Navigating Positionality and Power in Classroom Spaces
Length of Presentation
100 minutes
Start Date
15-10-2021 2:00 PM
End Date
15-10-2021 3:50 PM
Document Type
Presentation
Abstract
This presentation and workshop asks attendees to consider the power dynamics of their own positionality in classroom spaces. Through a short series of exercises and critical self-reflection, this workshop invites attendees to focus on their own social identity in relation to power dynamics within the classroom and beyond. To support these discussions, the speaker will draw on her own negotiations of white privilege in different community and educational settings to model the need for vulnerability and to underscore critical reflexivity as an ongoing process. In addition, this presentation offers instructors approaches to norm-setting and other pedagogical practices that can support “difficult” conversations about identity, experience, and how structures of power impact our learning and teaching, drawn from the speaker’s diverse experiences teaching and facilitating, from public school classrooms to prison classrooms.
Description
Description and Connection to MEI Objectives: This presentation directly relates to MEI’s core principles of diversity, inclusion, equity, and equity-mindedness in that the presentation asks attendees to consider how their own identities and relationships to power impact practices and approaches to DEI. In fact, this presentation emphasizes the importance of grappling with power and privilege in dialogue with others. Drawing on Krista Ratcliffe’s concept of rhetorical listening, this presentation asks attendees to reconceptualize what it means to radically listen to another’s story (or their own) by “listening to discourses not for intent, but with intent…[so that] listeners might best invert the term understanding and define it as standing under…discourses that surround us while consciously acknowledging all our particular—and very fluid—standpoints” (28). In other words, helping classroom communities—both students and teachers—learn and practice new forms of cross-cultural communication can help enable new forms of understanding. Inherently this also disrupts the status quo of the instructor as expert and necessitates a more collaborative approach to enabling diversity, equity, and inclusion in the classroom.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Navigating Positionality and Power in Classroom Spaces
This presentation and workshop asks attendees to consider the power dynamics of their own positionality in classroom spaces. Through a short series of exercises and critical self-reflection, this workshop invites attendees to focus on their own social identity in relation to power dynamics within the classroom and beyond. To support these discussions, the speaker will draw on her own negotiations of white privilege in different community and educational settings to model the need for vulnerability and to underscore critical reflexivity as an ongoing process. In addition, this presentation offers instructors approaches to norm-setting and other pedagogical practices that can support “difficult” conversations about identity, experience, and how structures of power impact our learning and teaching, drawn from the speaker’s diverse experiences teaching and facilitating, from public school classrooms to prison classrooms.
Speaker Information
Elizabeth Tacke is an Assistant Professor of English and received her Ph.D. in English and Education from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor in 2020. Her interdisciplinary research interests are situated within disability studies, trauma studies, life writing studies, and rhetoric. Before returning to school for her doctoral degree, Elizabeth was an English middle school teacher in Oakland, California. At Eastern, Elizabeth teaches methods courses for English Education majors, composition instruction with a social justice lens, and disability, life writing, and rhetoric courses. Elizabeth is also involved with prison education and programming. While living in Michigan, she was the co-founder of the Carceral Studies Interdisciplinary Workshop at the University of Michigan, ran weekly improv workshops at Cooper St. Correctional, taught a composition course at Huron Valley Women’s Correctional through Eastern Michigan University, and was a member of Michigan’s Inside-Out Prison Exchange Theory Group at Macomb Correctional. She will begin teaching at Danville Correctional in the spring term with EIU’s new program.