Teaching the truth: Navigating student bias in the life narrative classroom

The teaching of life narrative offers powerful and impactful opportunities for students to reconsider much of what they think they know about the world and about themselves. Using my own experience as inspiration, this essay considers student evaluations of teaching in courses on life narrative in which the content challenges their privilege. By examining correlations between what narratives we teach, who the students we teach them to are, and who is doing the teaching, I demonstrate how the metrics of student evaluations are impacted when faculty present students with opportunities to grapple with uncomfortable truths about the lived experiences of others who are systematically oppressed. In examining the truths of who we teach, what we teach and who students perceive us to be when we are when teaching life narrative, this essay shows that flawed mechanisms for feedback allow students to vent biases against faculty who teach life narratives that confronts racism, sexism, imperialism, colonialism, and power dynamics of socio-economic class.