Teaching In Today's Classroom

Scholars have debated and researched methods of teaching in the classroom for as long as there a classroom has existed. Today's textbooks embrace multiple types of subject positioning in order to explore the best possible technique to appeal to the students of today's classroom. Two primary types of subject positioning find a place in the college classroom. The first type known as direct subject positioning appears through direct contact. Direct subject positioning combines the knowledge and findings of the writer with his/her personal experience. The second type of subject positioning, however, involves technical data and specialized words, known and understood fully by only an elite few. Indirect subject positioning tends to be more impersonal and scientific than direct subject positioning. The common college student finds direct subject positioning easier to understand, retain, and relate to; therefore, direct subject positioning should be the primary teaching method used in today's college classroom.

If the teacher does not relate these theories to his/her own personal experience, students in the classroom will not remember the majority of statistics, scientific methods, and theories covered in a college curriculum. The jargon (special language used by a particular group of people) and the technical data associated with today's education overwhelm and prove confusing. For instance, someone who works on aircraft will know many acronyms and specific terms that, to someone outside of the aircraft industry, sound like nonsense. Likewise, someone uneducated in the field of math would find themselves completely lost in a College Algebra class when the instructor starts speaking about rationalizing denominators, quadratic functions, and the arc cosine. It would go in one ear and out the other. Students will retain stories they can relate to, when presented correctly, the methods and theories related to those stories will be retained and retrievable in the process. Experience remains one of the best methods of learning and understanding new subject matter. If instructors harness and utilize their past personal experiences to help explain new ideas, theories, and data, the application and correlation produces lasting results. If, for example, one tried to convey the importance of wearing a seatbelt, a story about an accident in which a seatbelt really did save a friend's life presents good use of direct subject positioning. Relating the importance of experience compliments students desire to learn. Students do not want to make all mistakes, they would much rather learn from others mistakes and avoid unpleasant situations.

In his essay "Grief and a Headhunter's Rage," Renato Rosaldo utilizes the direct subject positioning method to describe how grief could cause one to sever the head of a human being without any regard to the life of the headhunter. Rosaldo lived amongst a native group of people called the Ilongot in the Philippines for thirty months while doing his first fieldwork. As an anthropologist Rosaldo focuses on making other cultures known and coherent. Rosaldo also writes to make a case for a change in cultural studies. Anthropologists typically study cultural rituals to form a hypothesis on deep cultural wisdom. Rosaldo contradicts, describing rituals as "vehicles for processes that occur both before and after the period of their performance" (600). When Rosaldo begins exploring the reasoning behind the seemingly barbaric ritual of headhunting carried out by the Ilongot men, his own life experiences (or lack thereof) do not allow him to understand the rage felt in bereavement. He explores other options typically used by anthropologists to describe such behaviors as killing with no clear "scientific" explanation. The exchange theory, in the case of Ilongot headhunting, states that perhaps one death can cancel out another, meaning that the beheading of one person will take the place of the relative over which one grieves. The exchange theory does not make sense to the natives. The scientific method cannot explain why native people behead their victims. The intense rage felt impels them to follow tradition and quite simply, it makes them feel better.

Only after Rosaldo loses a loved one and experiences, for himself, the terrible anger felt in the bereavement process does he gains a bit of an understanding and appreciation of the Ilongots' gruesome attacks as attempt to overcome such a bitter feeling. Rosaldo explains the benefit of direct subject positioning: "personal experience serves as a vehicle for making the quality and intensity of the rage in Ilongot grief more readily accessible to readers than certain detached modes of composition" (594). He could not begin to comprehend what that grief felt like without the direct impact of personal experience. He does not go out and attempt to kill someone, but he does inherit some knowledge, that before, he could not possibly have understood. Rosaldo displays his understanding of subject positioning:

The emotional force of death, for example, derives less from an abstract brute fact than from a particular intimate relation's permanent rupture. It refers to the kinds of feelings one experiences on learning, for example, that the child just run over by a car is one's own and not a stranger's. Rather than speaking of death in general, one must consider the subject's position within a field of social relations in order to grasp one's emotional experience. (588)

In relating to his subject on a personal, intimate level, he draws the reader into his experience, not only furthering our own understanding, but also giving a real life example we the reader can relate to ourselves. Anyone who has lost someone dear and close has some idea of the grief and rage Rosaldo describes. The author's personal experience is the primary factor in aiding in ones understanding of otherwise hard to grasp subject matter.

Another example of direct subject positioning comes from Sherene H. Razack, Ph.D., Professor of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education at University of Toronto, who in her book, "Looking White People in the Eye," writes about what happens when whites look at non-whites, and in particular non-white women. She expresses how subject positioning can affect the student:

When we depend on storytelling, either to reach each other across differences or to resist patriarchal and racist constructs, we must overcome at least one difficulty: the difference in position between the teller and the listener, between telling the tale and hearing it. Being all about subjectivity, storytelling is often uncritically 'understood as sentimental, personal and individual horizon; often attributed to women, the other of man, and natives,

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