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Perhaps, selfishly, my journey away from authoritarian teaching came from confronting bad teaching evaluations in my first two years of teaching. While my early education was decidedly not authoritarian – I was homeschooled by a mother inspired by unschooling, Waldorf, and Montessori – I often fell into the trap of confusing being rigorous with being an authoritarian. My first few years of teaching, I threw my hands up in frustration, wondering why my students didn’t take pleasure in learning. My thinking remained unproductive until I began to reflect on a difficult question: what energy was I bringing to the classroom? The conclusions weren’t pleasant: I thought that to earn respect, I had to be tough. Being tough meant being inflexible with deadlines (what am I, a pushover?), having an intense, aloof demeanor in the classroom (how else would they take things seriously?), and having rigorous, high standards for grading that were given in an unfeeling manner (no A for effort, kids). As a young woman, I felt like I had a lot to prove and it showed. My teaching evaluations were abysmal. And while yes, there is a lot to be said for gender (and, though it does not negatively impact my evaluations personally, racial) biases in evaluations, I do think that students were picking up on my general insecurity and responding to their own feelings of powerlessness. Put more simply, it is hard to be invested in a class in which you feel you have no control over, and it is easy to assume that everything you don’t like is the fault of your professor. At first, my move into more student involvement was rooted almost solely in improving my evaluations. But after major shifts in teaching practice, I’ve noticed that the more I’ve levelled my authority and engaged in more collaborative teaching with my students, not only do my students enjoy my classes more, but they also learn a lot more too. They also seem to feel much more invested in the material and take ownership of their work and role in shaping the classroom environment. As a professor in a required first-year seminar program, I teach St. Augustine’s Confessionsoften. I am always struck by Augustine’s reflections on the distinct experiences of learning from authoritarian teachers at school. Discussing learning Greek, he writes that “the threat of savage, terrifying punishments was used to make me learn.” He contrasts this to the ease with which he learned Latin, under the gentle tutelage of his childhood caretakers, “without any fear or pain at all.” Augustine concludes that “It is evident that the free play of curiosity is a more powerful spur to learning these things than is fear-ridden coercion.”[i] Inspired by Augustine (along with feminist thinkers such as bell hooks and anti-carceral pedagogy inspired by Mariame Kaba and others), I have sought to create an environment of genuine freedom and joy to explore ideas and improve my students’ critical abilities.In the next entries in this blog series, I will share some of the specific practices I use to create a more collaborative learning environment (such as students creating discussion expectations, collaborating on course policies, changes in how I offer grading feedback, and more). I will also discuss how I maintain rigor in such a classroom. For now, I invite readers to consider a series of questions: am I unwilling to be more collaborative out of fear that I won’t be taken seriously? How can my vulnerability inspire the same in students? How can this shared learning space enrich all who enter it? Notes & Bibliography[i] Augustine, Confessions, translated by Maria Boulding (New York: Vintage Spiritual Classics, 1997), I.14,23.

I have been learning over the last several months that transition is not the same thing as change. Change is something I live with every day as I battle the side effects of diabetes—not ever knowing if my feet will betray me or my hands remain cold all day. Change is a part of my life and living as I see new things from the folks I work with everyday, but then there is a quirk of phrase, the sidelong look, the slight roll of the eye that I had not seen before. Change is something I am trying to make my peace with as I age and get closer to the ages that my parents died, and worry, what this will mean for my spouse and my only sibling, my sister, who is managing mental illness in magnificent ways. Who will be their confidante? Who will be their big sister? As I prepare to leave the deanship at Vanderbilt Divinity School, I am very aware that this transition thing is a whole ‘nother thing altogether. Because it means that I can’t just react to my disease and try to stay on top of it. I can’t just acknowledge that there are some physical acts that I used to do with ease and now, if I can do them at all, they do not come easily or look slightly askew. Transition means that I am leaving something I’ve done and loved but realize that it is time to move on. It is bitter and it is sweet. And there are large parts of the future that I do not know about but have a dim awareness that they are out there. There is only so much I can know about what the full textures of this transition will be. So, I make to-do lists in my head, in print, and then talk about them with the folks in my life and I say over and over again that I am looking forward to what this transition will mean. But I suspect that a part of me is really only doing this as a profound exercise in hope. Because I do like control and order and there is simply the unknown until I walk into this transition each day, hoping that it will be alright and that I do lead well until I no longer carry the marvelous responsibility of my school in ways that only the dean can. And what little I am sure of is that I am looking forward to full-time classroom teaching after a long sabbatical but it will be like learning to ride that bike again. Only this time it’s electric.