Classroom Dynamics: Emily O. Gravett
Dialogue on Teaching, Wabash Center’s podcast series, is hosted by Nancy Lynne Westfield, Ph.D., Director of the Wabash Center. Amplifying the Wabash Center’s mission, the podcasts focus upon issues of teaching and learning in theology and religion within colleges, university, seminaries, as well as the publics impacted by these schools. Dialogues with faculty and administrators working in the wide range of institutional contexts illumine the complexity of teaching and the teaching life.
Emily O. Gravett is the Assistant Director of the Teaching Area in the Center for Faculty Innovation and Associate Professor of Religion at James Madison University.
The power dynamics of classrooms are as varied as the teachers and the learners. Building classroom communities means being attentive to and curious about students, while allowing students the space to be eager, afraid, anxious, disagreeable, and sometimes, tired. Approaching students as real, whole people, who themselves possess considerable classroom power, must be considered and critically reflected upon.