In her discussion of distinctions between “body” and “embodiment,” N. Katherine Hayles explains that “the body is always normative
relative to some set of criteria,” while embodiment is “contextual, enmeshed within the specifics of place, time, physiology, and
culture, which together compose enactment” (196). This distinction is a useful reminder that the teacher’s body is an abstraction that
gets particularized in a variety of ways through embodiment. Novice teachers are especially prone to applying ideals concerning what a
teacher looks like, acts like, and sounds like in college classrooms to their own teacherly performances. A new GA in our program, for
example, wore a pair of tortoise shell glasses without a prescription in hopes of appearing older and more sophisticated; another
decided that shorter hair would make him appear more serious-minded than would his shoulder-length hair. Not surprisingly, then,
tensions around ethos and authority rise to the surface when “the teachers body” does not coincide with the improvisational
embodiments of new teachers in composition classrooms. Indeed, as Hayles puts it, “embodiment is other and elsewhere, at once
excessive and deficient in its infinite variations, particularities, and abnormalities” (196-97). In this section, I turn to voice as
a specific form of excessive embodiment in the classroom that creates tension with cultural constructs of the teacher. By seizing upon
a spontaneous utterance of profanity in the classroom and my efforts to process the effects through a series of interviews presented
as a podcast, I explore what Hayles calls the “inherently destabilizing” aspects of embodiment, particularly for new teachers (197).
Before we turn to that analysis, please listen to this introductory description of my project:
figure 3 (02:01)
“I tend to curse; it’s just the way I am.” This comment reveals tensions in my development as a teacher. On the one hand, I
envisioned the classroom as a space where I could “be myself” unfettered by preconceptions of “the teacher”; on the other, as
evidenced by the multimodal project this moment inspired (excerpted above), my student’s response called attention to performance
expectations in the classroom, the need to be other than “the way I am.” My multimodal project uses the tension around this language
gaffe as a means for investigating a novice teacherly persona, particularly in relation to appropriate and inappropriate speech acts
in college writing classrooms.
I turned to audio for this project because I wanted to capture organic responses as well as the sound and cadence of voices,
including my own, in conversation about profanity in the classroom. Orality was the vehicle for my questionable teacherly performance,
so it made sense to catalogue and present other teachers’ voices to create something like a chorus on this topic. Just as I improvised
a response to my student after realizing I had offended him, I created a podcast that was not a studied response but a spontaneous
articulation of language practices in the classroom, from a handful of experienced and inexperienced teachers, as they relate to
teacher identity and ethos (understanding that spontaneity was mediated by the fact that I described my project beforehand).
In retrospect, I see that this method of interviewing allowed me to document varying practices of teacher embodiment, creating
opportunities for me to turn a fleeting classroom moment into a research project that ended up heightening my awareness of teaching as
performance. In one conversation, for example, a peer explained a time in which he directed profanity toward his students, saying, "if
you don’t have your draft [for the peer review session], fuck you, you're dead to me" (see figure 4). The violence and dismissiveness
of this statement, lifted straight out of a gangster movie, revealed a certain kind of performance bravado (not to mention callousness
worthy of disciplinary action) that came across as uncongealed—an effort to “try on” a not entirely convincing teaching persona. This
point comes through in the context of his earlier comment that he uses profanity to get his students focused, to wake up the back row:
a special effect. The cinematic quality of my peer’s missive cued the crucial role that classroom language plays in our formation as
teachers who are very consciously in process. We experience our identity as teacher and our embodiments as teachers “in constant and
dynamic interplay with one another” (Hayles 220).
figure 4 (00:39)
In another interview, I talked with a peer about cursing as a way to bring the body into the classroom:
figure 5 (02:11)
This teacher makes a direct link between cursing and using her body for pedagogical effect in the classroom. When she became more
engaged with the conversation, she stood up, gestured, and got in her students’ faces as she announced, “this shit is important!” Her
equilibrium and sense of decorum were destabilized in what sounds like a very productive moment of response and connection. Other
teachers framed cursing as a destabilizing tool as well, though they described it in more intentional terms as a subversive means for
“performing a different kind of feminine identity,” “disrupting assumptions,” getting students “fired up” (“just fucking care!”),
repudiating “middle-class indoctrination,” consciously making students uncomfortable, and reaching across social class registers when
discussing theoretical ideas (one teacher makes this point in reference to Derrida). Listening back, I can’t help thinking that using
audio as a medium for capturing teachers’ ideas about cursing, while in conversation with me, permitted raw access unavailable through
print mediums. In turn, representing their perspectives in my final project achieved a sense of intimacy made possible by the sound of
their voices and the contrasts between voices that emerged when listening to interviews side-by-side. In the end, the project offered
me a sampling of intellectual and pedagogical views that positioned my personal experience in a larger context. This enlargement
attached an expanded set of meanings to my initial embarrassment and allowed me to probe language in the classroom in some depth and
with a surprising degree of frankness.
I witnessed this awareness of the larger context with participants as well. One teacher gave an interview that displayed a casual and playful
attitude toward the use of curse words while teaching, and claimed that the use of profanity allowed her students to remove her from a
pedestal and see her as “more of a coach” than an instructor, likening her use of profanity to that of her experiences with athletic
coaches during high school. In this interview, I asked the teacher, “Would you ever curse at your students?” She responded that while
she had not directed profanity or insulting language toward students, she “could see it happening” as part of “a witty repartee” she
sometimes engaged in with students, especially while teaching writing workshops, where the instructor typically sits in a circle of
desks with students, breaking down the spatial barriers often created between students and an instructor who stands at the front of
the room. The day following this interview, I received an email from this GA asking me to delete the interview she had
enthusiastically participated in less than twenty-four hours earlier. Upon reflecting on her interview, she began to see her teaching
performance as unprofessional, and worried about the repercussions of publicizing these practices. Her change of heart revealed an active
self-assessment that played out in relation to-and not merely within-the podcast's interviews. For this novice teacher,
participating in the interview led her to critique her classroom identity and to revise her thinking about language use in the
classroom.
In recording and publishing online my conversations with fellow graduate students and professors, the podcast and individual
interviews created a time capsule through which I have been able to document my developing teaching persona. My interviews are fixed
in time—the audio is representative of how I sounded then. Oral language is ephemeral— it passes away. Digitizing voices became a tool
for freezing a moment in my teaching development, effectively creating an object of analysis and starting point for more research on
the relationship between profanity and teacher identity and authority. The podcasts serve not as a finished product with a definitive
conclusion, but as evidence of the messiness entailed in occupying that category, “teacher.” While I could have revised or edited what
I'd recorded, I was limited by my own skills and so was able to do only minimal editorial work with the audio: adding music and
ordering the conversations in accordance with my own preference for when I wanted the listener to experience each clip. (Ultimately, I
ordered each conversation chronologically, starting with the first interview I conducted.) Where I saw writing as a technology I had
mastered—on a word- processor page, alphabetic text was malleable and erasable—the tone and pitch of my voice did not strike me as
revisable. This perception mirrors my project in significant ways: I cannot “take back” or reshape what happened in my classroom.
