forward to performing the role of the observed – as a performer or an exhibitionist does. After reflecting on these aspects, I was able, at some point, to leave the door wide open during my classes without the fear of being observed by others. The more confident I felt teaching, the more I allowed the exterior world to come into the classroom. The first time that Marco offered to come to my seminars I rejected his offer. I have to confess that I was a little bit scared. It was at the beginning of the semester, probably in the first or second week and I was still building confidence in myself. Marco is not only born in Italy, but also a very knowledgeable man and his Italian skills are extraordinary; he has published a few poetry books and he is a person whom I really admire. I think that I was afraid of feeling inferior to him if he came to my class. He is very charming and I thought that maybe the students would prefer him as a teacher. Basically, I was afraid of losing my authority and my position of power over the students. Italian is not my first 62 language and even though I have an advanced level of competence and I feel very comfortable speaking it, I still make mistakes when I speak or write. I thought that being corrected by Marco in front of the students could undermine my teaching performance. I thought this even if during my very first seminar I told the students that I wasn’t a native speaker, but that that was an advantage rather than a disadvantage because I knew what it means to struggle while learning the Italian language. This was my thinking, even though I considered that a teacher doesn’t have to know everything to be committed to learning. My fears and insecurities were contradicting my political position and my personal beliefs as an educator. I decided to give myself a few weeks to adapt and feel secure until, at some point, I would open the door to external people, including Marco. The first person who observed me in the classroom was Marika. She is an Italian friend who was visiting Helga, my colleague, for a few weeks. Marika had a lot of free time so one day I spontaneously asked her to come to my seminars in order to encourage the students to speak in Italian. The result was very positive. The students were not expecting her to come because it was a last-minute decision, so her presence was a complete surprise for the group. They were naturally curious to know who she was and what was she doing at Guelph. Moreover, Marika’s English skills at that time were very limited, so the students were forced to speak in Italian. Confronting the students not with a hypothetical situation but with a real one in which they actually needed to communicate made them experience first-hand how useful speaking Italian could be. For an introductory level course, not being able to switch to English when one didn’t know how to say something in Italian was such a challenge. This changed the dynamic of the class completely. I didn’t position myself as the bearer of knowledge, who knows more than the students and transmits to them the information that they are lacking. Rather, we were all sharing a common knowledge and a position in which we are exchanging ideas and learning from each other. We even ended up singing together a traditional Italian song that, during the open discussion in class, 63 Marika and I discovered that we both liked. Some of the students knew the song too and all of them sang it following the lyrics and thus participated in a common culture. After that experience I decided to follow up on Marco’s offer and I asked him to come to one of our seminars. The seminar that he attended was dedicated to the different regions of Italy. I had previously asked the students to do some research about a city in Italy that they knew or wanted to know and to provide information about the culture of both the city and its region. All of them prepared short texts that they read in front of the class. Then Marco completed the discussion by providing information about the cultures of the regions of Italy that weren’t chosen by the students. This seminar was the first one that was completely in Italian. I asked some students to translate Marco’s words into English for the others. When they didn’t know how to translate something, classmates helped each other. This was a way to confront them with some of the difficulties of translation and to make sure that everyone was following the conversation. Marco and I, however, spoke exclusively in Italian. This experience proved to be very useful. The students connected our collective discussion to personal stories about their visits to Italy or to their Italian family members, thereby linking the learning experience to the exterior world. If I think about it, I didn’t have to do much during this class. Marco and the students engaged in a fruitful conversation while I was only facilitating the class dynamic. Marco corrected me once because I misspelled a word that I wrote on the blackboard, but that didn’t undermine my position. I didn’t position myself as knowing more or having a more important role than Marco and the students, yet I wasn’t in an equal position to them. I was positioning myself in the pedagogical relation as manipulating students into taking responsibility. Ellsworth describes the difference between teacher and student as follows. There is a difference between teacher and student after all, according to Felman’s reading of Lacan. But it’s not the difference of the teacher having more knowledge, authority, or experience that the student. Rather, the difference between teacher and student is a difference of location within the pedagogical structure of address that takes place between student and teacher. (62) 64 By inviting other people to come to class and by not controlling the meanings that the students produce, I was performing a role that allowed for multiple subject-positions. I asked the students to bring a short description of an Italian city, to read it to Marco, to interact with him and to translate his words into English. I was responsible for all this, but my positioning allowed for meanings and subject-positions that were not under my control, nor were they part of the course content. The teaching experience became performative in the sense that we were reiterating subject-positions that didn’t fit perfectly with the roles of the student and the teacher. We all became learning/teaching/translating/sharing subjects with no fully delimited or fixed positions, which connects with Ellsworth’s idea of teaching as a suspended performance. Teaching is a suspended performance in the sense that it is never completed or finished. And it is suspended in the sense that we, as teachers, must stop ourselves if students are to take responsibilities for the meanings they make. (158) Of course, the idea that teaching is a suspended performance is not exclusive of pedagogical practices where guests are included; I can connect it with other moments of my teaching experience. When at some moments during the class, I stopped expecting certain responses from students – i.e. expecting that they understand the very specific thing that they were supposed to learn at that time in order to pass a quiz or an exam and to show me that I am a good teacher – the dynamics changed completely. When I managed to stop trying to control the meanings that they were making, I allowed them to position themselves differently from the position whereby they were fulfilling my expectations in one way or another. In my notebook, I describe a moment in which the communication with the students wasn’t working. I explain that I was trying to be enthusiastic but they didn’t give me any feedback and they didn’t even laugh at my jokes. Then, I provide an explanation for this lack of communication: 65 It took me a while to understand that I was not really there. I was not really looking them in the eyes or allowing them to be tired or uninterested. I was trying to force a situation. This is something that didn’t happen in the afternoon seminar. On the one hand, I had lower expectations and I didn’t care too much about doing all the exercises. I gave them time to enjoy them. On the other hand, I established a close contact with them from the very beginning, but more importantly, it was a real contact. I was relaxed and I really wanted to communicate with them. This is something that is really hard. On the previous times I was pretending that I cared but I was more focused on myself. I was worried about my being a good teacher and about them confirming that I was. During the last seminar, instead, I really wanted to have a nice time with them. I somehow forgot about being efficient. This is for me a lived example of how our focus and our positioning change the learning dynamic. Instead of caring about the grades, the grammar, the contents or the specific goals of that seminar, I cared about the moment that I was living and that allowed everyone to feel part of a shared experience. This, for me, is proof of how getting rid of the idea of learning in the traditional sense – as a neutral exchange of information – allows for meaningful and embodied learning. Or, to use Ellsworth’s words, considering that “teaching is impossible [...] opens up unprecedented teaching possibilities” (18). 