I read this and was immediately rejecting of the idea of being an adversary, because I don’t want to be an adversary to my students… I also wouldn’t want to call myself their partner either. To me, I’d prefer to be their advocate. Somebody who has there back and will support them, but is more of a resource of support rather than someone who is going to seek them out. I’ve considered myself an advocate in a lot of different roles I’ve played in my life. Most obviously in my mind would be being a survivor “advocate” which was a very specific role and position, but I’d also consider myself and advocate for political change with opening the door and saying, “Hey, if anyone is overwhelmed or uncomfortable with voting and how to vote, send me a message and we can figure it out.”

This is all coming back to say that the role I’d like to give myself as an instructor is the role of an advocate who students who can try to look out for them and support them when they come to me. The word “adversary” struck me as incorrect for what I hope I am for my students, but I think that’s because that’s something teachers sometimes are or feel like. I think that if a teacher becomes more of an adversary when students can feel a gate-keeping experience happening. As a student this has been when teachers refuse to meet me part of the way or refuse to be transparent (the first I have very specific examples of from being in calculus in high school and the second coming from experiences of me having to go and ask professors in college for transparency and them refusing to help me understand why we were doing things the way we were doing them). As a student teachers have be adversaries when it feels like they’re trying to hide or are prescribing to some capital-T “Truth” that I’m never going to know and they aren’t willing to work through with me. As someone who is an instructor, I try hard not to replicate this… but there’s no real way for me to know right now.

I don’t think the relationship between student and instructor is necessarily inherently and always set out to be a negative one, but I think that there are many ways it can devolve into that. For me, I think this can manifest as defensive. When someone (student or teacher) has actions that appear to be defensive, the conversation shuts down and there’s a lot less negotiation.

This relates back to Dolmage’s Academic Abelism: Disability and Higher Education the idea of literacy is not only discussed, but also the idea of a neoliberal and capitalistic classroom structure is discussed. Capitalistic language is immersed in the way we talk about the classroom (we talk about students “buying” into the class… we worry that there isn’t much difference from one draft to the next which emphasizes the idea of the texts students create as “products” over processes when we are talking about the class… even if the two things feel inherently interrelated). I also think it’s interesting for a lot of different reasons. Maybe it’s too late for me to be reading, but I liked the way the reading discussed the ways the education system is failing multiple groups of people.