Since I started teaching at Whittier, I’ve been thinking about\u00a0how I like my students to address me.\u00a0There’s something of a local norm\u00a0of\u00a0just calling everyone\u00a0“Professor.”\u00a0It cuts down on cognitive overhead, no doubt, to be able to\u00a0address all of one’s teachers\u00a0by their title; it saves on having to keep track of their names. Not to mention that\u00a0my\u00a0last name is hard to pronounce, so perhaps students don’t\u00a0know how to say it, or don’t care to risk getting it wrong…<\/p>\n
I’ve started to tell them they can call me “Eli,” as a sign of… a sign of\u00a0what? Familiarity? Informality? Friendliness? Being easygoing? Not wanting to reinforce the old-school hierarchies? Some combination of these. But it also\u00a0occurs to me that\u00a0telling<\/em> my students what to call me\u00a0is\u00a0still a way of inhabiting\u00a0authority, even if I ask\u00a0them to call me something less-hierarchical.\u00a0So instead of requesting<\/em> that they call me “Eli,”\u00a0I just frame\u00a0it as giving them\u00a0the option<\/em> of calling me by [firstname]. They can exercise it as they choose.<\/p>\n I’m less invested in what my students call me, per se, than in the forms of knowledge and eloquence\u00a0that we’re able to create together, and the broader institutional structures that make that possible. In that sense, forms of address seem like a relatively ornamental part of classroom culture, while the deeper forms of learning, bureaucracy and institutional power seem more fundamental.\u00a0At the end of the day, I’m\u00a0grading their work,\u00a0and not vice versa,\u00a0however we may address each other.<\/p>\n That said, ethnographically speaking,\u00a0there’s something quite interesting about\u00a0these moments where shifting to an informal speech register\u00a0doesn’t really\u00a0change the academic hierarchy<\/em>. Maybe it does shift the atmosphere a bit, or pushes classroom culture in a certain direction; maybe it differentiates you from your more old-school colleagues. But\u00a0even this obviously has a lot to do with the teacher’s social characteristics; many women academics \u2014 who get subjected to casual but structural\u00a0forms of gendered disrespect in the classroom \u2014 have good reasons for\u00a0preferring more traditional forms of address. I’m not convinced that familiarity necessarily\u00a0breeds disrespect, but clearly\u00a0formality can discourage it, as if one kind of hierarchy could\u00a0help undo the bad effects of another.<\/p>\n I started out here\u00a0wondering if classroom\u00a0informality really\u00a0matters.\u00a0Yes, perhaps, but it doesn’t always accomplish what you want it to.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Since I started teaching at Whittier, I’ve been thinking about\u00a0how I like my students to address me.\u00a0There’s something of a local norm\u00a0of\u00a0just calling everyone\u00a0“Professor.”\u00a0It cuts down on cognitive overhead, no doubt, to be able to\u00a0address all of one’s teachers\u00a0by their title; it saves on having to keep track of their names. Not to mention that\u00a0my\u00a0last […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[486,494,496],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2241"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2241"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2241\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2243,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2241\/revisions\/2243"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}