66 CONCLUSIONS I don’t see this project as concluding, but rather as pointing towards new horizons to be explored and new questions to be asked. Any appearance of linearity and progression in this dissertation doesn’t correspond to the reality. This research has been chaotic, dispersed, complex and based on a continuous experimentation and praxis. It stems from real concerns and lived experiences. Living this research as a creative process is precisely what has been stimulating for me and has lead me to this point. Rather than using a concrete research question that anticipates foreseeable results, I have been asking myself a very personal question: “What am I doing here?” This question made me rethink my research and my pedagogical practice constantly and has triggered moments of anxiety, relief and satisfaction. Most of the ideas in the dissertation have had to be condensed during the writing process. Before that, they took the form of intuitions and bodily hunches that couldn’t be put into words. The final format which is divided into three axes is an attempt to organize a very complex process of lived inquiry; it is inevitably a simplification, but one that has proved to be useful to me. The reproduction of discourse and subjectivity depends both on the intentions of the members of a disciplinary community and on a constant negotiation of their relations to objects, spaces and practices, their relations to knowledge and their relations to others. It is a negotiation in which, in one way or another, we reiterate what it is already familiar. From this perspective, counter-hegemonic pedagogical strategies are more likely to have an impact on disciplinary communities like the university when they engage in a displaced or distorted repetition of what is already familiar. This appreciation applies to pedagogical practices inside the institutions and doesn’t imply that alternative and oppositional practices outside the institutional framework are not politically necessary, interesting and effective. By working with critical tools that make familiar the unfamiliar and the invisible visible, counter-hegemonic positions have the capacity to point out what has disappeared 67 or been hidden from sight in an institution. It is from this perspective that – reading through the concepts of Ellsworth, Springgay and Butler – I proposed my experimentation with invisible pedagogies, pedagogies of touch and performative pedagogies. Needless to say, these are not solutions to problems, but critical approaches that actually intermingle with each other and that, taken together, contribute to the development of a visuallycritical curriculum. The invisible pedagogies are an invitation to understand pedagogical practice as discourse and to address the invisible in our teaching. By asking the question “Who does this classroom think we are?” we can reflect on how the objects, spaces and practices that mediate the pedagogical experience position us as subjects. By acknowledging that none of these elements is neutral, we can trace the focus of our attention. Artistic forms of appropriation or oppositional readings can be used to distance ourselves from what is familiar to us and to open up creative possibilities. Above all, the invisible pedagogies are an invitation not to take our pedagogical settings for granted and to address our expectations as teachers. The pedagogies of touch are an invitation to rethink our relation to knowledge and not to consider our bodies as entities that are separated from each other or from discourse and social norms. Instead of belonging to autonomous subjects that share neutral information, knowledge is generated through embodied encounters. Feminist theorizations of touch focus on our relation to others and reaffirm the importance of body knowledge. Learning doesn’t depend exclusively on the teachers’ and students’ capacity to code and to decode information; it also depends on their capacity to engage in social interaction; it depends on our capacity as educators to affect students and to be affected by them. Our responsibility as educators is to be aware of these issues and to acknowledge the inequalities and resistances that we may encounter in our interaction with students. In a general way, pedagogies of touch are an invitation to see embodiment and the 68 redistribution of attention and affect as the core of pedagogical practices, which include those used in online education programs. Finally, performative pedagogies are an invitation to address not only our mediation of the technical capacities and the role of the body in the relationships of communication, but also our position within the structures of power relations. If we consider ourselves as not being in a position of exteriority in relation to power, as well as focusing on the performative rather than on the liberating aspects of our pedagogies, we encourage ourselves as educators to give up trying to control the meaning that students make and to allow for the creation of multiple subject-positions. I suggest that we use the question “How much do I open the door?” as a step toward experimenting with the possibility of losing control of what we allow into the classroom and toward acknowledging that our position as educators is always political. 69 BIBLIOGRAPHY Baudry, Jean-Louis. “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus” In Philip Rosen (ed.) Narrative Apparatus Ideology: A film Theory Reader. Columbia University Press, 1986. (1st ed. 1970). Print. Bernstein, Basil. Class, Codes and Control: Theoretical Studies towards a Sociology of Language; Volume 1. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971. Print. 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Teaching Positions: Difference, Pedagogy and the Power of Address. Teachers College Press, 1997. Print. 70 Dreyfus, Hubert and Paul Rabinow. Michel Foucault. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. University of Chicago Press, 1983. Print. Ellis, Carolyn. Investigating subjectivity: Research on lived experience. London: SAGE, 1992. Foucault, Michel. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2012. Print. - - - . Freedom and Knowledge. Edited by Fons Elders and Lionel Claris. Elders Special Productions BV, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Print. - - - . "On Infantile Sexuality." (N.d.) TS. Michel Foucault Archives, L'Institut Mémoires de l'édition moderne, L'abbaye d'Ardennes (Caen), Unpublished, undated document, D. 262. (Information communicated to me by Clive Thomson) - - - . “The Ethics of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom.” The Final Foucault. Ed. David Rasmussen. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988. Print. - - - . 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Print. - - - . “2016-2017 Undergraduate Calendar.” University of Guelph Website. 