Celeste Atkins

Colored Girls and Controlling Images: Using Multiracial Feminist Theory to

Transform Pedagogy Celeste Atkins

Abstract This reflection is the culmination of an innovative, graduate level, group independent study created and led by students focusing on feminist works by women in traditionally marginalized groups. The author, a Black, female sociology instructor and department chair at a rural community college now embarking on a doctoral program in higher education, explores her own experiences as a marginalized student and how that influenced her approach to teaching. Throughout the paper the author shares her journey from a pedagogy based on “I hated that as a student; what can I do differently?” to struggling with the idea of giving up power (a central concept in feminist pedagogy) to a broadly inclusive and learner-centered pedagogy based on empirical evidence, yet shaped by multiracial feminism and intersectionality.

And the colored girls say Do dodo do do dodododo Do dodo do do dodododo Do dodo do do dodododo ooooo

This simple refrain, from a poem entitled “The Black Back-Ups” by Kate Rushin, in the seminal, multiracial, feminist anthology This Bridge Called My Back, led to a pedagogical epiphany which changed the course of my teaching. This reflective essay is the culmination of the most challenging, enlightening, illuminating, disheartening, reinvigorating, soul-draining, reaffirming, isolating, empowering, frustrating, exhausting semester of my entire academic career. My first semester of graduate school after a decade-long hiatus has inspired me to critically reflect on my teaching philosophy and practices. My “aha” moment, about which students tend to star in the classroom and which students are relegated to backup roles, coupled with the realization of how controlling images

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drove much of my teaching, has driven me to four main conclusions about my pedagogy as well as a personal revelation about my character and core values.

Let me back up a bit. I am a forty-something, Black, female sociologist and single mom, fortunate enough to have my mother live with me and co-parent my four-year old. I am in my seventh year of teaching full-time at a rural community college in Arizona and in my fifth year as department chair. I terminated at the Master’s from my PhD program in sociology at the University of Southern California (USC), so it has been a goal of mine to complete that degree. I made some inquiries about sociology at the University of Arizona (U of A) but was led instead to the Center for the Study of Higher Education where I began my doctoral studies this fall. As a college instructor who doesn’t earn enough to begin to pay off her previous college debt, I knew that I would not be able to rely on loans for tuition. I was fortunate enough to land a graduate assistantship as the first graduate assistant for the U of A’s Office of Instruction and Assessment (OIA) where I would be able to hit the ground running having worked on assessment and teacher mentoring as a department chair. Here it is my first semester, and I am teaching five classes (three face-to-face and two online); I am also working a twenty-hour a week grad assistantship; and I am taking four graduate classes, plus I have a four-year old. This is me in a nutshell (emphasis on nut).

This paper started as an abstract, a pretty good abstract, written early in the semester when I was full of naiveté and boundless enthusiasm. I was taking an Introduction to Higher Education class with about forty students who varied from non-degree seeking, to Master’s students, to doctoral students. I was taking Sociology of Community Colleges, an intimate class with four students. I was taking Learner-Centered Teaching as part of my work for OIA, a class of graduate students from all different disciplines across the university. Finally, I was taking the class I was most excited about, a graduate student created and led class on multiracial feminism. We designed the class and we chose the readings. I still haven’t met the instructor of record because the class time that worked

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for all of us happened to be one during which she was already teaching another class. Now, the stage is set. You know a bit about me, you know a bit of the context, let’s move on to the epiphany. I commute an hour each way to work, which gives me a lot of time to think about students, teaching, and now that I am a student myself, the previous night’s classes. On my way to work the refrain from that poem kept coming back to me...

And the colored girls say Do dodo do do dodododo Do dodo do do dodododo Do dodo do do dodododo ooooo

And it struck me...that is the perfect analogy for traditionally marginalized students. Whether we are students of color, differently abled students, non-genderconforming students, gay and lesbian or queer students, we are the background singers. They show us in the catalogs and talk about diversity, but our voices are rarely, if ever, centered. We are the richness that makes the music amazing, but is never seen as important. We are just the “colored girls” saying “do dodo” or “la la la” or providing harmony. Without that harmony, without those background vocals, the music is bland and all too forgettable, but the lead singer gets all of the credit. Students of color are the Supremes, the Pips, the Revolution, Destiny’s Child (depending on your age), but we are rarely the star of the show. This analogy gave me a way to connect all of my feminist and sociological readings to a concrete idea. Building upon Patricia Hill Collins’ (1990) argument that centering traditionally marginalized groups, such as Black women, is important to understanding that all social groups both enjoy privilege and suffer oppression in varying forms, I began to wonder what my teaching would look like if I stopped trying to “include” traditionally marginalized students and instead began to center them and their experiences. Around this time, in my Learner-Centered Teaching class we began discussing pedagogy, particularly feminist pedagogy. In one of our readings, Weimer (2013) asserts that feminist pedagogy “finds

