‘Teaching Naked’ in Late Capitalism: Instructors’ Personal Narratives and Classroom Self-disclosure as Pedagogical Tools

Abstract

I argue the use of instructors’ personal narratives and life experiences via self-disclosure in the classroom is a uniquely effective pedagogical strategy for teaching students about social class inequality, as well as intersecting oppressions, as they operate under late capitalism. Instructional strategies that include recounting the instructor’s significant life experiences may, for example, focus on perspective shifts (such as from colorblindness to racial literacy), the onset of sociological consciousness (or learning to use the “sociological imagination” to understand one’s own life trajectory), or especially telling encounters between the body and oppressive structures. Altogether, such strategies may serve as powerful antidotes to student subscription to toxic meritocratic ideologies, student tendencies to understand the behavior of the poor as inherently criminal or amoral, and the widespread mystification of the causes of contemporary inequality. However, recounting personal experience in the sociological classroom must always be contextualized with data on larger institutional patterns, else one risks what Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie calls “the danger of a single story” that threatens to flatten complex lives into stereotype. Additionally, pedagogical methods involving classroom self-disclosure may entail unique professional risks or other detriments for instructors who are members of groups historically underrepresented in the academy. For example, students may perceive instructor “bias,” they may infer a partisan political agenda on the part of their instructor, or they may feel their otherwise unpopular views on contentious subjects silenced in the classroom. Despite such risks, most potentially problematic outcomes may be mitigated with the use of a handful of specific and conscientious corrective pedagogical strategies. Overall, I believe, each instructor must decide for themselves how much self-disclosure is effective or comfortable, given unique institutional circumstances, emotional histories, and strengths and vulnerabilities we all bring with us when we enter the classroom. I present data on student assessment of the costs and benefits of pedagogical strategies of self-disclosure so that interested sociology instructors may make a more informed decision about the appropriate, most beneficial role of their personal experiences in the classroom.

If we ask academics to hold students in a space of vulnerability and uncertainty in which they can embrace their own beings, it is necessary that we create the kind of environment where academics can explore their own vulnerability and uncertainty.

—Blackie et al. (2010: 643)