5 April 2016. Web. 16 June 2016. - - - . “2016-2017 Graduate Calendar.” University of Guelph Website. May 3, 2016. Web. 16 June 2016. - - - . “Ten Golden Rules of Academic Integrity.” University of Guelph Website, n.d. Web. 16 June 2016. Reisigil, Martin and Wodak, Ruth. “The Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA)” Methods for Critical Discourse Analysis. Ed. Ruth Wordak and Micheal Meyer. London: SAGE, 2009. Print. Rose, G. Visual Methodologies. London: SAGE, 2001. Print. Rogers, Rebecca et al. “Critical Discourse Analysis in Education: A Review of the Literature” Review of Educational Research, Vol.75, No. 3, (2005):365-416. Print. Skelton, Alan. “Studying Hidden Curricula: developing a perspective in the light of postmodern insights.” Curriculum Studies, Vol. 5, No. 2, (1997):177-193. Print. Sturken, Marita and Cartwright, Lisa. Practices of looking. An introduction to visual culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Print. 72 Springgay, Stephanie. Body Knowledge and Curriculum: Pedagogies of Touch in Youth and Visual Culture. Peter Lang, 2008. Print. Springgay, Stephanie and Debra Freedman. Curriculum and the Cultural Body. Peter Lang, 2007. Print. Youdell, Deborah. School Trouble. Identity, power and politics in education. Routledge, 2011. Print. 73 APPENDIX This Appendix includes: - A representative selection of the transcriptions from the interviews that I undertook from November to December 2015. - The students’ evaluation of my seminars in ITA*1060 Introductory Italian I. 74 FACULTY MEMBER – “Sarah” What do you consider the features of excellence in a student? Curiosity, rigour, attention to detail I think is important. Those are the things I find quite important. Do you perceive yourself having a different social status than other professionals? Not really. I guess that as a professor of the arts I am finding lately that there is a lot of discourse about the lack of usefulness of the arts and that is a shame. […] So, first question “what do you do?” Ok, so usually that gets kind of respect and then “what do you teach?” and when I start saying what I teach sometimes there is a little less respect for that. What would be a good example of success in your career? Things that I am most proud of in my career are research related actually. Is interesting, I am really proud of my students’ success as well, but the greatest successes that I had are research related – publication of books, chapters and articles and things like that when they come out in places where it is difficult to be published, that is a real mark of success. For students, definitely I feel a lot of pride when my students go on, they apply to a Ph.D. and they do well in those programs, and I shouldn’t just say Ph.D. because there are so many other things that students can go on to do as well. So, in general looking back and seeing alumni who are successful and that they are using the skills that they have gotten here that is a real success. How do the grades that your students get affect you? I am personally not that bothered by my students’ grades. Maybe it is because I have been here for a while now, but when I see that students get lower grades often they deserve it because they are not often in class and at this point I don’t get upset about that anymore. I think there is a lot of choice, there are a lot of opportunities for students to do well [...] and I am often not bothered by the bad results anymore. Maybe I used to be more bothered by it and sometimes I am still a little bit frustrated I suppose, but I see it as being the students’ choice. Which do you think is the key for a student for getting good grades in your classes? I think it is important that they come to class. There is a big correlation between not attending and doing poorly. Then, also, that they follow the instructions that they are given for the assignments and the essays and stuff like that. Generally they do quite well. 75 Perseverance, asking questions as well, in preparing for the essays students who come and see me and really think about things ahead of time usually do quite well. How does being assessed by the students at the end of the semester affect you? Again in different points of my career that affected me more. A couple years ago I won some teaching awards at Guelph and I must say that I was very proud to have won and very proud to get to that point in my career and kind of know I feel like “bah, I won those awards, I am just going to concentrate on being a good teacher and whatever the assessments are”, you know? It doesn’t matter too much to me. In which ways does the institution to which you belong assess your work? [...] I think that a lot of these professors are used to getting A as students and used to be high achievers, so if the result comes back and they are not all in that top category sometimes it is a bit difficult to take it. Is it similar then to the experience of being a student? Oh yes, it really is. To what extent is the students’ knowledge of a specific style system more important than the content of their works? The use of the academic language is quite important I think. I guess it becomes more important throughout levels. It becomes more important in graduate school because there you are really entering into this professionalization process, which means that you should be able to be writing in a certain style and follow a certain criteria that the profession has established. To what extent do you think that control limits your pedagogy? This works differently in different courses. [...] In the course that I will be teaching next semester though we do have surprise assignments that you have to be in class to write and there is a lot more control there and honestly I don’t like that all that much as a teacher, I don’t like having all these stumbling small assessments, to me that is very high-schoolish, and at the university I’d rather not have to do that sort of thing, but we decided that the course will be in that way. [...] So I don’t enjoy imposing this kind of thing but we decided that it is going to be like this. Do you think this kind of control is increasing or decreasing? 76 In my experience it is in certain kinds of classes. In the language classes, yes, it is increasing. It didn’t used to be the case. I taught the same course 10 years ago and we didn’t do this. I think it is because of a frustration with students not coming to class and it is a way of trying to make students attend more. What techniques do you use to be as objective as possible in your grading? For grading presentations and things like that I usually provide a rubric and just use the rubric and make sure that different elements are covered and assign grades to the different categories in the rubric too. To what extent do the grades you assign vary, in situations where you have met the student as opposed to situations where you have never met the student whose work you are grading? I do always see them and I get to know all their names, so it is rare for me not to put a face to their names. So let’s say how does the grading change if a student has come to office hours and has put in a lot of effort? Yeah, I think that definitely affects your grading. I mean, I would try to sort of be aware of that as an instructor and not allow it too much, but I think it does affect especially when you see effort and when you see students coming. That is a good thing so in some cases I would give the benefit of the doubt or give a slightly higher grade that reflects that too. What do you do to remember the names and faces of your students? That is a good question. Well, in the first class I ask everybody their names and usually ask them to say something about themselves too because that helps me. If there is a little bit of a narrative that you can apply to that name, that kind of helps. Then, during the first few weeks, whenever they contribute I will ask them to repeat their names, which does mean that the students who don’t contribute are a in a little bit of a disadvantage for getting their names. Also when I am handing back work or picking up work I will look at the name and look at the student if I am not sure about the name and try to remember. In classes where there are frequent assessments that is actually quite good because you are giving back work frequently. How do you hold the gaze of the students when you are at class? 