Decentering Myself

When I first moved to the U.S. to pursue my Ph.D., I knew teaching was in the foreseeable future, but I fully refused to think about it due to certain fears I had about the process. The notion of entering the classroom was like a vague and distant threat that I did not have to immediately confront—until the fall of 2021 rolled around, when I was assigned my first in-person class.

I was terrified. I was an international student with a non-American accent who had completed all of her education up until this point outside the U.S. The class had about 60 students from all over the world; some, I assumed, were older than I was, with a wealth of life experience far exceeding mine. What was I doing here?

I had taken a pedagogy class with a great professor. I knew what to expect as a student teacher, as a foreign teacher and as a teacher in many nondominant categories. I had done the readings about engaged classrooms. However, as is very well-known, taking a class about something does not equate to being prepared for the thing or to mastering it. Scholars have noted the “reality shock” or “transition shock” that comes when a new instructor first moves from taking a class about teaching to actually teaching a class themselves.

Beyond the transition shock, additional tensions occur when the teacher and student have a cultural divide. On the scholarly front, researchers have documented issues with communication and cultural disconnectedness from the viewpoint of the student. On the other hand, teachers accustomed to more compliant student behavior may experience culture shock when they encounter classroom discipline issues. All these issues made me apprehensive of how students would react to me and how that might influence the dynamic of the classroom.

This fear was compounded by the pressure to do exceptionally well to prove myself—or, perhaps, to prove to my own self that I was deserving of the position. This, I believe, is felt by many new teachers regardless of country of origin or culture. In this writing, I will not go into detail about my first class, but it is worth noting that my performance improved over time.

Despite the improvement, I found myself unable to shake the feeling that I had to constantly prove myself. And while each class or group of students taught me something new about teaching—the place of performance and vulnerability in a classroom, or how understanding works—my third time teaching showed me the importance of decentering myself.

In that class, I had about 20 students. I had designed my syllabus such that the final two weeks of the class would be spent on students’ presentations, which always excited me because of the variety of viewpoints and ideas presented. I have always considered reviewing someone’s work to be a sacred process, like walking through the hallways of their mind, and it is one I attend to with the utmost respect. In the past, I would read students’ papers in advance to get a sense of the topics they would be presenting on. I did that so I could look up recommendations for them, suggest further readings and have enough information to spark conversation. This time, unfortunately, I did not get a chance to preview my students’ papers. I was slightly concerned about how the class would proceed since I was going in blind and would not control the discussion. To my surprise, however, the conversation picked up by itself. The students listened to their colleagues, asked their own questions, brought up suggestions and produced a lively classroom environment on their own.

Previously, I had believed I was needed to start the conversation—and while it was wise to be ready to do so, the robustness of the discussion happening outside of my intervention reminded me of the importance of decentering myself and learning to recognize everyone’s competence and contribution. Of course, these ideas are not new, and I had discussed similar ones in the pedagogy class I had taken. But understanding a thing seems to take place on different levels. The writer Benjamin Cain proposed “degrees of understanding.” As he plainly explained, any human who speaks English has an understanding of what skydiving is. An actual skydiver has a deeper understanding of it. A physicist would have another level of understanding due to their perspective on the mechanics of jumping out of an airplane. What about a physicist who skydives? Finally, a considerably higher, extraterrestrial mind may have a far more profound grasp of the act’s reality, placing skydiving in a cosmic context that most of us cannot grasp. By observing and connecting the classroom dynamic to the idea of decentering myself, I had attained another level of understanding.

It’s easy to believe that the classroom dynamic depends on you, as a new international graduate teaching assistant. But as bell hooks has written beautifully about, radical pedagogy deconstructs the idea that only the professor is necessary for determining the classroom dynamic. hooks wrote that the excitement we create in the classroom can be achieved primarily through “our interest in one another, in hearing one another’s voices, in recognizing another’s presence.” The professor must value everyone’s presence, and this, I believe, means recognizing the intrinsic value of every member in the class and what they bring to the teaching and learning experience, whether it is the student who shows up late, the person who doesn’t seem to care too much or the one who has all the answers. All these types of students give the class its distinct personality. And some students simply make others happy, and that happiness inspires results.

What this means is the international TA can ease the pressure on themselves to single-handedly create a phenomenal class simply by valuing the presence of everyone and realizing how everyone contributes to the classroom dynamic. The international TA, perhaps coming from a country with classroom structures that value vertical authority, compliant behavior and less debate, may have a higher learning curve in adopting this perspective.

I would also argue that valuing the contribution of everyone in the class is a two-way street, and that students also need to realize how immensely valuable they are in shaping the classroom experience. The poet and feminist scholar Adrienne Rich has written that the classroom dynamic entails “an ethical and intellectual contract” between student and teacher—a contract, of course, implying that the parties mutually respect and understand each other and their roles. Students who appreciate their own contribution to the classroom dynamic, to learning and teaching itself, can, as Rich puts it, “claim” their education, instead of simply “receiv[ing]” their education. To claim something, she discusses, is “to take as the rightful owner; to assert in the face of possible contradiction.” Students must see themselves as active participants, with a great responsibility.

Decentering yourself in the classroom as an international teaching assistant does not argue for a lack of responsibility or a lack of preparedness. It simply argues for the recognition of the value and contributions of all students and a genuine interest in everyone’s capacity to advance teaching and learning goals. The international teaching assistant who feels unduly burdened to influence everything in the classroom may therefore benefit from taking a moment to ask themselves about their role, to figure out if they are overly centering themselves or if they are a sharer of responsibility.