on the performativity of teaching

Before writing what I want to write, I want to make a few things clear. Teaching is an important and noble profession, I love being a teacher, and it’s possible (and often easy) to distinguish between better and worse ways of teaching. With that out of the way, I want to start off this post by arguing that teaching is less of “a thing” than learning is. That is, learning is the real phenomenon here, and teaching is sort of an auxiliary practice that aims to support learning but can’t ever quite be the same thing.

I think this is true no matter how you define learning, but it’s especially exaggerated in the sociocultural view that I adopt. This view understands learning as being enculturated into the knowledge, tools, and practices of a particular community. When you think of learning in this way, sometimes it’s something that just happens, and although there is often some teaching also taking place, it’s kind of hard to point to where or how it happens. My kid picks up ideas and words from all kinds of sources, often without any party being consciously aware that teaching is happening, even though learning is. Throughout my research career, I’ve frequently pointed to social media activity and been able to say “hey, there is learning happening here,” but if a reviewer or a reader asks “so how can we make that learning happen?” I’m kind of at a loss. It’s not that I couldn’t come up with an answer for how to teach that sort of thing, but there’s always felt to me like there’s a natural disconnect between the core phenomenon of learning and active efforts to teach.

Again, none of this is to say that teaching is bad! However, that natural disconnect means that there’s a sort of inherent performativity to teaching. Learning may sometimes be something that just happens, but if you’re responsible for teaching, not just learning, you need to demonstrate that learning is happening as a result of your efforts. That performativity can be harnessed in good ways: I believe that effective assessment is an important component of teaching precisely because it demonstrates whether learning is happening. However, it’s also really easy for assessment to become performative: Whether learning is happening in a university may become a corporate exercise in demonstrating value to stakeholders. Standardized assessments become an uncritically accepted means of determining suitability, without regard for how they might be discriminatory or inaccurate.

Performativity can get even worse than that, though. I recently attended a mandated-by-my-university in-person research compliance training, and although I’m personally deeply committed to research ethics, I was disappointed by how performative the training felt. Our instructor for the session was great, and while the training materials were less great, I understand that they come from an underfunded, overworked office that I’m not inclined to blame either. Instead, I’m upset at the university for recognizing that there’s a greater need for its employees to learn research ethics (thanks to some highish-profile cases of research misconduct) but treating its teaching response as performative. Requiring research-engaged employees to participate in occasional in person trainings is a great way to perform concern about research misconduct by showing that the university is responding with some teaching; however, between low-quality training materials and a lack of any real way to determine whether we learned anything during the training (not that I trust that adding assessment to this would have made the experience more enjoyable) made the whole thing feel like it didn’t go beyond a performativity of that concern.

I also think that this performativity can trickle down to learning itself, and there, it gets even worse. When students perform learning in class (going through the motions on assignments) because we perform teaching to them (if you get an A, it means you learned what you were supposed to), it feels like something is deeply missing from the whole process. I don’t know what the answers are to all of these concerns, but as I approach the end of this semester, I’m getting really bummed out by it. I’m teaching a graduate class for my college next semester, and I’m tempted to throw performances out the window and put some radical trust that learning can happen if we trust it to happen. At the same time, though, I need to perform good teaching for the college so that I don’t damage the reputation of instructors coming out of my unit. So, yeah, we’ll see what happens when the new semester rolls around.

• macro
• Work
• teaching
• learning
• research
• assessment
• research ethics