77 I don’t know about that. I guess I try to vary eye contact through the room and definitely when we are having discussions I will make eye contact with the person who is contributing. When I am lecturing it is a little bit harder to do that. How different is your relationship with undergraduate and graduate students? It is fairly different. But I am not sure it is stuck to graduate and undergraduate. I think that students that I had more than once in undergraduate as well when I have them the second time it is a little bit more like the graduate relationship. [...] 4th year undergraduate it is not all that different than graduate students, but definitely you have a different relationship with a graduate student. They are entering the profession so we see them more as colleagues. What codes of sociability do you find the most complex and how do you navigate them? I feel it is time to talk about social media because we haven’t talked about that yet and actually that is a way that sometimes I... it helps to get to know the students names. There is sometimes that moment of “who is that student on my list?” Well, I will look them up on Facebook and I won’t add them but then if there is a photo I am like “hurray, now I know who it is”. So adding students on Facebook is something that I would do with graduate students without hesitation, with undergrads I try to do it after I don’t think I will ever have them again as students. I am not always perfect with that [...] but that’s ok. So that is something that I find a bit difficult to navigate. If you detect distress among your students, how do you deal with it? I mean there are different levels there because part of the undergraduate experience is stressful so there I try to be reassuring and as long as they are well prepared and they know what to expect you can alleviate some of the stress there. So I try to be accessible and available in that way. I have had students coming to my office and being upset about personal issues and breakups and things like that. I just again try to be a little bit motherly and you know “this is something that happens” and reassuring. When it goes beyond that I think I am really lucky that we have different services on campus so I would refer people to student counseling services and things like that. To which extent does the setting of the classroom limit your teaching performance? Again I have taught in a variety of rooms and I definitely have my favourites. [...] Sometimes it is the sitting arrangement too, there are rooms with long tables that don’t have movable chairs [...] I don’t like those rooms very much. 78 How do you dress and how do you prepare yourself physically before teaching? I mean, I guess that the clothes I wear when I go to the office are different than the clothes I wear at home, just slightly better. I think that we are kind of lucky in academia that there is a lot of latitude to, like I don’t feel I have to, I have never worn a skirt in years and never high heels. I don’t feel that there is a pressure. [...] I might dress up a little bit more for certain kinds of meetings because across university there are different cultures about that. I noticed that in the classroom I don’t feel that I dress. 79 FACULTY MEMBER – “Laura” What do you consider the features of excellence in a student? A student who is clearly committed to the course and to the materials, who is engaged, who is visibly engaged, who does the preparation but goes beyond that and takes the material given and becomes creative with that material. [...] That is a feature that is visible at many stages almost on a regular basis. It can be a question about grammar which is one step ahead, or “how do you do this or why do you do that with language which is different from what you told us last week?” and then you have a chance to explain, to work in that content and that is very beneficial for everybody, so that to me is a mark of excellence. [...] Do you perceive yourself having a different social status than other professionals? Not necessarily social status. No, I don’t think so. But the type of job brings with it a different position in society. I think there is a big gap between how are we perceived and what we really do. It has been mysterious what professors do. I mean everybody thinks that we only teach, but teaching is only the 40% of what we really do, so the other 60%... Our social status is misrepresented because people have this idea that we teach 5 or 6 hours and then sit in our office and have coffee and think big thoughts. This is what people think but it is not the case. What would be a good example of success in your career? I would love to publish a certain amount of books. [...] More publishing, more research and that is a real challenge these days because there is not much time for your research. What do you think a professor has to do to maintain them position? It is mandatory in my opinion in order to grow, to explore new areas all the time. [...] How do the grades that your students get affect you? At times I am really worried about giving very low marks. Usually I give very low marks and if the students deserve it I give other marks. I mean, I think I am fairly fair in my evaluation. Especially with students who show engagement but still get low marks I invite them to put in extra work or to come and see me to discuss their work to discuss what they really know what they don’t know, why things went the way they went . [...] I give them the opportunity and if they don’t take it they keep the mark they had but if they come and talk to me and we discuss the work (even the midterm) then if I see that in fact they knew more than what appears there I am ready to give them a few points more. 80 How does being assessed by the students at the end of the semester affect you? I tend not to open the students evaluations for a while. [...] I tell them it is important to shape the future offerings of the course but I do not anymore say anything about the fact that these evaluations have an impact on our salary or promotion [...] I don’t find it ethical to ask them because that has nothing to do with their learning process. I think the university should make assessment mandatory. [...] They shouldn’t be compelled to evaluate me because I make more money. I find this so ridiculous. To what extent is the students’ knowledge of a specific style system more important than the content of their works? That is a tricky question because it is hard to have a really refined and academic style of presenting the material with poor content. I think that if you have that you have learned it through engaging with scholarly material and therefore you know how to do it. If still their writing maybe it is not as good, it is poor, I would reward that effort. That would be something I would look at positively. What about mediocre content but very well presented? If it is well done and well constructed they get a reward for that because they are on the path of a more sophisticated way of packaging, of presenting and articulating to themselves that content so I can see that there is potential. But if it is poorly written and poorly presented then... To what extent do you think that control limits your pedagogy? Not much. I don’t really feel that. I don’t worry too much about these things, I trust the students. I am glad that this year we introduced the Turn-it-in, a plagiarism tool. [...] I think that is a type of control that I don’t think limits but actually enhances our freedom. [...] What techniques do you use to be as objective as possible in your grading? It is part of a mindset. I try to look at each student without any prejudice or preconception and if anything I tend to be maybe a bit more forgiving or to have more sympathy for people who have a disability or who come and talk to me and explain they are struggling. I value extracurricular work if they tell me you know “I was organizing holocaust week” [...] I give options and all the extensions they need because really I value that very much. So, I try to be objective. I feel guilty if I perceive that I am not being objective, but I don’t have a hard time being a bit harsh with people who show lack of interest. 