Transform Your Teaching
Faculty Identity and Self-Reflection
One common reality in nontraditional educational settings is that the faculty often come from distinctly different socioeconomic, racial, and gender backgrounds than students, and with sometimes vastly different life experiences. A faculty member whose lived experience varies substantially from their students’ will need to enter the teacher-student relationship with care. Ideally, faculty come seeking to learn, asking themselves:
- Who are my students?
- What are their unique needs?
- What are they hoping to gain from the class?
- What are their motivations?
- What are their fears with regard to the course?
- How are they connecting—or not connecting—with the course materials?
There can also be distinct benefits when students and faculty recognize one another across differences. Given the likelihood of difference being a defining feature of the teacher-student relationship, it is crucial that faculty be equipped to manage the many ways such differences can play out in the classroom.
A longer discussion of unacknowledged assumptions and faculty reflection can be found in the
Best Practices guide. To read a more detailed discussion of the topics found on this website, you are invited to download a
PDF version of the guide, Best Practices for Teaching (the Humanities) to Nontraditional Students from which this was drawn.
Anecdote:
When I first started working in the prison setting, I sometimes blithely criticized the prison administration in front of students. Sometimes the students seemed sympathetic, but I later learned that some students in fact wholly disagreed with my assessment, felt I didn’t really know well enough to criticize, or that students had work assignments in the area I was mocking and so took a certain pride in and had a sense of ownership over the area I was being critical of. I realized in turn that my jabs had been attempts to gain favor, be one of the crowd, be accepted, and were driven by assumptions about a cultural setting—the prison—about which I had far too little knowledge.
Laying the Groundwork for Change
A basic principle held among this guide’s authors is that education is not simply about passing information from one brain to the next. We believe this is true for any student, but that serving nontraditional students offers unique challenges and possibilities. The opportunity cost of being in school for someone who may be raising a family, working multiple part-time jobs, or building a life after experiences of trauma such as violence, racism, or incarceration—or a global pandemic—may be just too high. Our goal here is to give teachers strategies that will help their students respond to these challenges and offer support to a strained higher education system.
A lot of the practices in this guide take time. Implementing them requires additional preparation and creative approaches to lesson planning that goes beyond simply sharing content and assessing learning. Depending on your institution, this may also require extra support from directors, deans and department chairs, program designers and recruiters, and in some cases, even registrars. However, if the goal of your teaching is to help your students love the learning process, we believe the extra investment of your time is worth it. It will help you build a more engaged community of learners, and lead to better outcomes for your classes and for those who participate in them. And you may find that you will love teaching even more!
Resources
To read a more detailed discussion of the topics found on this website, you are invited to download the full guide, Best Practices for Teaching (the Humanities) to Nontraditional Students, from which this was drawn. A full bibliography is included.
Learning modules that present this material in an interactive toolkit format, were developed by the Open Society University Network (OSUN) and will be linked here soon.