Navigating Student Resistance in the Classroom: Challenges and Strategies for Female Faculty

Abstract

The #Me Too movement has called attention to the importance of sexism in experiencing mistreatment in a number of professions. In this paper, we explore the experiences of female college instructors navigating problematic student behaviors, such as interruptions and challenges to classroom management. Drawing on a survey of instructors at U.S. colleges and universities, we outline patterns in problematic student behaviors reported by instructors. Specifically, we demonstrate that instructors who self-identify as female experience a variety of behaviors that are hostile and problematic from students in their delivery of course content. Further, we suggest some strategies for mitigating these issues based on the female faculty surveyed, and areas for further research concerning college instructors’ experiences. In so doing, our work draws attention to the importance of examining and comparing how gender and influences instructors’ classroom experience.

Keywords:

• Student incivility
• contrapower harassment
• faculty
• teaching victimization

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval was obtained from the authors’ University prior to conducting the study.

2 The listservs reach approximately 600+ members in total.

3 The number of contacts reached by the social media accounts of the principal investigators is unknown, as it involves combined venues and sharing of content beyond these lists.

4 Excluding cases in which the respondent did not complete questions, but logged in to the questionnaire. We also included only complete responses for the variables of interest (difficult behaviors) to avoid problems with missing data. As this study is has relatively few missing responses and is exploratory in nature, we did not feel it appropriate to adjust for the very little missing data.