81 To what extent do the grades you assign vary, in situations where you have met the student as opposed to situations where you have never met the student whose work you are grading? I think that to me if the student has shown interest that is very important. Not because it is an act of reverence towards me, I don’t care about that, but because they have shown interest in the material and that to me shows an engagement and that is what we want from them. [...] What do you do to remember the names and faces of your students? That I lack terribly because I am not good at remembering faces and names. I get really mixed up. Faces I remember, but the names I really get mixed up. I just don’t retain them very well and I apologize with my students because I have a hard time remembering their names. Sometimes I do, but even in smaller classes. I mean, if I have a hundred students there I can’t. But for courses with 25 students, I remember a few, others they don’t come much or they don’t talk and I don’t remember their names. There I think I could do a much better job. How different is your relationship with undergraduate and graduate students? It is very different. Although from 3rd and 4th year undergraduates if I have a student often and they engage the relationship builds up, but with graduate students there is more of a peer relationship really. [...] What codes of sociability do you find the most complex and how do you navigate them? The students’ evaluation that we are supposed to ask them to do. [...] If you detect distress among your students, how do you deal with it? I try to address that but not in front of everybody. I ask the student at the end of the class to come and see me and then we have a talk, if it is really visible. [...] To which extend does the setting of the classroom limit your teaching performance? A lot. Especially in language courses, I wish we had more classrooms with chairs and tables that we could reassemble and work in small groups. We are giving the largest first year classes in the province. [...] One day I wanted them to work in groups, so they had to sit on the floor, climb on desks. It can be fun for a while but in the end... I am sorry we are spending so much in other things... I don’t think it is a priority for the University frankly but it really is limiting. [...] 82 How do you dress and how do you prepare yourself physically before teaching? I try to go in front of the class always in good shape in the sense that if I am very tired I might tell to the class “look, today I am so tired, please excuse me” and also present yourself in a professional way. [...] Even if I am tired, teaching is 80% of the time energizing. [...] I never show impatience. 83 GRADUATE STUDENT – “Carla” Why did you decide to continue studying? I wanted to have a qualification and I wanted to do things I find interesting; I wanted new challenges. [...] I had an undergraduate but I suppose that in terms of jobs applications I felt that I needed something else to stand out. Who influenced your decision? It was mainly a very personal decision but it is true that my parents were extremely pleased when I told them my decision. So they didn’t influence my decision at first but they made me feel comfortable that I was doing something that they were pleased with. What other options did you have? I could have kept doing the work I was doing. [...] I had lots and lots of different options and becoming a Master student was just one among many. [...] I wanted to go more into the role of the student and not the teacher again. Do you perceive yourself having a different social status? I suppose I might feel in that way once I have finished the master. At the moment I am in a sort of limbo. I haven’t got the qualification, so I would just say to someone that I am a student and in a way it feels like I have gone down in status because before people said “What do you do?” and I replied “I am a teacher” and now it’s “What do you do?” “Oh, I am a student.” It’s almost like it’s going back down, but I feel that as I soon as I have the Masters I would feel that I had a higher social status than I had before when I had my undergraduate. Would that distinguish you from the friends that you have at home? Not many of my friends have Masters so in that sort of purely academic sense it would distinguish me, but then obviously they do have skills that I don’t, which are not related to academia. Do you perceive yourself having a different social status than undergraduates? Yeah, definitely. I think that even by the professors within the University there is a big difference in the way they look at you. I think that maybe is just that there is a more direct relationship, we are more friendly. We are on first name terms, I suppose that is the same for some undergraduates but I don’t know, I mean we work with them; we are their 84 colleagues, we are correcting essays. I suppose that in the hierarchy of the University as a grad student you are sort of bridging the gap between the professors and the undergrads. What would be an example of success in your career? The thing is that I don’t have a clear plan but I imagine – I am sure – that I will do more teaching in at some point in the future. [...] If the Masters had been successful for me I would expect to have a higher paid job than the job I did before I had my Masters, which is not very difficult because the job that I had before I had my Masters was very badly paid. What do you consider the features of excellence in a graduate student? I think it is being so involved in you studies that they almost become a part of your life. [...] I think we all laugh about it, but I think that we are all actually quite like that. [...] Do you care about your grades differently than when you where an undergraduate? That’s a difficult question. No, I don’t think so. I think it has the same importance. I think it is equally important. I aim at getting an A, because in my head getting an A that’s a successful grade. So I would stop working when I know that I got to the A. I am well aware that in most of the work I do I could put a lot more time into it, but I don’t see that I need to get more than the A. [...] What do you think is the key to getting good grades? Understanding the system, knowing the rules, knowing what is wanted of you. From being on the other side of the table, from correcting essays, I have become very aware that what I value when I am correcting is the structure, almost more than what is actually written. Because if the structure is not clear from the beginning, if it is not following the rules that we have been told to respect here – like having a thesis statement, or having two or three main parts and the references and all of this stuff – if it doesn’t follow this structure I am likely to think that the essay is not good, which is not necessarily true. It’s just that it is not within the framework that the University is giving us and a first year student obviously can’t know what that framework is. Do you compare your grades with the ones that your classmates get? Definitely. I think everyone does. I think that it would be a complete lie if anyone said they didn’t. I try not to, again. [...] And I think we need to think of that when we are grading. Well, we can’t think of it really, but we must be aware that the students will compare and they will come to office hours and say “Why did this person get more than me?” I think it’s 85 human nature. I think we are always jealous of other people who are more attractive, more intelligent, have a better car than us. That is inherent to who we are, so I think it’s the same with the grade, or even worse with the grade because it is a number and is so measurable. If you say “Is this person more intelligent than me?” there is no proof, whereas a grade in our mind is proof of our intelligence, whether this is correct or not. So we believe that this defines us. How do you test or make sure that your work is academically rigorous? If I am using a referring system I would take a look at the internet and make sure that I am using it properly. [...] In my entire undergraduate degree I was not aware of the system, so I learned it in my second semester of my Master studies. I learned how to reference. [...] I learnt by submitting and getting it