This document discusses positionality and intersectionality in teaching. It explains that a teacher's social attributes like race, gender, and religion affect how they are perceived by students and impact the classroom dynamics. A teacher's position is shaped by combinations of their various social identities. The document also discusses how students enter the classroom with their own biases based on teachers' perceived social identities. It emphasizes that to understand social position, all aspects of a person's identity must be considered simultaneously rather than separately. A teacher's power and influence in the classroom depends on social contexts and how their various attributes are perceived.

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A Scholarly Reflection paper on positionality
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Introduction
The concept of positionality includes the ethnographer's given attributes such as race, nationality,
and gender which are fixed or culturally ascribed. Such attributes require textual disclosure when
they affect the data, as they always do to some degree. The development of cultural
responsiveness stems from various experiences, as it is multi-dimensional and complex. We
believe self-reflection through writing (literacy practices) is an aspect of culturally responsive
teaching that needs more exploration.
Self-reflection and awareness of one’s interpersonal insights are essential to teacher education
programs and culturally responsive pedagogy; in order to understand others, individuals must
first understand themselves (Howard, 2006). Some scholars encourage critical self-reflection and
analysis to further generate sociocultural consciousness (Gay & Kirkland, 2003; Villegas &
Lucas, 2002), and others emphasize cognitive dissonance as a way to promote increased
understandings (Lea & Sims, 2008). Teachers’ unconscious understandings, such as biases and
prejudices regarding students from diverse backgrounds, impact their beliefs and teaching
practices (Berlak, 2008).Essential to becoming a culturally responsive teacher is awareness of
differentness of self and others and relatedness to other people and cultures (Howard, 2006).
Preservice teachers need to know what the differences are and how they connect to others. As
educators and researchers, we need to find ways to facilitate deeper reflections and to better
prepare preservice

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teachers in a time-efficient manner (Adams, Bondy, & Kuhel, 2005).
Written reflection can serve as a tool to gain individuals’ knowledge of self and others, and
through their own self-awareness individuals recognize connections to and differentness from
others. In recognition of differences and connections, teachers must respect the values and
beliefs of others. Written language provides one channel for individuals to explore the self and
others. Preservice teachers’ reflections illustrate social/emotional connections and personal
growth, and reflections can provide further insight into the development of culturally relevant
teachers (Morton & Bennett, 2010). Reflection is a means to examine cognitive dissonance and
change.
Potitionality
Positionality, also termed social location, refers to the place that a person occupies within a set
of social relationships. It offers that all persons have a position in relation to others within a
society. One’s position is the result of combining various social factors or identifiers including,
but not limited to, race, sex, class, gender, ability, age, religion, sexual orientation, nationality,
physical stature, education, occupation, relational status, language, etc. Social location
(Zaytoun, 2006) and critical feminist (Collins, 2005) theories also argue that educators are
not purely “objective” beings and thus, do not come neutrally into a classroom. They, on the
one hand, have many experiences and prior learning that shape who they are as embodied
educators. As much as they try to remain fair in the educational process and may take the posture
of learner and facilitator, they are not blank slates when they enter a classroom. They have biases

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and opinions that affect their teaching in some way (Freire,2000; Sleeter, 1996).On the other
hand, the learning environment is replete with embedded scripts on account of society’s shaping
of its views in regards to persons and people groups. Students come into a classroom with their
own biases, preferences, and assumptions that are mostly based upon the previously-mentioned
social identifiers and the histories behind those identifiers. The students, in their quest to make
meaning, already come with constructed language, meaning, and understanding that arise out of
personal and social histories and experiences. They too are not neutral participants but ones who
bring existing meaning into class space. Two studies, for instance, suggest that social identifiers
such as race and gender are significant factors in student opinions and evaluations of faculty
members. One study of entering college students reveals that these students make evaluations
prior to commencing their studies of their professors‟ competency and legitimacy levels based
upon the ethnicity and gender of the professor (Bavishi, Madera, & Hebl, 2010). Black
professors are seen as less competent as, and with less legitimation in their academic
accomplishments than are white and Asian professors, despite having been hypothetically
constructed with the same academic qualifications as their white and Asian counterparts. A
second study reveals that students rated Black and Asian professors with less overall quality,
helpfulness, and clarity than white professors on the popular website, ratemyprofessors.com
(Reid, 2010).
While race or ethnicity appears to play the most significant role in these studies, gender is also an
important factor where women are mostly evaluated lower than are men, except in the case of
Black men who are usually the lowest rated (Reid, 2010).

