I asked my students today about the relationship(s) among appearance, identity, and authority - specifically mine. It's part of the ongoing pedagogy project I've been working on with Leda about the visibility/invisibility of our actual bodies in the classroom. By the end of the discussion several students were telling me how I should have taught (!) the class all along: roughly more form-based than content-based.
Interesting blogpost by Danah Boyd about Facebook as a public sphere where young people can "negotiate their peers and learn about the social world." The speeches in Public Speaking about Facebook emphasized its fun and useful qualities (although I have to seriously wonder if anyone really uses it to get notes from a missed class!) but also the risks of providing so much information to an unknown (and unknowable) public. Besides the debate on whether online communication somehow "takes away from" or "substitutes for" face-to-face communication, I'm wondering about differences between online "public speaking" and face-to-face public speaking.
I came out indirectly to my students in COM260, Public Speaking. I told them of the time I questioned Geraldine Ferraro, at the National Women's Music Festival, about how she could address an audience of 3000 lesbians without using the word, "lesbian". I don't remember exactly what I said, I'm pretty sure it was implicit - I was a member of the audience she was addressing (without knowing us too well). I do recall a moment of heightened alertness/silence - as if a shudder went through the whole class at the same time?
It's Leda's panel, I'll just present a part of The (In)visibility of Teachers: On Meaning, Body and Pedagogy