back. I think that it is very important that people who grade your work tell you what you need to improve. To what extent is the students’ knowledge of a specific style system more important than the content of their works? I can say again that it is more important. I think is more important. Specially as someone who is grading essays in a field that I don’t know, because I cannot tell you if the content is correct or not, so I am not really even reading the content. [...] We can’t verify all the information; It would take us an hour to mark one essay. [...] So, in that case, if we got to evaluate the work we have to look at the referencing system, the structure, and how well they fit into this framework of expectation. What criteria do you use to be as objective as possible in your grading? When I recognize the name of the student and try and pretend that I don’t, but that is not a very good technique because I still read the essay through the lens of knowing that I know the student and then that is influencing me. Do you feel a difference? Definitely, if I know the student and I am marking the work and I know whose work it is I just want to give them a better grade. I haven’t actually had the inverse experience, but I am sure that if you have got students who you really don’t like the same thing would be true. You would be marking their work and trying to give them a bad grade because they annoy you. I think that in my case it’s just that I am very affected by the fact I know that they tried. If I know they tried, they come to office hours, they sit at the front of the lecture hall, they put their hands up during the lectures, even stupid things like that they smile at 86 me when I am in the classroom, obviously that makes me more sympathetic towards that person because they are showing that they are pleased to see me, pleased to be in the lecture or pleased to be studying, rather than a person that sits at the back, plays with their phone during the whole lecture. In that sense I have judged their submission also based on that, but luckily I don’t know my students names. So I often don’t know who is the one sitting at the back and who is the one sitting at the front. That keeps me more objective. To what extent do the grades you assign vary, in situations where you have met the student as opposed to situations where you have never met the student whose work you are grading? I think almost all the time, if I have met the student I’ll give them a high grade, or not that I will but I would feel that I want to. Sometimes I would go against that, but there is this feeling of wanting to give back in return what they have given to you. Because they have given me a satisfaction as a teacher – or as a teaching assistant – by showing interest, so I want to reward that and reciprocate that giving them the satisfaction of having a good grade. 87 GRADUATE STUDENT – “Carmen” Why did you decide to continue studying? I think because I know I am good at school and I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. My perspective right now is applying to a Ph.D. program because I don’t really know what I want to do. Who influenced your decision? My parents wanted me to continue in school, but that is always my choice. How different is your current educational experience from your previous ones? It is different because I see the mechanics of what it is to be a professor. Do you perceive yourself having a different social status than undergraduates? No, and I feel like that there is this feeling of the impostor syndrome. When you feel like an impostor. So I feel as a grad student that there is no difference. I just have more experience than people in undergrad, but I am still learning. There is much more for me to learn so, why do I have the right to say I am in Masters Degree? Teachers treat you with more respect at a graduate level and there is a high expectation from family to succeed. What would you answer if somebody told you that you should get a real job? People have asked me that before. I kind of laugh about it because it is true and I don’t think that if you are working in academia you ever have a real job because I think the academic life is very different than a 9 to 5 job. You are working through a semester, you have your summers off, you can go on sabbatical, you are constantly researching and I think that in that regard there is no a real job aspect. What do you consider the features of excellence in a graduate student? I am not sure. Time management? I think just to be engaged maybe and privilege assignments over than having a social life. I am not sure, it is a hard question. Do you care about your grades differently than when you where an undergraduate? Yes. But I also think the grading is different. Like, they hold you to a higher expectation but the professors are more willing to help you getting good grades. I care more, I think. What do you think is the key to getting good grades? 88 I don’t know. I seek the teachers out a lot. Also, I talk to the other people in my program because I think it is a collaborative process to be in graduate school. So both talking to the teachers and the students and also understanding that you can’t read every article in depth that your professor has given to you. So I think that learning how to skim is a really good quality. Also to use what you are interested in, finding what you are interested in and sticking with that as opposed to just doing random things. Do you compare your grades with the ones that your classmates get? Sometimes. Not really for final marks, but if we were applying for RAB applications we would be comparing who passed the RAB application, who didn’t pass and that sort of thing. To what extent is the students’ knowledge of a specific style system more important than the content of their works? I don’t think the knowledge of a specific style system helps the students getting good grades regardless of the content of their work. I don’t think so just because it is something I still struggle with as a graduate student. I think that the content definitely trumps. If they have glaring issues with citation and everything that’s important but the ideas are what you are trying to get out of the student. What criteria do you use to be as objective as possible in your grading? I go through a couple of them, like a handful of essays and I separate them off into sections like if I find a very good one I would put it over here and a really bad over here and then I just mark the papers according to the two of those groups. Or even sometimes if I think a paper is really good I would write a grade on the top but then if I find a paper that is even better I might modify the other one just so it is more on a spectrum. Since I don’t know the students I cannot be really subjective towards the actual student but I think that makes me accountable just knowing what the spectrum is, what is a really good paper and what is a really bad paper and what is the average. What if you recognized the name of the students, would that make any difference? It probably does indirectly but I try to make it not. If they took my advice and I saw that they were trying... I would still provide critical feedback. I would check if they followed my advice. 