Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers (Teaching and Learning in Higher Education) - Softcover

Neuhaus, Jessamyn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1949199061 ISBN 13: 9781949199062

Publisher: West Virginia University Press, 2019

Synopsis

Geeky Pedagogy is a funny, evidence-based, multidisciplinary, pragmatic, highly readable guide to the process of learning and relearning how to be an effective college teacher. It is the first college teaching guide that encourages faculty to embrace their inner nerd, inviting readers to view themselves and their teaching work in light of contemporary discourse that celebrates increasingly diverse geek culture and explores stereotypes about super-smart introverts.

Geeky Pedagogy avoids the excessive jargon, humorlessness, and endless proscriptions that plague much published advice about teaching. Neuhaus is aware of how embodied identity and employment status shape one’s teaching context, and she eschews formulaic depictions of idealized exemplar teaching, instead inviting readers to join her in an engaging, critically reflective conversation about the vicissitudes of teaching and learning in higher education as a geek, introvert, or nerd. Written for the wonks and eggheads who want to translate their vast scholarly expertise into authentic student learning, Geeky Pedagogy is packed with practical advice and encouragement for increasing readers’ pedagogical knowledge.

About this title

About the Author

Jessamyn Neuhaus is a professor of US history and popular culture at SUNY Plattsburgh, a scholar of teaching and learning, and a recipient of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. She is the author of Manly Meals and Mom’s Home Cooking: Cookbooks and Gender in Modern America and Housework and Housewives in American Advertising: Married to the Mop.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

“Strange, Specific Stuff”

Just because you know a lot about something doesn’t mean you can teach it.

—Anonymous 1998 student evaluation I received after teaching my first college class

It’s hard to write a catchy statement of teaching philosophy. Required by many hiring and promotion committees, these nebulous documents tend to sound pretty much all alike. When I was applying for college teaching jobs, I tried to liven up and personalize my teaching philosophy statement with this true anecdote:

Learning how to read in first grade was the best thing that had ever happened to me. I still vividly remember the moment the words on the page started to make sense, and the feeling it gave me of unlocking a secret door and entering a wonderful new world. Afire with my discovery, I decided that my sister Alison, a kindergartener, should learn how to read too. After several weeks of sitting together and poring over books, Alison learned to read a year before her classmates and my career as an educator began.

Cute story and a good way to introduce myself as a teacher, right? I know at least one search committee thought so because during my interview for the tenure-track job I eventually landed teaching US history and popular culture at the State University of New York Plattsburgh, one of the department’s most esteemed teachers complimented me on it.

There’s just one little problem with framing my philosophy of college teaching through the lens of this particular childhood story: it illustrates the very worst assumption many of us make about teaching at the college level, namely, that sheer love of a subject inevitably leads to effective teaching and student learning. In my story it’s not a desire to teach that makes me a teacher but instead an all-consuming passion for reading. There’s no need for me to learn how to teach someone else to read because purely through some mysterious alchemy conferred by my own mastery of reading skills and adoration for books, I’m able to impart these skills to another person effortlessly. This is the problematic premise of college teaching because earning an advanced degree is the main criteria for most college teaching jobs, usually with no additional formal preparation for teaching required. But as the reality check given to me by my first student evaluation of teaching pointed out, although it’s a necessary precursor, knowing a lot about a subject doesn’t necessarily mean that you can effectively teach other people how to do things in and with that subject matter.

Yet many advanced degree programs offer little meaningful professional teaching development for their students. Instead, graduate students spend years immersed in their own research, experiments, writing, or art, and completing a dissertation, which literature professor Jay Parini calls “the worst possible preparation for teaching.”1 If grad students do get classroom experience as teaching assistants, programs often send them into the teaching fray with the unspoken supposition that any teaching they have to do will be the grunt work that (partially) pays the bills and thus allows them to continue their real work—the work of the mind. This isn’t the case at every institution, and the growing presence of teaching and learning centers on campuses and increased attention to pedagogy as part of graduate school is a hopeful sign that more students are finding support for developing their teaching skills.

However, the basic model remains firmly in place, and many people teaching college classes today followed this process. Step One: Spend at least a decade grappling with an erudite subject and proving how smart you are to other smart people who know a massive amount about said erudite subject and who, like you, believe the erudite subject is incredibly important and have devoted their professional lives to it. Step Two: If the stars align and you are fantastically lucky, obtain a job teaching college classes in the erudite subject. Step Three: Realize that many students believe the erudite subject is pointless and boring and seem to be unwilling or incapable of learning anything about the erudite subject. This book is for everyone teaching college classes who has reached Step Three and wants to successfully move on to Step Four—become an effective teacher.

