Personae and Presentations

On Wednesday, I gave my intro to grad studies students the lecture on in-class presentations--the usual types, the dos and please-do-nots, and so forth.  About two-thirds of the way through the lecture, I realized that graduate student presentations often falter because the students haven't yet developed a teaching persona; that is, they put themselves in front of the classroom, naked to those other graduate student eyes (or, given the number of swing courses we have, undergraduate eyes).  And so they deliver a presentation as though their own personalities are under the microscope.  Obviously, there are other things that graduate students eventually have to learn about speaking in front of a group--how to speak from notes instead of reading from a script, how to make eye contact, how to emphasize key points. But the instructor's confidence and authority are bound up in her persona--"Professor Burstein," as opposed to "Miriam"--and that persona doesn't exist outside the classroom.   A classroom session is, in effect, a kind of play. It's all very Erving Goffman.    

Comments

[Bourgeois Nerd]

Did you share this insight with the students? Have you considered incorporating it somehow into the course? Sounds like it could be helpful.

[Ryan]

I remember the first in-class presentation I did as a PhD student, after becoming an instructor as well. It felt so much less daunting, so much less risky, precisely for the reasons you mention here.

What's interesting is that risk never felt the same for me in class discussions, but the element of preparation made those early presentations feel riskier--discusison was off the cuff, but prepared presentation seemed like it was supposed to be the best I could be.

But after implementing a planned lesson several times a week in the classroom, the persona became automatic, while the material then came to the forefront. So in that first PhD presentation (on paratext, I think), I was less on display than the prepared presentation itself was.

[What Now?]

I once co-taught the "How to Teach" course for new TAs, and one of the things we discussed was creating a teaching persona. Some students were really upset at the idea that they wouldn't be their "authentic selves" in the classroom. I appreciated their idealism and didn't push the persona idea further, assuming that they would come to it on their own before they'd been teaching for very long.