89 What do you do to remember the names and faces of your students? Sometimes I would do a sitting chart. That helps a lot. I have done Facebook. I think we have all done that. At least if there is a person who sent us an email we would check Facebook. I am not even sure if that is fine, but that helped a lot. From a big group of students I knew all the names because the people who were talking the most of course I remembered their names but then the people who didn’t talk as much I would go through the list of students and be like “who is this?” and check it out. What codes of sociability do you find the most complex and how do you navigate them? One of the most difficult rules to follow was the professional distance. I tried to find the balance between being a student and being an authoritative figure. I think as long as you are not adding people on Facebook, as long as you are being nice but then also disseminating the expectations of the course, I think that’s the only thing is necessary, or not closing your doors or things like that in your office. I think that professors are hyper focused on ensuring the distance and maintaining it. To which extent does the setting of the classroom limit your teaching performance? For me coming from a small school it was a lot different from how you would have to treat a group of 40 people. In my other university we were in a circle and we always had professors walking around and personally asking if we had a question. How do you dress and how do you prepare yourself physically before teaching? I treated that teaching assistantship the same way as I treated I guess my entire college career where I always dress up for class. In my university we had a dress code so if you weren’t dressed up enough in class you would be kicked out. I think that has had a major impact on how I treat everything really. I think that if you are dressed up, if you are presenting yourself in a way that is more professional, I feel that you act more professional. Some people assume that you shouldn’t have to dress up for class and I understand that to be uncomfortable and everything but I feel it also as out of respect. If you are not dressed up then I feel like it is somehow not respectful for the students. There is definitely not a dress code in the university, but I feel like privileged, I feel like if I am at the university and if I am in a classroom setting that is an opportunity and I should treat it as such, not kind of degrading it by not dressing up. 90 UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT – “Megan” How different it is studying at the University from what you imagined? It is completely different. It is a whole other world. [...] You have to grow up quick. Who influenced your decision to go to University? Definitely my cousin. I knew I wanted to do European Studies. [...] What would you have done if you hadn’t gone to University? I think work probably. [...] My parents are always like “you need to have an education”. So really not going to school wasn’t an option for me, maybe taking a year off but only if I was doing classes on the side and working, not just work all the time. Did you have the feeling of having a choice? Not sort of ‘ish’. Like, I knew that now with the competition definitely you have to have a degree, you have to have some sort of paper that says you have a degree so I knew that strongly that I had to go to school but choices I knew I would have the support whether to take a year off or as long as I went to a school and got some sort of education that would be fine. How different is your current educational experience from your previous ones? So different. [...] Do you connect going to the University with having social status? At first I did. At first I really was focused on making a lot of friends and then coming to University that is where I wanted to be. I wanted to be in a social [incomprehensible]. But now, I am more focused now on academics more than anything, so I have established my friends, I have my friendship circle and then other than that social status is not that important any more. I think now it is more about academics. Do you feel a gap between the friends who didn’t study in the university? Oh yes definitely, I have friends who took two years off and now they come to university and I don’t see myself as higher or below them. I think they are fortunate enough to now go after two years and sometimes I envy them because they had two years to figure out what they really wanted to do instead of jumping into something [...] There is no real difference. 91 How do you think your program is going to help you get the job you are looking for? I don’t know if it will to be honest. I mean, it would be nice to say I am an alumni from the University of Guelph, I graduated and stuff... I like to brag about it I guess “I go to this University, I have the best professors and stuff” but whether that is going to help me in the future I am not sure. [...] I see more of it as an experience. [...] I don’t know what employers are going to be looking for. [...] Do you think having a diploma is going to make a difference? Yeah, definitely. I think you should have a diploma, I think you should have some sort of form of education, but I also feel that you should have experience to back up what you have. So even if you have volunteering in a Spanish community here at the university you can say so here is my degree I can speak Spanish but I also have the experience of working with other people. So I think is on the person’s initiative, you really have to get experience, as well do well and get the diploma to. What do you consider the features of excellence in a student? I think in reality everyone is going to need a university degree, everyone is going to need a master degree, maybe even throwing a Ph.D. over there because I think that there is a lot of competition. I don’t think you can get away with just having, not to be rude, just having a college degree. Employers and the excellence they will be just looking at your degree they will be looking at your grades. [...] I really think that the university is the way to go in the future. How important is it for you to get good grades? So important now. So in first year I thought it was a joke but now I am thinking about graduate schools and the future and even if you take two years off they are going to come and look at you transcript. [...] Grades are number one priority right now. What do you think is the key to getting good grades? I think definitely talking to the professors. I didn’t take advantage of how the professors have hours, but now I definitely take advantage of their office hours, even go after class, get to know them, it is definitely beneficial. And even small study groups, make friends in the class, you never know the level students are at, so make some friends but definitely talking to the professors. [...] They definitely know a lot more than you could probably figure out yourself so to go and talk to them and to have that relationship with the 92 professor you can definitely use it to your advantage and studying and continuing on your studies because I may be a professor next semester and then you can always say “ok, I know how they teach, I know they grade” so that is definitely the number one thing, to talk to the professors after class, before class, anything. Do you compare your grades with the ones that your classmates get? Not really. [...] For me it is not a competition really because I am not competing with the person next to me I am competing with myself. [...] Do you think you don’t compare your grades because you are happy with them? Yes, I am happy with mine and even when I am not happy it is just, not to feel pity or anything, but I think it is just a sort of... I don’t know, like if I have done poorly and my friends have done good I would definitely go and congratulate them, but then after my grade I don’t want to tell them I did so bad I don’t want them to feel pity or anything. [...] I kind of compare it to talking about money, you are not going to go to your friend like “how much are you making?” [...] Like I like saying I did well, I did good, I won’t get into the specifics of what my grades are. How did your writing style change since you started University? Oh my god, so much. [...] You definitely have to adapt to the class, to the vocabulary, to the textbook [...] How well do you know the style systems for writing academic essays and assignments? Pretty good. [...] By now I am so used to it that it almost comes naturally to you. [...] How fair do you think that the grading system is? Pretty fair I think. Grading it could be worse I think than it could be better. I know that if you compare this university to the University of Toronto this is almost like a god [incomprehensible]. I think they are very tough from what I have heard from friends. Then here it also depends on the professors. For instance, this semester I had one professor who just buckled down my notes more on the essays. So I think it depends on the professor, it depends on the course; it depends on how much you are willing to study for, to write for the essay or the paper. So if it depends on the professor it might be that it is also a bit subjective? 