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that most teaching is too authoritarian” (p. 19) and argues that radical pedagogy “challenges teachers to explore ethically responsible ways of sharing power with students” (p. 19). I really found that difficult. As a woman of color teaching sociology, a subject often not seen as a “real science” by many students, teaching challenging and uncomfortable subjects such as racism, sexism, and white privilige, I frequently found my biggest struggle was getting students to see me as a subject matter expert and an authority. As a woman of color with very little power to begin with, it felt simplistic and frankly, a very middle-class white feminist approach, to talk about “sharing power.” I have wrestled with these ideas all semester. What is it about the concept of giving up power that makes me so uncomfortable? I truly want my students to be empowered. I want them to be adults and make decisions and take responsibility for those decisions. I want them to be accountable. Why then is the thought of giving up power so terrifying?

I then began to reflect on my pedagogy. I have a clear pedagogy developed during my first semester of full-time teaching: The mission of a community college and more specifically a community college instructor should be to meet the needs of the students and the community as a whole. This entails a paradigm shift from being the dispensary of knowledge to being part of a larger learning community. We achieve these goals by creating an impactful, interactive learning environment, creating a safe learning environment for students and nonstudents alike, making cultural competency and inclusiveness a priority, and becoming an active and vital part of the larger community. (Atkins, Self-Reflection, Fall 2011) However, as I got deeper into teaching, my day-to-day practices were driven by student interactions and student feedback. One area of student feedback that was the most challenging and frustrating was repeatedly being called intimidating, aggressive, domineering. As my Master’s thesis

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was about how big Black women are perceived, I naturally connected this to Collins’ (2009) concept of controlling images. Collins posits, “As part of a generalized ideology of domination, stereotypical images of Black womanhood take on special meaning. Because the authority to define societal values is a major instrument of power, elite groups, in exercising power, manipulate ideas about Black womanhood” (p. 76). Seen as domineering and intimidating by my students, I typified the controlling image of the matriarch. Collins explains, “[a]s overly aggressive, unfeminine women, Black matriarchs allegedly emasculated their lovers and husbands” (p. 83). Wally-Jean (2009) builds upon this stereotype to discuss the “angry Black woman” stereotype, referring to the work of Taylor (2004) who asserts, according to Wally-Jean, “that because more powerful and higher status individuals have anger privilege...subordinates (in this case, African Americanwomen) are often accused of unjustified anger or irrationality if they express anger directly” (p. 71). Wally-Jean posits “that the ‘angry black woman’ stereotype arises from this foundation of negative images and the position of subordination of African American women that seeks to restrain their expression of anger by negatively labeling it” (p. 71). This is the story of my life. Raised to speak my mind and to advocate for myself, privileged by a middle-class upbringing and educational success, I could not escape the “angry Black woman” label. Passion, frustration, enthusiasm have all, often, been perceived by others as anger and aggression. As a new instructor, I came into the class knowing that my gender and race would color my students’ perceptions of me, but as I began to get student evaluations stating that I was racist, intimidating, and, most hurtful, uncaring about students, I realized that every semester I would again have to overcome the angry Black woman stereotype before I could get on with the business of teaching. I worked on this in different ways. I changed the textbook to one that focused more intentionally on intersectionality so that my use of my personal perspective as a “big Black woman” would make more sense sociologically to the students. I also worked with my strengths, my big

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personality and my sense of humor, to make class engaging and fun. Finally, I addressed the elephant in the room at the beginning of the semester saying to each class something to the effect of “while some of you may see a big Black woman and be intimidated, I am here for my students and I want you to be successful so please come and see me.” However, at the same time, students pushed my limits and my boundaries and tried to get away with things as students are wont to do, so my syllabi became increasingly dictatorial and interspersed with rules in BOLD, RED, and ALL CAPS!

As I became a student, taking Learner-Centered Teaching and other minicourses within OIA, I realized that their syllabi were warm and welcoming and treated me as an adult with the expectation that I was going to do the right thing, instead of as a child who needed a list of “don’t you dares!” This made me reflect on my own syllabus and I was horrified. I had a discussion with my face-to-face classes asking them if my syllabus was an accurate reflection of my teaching style, and the students indicated it was not. Many also indicated that they were wary and taken aback by the syllabus until they got to know me as an instructor. That is not the first impression I wanted to make on students. My pedagogy, although student-focused, was not necessarily student-centered. It was more a combination of “this is what I hated as a student, so I won’t do that to my students” and “how can I get them not to see me as a big scary Black woman.” This led to my first conclusion. I need to move from a fear and contradictory pedagogy to a proactive, deliberate pedagogy grounded by theory and evidenced-based praxis.

