Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

Can online instructors show “selective vulnerability?”

Posted by Peter Seaman

Back in January, I was pleased to see that many online instructors responded warmly to my post about becoming a “warm demander.” Since then I’ve been thinking about another concept from the work of Zaretta Hammond – the concept of “selective vulnerability.”

Selective vulnerability is an important tool you can use to build what Hammond calls “a different type of relationship with your students” – one that will allow you to reach dependent learners.

Selective vulnerability is a somewhat counterintuitive idea, because we who teach can feel a lot of pressure to be the experts – the ones who know everything and have all the answers. Our authority to teach stems from years of study and preparation, and we don’t want to “lose face” or look bad in front of our students. Yet there’s a lot of research that suggests exactly the opposite: students (and humans generally) connect more deeply and more quickly with instructors (and people) who show vulnerability.

Hammond cited a book called Click: The Magic of Instant Connections (also in the PCC library – good job, PCC librarians!), which tells the story of a hostage negotiator who used selective vulnerability as a way of connecting with very desperate people in difficult situations – probably nothing like what you’ll ever experience with your online students. But there are some parallels: you as an online instructor don’t have a lot of time to connect with your online students – maybe 10 or 11 weeks at most. The hostage negotiator is under intense pressure to establish a connection and find an avenue of de-escalation; you as an online instructor have a similar challenge, as your online students often see your online class as a learning experience to be gotten through, and they can feel a bit trapped by the experience.

But what about the “selective” part of selective vulnerability? I recently did a little experiment at a conference of online educators, where I asked a group to read a description of a fictitious instructor’s approach to her online class. The fictitious instructor was named Sammy Davis (the conference was in Las Vegas, after all) and Sammy shared A LOT about herself with her online students, including her prolific crafting, documented on Pinterest, and especially her interest in all things “shabby pink” (which is apparently a real thing). Also Sammy invited her online students to follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, in case Pinterest wasn’t enough. I was surprised by the reactions to Sammy’s self-disclosure: one instructor thought that shabby pink would alienate the men in the class! But there was widespread consensus that self-disclosure can be taken too far. The group agreed that when you disclose facts about yourself, to your online students, you want to be selective and intentional about what you disclose.

Implications

What are the implications of using selective vulnerability in your online teaching? I’ll venture to name a few.

1. You can connect with students by sharing your own struggles in learning the academic subject you are now teaching. I recently heard Ann Cary, online faculty mentor for math, talk about how she is unafraid of saying to her online math students, “Math is hard, and I once struggled with it myself.” When you do this, you are showing a type of selective vulnerability that gives students permission to reveal their own vulnerability in the learning process. Then you might gain the level of trust that allows you to become the “warm demander” that the student really needs to hear from.
   

   Attribution: 123RF Copyright : Ivelin Radkov

2. Tell your story, and be particularly generous in telling stories from your academic field. Hammond notes that modern brain research has revealed how storytelling activates parts of the brain that are similar in both the storyteller and the story-hearer! There is almost nothing more powerful than a good story in creating a connection between teacher and learner. Yet I feel compelled to add that when I review online courses, I am often struck by how generic they are – how devoid of stories and personality they are. I sometimes think that online instructors have received a secret memo requiring their online courses to be formal in the extreme – present only the facts and just the facts, and then assess the students’ knowledge of the facts, but never ever venture into the forbidden realm of stories and emotions. Instructors in our CTE fields in particular have so many great stories they could tell about, say, hairy moments in firefighting, clever solutions in the building trades, and near misses and averted disasters in the medical fields.
3. Even when you show vulnerability in a specific and intentional way, not every student will feel a sense of connection. Some years ago, I was working with a group of trainees in the lab who were learning about the LMS (learning management system). The group was struggling in ways that are typical for people new to an LMS, and the skills of individuals ranged widely, which is also common. I decided to show a little selective vulnerability by admitting that I myself had struggled to learn the LMS and continued to learn something new almost every day. I added, “I’m still not an expert in the system – there’s still a lot I don’t know.” A man sitting at the back of the lab piped up: “Okay, so when are we going to hear from the experts?” It was a slightly crushing moment for me, but in hindsight I can see that this particular learner wasn’t the type who would connect with me, as his instructor, based on a shared experience of struggle. Instead this learner wanted just the very best info he could get his hands on, and that’s fine. I later learned he taught high school full-time, so he probably had little free time to indulge in empathy for his instructor. But I think the moral of the story is clear: If selective vulnerability isn’t having an effect on some students, you’ll need to find another way of reaching them.

What about online?

Having pondered the implications of using selective vulnerability as a teaching strategy, I want to return to the original question: What does showing selective vulnerability look like online? Here are a few directions you might take:

• Maximize opportunities to show selective vulnerability in one-to-one interactions with your online students. Self-disclosure with your entire online class is still important, but the more you get to know individual students, the more easily you can spot situations where showing vulnerability could work particularly well with certain students. Also self-disclosure happens more easily and feels safer in one-to-one interactions, for both you and the student.
• Be especially alert for cues that your online students provide. The online introduction that your students provide can become particularly important as a source for discovering information about students that you can use to establish a connection with them. Max Macias recently showed me a list of questions to ask online students – everything from hobbies and sports to places we grew up and foods we loved as kids. If you know nothing about your online students as individuals, you won’t have points of connection to make with them.
• Zaretta Hammond talks about the importance of being “authentically human” as you make yourself open to forming the types of relationships your dependent students will most benefit from. Anything you can do in the online environment to reveal your “authentic humanity” is going to help in this regard. I often hear from online instructors, “I hate the way I look in my online videos” or “I hate the way I sound when I record my voice.” My advice is to try to get over these feelings – we all think we look and sound terrible online! (and I blame Hollywood: who can compete?). Any media you can use to show your authentic self – and it can be as simple as a photo of you with your dog or cat – will make it more likely that online students will see you as vulnerable and human and worth connecting with.

Wow – I’ve issued a lot of challenges here, and I know my own online courses don’t yet live up to them. But we’re all on a journey.

Further reading

Culturally Responsive Teaching & The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students. Zaretta Hammond. Corwin, 2015. Available at PCC library.

Click: The Magic of Instant Connections. Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman. Broadway Books, 2010. Available at PCC library.