93 Yeah definitely. For instance, this semester I had a very good paper and I thought I was doing well but then I went to my professor and then I got the grade back and it was horrible but then you give it to like my roommates for instance and “is this worth it of this grade” and no, like they don’t know how this professor marked it that’s so difficult. So, I would never go from one professor from one department to another professor in this department, but like you see in my class there were papers I did so poorly while in other class I was doing so well. So I think it depends on the professor, it depends on how much you know the subject. [...] What other methods of assessment would you prefer? [...] I would like to have more class discussions. [...] Do you think you are generally noticed or unnoticed by your teachers? Definitely noticed. Especially this semester I felt myself more noticed than ever. I think that it helped that I was in a smaller classroom and that the professor I had it was last year too. So she still knew my name and that was very helpful. [...] I enjoy having that interaction. I enjoy the professor knowing my name. [...] With even a hundred students classes your professor is not going to know your name unless you go up and introduce yourself and even ask for a problem or just say hi hello I am in class and I look forward to this is better than just sitting back and not saying a word. How do you think that you are perceived by your classmates? Good. I can’t shut up in class. [...] How much importance do you give to the way you dress when you go to class? It depends on the class. Like from 7 to 10 not that much effort. In the morning, 9.30 that is pushing it and I think that also depends on who is in the class. [...] If it is a smaller classroom I definitely put more effort. If it is a large classroom who is really going to know me? [...] Everyone is judgmental, so if you see a girl walking across campus with a dress and she is all fancy it up going to class people are going to judge. If you see a guy wearing a suit and he comes into class people are always turning heads and are going to judge. [...] Here I think that the common things are jeans or leggings and a hoodie and that is about it. [...] 94 UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT – “Cynthia” How different is it studying at the University from what you imagined? Is not that different. [...] Who influenced your decision to go to University? My mom did. Well, actually both my parents. [...] What would you have done if you hadn’t gone to to University? I have no idea. [...] Do you connect going to the University with having social status? Not really. I think in Canada it is a little bit different because I am thinking like my cousins got to the university in the states and since they got to university there they see themselves a lot better than other people, but for here a lot of the time if you go to college and that you actually sometimes have better chances to getting a job, so it is different. There is not really a social status it is kind of more what program you are in. Like people who are in computer sciences or engineering kind of have a little bit of better status because they are considered to get better jobs and get more money, but not universities in general. What do you consider the features of excellence in a student? Someone who can work hard and who knows how to do time management and to adapt and to ask for help. I think that’s a big thing. If you failed and you don’t ask for help then you are just going to keep failing without knowing how to go on that and get it fixed. How important is it for you to get good grades? At the moment it is very important. I am applying for a master’s program so I need to be graded high. [...] It is more important now in my last year than it was in first year. At the beginning it was important enough that I got good funding and my marks weren’t horrible. [...] What do you think is the key to getting good grades? Being prepared, having good time management skills, I think that is really important. Knowing what your professors expect, because I had different professors who have widely 95 different expectations and so knowing what they expect is really important to tailoring your work and tailoring how you study and all that. Do you compare your grades with the ones that your classmates get? It depends on who the classmate is. I think sometimes there are people who you know just automatically for some reasons can do just amazing and they can just show up without studying and get like 90 versus I think there are more people who are at the same scale as you that you are like “oh, how did they do better than me? What did I do wrong?” How fair do you think that the grading system is? I think it depends on the professor. I think some professors are really fair and they are really good at understanding perhaps that they should be considering all the process, but I do think that there are other professors who do expect a lot from students. Like I had professors who kind of expect you to have the same knowledge as they do when you go to write the test, which for me I think is unfair, they have their Ph.D. and I am doing my undergrad and I am still learning this stuff, they know it and so I honestly think it can be a little bit bias towards those professors because they don’t... there is no like consistent grading criteria for all the professors, it is kind of what they feel you should do. [...] Do you think professors are objective when they grade? It depends on the professor. I think some professors are really good at being objective and just looking at your work. I had one professor who would literally say every time we had an essay back “I want you to know that this is not a reflection on how you are, it is totally on what your work is and how you wrote and it is not about you the person.” Which is a really objective thing I am just looking at your work, I am not comparing you. But I do think that there are other professors who sometimes they form opinion of the students or sometimes they form opinion of their previous work and then they put that into the marking, so I think that can be a bit of a problem. What other methods of assessment would you prefer? I don’t know I never really thought about it. [...] I like the idea of going over your work and see what the professor is expecting. [...] Do you think you are generally noticed or unnoticed by your teachers? I think I am generally noticed. I know most of my professors. Four of my professors this semester know me by my name and know who I am, so I think I am noticed. I did have 96 bigger classes in my other university and generally in those the only way a professor would know you is if you have gone to their office hours or gone to talk to them. [...] How do you make sure that your teachers know you? Go to their office hours, go and talk to them after class, ask questions. [...] It means that they are more willing to help you because they know who you are and they know you are trying. How do you think that you are perceived by your classmates? I have no idea. [...] What do you see as the codes of sociability between students and teachers? I think there are unwritten rules. Obviously you must treat your teachers with respect. [...] I like university specially compared to relationships in high school where there is a strong hierarchy versus the university where there is still hierarchy but there is also the understanding that everyone is an adult and everyone can communicate. So I think there is much more of an open flow of communication and as long as everyone is treating everyone with respect then I think it is good. [...] How do you feel physically during busy periods of studying? Usually tired. […] When I sleep I don’t sleep well so I am generally pretty tired. […] How much importance do you give to the way you dress when you go to class? None. I just dress with whatever. I don’t go to class in track pants or that, I don’t feel comfortable wearing that, but I am never going to... it’s more if I am going somewhere afterwards that I dress nice. [...] 97