Leading with Authenticity

Thinking aloud about a workshop I’m going to apply to give next year at the National Conference on Race and Ethnicity. Felt relevant to share.

“Coming out in the classroom- What’s your version? How leading with wholeness and authenticity fosters self-care and cultivates student trust and achievement.”

What does leading with wholeness and authenticity mean? A student wrote to me recently thanking me for ‘being out’ in the classroom. She had just started a new teaching job and was attending a district meeting on cultural competence. She had taken my class entitled Cultural Competence and Humility and said she found herself referring back to the environment in the class and how through my sharing of appropriate personal narratives she had experienced what it meant to be in a classroom where the teacher modeled being authentic. She found herself referring back to that class a lot in this training, and thinking that is the way she wants to approach her own teaching. She wrote in witnessing my own wholeness regarding being gay, (among other things), she felt more empowered to be herself.

The point to me wasn’t so much the ‘being gay’ part, even though we need out teachers in schools for sure, it was more about how when teachers model being themselves they gift their students with the freedom to be themselves. In our deficit and media driven culture, students suffer from not feeling they are enough. Anxiety and depression are impacting so many of my college-aged students. I believe when we show them they are enough, and share strategies for how to unpack why they often feel like they aren’t enough, they reclaim lost and forgotten parts of themselves. This leads to a greater felt sense of wholeness and well-being.

My graduate training was in postmodernism, critical race theory, multicultural social reconstructionism and feminist poststructuralism. They don’t particularly need to know the ins and outs of those theoretical frameworks…but it does come down to a few basic tenets in my opinion. First, they are freer to create who they want to be outside of the constructs they find themselves in (gender for example). Second, in understanding they are both oppressor and oppressed, they gain a better sense of their place and responsibility in the larger system of oppression we are trying to dismantle. Third, in realizing such, they build empathy for people unlike themselves…and also self-compassion. Fourth, we can’t afford as a culture to be ‘neutral’--for really there is no such thing. So how do they want to direct their attention? What do they truly value and how can they live in alignment with those values?

We talk a lot about mindfulness and building a witness self. Pausing. Asking in those immediate moments of response, if this is in fact, how they want to respond—or are they reacting without much consideration? We talk of this is a practice…not an immediate fix, not a one-time thing.

To me, teaching this class is a such gift and responsibility given the current political climate. I think if I were to design a workshop (this is it!) it would be one in which we talk about what it means to be whole, what is means to be authentic, what is means to be courageously vulnerable. I often tell my students, if I am not real with you, how can I expect you to be real with me? How can I expect them to trust me? They nod in agreement and in that class in particular, students say thank you at the end of each class on a regular basis. They understand that this is a different class in that way. I try to model that in all my classes, but when working with this kind of material (systemic oppression) it feels particularly salient. What if all of our interactions strove to this level of understanding, compassion, freedom and ultimately, love of self and other? My imagination runs wild with possibility.

Saying prayers for the planet with views of Nanda Devi~ India, November 2005