On Acknowledgment

I don’t think I’m very good at teaching online. This isn’t an appeal for pity or affirmation; it’s a grounded self-assessment. I accept where I am on this learning curve. Some days things work and we make a connection. Some days I feel like I’m standing on the subway as it lurches away from the station. Some days I’m knee-deep in the water, feet sinking into the sand. We are all somewhere in our process of becoming. We don’t acknowledge that enough.

Over the last year—which needs no introduction—I’ve made choices about my teaching that were necessary if uncomfortable. I might not be terribly skillful in how I execute them, but the process of trying them has helped me clarify my sense of purpose. My eye has become sharper; my ear more finely tuned; my voice more resolute. The marks left after a year of teaching under these circumstances are indelible, and transformations of this magnitude are important to commemorate. Everything has changed. Everyone is tired.

As I peeled back the layers of my teaching so I could reconfigure it for an online context, I discovered a pedagogy and a praxis rooted in the many forms, shapes, and meanings of acknowledgment: of listening and being listened to, accepting and being accepted, appreciating and being appreciated. Regardless of the space, the content area, or the context in which I teach, the simple act of acknowledging has become an essential pedagogic praxis.

The five takes on acknowledgment that I offer here may seem like they’re about ballet, but they’re really about people. Our pedagogies matter, after all, not because of what we teach. They matter because of those with whom we learn. 

Acknowledgment 1: Greeting

I’ve never been that teacher who bursts dramatically into the studio at the last second, tossing her scarf over her shoulder and sidling up to the barre: “Let’s begin.” The richest moments for me are those just before that beginning, as students trickle into the room. I love checking in with those who’ve arrived early, hearing about funny or important goings-on in their worlds, and sometimes sharing updates of my own. I relish the opportunity to lay some groundwork; to get a sense for how they’re doing and what they need from our class that day. To see how they are in their bodies, and—because I trust what bodies have to say—in their persons, their postures, their energies. If I haven’t had a chance to check in with everyone individually before we start, I try to at least meet their eyes kindly as we get going. Greetings are important, even silent ones. I’m glad you’re here. Welcome. 

Acknowledgment 2: Recognizing

At 16, I began a year-and-a-half of study with Maggie Black, a renowned teacher who’d worked with some of the biggest names in ballet before coming out of retirement to teach at my school. In her classes, we’d do each exercise at the barre twice, and by the end of each one, every person in the room would have received a quick, pithy comment. Every one. For every exercise. It was a pedagogic feat of efficiency, but of course she didn’t do it for efficiency’s sake. After she retired, she explained to me in her wonderfully uncomplicated way that it: “didn’t matter whether they were famous or not famous or whatever. I made the effort to work with everyone because that’s the reason they were there.”

I try my best to approximate this part of her approach when I’m teaching. Working online this year the pace is slower, and the change in my physical proximity to the students has undoubtedly affected our dynamic. But I try to ensure that every student knows I’m aware of them as an individual in the room. I address each person by name as many times as I can each day, even if it slows us down. Sometimes I’ll look around explicitly just to find students I haven’t spoken to yet, so I can be sure not to miss anyone.

It’s also occurred to me, perhaps too late, that there’s a difference between recognizing and targeting. Particularly for students in the margins, my “good intention” to recognize them fails if they perceive that I’m singling them out. I’m working on this. It is always-only-ever about trust. 

Acknowledgment 3: Trusting

I’d like to think that the students I work with trust me so they might be willing to take the kinds of risks in our classes that lead to learning. I’d hope they do, but I’d understand if they didn’t. Hierarchies and inequitable power dynamics don’t inspire trust, and I work with students inside the nested hierarchies of ballet in academia. If ballet’s notorious elitism and gatekeeping aren’t enough reason for them not to trust me, then my control over their letter grades and GPAs will take care of it. Nested hierarchies lead to nested trauma.

In a public lecture I gave at Temple University shortly before the pandemic began, I said that students, “know how to behave around us, but they don’t trust us.” They’re savvy. They see us—our words and our actions—and they can read our relationships to power. Even if they don’t understand or believe in what we’ve asked of them, when they’re up against the hierarchy they’ll figure out a way to make it look to us like they do. They’ll say yes when they’d rather say no. They’ll develop a secondary protective persona just to survive being in an environment with more impossible standards, ideals, and requirements for them to fit into than the willingness to accept them for who they are and what they carry with them. Any expectation that they’ll trust us outright in this context is nonsensical at best. 

The power we’re endowed with is different from the power we wield. Students, I suspect, are more keenly aware of our relationships to power than we are, only because they have to be. As the person in power, I have to extend trust first, explicitly and consistently. I have to design and enact pedagogies that prioritize their voices, their agency, their humanity. And the reality is that I’ll never know if a student trusts me unless they choose to tell me. Students are their own autonomous people. We have no right to them.

Acknowledgment 4: Seeing

Several weeks ago, a student told me she felt invisible. She was half-laughing and incredulous about it—like she just couldn’t believe the things she could get away with during class without being noticed. I didn’t ask what those things were, but I got the sense that she’d never before thought about doing anything the least bit subversive. She’s what some might refer to as a “good student” (i.e.: diligent, dedicated, a well-behaved rule-follower). As I listened to her, I came to understand that being a “good student” was the basis for her identity in dance classes—and it was predicated on her feeling visible to the teacher. She seemed a little lost.

There’s a huge difference between feeling watched and feeling seen. I didn’t know which she was referring to, so I suggested—perhaps a bit too quickly and without clarity on that point—that maybe not feeling watched could be empowering. That she could use her feeling of invisibility to allow her to try new things with less fear of disapproval or being “wrong.” 

I should’ve just listened. Should’ve just been present for her in that moment. She shook her head, palms up, “I mean…” and started to cry. She’d meant that she didn’t feel seen, and I missed the subtext. 

I hope she’s reading this. 

Acknowledgment 5: Appreciating 

The révérence in ballet is a stylized bow that concludes a class or a performance. It is a humble, knowing movement. Sometimes joyous. Neither sheepish nor arrogant. The head tips forward and the chest softens. The arms move from the dancer’s center forward, outward, and down or into the center of the body; to receive and extend gratitude simultaneously. We aren’t dancers during our révérence; we’re people who’ve danced.

I interpret the révérence as an honest demonstration of gratitude; the authentic kind as opposed to the Pinterest version. When I teach it in a ballet class, I suggest sending the focus first to the back corners of the imagined theater’s orchestra section, then up to the balconies. Theaters have been empty this year, which makes this ritual particularly poignant. It’s a moment to bring our work to a close. To distill our experience. To acknowledge ourselves and our communities; where we have come from, and where we are, now.

Photo by Fabrizio Conti on Unsplash