Do you think about socioeconomic class when you teach? Not in terms of the content that you teach but with regard to your own class background and the class background of your students?
This question is important because research tells us that college exacerbates inequality, with working-class college students having differential access, experiences, and outcomes compared to their middle- and upper-class peers. Colleges and universities are increasingly focused on supporting students’ basic needs, particularly in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic that has magnified poverty and inequality. Campus initiatives include basic needs task forces, libraries that have family friendly work spaces (such as cribs beside computers), campus food pantries that serve more than food, efforts to support open educational resources, and basic needs hubs with centralized student services. There has also been a focus on teaching, with instructors committing to a pedagogy of compassion and care. Yet, most instructors come from middle- and upper-class backgrounds and the disconnect between those backgrounds and the backgrounds of the working-class college students they teach receives little attention.
It is inevitable that our teaching is shaped by our own educational experiences, and educational experiences are deeply rooted in class backgrounds (see bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress, chapter 12 “Confronting Class in the Classroom”). Yet as sociologist Allison Hurst notes, “regardless of our own backgrounds, we can model class sensitivity, awareness, and desire for change for our students” (Routledge International Handbook of Working-Class Studies, p. 87).
So ask yourself:
How does your class background influence your teaching practices? And how do your teaching practices benefit or harm working-class college students?
Visit the Working-Class Pedagogy project and take a self-reflection survey to:
1) reflect on your teaching practices using a class-based lens, and
2) inform pedagogical research on socioeconomic class and teaching practices.
Examining our teaching practices, individually and collectively, using a class-based lens is essential to supporting student basic needs.
This project is supported by the HUB for Teaching and Learning Resources at the University of Michigan – Dearborn and is a collaboration between Carmel Price, Autumm Caines, and Sarah Silverman.
Feature photo by Sergei Akulich from Pixabay.