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Intersectionality
A young, female, dark-skinned, Muslim educator who wears a hijab as she teaches in the U.S.,
holds a much different social position than seeing her as a young, female, educator, or simply, as
an educator. The embedded scripts constructed sociohistorically in the U.S., particularly after 9-
11, do not allow her to be seen simply as a young, female educator. Therefore to speak about
social position adequately, intersectionality asks that all identifiers be simultaneously considered
Intersectionality is important to consider in higher education because learners enter the
classroom with preconceived ideas and assumptions concerning others, content matter, and daily
life realities.
Context
For instance, there is a traditional privileging in the U.S. of men over women, white over non-
whites, and elite- and middle-class over the poor; one could see various societal values with
every other social identifier. It is mostly advantageous, for instance, for a person to be a white
man in the U.S. where white men have historically administered it, particularly in the public
sphere and at the highest levels of the private sphere (Allsup, 1995; Howard, 2006). His power
and privilege are far different than is a Latino child of poor, immigrant parents from Mexico.
Moreover, this privileging is learned and passed on from one generation to another until the work
to uncover and alter these power dynamics occurs. It is important, however, to note that while
there exist overarching privileges in any given society, there are more particular contexts that
may privilege one or a few social identifiers over others. While an older, white, heterosexual,

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male educator undoubtedly has more power in most contexts in the U.S., there might be other
spaces where the young, dark-skinned, Muslim, female educator might have more influence than
him on account of referent power and similar identification to an authority figure with oneself
(Glascock & Ruggiero, 2006; Goodboy, Bolkan, Myers, & Zhao, 2011; Muhtaseb, A., 2007). For
instance, a group of other young, female, Muslims may identify more readily with this woman
than they would the man. This is not to dismiss the overall inequity of power between the latter
and the former, but it is meant to show the importance of shifting contexts. Moreover, the
identifiers of gender and religious identity may take precedence over others (e.g., race and
nationality) in this imaginary context, while in another context, race and gender may take
precedence over religious identity (e.g., mutual respect and understanding among darker-skinned
women regardless their religious identity). Though a person is all of these identifiers
simultaneously, several may take more primacy in any given context.
Conclusion
Teachers, by virtue of their role, hold much power in traditional classrooms. They are authority
figures who possess the power to establish and change syllabi, course content, and assessment
tools. Perhaps the chief example of this power is the power to grade. Students, however, possess
their own measure of power. On the rare occasion, they may explicitly question an instructor’s
authority but usually revert to subtle forms of resistance such as sleeping in class, checking
social media rather than engaging in the lesson for the day, and writing student evaluations with
poor remarks of the instructor. A young, tall, good-looking, white male professor carries with
him a much different social location and thus level of privilege than does a shorter, older, faculty

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member of color in the United States. This is amplified in an undergraduate context where many
of the students, faculty, and administration carry several of the same social identifiers as the
white male instructor and not the faculty member of color. The two, therefore, do not hold the
same power. The two professors could teach the same content in the same ways, and yet,
students may receive the professors‟ teachings in two differing ways by virtue of the
professors‟ positional differences. The context constructs frames that allow one to be seen as
“cute,” “funny,” “engaging,” and “smart,” while the other, as “tries too hard to be funny,”
“boring but nice,” and “needs to retire.” Talvacchia (2003).

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References
Talvacchia, K. T. (2003). Critical minds and discerning hearts: A spirituality of multicultural
teaching. St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press
Glascock, J., & Ruggerio, T. E. (2006). The relationship of ethnicity and sex to professor
credibility at a culturally diverse university. Communication Education, 55(2), 197-207.
Goodboy, A. K., Bolkan, S., Myers, S. A., & Zhao, X. (2011). Student use of relational and
influence messages in response to perceived instructor power use in American and
Chinese college classrooms. Communication Education, 60(2), 191-209
Muhtaseb, A. (2007). From behind the veil: Students' resistance from different directions. New
Directions for Teaching and Learning, 110, 25-33.
Howard, G. R. (2006). We can't teach what we don't know: White teachers, multiracial schools
(2nd ed.). New York: Teachers College, Columbia Universit
Bavishi, A., Madera, J. M., & Hebl, M. R. (2010). The effect of professor ethnicity and gender
on student evaluations: Judged before met. Journal of Diversity in Higher Education,
3(4), 245-256
Collins, P. H. (2005). Black sexual politics: African Americans, gender, and the new racism.
New York: Routledge.

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Zaytoun, K. (2006). Theorizing at the borders: Considering social location in rethinking self and
psychological development. NWSA Journal, 18(2), 52-72.