Cloning Brianne

Hollis Glaser, Speech, Communications, and Theatre Arts

Introduction

Brianne Waychoff, our colleague from the Speech, Communications and Theatre Arts Department, teacher, scholar, activist and performance artist, passed away in July 2022 from a 9/11 cancer. She had been ill for about 18 months prior to passing and although she wasn’t able to remain co-coordinator of the Gender and Women’s Studies major, she continued to teach Introduction to Gender and Women’s Studies (GWS 100) and Gender and Communication (COM 265), and to edit Women’s Studies Quarterly (the first community college faculty to do so) throughout her illness.

I took over co-coordinating GWS when Brianne was ill and also picked up a GWS 100 section. I asked her if I could lift her course whole and she enthusiastically said I could. I know the basics of feminism (of course), but I’m not a feminist scholar as was Brianne, so I was excited to learn from her. I told her it would be like taking the class from her and teaching it at the same time. This essay is a tribute to my friend Brianne, her teaching and an explanation of what I learned from her by cloning her Open Lab GWS 100 class. I taught this class in the Fall 2022 and Spring 2023 semesters, after Brianne had passed (and am teaching it currently).

Brianne’s class was an online asynchronous class on the Open Lab platform.  Each week there were a number of readings and/or videos.  Brianne gave the students two written assignments every week: 1) respond to the materials in any way they’d like; 2) answer a prompt that required them to write at least 400-600 words. I taught it as an online/synchronous class where we met for an hour a week on Zoom.

After teaching the class for a year, reading Brianne’s assigned materials, using her prompts and talking to her in my head most days, how Brianne approached teaching and her students unfolded before me, across the syllabus, the platform and the semesters. She was a passionate teacher who believed in what she said and was fearlessly honest always. I have been teaching for about 20 years longer than Brianne, but I sought her guidance and learned from her. And this is what I learned from cloning her course: 1) Be open; 2) Respect the students’ intellect; 3) Respect the students’ emotional maturity; 4) Ungrade; 5) Good teaching always works.

Lesson #1 be open: Open Lab

The first thing I learned from Brianne: keep it open; keep everything open. I asked her what the easiest way was to read her syllabus and she said it was on the Open Lab, a platform supported by BMCC which allows instructors to share their courses, students to share projects, groups to share their discussions for anyone who is interested. (You can also keep everything private if you wish.) I was able to go into her course and “clone” it, meaning transfer it whole to my Open Lab space. Open learning—open resources, open education–was a passion of Brianne’s. She was a true feminist, a strong union member and believed deeply in equality and equity and so believed that education should be available to all, no exceptions. The Open Lab was one way to realize these ideals.

This sense of openness that the platform allowed also included Brianne’s commitment to transparency, in true feminist style. Transparency gives power to the students; the more transparency, the more students can look behind the pedagogical curtain, the more power they have. Brianne and I talked about this a lot, the importance of telling students what we’re doing and why. This openness was central to Brianne’s course and her pedagogy.

In the summer of 2022, while Brianne was struggling to stay alive, I participated in the Open Lab training which gave me the basic orientation to the platform. However, I couldn’t dive into how I would specifically transfer Brianne’s course to my own until later in the summer after she had passed. The first thing I did was to go through her course with the Open Lab trainer, Syelle Graves. As we scrolled through it together, Syelle commented on how well Brianne constructed the class. “Of course she did,” I said. It was clear, easy to follow, specific, and she gave detailed directions to the students on how to participate. This transparency was one of the ways Brianne empowered students.

Lesson #2: Respect the Students’ Intellect

Brianne’s respect for her students showed in everything she did in her class. First (as noted above), the course was designed to be straightforward, easily accessible, to function smoothly and clearly.

Second, the texts she gave the students were all central, powerful, influential and written by our most brilliant writers: bell hooks, Audre Lorde, The Combahee River Collective, Peggy McIntosh, Marilyn Frye, Betty Friedan. She had them watch Paris is Burning, the iconic documentary about ball culture in New York City in the late 1980s. I watched it a second time, the first time being when it first came out, and it is as fresh and poignant now as it was then. The students loved it.

Third, Brianne covered intense, important topics: Gender, Performing Gender, Patriarchy, Privilege and Oppression, Intersectionality, the three waves of Feminism (each got a week), Medical Oppression, Art and Activism, Identity Politics, 20^th Century Intersections, Abortion. Brianne put together a course that treated her students as equal, in every way, to her. She never talked down to them, fully expecting them to be brilliant and insightful.

Fourth, the discussion prompts she gave the students assumed they understood the material and would have something to say about it.  Brianne focused them on a particular idea or image or person or moment in history, then asked them provocative questions.  Here’s an example:

What does it mean to move beyond the gender binary for Alok? Even for people who identify as cisgender, gender is fluid and complex. We all express and experience our gender in different ways, and for most of us, some aspect of our gender identity goes against the binary norm. In what ways does your gender identity go against the binary norm and in what ways does it fit the binary norm?

Fifth, her responses to the students were essays in their own right, where she picked up themes in their responses, commented on them and drew in other relevant material. She clearly spent a significant amount of time replying to her students’ posts in a very specific and theoretical manner.