The premise of Geeky Pedagogy is that those of us who have reached this moment often have another important thing in common. People teaching college classes are usually intellectuals and frequently some combination of introvert, nerd, and/or geek. Although they bring some hefty baggage with them, “geek,” “nerd,” and “introvert” are not necessarily pejorative or inherently derogatory terms. Emulating other writers and commentators today who are proudly self-identifying as geeks and nerds, expanding the definition of geek culture, and challenging negative stereotypes about nerds, I use these words as a wry, occasionally self-deprecating, but also affirming and celebratory way of describing certain characteristics we in higher education often share and which have an impact on teaching. For ease of reading, I’ll refer to geeks, introverts, and nerds as GINs, and I presuppose that identifying college teachers as such is not in any way to criticize nerdiness, denigrate geekdom, or decry introversion. I am all of those things myself and, in fact, these are qualities that make many of us scholastically successful during our own education.

However, many GINs have neglected to figure out how these particular qualities may enhance but also may impinge upon our ability to teach effectively. If we want to be effective teachers, recognizing and embracing these characteristics and learning how to deploy them strategically in the classroom and during interactions with students is essential for those of us with advanced degrees in our own specialized scholarly subjects but little formal training in pedagogy. I argue that effective teaching is fundamentally an intellectual activity, an endeavor to which we brainiacs in higher education are particularly well suited, but as introverts who may be more practiced at studying than at peopling, we also have to understand and prepare for all the important ways that teaching and learning are social and emotional interactions that require clear verbal and nonverbal communication. In the following introduction, I will briefly unpack the terms “geek,” “introvert,” and “nerd,” and explain why I see them as a useful way to describe college instructors and to frame our work as teachers. I will also set forth my conceptual framework of five general categories—awareness, preparation, reflection, support, and practice—for organizing the activities which effective teaching encompasses. Finally, I will summarize what Geeky Pedagogy adds to the scholarship on teaching and learning (SoTL).

“Geek,” “introvert,” and “nerd” all have their own etymology, with introvert being perhaps the least debated. Coined by Carl Jung in the 1920s, “introversion” and “extraversion” are now accepted as measurable personality traits by social scientists and psychologists.2 Though often mistakenly equated with being shy, an introvert is not perforce someone who is awkward in social settings or has trouble connecting with other people. These things may frequently go together, at least according to #introvertlife tweets, but being introverted just means that you need time alone to recharge your mental, physical, and emotional batteries. You draw energy from time by yourself. In contrast, extroverts draw energy from interacting with other people, explains journalist Michael Godsey, who writes that introverts are those “who are energized by quiet space, introspection, and deep relationships and are exhausted by excessive social interactions” while extroverts “are energized by social interaction and external stimulation and tend to be bored or restless by themselves.”3 Whether you only slightly tend towards introversion or whether you are an off the charts “I” on the Myers-Briggs, you almost certainly already know this about yourself. There’s an obvious divide between those who favor social situations over solitude, and those who need more time by themselves and find socializing tiring.

For example, when he was only a year old, I took my son to his first playgroup. The moment we entered the community center teeming with shrieking toddlers and parents I’d never met, I felt a wave of exhaustion. My extroverted child, on the other hand, lit up as if he’d seen the Promised Land and immediately began trying to wriggle out of my arms, eager to plunge into the seething mass of other tiny noisy people. He’d been looking for this his whole life! Instantaneously energized just by being surrounded by other people—that’s an extrovert for you. Fifteen years later, he expressed genuine dismay when his summer job with a landscaping company required him to spend time by himself mowing grass and painting fences. “What am I supposed to do all day?” he lamented in real outrage. “Be alone with my thoughts?!” There’s no better definition of what it means to be an introvert. If “being alone with your thoughts” is something you regularly seek out, if that sounds pretty good to you, you belong on Team Introvert.

In academia, there are some major benefits to being an introvert or having introvert qualities because “being alone with your thoughts” is the essence of doing intellectual work. Introvert qualities are what enable many of us to undertake successfully the hours of concentrated, mostly solitary mental labor required for research and for writing. Due in large part to the 2012 publication of Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, many Americans seem to be increasingly recognizing that introverts’ introspection and thoughtfulness is a valuable quality in a world ever more chaotic and noisy.4 Twitter humor about our social awkwardness aside, introversion as a descriptive term about individual people does not for the most part conjure up highly problematic stereotypes.

