Teaching to See the Water
In teaching sociology, one objective in particular undergirds my pedagogical efforts. Metaphorically, I conceive of this task as getting fish to see the water in which they swim. Although students generally understand that they are “forced” into certain behaviors and norms because of “culture” and “society,” these remain abstract concepts and connections. <As a parallel: when asking about the sociological reasons we do a particular thing, a common refrain is that society is responsible– it’s like the joke that “Jesus” is the answer to every question in Sunday school.> Accordingly, my goal is to better elucidate the connections, to de-mystify the ways in which the social structure is associated with various forms of thinking and doing.
Over the past week, I’ve been working on this particular project in the context of teaching about feminism and its various manifestations. Feminism is, already, a difficult topic on which to teach. F0r starters, many people have a knee-jerk reaction to it as the f-word without really knowing why or whether they agree with the tenets of one side or the other with respect to gender issues. But even beyond that, much like issues related to racial oppression, the distance we’ve come in terms of women’s rights and greater gender equality in some ways makes continued efforts in this vane seem over-the-top, unnecessary, or of marginal import. Sure, gender discrimination, sexism, these things happen; but compared to 1950s America, no big deal…right?
So, fish in the water: My approach to this problem entails pointing to subtle examples of male privilege built into our culture such as marital name change (which privileges the family name of the male) and more dramatic but still generally unacknowledged examples such as “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm,” (which points to the fact that what is normative in terms of sexuality is culturally understood in terms what is normative for male sexuality).
But my problem is this: I am a fish <a pisces, in fact> who has become so adept at seeing the water, that it’s hard to remember what it was like to be on the other side– and hence, how to reach the minds that are still there. For the most part, the sociological imagination has become for me not just another way of seeing, like a pair of sunglasses you don in the proper context, but my main pair of frames. I don’t see without them. It’s a supreme irony that I know I share with others– it seems to me that many an instructor (dare I say most?) forget how to be the student. And while that means many things, here I simply ask, how do you remember what it was like to be there so you can discover how to reach them?