What does a deliberate multiracial, feminist, learnercentered, evidenced-based pedagogy entail? I am still working on that. According to Carolyn M. Shrewsbury (1987): Feminist pedagogy is engaged teaching/learning – engaged with self in a continuing reflective process; engaged actively with the material being studied; engaged with others in a struggle to get beyond our sexism and racism and classism and homophobia and

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other destructive hatreds and to work together to enhance our knowledge; engaged with the community, with traditional organizations, and with movements for social change. (p. 6) This idea gives a good starting place. Feminist pedagogy is not a single act– it is a way of approaching teaching (and life really), continually reflecting on what you have learned, how your students perceive you, and what you can improve. I would also say that my focus on intersectionality reminds me that I need to remember and acknowledge my own areas of privilege as a well-educated, middle-class, cisgender, heterosexual woman. Another challenge is being learner-centered. Those of us who are “called” to teaching (and for some it is a calling, an art form, not just a profession) teach because of the students. They make it worthwhile, even with the endless grading. But evidencebased, learner-centered teaching means going beyond a true dedication to students to move away from what is most comfortable for you as the instructor, to what is proven to work best for learners. This is difficult for me because a lot of my teaching practices are based on my own likes and dislikes as a student. However, not every student is like me, so I also need to accommodate their needs and preferences. For instance, I have begun to incorporate group work because although I disliked it, others do like it. I have learned to make it my goal to do group work in a way that addresses some of the issues that made me dislike it as a student. This is an example of growing from learner-centered teaching to evidence-based, learner-centered teaching. My second conclusion centers on the notion of power in the classroom. For me, the most challenging aspect of feminist pedagogy was the idea of giving up power. As an instructor who is female and of color, it is often difficult and paramount to establish my authority, particularly in the area of sociology where many students don’t even understand that it is a science and it’s not all based on opinions and personal experience. Weimer (2013) asserts, “Changing the balance of power in the classroom requires a bigger conceptual stretch. Teacher

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authority is assumed...The challenge for learner-centered teachers is finding those strategies that give students control and responsibility commensurate with their ability to handle it” (p. 10). As a female and a woman of color, I deal with push-back and disrespect from students that males, particularly white males, rarely face, so the idea of giving up any degree of power was anathema to me. I struggled with this idea throughout the semester, until it occurred to me that increasing student autonomy did not have to be synonymous with giving up my own authority. In fact, I had done so in the past by allowing students a choice in the assignments that they did. When I first started teaching Introduction to Sociology, I allowed students to choose from two grading tracks, the first (for students like myself who are good at writing and tests) was only quizzes, tests, and the main writing assignment, the second (for students with writing issues or test anxiety) had the same tests and writing assignments, but they were weighted less and they had study guide homework assignments that both helped them prepare for the tests and gave them lower stress opportunities to gain the bulk of their points. For Track One, the homework was extra credit, and for Track Two the quizzes were extra credit. This was a very popular approach, but recently I had begun to feel that the study guides made the exams too easy, so I stopped doing this when we changed textbooks. However, as I revamp my classes for next year, I am looking at ways to create a “self-serve menu” of assignments that students can choose from to earn the points they need to get the grade they want in the class. This leads me to my third conclusion, I was doing some things right already. Each semester my only goal for the first week of school is to create a safe learning environment, one in which students acknowledge their differences but feel important and empowered to share their ideas in a respectful manner. Rosenbaum, Deil-Amen, and Person (2006) found that in their study, “[o]ver 70 percent (sixteen of twenty-two) reported that community college faculty were critical in helping them become confident” (p. 55). Particularly in the community college arena, faculty interactions are key factors in student

