The Importance of Being Earnest: Engaging with student-teacher identities improves classroom experience

Newswise — “The truth is rarely pure and never simple,” says Algernon Moncrieff, a lead in Oscar Wilde’s vivacious triumph The Importance of Being Earnest1. Wilde’s play about the power of self-actualization through truth was a literary foil to his own secret life of homosexuality, one that ultimately led to a scandalous downfall. Then constrained by Victorian social norms, we might assume our generation would embrace such a celebrity with open arms. But even 127 years later, LGBTQIA* community members still face being socially stigmatized and marginalized2. Can we, as a society, maximize our collective potential by embracing the diversity of individuals within it? How might we make this dream a reality? Naturally, the future is brightest when we look to shape the generations to come. 

As students navigate their identities during college, most time is spent in a classroom. Instructors, then, have a disproportionate effect on how a student focuses their efforts during these formative years. Teaching practices have undergone a major overhaul with the introduction of active learning, a method which encourages student participation and reduces emphasis on long lectures. Instead, professors engage students with different activities like polling or peer-focused conversations. Studies indicate that student performance and learning increase with these styles over traditional formats. But despite its growing popularity and positive impact, “active learning presents novel challenges,” says Sara Brownell, Ph.D., a Arizona State University professor and discipline-based education researcher. Increased interactions amongst peers introduces a stronger human element – and their potential biases3,4. For people with marginalized identities, this can create new social situations that make learning more stressful than for non-marginalized individuals, like choosing or feeling pressured to come out during conversations in the classroom. Brownell is a proponent of active learning, but cautions that such a new system also has costs that educators must recognize. Her research, presented in Phoenix, Arizona at the annual conference for the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology, indicates that marginalized people might suffer more adverse reactions to active learning than traditional lecturing, and that professors need to be conscientious about the ways in which they ask for participation.

One way professors can increase student experiences is simply by being more thoughtful and open with their classes about their identities. A recent study5 by Brownell’s graduate student Carly Busch and their colleagues at the Arizona State University reveals that when a professor publicly normalizes a stigmatized identity like sexual orientation, this can have a profound, positive impact for most students in a class. Students in a large, lecture-type class were shown a single slide with images about their teacher at the beginning of the course – including a picture of a Pride flag to indicate their LGBTQIA* identity – and which was never mentioned again throughout the course. At the end of the instructor’s teaching, students were surveyed to assess their responsiveness to this subtle, public declaration of marginalized identity by their professor. Most students (65%) said that this public coming out increased their positive experience in the course. Of students who reported a positive association, those that identified as belonging to the same LGBTQ+ identity group were more greatly affected than their cisgender, heterosexual peers, even though all groups reported an overall positive impact. Moreover, a heartening 96% of students believed this display of pride was appropriate to reveal. A welcome datapoint in the minds of those who fear using their personal life to connect with their students, seemingly, “students want their instructors to be relatable,” says Busch, and which her data support. Overwhelmingly, students are poised to embrace their educators at a more personal level, and expressing a piece of their humanity can help foster that relationship.

Beyond using their identity to help create a better classroom environment, modern educators are being held to a higher standard of inclusivity when it comes to representation. Sam Sharpe, a graduate student at Kansas State University, has been updating their department’s course work to better reflect the biological realities of sex and gender in nature. Biology and other STEM fields are rife with the conflation between biological sex and gender, largely stemming from a historical and inaccurate blending of these ideas. For example, botany uses terms of both sex and gender to describe plant sexual organs, but this does not translate to human biology, especially when used colloquially. Sharpe has adopted more accurate language along with other policies to avoid such confusion. “I try to be very deliberate with the language I use,” says Sharpe, who has collated a list of resources (see attached)6 for use by others to improve classroom inclusivity. “I don’t think you need to be an expert in any way to talk about gender,” they insist, and by acknowledging the roots of our scientific miscommunications and deliberately tackling them, Sharpe hopes we can better appreciate human diversity and be less likely to introduce biases into our systems.

In the end of Wilde’s play, Mr. Moncreif secures love by simply being Earnest. Although this was untrue for the author, in our changing world, we are poised to take this message to heart. By being more deliberate and honest, educators can better shape student experiences in the classroom and prepare them to lead in the future.

References

1. Wilde, O. (1895). The Importance of Being Earnest.
2. Cech, E. A., & Waidzunas, T. J. (2021). Systemic inequalities for LGBTQ professionals in STEM. Science advances, 7(3), eabe0933.
3. Cooper, K. M., & Brownell, S. E. (2016). Coming out in class: Challenges and benefits of active learning in a biology classroom for LGBTQIA students. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 15(3), ar37.
4. Cooper, K. M., Auerbach, A. J. J., Bader, J. D., Beadles-Bohling, A. S., Brashears, J. A., Cline, E., ... & Brownell, S. E. (2020). Fourteen recommendations to create a more inclusive environment for LGBTQ+ individuals in academic biology. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 19(3), es6.
5. Busch CA, Supriya K, Cooper KM, Brownell SE. Unveiling concealable stigmatized identities in class: The impact of an instructor revealing her LGBTQ+ identity to students in a large-enrollment biology course.  In press at CBE Life Sciences Education.
6. List of resources will be linked on the SICB website