The Art of Professing and Holding Back in a Course on Gender

Abstract

In this article, draw on my experience of teaching four Sociology of Gender courses between 1991 and 1994. The course is an upper-level undergraduate elective for sociology majors and for the women's studies cluster. The enrollment was approximately 40 students in each of my first two classes, and 20 and 25 in the two most recent ones. Along with sociology majors and a few women's studies students, at least half of the students come from other majors -- mainly from other social sciences and from the humanities. Females have always outnumbered males by a wide margin, with the closest ratio so far being about three to one. Most students around age 20 or 21, although there always several nontraditional students in their later twenties, thirties, or forties. Of the courses currently teach, this is the one that most stirs my passion. The issues of equity and justice matter profoundly to me. Misogyny, homophobia, heterosexism, and other blind prejudices that fuel sexism arrest our wholeness, my own included. want students to leave this course with a keener alertness to these problems, both outside and within themselves Like Cannon (1990), I want them to the smartest social analysts they can be (p. 127), hoping that once they see the pervasive impact of the forces that narrow our lives, they will feel a sense of urgency about becoming an agent of change in whatever large or small way they can. After 25 years of teaching, have learned to cautious about my own passions in the classroom. To profess with feeling is not bad practice, to sure; students always appreciate some palpable evidence of the real person inside their professor. But that real person may easily steal the show, particularly if she or he can profess in an entertaining fashion. The more become the focus, the more the students abandon their own interior workings for the sake of attending to mine -- my knowledge, my awareness, my feelings, my moral sensibilities. Although there may, indeed, something of value in their attending to me, am convinced that focusing on the instructor is a roundabout pathway to their own reflexivity about the issues of this course. Accordingly, try to find the right balance between two old tenets of teaching. On one hand, the job of a professor is to profess, and students have every right to expect some guidance and direction from those who presume to instruct them (Gardner, Dean, & McKaig, 1989). On the other hand, the art of teaching is the art of holding back until the student is ready, and neither the teacher's knowledge nor his or her passions will serve students who not prepared to critically engage the issues through having honed their own active voices. In this course, holding back is at once pedagogical strategy and, in my case, moral and political imperative. am a man teaching about gender, wanting to alert students to a vision of greater wholeness, but the classroom itself is a microsetting in which gendered power relations all too easily reenacted. What would it mean to female students to sitting silently in this class, listening to a powerful male voice professing about gender inequities? And what would it mean to male students to silent witnesses to this same authoritative male performance-males sitting alongside silent females, both hearing no voice of female authority at all? Is there not something contradictory and all too familiar about this picture? If there is, and if truly believe in affirmative action, then as a man must get out of the way enough for women to step forward and actively shape the public, classroom space. If class discussions in which male students silence female students are more reactionary than radical -- reproducing the traditional gender role inequities found in the wider society (Wright & Kane, 1991, p. 472), the same must true when male instructors do all the talking. Accomplishing the juggling act between professing and holding back is not easy, and my attempts still very much in process, still somewhat faltering. …