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success. Furthermore, they discovered that “[c]ontact with faculty over academic matters not only can provide needed academic support, it can also enhance feelings of belonging for marginalized students” (p. 79). The students who are often overlooked, who slip through the cracks, can be engaged and encouraged through faculty efforts. During teacher appreciation week, I received a note from a student who stated, “You’ve made me realize my importance as a person.” My students know that I care about them. I hold them to high standards because I know that they can achieve those standards. Students come to me with personal concerns and for academic mentoring because they view me as someone they can trust who will guide them in the right direction. This need for a safe space was reiterated to me this semester in my own graduate classes. One class consisted of forty students with various levels of maturity and academic experience. A professor I truly respect had the challenging task of engaging and managing (not to mention teaching) this class. Some of these students in their activist fervor created a classroom that, for me, felt unsafe. They “called out” white students while ignoring their own class privilege, and when anyone, including myself, had a different perspective, it became a personal attack about how “you don’t understand” instead of an academic debate about perspectives and theories. I had a similar experience in my graduate student led independent study. While I really liked the students as individuals, I found myself dreading the class because I felt constantly policed in my word choices. The situation became untenable when one student continued to interrupt me and “correct” my word choice until I couldn’t even make my point. When I protested stating that this class should be a safe place, that student asserted: “There are no safe spaces.” I fundamentally disagree with that statement. If learning and growth are to occur, there have to be safe spaces. Safe doesn’t mean comfortable, because it is often uncomfortable to learn truths about ourselves and our world that change our perspectives, but every student deserves to feel safe. I found myself shutting down in these classes and acting against my

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nature because I was so wary of being personally attacked. In the independent study when I protested being policed, the student responded, “You always get angry so fast.” I found it ironic that after being chastised for using words that this student perceived as “racist” against Black people (as the only self-identified Black person in the room) that then the stereotype of the angry Black woman was used against me when I tried to defend myself. It was a no-win situation, and since none of the other students intervened to say, “no matter who is in the right here, if Celeste is feeling personally attacked, perhaps we should table the conversation,” I felt that I had no choice but to leave the room and the class. Unfortunately, the class that inspired the upbeat, positive abstract above ended up being the most personally hurtful and unsafe experience I have lived through as a student. In the independent study class while we briefly discussed ground rules, we didn’t formally set them down, which in hindsight was a mistake. In the professor-led class we didn’t address ground rules at all, which leads to my final insight about training students to become academics. I have come to the realization that we do students a disservice by not directly and specifically teaching them to become academics. We teach them methods of correct citation. We teach them proper research methods. We teach them to write academically. Why are we not teaching them how to debate in an academically appropriate manner? I do not remember when I learned how to debate a topic, concept, or perspective instead of personally attacking, but it is core to academic dialogue. I was frankly shocked at the lack of respect and appropriate conduct in graduate level classes. Students whose passion and enthusiasm were to be applauded when speaking up in class, created an environment which shut down dissent because they would personally attack anyone who disagreed with their perspective. The diversity of experience and perspectives in the class should have led to great discussions, but, for me at least, led to frustration and feeling disengaged. Moving forward as an educator, instead of just talking about agreeing to disagree and respecting each other, I am going to build into my classes skill building

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exercises on academic debate deliberately teaching students around them. As activists, they insisted that intent is not how to focus on the concept instead of the individual. Finally, dealing with these graduate student activists, I came to the conclusion that I am not an activist, particularly not as this specific cohort seems to define it. My interpretation of their goal is to call out and shut down anything they perceive as wrong or racist or inappropriate. They are the radicals, the agitators, the marchers, the “flip the table over” protestors, as my professor referred to it. In contrast, I am an educator. While both they and I work toward a more socially just world, my approach is to focus on collaboration, tolerance, understanding, and communication. My goal is to help individuals learn, become more open-minded, and think critically about the world important; however, for me, individuals who make racial faux pas while they are trying to learn or understand intent is key. While I will not hesitate to address intentional discrimination and racism, when individuals genuinely are seeking to learn, understand or connect, I want to “call them in” as it’s been termed. My intent is not to shame or embarrass individuals who are genuinely trying to understand a perspective different than their own. This world needs radicals, but it also needs teachers. I am called to teach, to create opportunities for learning, to help people think about the world in a different way. Hopefully, between the activists and the educators, our efforts will lead to a better world for my daughter and the children of the world.

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References

Atkins, C. (2007) Big, Black mamas: The intersection of race, gender, and weight in the United States University of Southern California

Atkins, C. (2011) Self-reflection: Fall 2011 Cochise College Collins, P. H. (1990). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment

Boston, Massachusetts: Unwin Hyman. Collins, P. H. (2009). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment (2nd ed.) New York, NY: Routledge. Moraga, C. & Anzaldúa, G. (2015). This bridge called my back: Writings by radical women of color. Albany,

NY: SUNY Press. Rosenbaum, J.R., Deil-Amen, R., & Person, A. E. (2006). After admission: From college access to college success. New

York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation. Shrewsbury, C. M. (1987). What is feminist pedagogy? Women’s Studies Quarterly (15) 3/4, 6-14. Weimer, M. (2013). Learner-centered teaching: Five key changes to practice (2nd ed.). San Francisco, CA:

Jossey-Bass.

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