In contrast, the words “geek” and “nerd” are historically thickly layered with meanings in popular media as well as people’s lived realities.5 A high level of intelligence is the common denominator in all iterations because the one agreed upon attribute of nerds and geeks is that we’re smart. The debate begins when trying to define just what other aspects of personality and personhood constitute a nerd or a geek and to make value judgments about those qualities. Both terms gained traction as demeaning descriptors about certain kinds of studious men beginning in the early to mid-twentieth century, but some of those at the receiving end of the slang embraced and repurposed “geek” and “nerd” in order to claim membership in a self-defined subculture, marking the beginning of a discursive and embodied struggle about the meaning of these words which continues to this day.6

“The nerd” remains in many ways a negative stereotype in our culture and in our visual media, depicted as an overabundance of intellect, a sad lack of social and physical skills and other sexually desirable traits, and perhaps most notably, a man whose repeated failure to fulfill masculine ideals makes him the hapless victim of jocks, bullies, and attractive women. The stock figure of the nerd, gendered as male, also reinforces the stereotype that intellectual superiority, with all its potential advantages and social drawbacks, is raced white (and, in the early 1900s, as Jewish).7 Similarly, popular usage of the term “geek” equates being geeky not only with being obsessed with and good at technology but also regularly assumes a white, male identity that falls short of masculine norms.

However, in contemporary culture, numerous commentators, feminists, and writers reject the derogatory meanings of “geek” and “nerd,” including any attendant assumptions about gender and race. Instead, online and social media users such as Nerds of Color, Black Nerd Problems, and Geeks of Color celebrate qualities such as science fiction fandom, insisting that we geeks and nerds exemplify what Star Trek’s Spock called “infinite diversity in infinite combinations,” and although they’re still rare, a few fictional characters on television illustrate increasing diversity in popular representations of nerds.8 Another significant development in diversifying the image of the nerd in popular discourse is the ascent of the “blerd”—the black nerd—online, in media, and in real life.9 Successful black performers who’ve declared themselves proud nerds include Keegan-Michael Key, Jordan Peele, Donald Glover, and W. Kamau Bell, and fictional representations of black nerdiness are increasing as well.10 Though criticized by some African Americans, the assertion of blerd identity poses an important challenge to stereotypes about both black Americans and nerds.11 Many people find “blerd” an empowering term, and this is especially true for black women because, as Jamie Broadnax, creator of Black Girl Nerds, points out: “Black women [nerds] face twice the scrutiny. A lot of folks have an idea of what a nerd is—and it’s that they look like a white dude.”12

Broadnax’s observation about gender and race assumptions holds true among certain groups of white men who position themselves as nerd victims in a culture war.13 For these trolls and flamers, being a geek or nerd entails elaborate patrolling of just who gets to do/read/play/say what, and who doesn’t. Such “policing” of geek identity has reached a frenzy pitch in contemporary society with the blurring of subculture and mainstream culture entertainment, when comic book superheroes are today’s most profitable film franchise juggernauts and Game of Thrones is an HBO megahit.14 Some self-identified male nerds and geeks resent such mass-market intrusion into their carefully curated and proscriptive subculture. People of color like Broadnax who identify as nerds additionally confront this subculture about issues of representation and diversity, but at the same time they face what self-defined nerd Erika L. Sánchez describes as being “doubly ostracized”: “We don’t fit in mainstream white culture and our Latino communities often shun us because of our bizarre ways, interests, and beliefs. Many times we’re accused of ‘acting white,’ whatever the hell that means.”15

Sanchez’s summary of this double ostracism, of “acting white,” also evokes a crucial point for GINs in the academy and in the classroom. When we’re women, people of color, and/or queer, being a scholar means fighting stereotypes outside and inside geekdom and academia, having to continually proclaim and prove ourselves as knowledge producers and our authority as teachers. Whether cosplaying at a Comic Con or teaching English 101, GINs of color and “female nerds” challenge the stereotype of the hyper-smart nerd as a white male—a stereotype that has real-life consequences. Stereotypes about nerds and geeks contribute to sociocultural factors that discourage girls from entering and women from flourishing in STEM fields where a “brogramming” culture still dominates.16 And while some observers of youth culture suggest that stereotypes about geeks no longer doom studious teenagers to ostracism, others argue such hierarchies remain firmly in place and nerds ar...

Edition details

• Publisher: West Virginia University Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1949199061
• ISBN 13: 9781949199062
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 264