I carried this lesson into my Introduction to Communication Studies course (COM 100).  I had a discussion with Brianne as I was planning to teach it for the first time that significantly shifted the way I taught.  Many COM 100 classes across the nation use a textbook that divides our discipline by topic areas such as public-speaking, small group decision-making, listening, non-verbal communication, etc. But teaching it that way didn’t interest me. Brianne instructed me to use a graduate-level textbook that introduces students to communication theories across our discipline (interpersonal, persuasion, rhetoric, digital, mass media, intercultural, etc.). She told me that when she teaches Gender and Communication, (COM 265) the GWS majors do better than the COM majors because they have been introduced to feminist theory in GWS 100. I followed her advice and have been delighted with the way our students grasp, apply and evaluate our theories. Brianne knew that our students can handle advanced and sophisticated material.

Lesson #3: Respect the students’ emotional maturity

Brianne assigned an article that explained how men (Freud especially) claimed that the vaginal orgasm was the only proper and mature orgasm for a woman to enjoy and that clitoral orgasms are immature and improper. Obviously, the vaginal orgasm prioritizes intercourse and makes the penis a useful tool. This “theory” delegitimizes the clitoral orgasm along with other methods for a woman to be satisfied: clear patriarchy and oppression and a good lesson.

Except that I really didn’t want to talk to my students about sex and orgasms. Really. Nevertheless, I went ahead with the lesson plan (because I hadn’t read ahead carefully and so had no time to change it) and I got through the discussion (Zoom thankfully) without too much embarrassment on my count. That is, until a heterosexual male student wanted to stay after class to talk to me about it because he didn’t understand. This was the point where I internally cursed Brianne and had to channel Dan Savage. I said things like “Everyone is different.” And “You need to talk to your partner.” I vowed to get rid of this reading for the following semester.

But I didn’t. I decided to teach the politics of orgasms again. I still didn’t want to talk to my students about orgasms, but Brianne was right to include “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm” by Anne Koedt. What is a better example of the evils of patriarchy? The invasiveness of it, its desire to control, its arrogance, its assumptions of heterosexuality and binarism? I put aside my qualms and talked to my students about clitoral vs. vaginal orgasms. My takeaway from Brianne: get over it and teach.

Lesson #4: Ungrade

I was already ungrading, where the students earn their final grade based on how many assignments they complete at an adequate level. I didn’t learn this from Brianne, but I was glad she embraced it. And I wish I could talk to her because I think I improved her point system. I simplified the formula which determines the final grade by eliminating the need to calculate percentages, and instituted a simple count system where the students earn one point per weekly assignment and one point for participating in each class session. I believe for ungrading to work properly, the students should be able to figure out their grade as they move along and shouldn’t have to ask the instructor how they’re doing. Also, ungrading increases transparency for the students and gives them more control over their final grade, openness, and empowerment again, two central values for Brianne.

Lesson #5: Good teaching always works: ChatGPT

As Chat GPT became more prominent this past year, I took a Writing Intensive workshop about it. It was obvious that some of my students were using it in their COM 100 papers where they had to explain a theory and apply it to their own life. The main solution to this problem, according to the workshop, was to give assignments that ChatGPT could not answer. That meant the questions had to be very specific to the students’ experience (among other methods).

Brianne was already doing this; her weekly prompts were detailed and personal. And the students responded in kind with specific and moving essays every week. As Brianne knew they would, the students had very interesting things to say about the material. But she was also prescient in that this kind of assignment is difficult to plagiarize and to use ChatGPT for.

I also transferred this lesson to my COM 100 class. Instead of having three papers (which were easy for ChatGPT to answer), I now have weekly prompts that ask the students to apply the concepts from the theory to their lives in very specific ways in at least 250 words (not the 500 words Brianne required but still an improvement).

Conclusion

Here’s the bottom line on how Brianne Waychoff taught: She gave her students important well-written, concise and interesting material to attend to. Then she asked them profound questions about how this material applied to their lives. And then she let them express themselves however they wanted, without judgement or penalty. And finally, she responded to them in a meaningful way. In other words, she created wonderful conversations with her students. She treated them as equals and loved them in the bell hooks way of love, meaning to bring your whole personhood into the classroom and to allow the students to do the same.

I miss Brianne every day that I teach and/or am thinking about teaching, which means every day. I want to talk to her about so many things: ChatGPT (of course), post-Covid teaching, the academic freedom issues higher education is facing right now, the future of the GWS program, all the Trans issues that are occurring, and my current obsession with Dionne Warwick who is the cousin of Whitney Houston who Brianne was obsessed with and I didn’t know that until after she passed; we should be trading Spotify songs right now. But most of all, I want to talk to Brianne about our students whom she loved and delighted in.

Pedagogically, it was a great experience to lift whole a course taught by someone as engaged, intelligent and authentic as Brianne was. Brianne taught some topics that I wasn’t even aware of, and if I had been, I probably wouldn’t have taught them because I would have thought I didn’t know enough. But Brianne believed in me as well as in our students: I read interesting material and talked about it with my students, as equals. That was enough. For example, the week on Artistic Activism was enlightening and fun and explained why so much of Brianne’s activism was performative and playful. That week’s prompt asked students to find art that tried to make the world more equitable. The students brought in amazing work; I never would have thought of this lesson on my own. And as already mentioned, I would have completely skipped Orgasm Week.

So thank you Brianne for being such a wonderful colleague and teacher. I miss your guidance and laughter, your intensity and passion. I hope I have done your work justice and that others who read this may learn from you what I have learned.

For anyone interested in seeing more of Brianne’s class, you can follow this link to her Open Lab course.

More From This Issue