Enacting a Teaching Persona in English Language Arts and Social Studies Classrooms

• In Event: Efforts to Conceptualize Key Structures of Teaching Practice in the Content Areas

Abstract

Objectives
Teachers must be skilled at building relationships with students and connecting students to the content (Cohen, Raudenbush, & Ball, 2003). Interactional work can be challenging or feel “unnatural” (Ball & Forzani, 2009), especially when teachers’ identities and experiences differ from those of their students (Taylor & Sobel, 2001). There is an underdeveloped dimension of teaching practice fundamental for facilitating such relationships, related to the small but significant ways teachers leverage voice, expression, gesture, and other “personal” resources in the classroom. I call it enacting a teaching persona. For this symposium, I describe the personas of a handful of expert teachers and suggest several considerations and resources related to this aspect of practice, particularly in the context of diverse classrooms.

Perspectives
Individuals continually leverage—consciously or not—voice, movement, expression and other “personal” tools during interactions (Goffman, 1959). Their resulting performances, or “personas,” are especially important in relational work like teaching, which necessitates engaging and motivating clientele (Cohen, 2011). By strategically using voice or gesture, teachers can outwardly show they are listening, they are interested, or they “mean business” (Waller, 1983/1965). But other persona enactments might impede teachers’ work. Teachers’ instinctive ways of talking or moving could confuse or frustrate students, depending on learners’ identities and experiences (Delpit, 1992), or might distract students from key content. Teachers therefore need to become aware of—and then control—how their personas are seen and understood.

Methods and Data
Data were gathered from five middle school social studies and ELA classrooms. All participating teachers were white and female and had over ten years experience and “highly effective” ratings by administration. Students primarily belonged to underrepresented groups and many qualified for free or reduced lunch.
Data were collected over four months. They included video recorded observations, teacher interviews, student focus groups, student surveys, and lesson artifacts. Analysis was iterative, centering on three themes: (a) components of persona enactment; (b) links between personas and purposes; and (c) student responses to personas.

Results
Although the overall “style” of each teacher varied (e.g., strict or humorous), many leveraged persona elements like tone, volume, expression, movement, and proximity in similar ways when faced with comparable instructional or interpersonal challenges. In other words, there were clear patterns across aspects of teachers’ persona enactments.
Participating teachers were not always able to recall their persona enactment, but students could recount many examples of how their teachers talked or moved during instruction. Further, especially in the social studies classroom, students with the same gender or racial identity often responded in similar ways to their teacher’s persona.

Significance
Research on teaching personas has implications for both teaching and teacher education. Unless we conceptualize and decompose the work of enacting a teaching persona, we will continue to relegate teachers’ mastery of this important dimension of practice largely up to chance. This has dangerous ramifications for preparing teachers to work with diverse learners and in unfamiliar settings. Even experienced teachers may benefit from more explicit training in this tacit aspect of interpersonal practice.

Author

• Martha Curren-Preis, University of Michigan