(NOTE: This researchhas been supported by a UMUC Faculty Research Grant)
Introduction
One of the decisions that professors of adult students immediately face is: How should your students address you? And how should you address them? Do you want to be on a first-name basis with your students, or do you prefer that they use an honorific, such as Dr. or Ms. or Professor? While this question may seem like a minor one, the way in which students and professors refer to each other is crucial to creating a strong classroom environmenton campus or onlinein which collegial relationships are transparent and in which the lines of authority are clearly drawn.
As someone who studies language and communication, I have been intrigued by these and related questions throughout my long teaching career. Many professors grapple with this issue: While you want to assert your authority and your expertise as a professor, you dont want to seem condescendingparticularly to adult studentsby according yourself with a title (albeit one that you have earned).
With adult students, you would think that a first-name basis would be fine. We are all adults, after all, and many adult students have had more life experience than their professors have had. But I am always surprised to find that many students are not comfortable when they are on a first-name basis with the professor. I recently discovered an explanation for their discomfort by analyzing the discussion board conversations in my online classroom using a theoretical framework from studies of language in social interaction.
This short article offers a brief summary of facework as an identity resource, applying its concepts to the discussions in my capstone class to explain student behavior associated with the use of honorifics in student-faculty interaction.
Face and Identity
Identity is complex; it is formed via symbolic communication with others within and across diverse contexts, cultures, and channels. Establishing identity helps individuals interpret experience and create meaning. While individuals display specific aspects of identity in specific social situations, the framing of individual identity in a situation is embedded within and dependent upon discourse practices (Fairclough 2001; De Fina, et al., 2006). Thus, the drive to create, construct, enact, and display identity may be understood as the basis for the discursive choices that individuals make as they interact.
In the online university classroom, negotiating and enacting identity via symbolic communication is typically limited to different forms of writing, much of it on the discussion board. The social practice of writing in the online discussion frames both the ways in which individuals present themselves as well as the ways in which they help to define and build the online class community (and community identity). Because the class discussion board invites students to negotiate and enact complex identities, it constitutes a rich environment in which to observe, analyze, and understand the ways in which students implement particular discourse strategies that help them both to display their own identities and to engage with the enacted identities of others.
A central way in which individuals manage identity in discourse is through the concept of face and the discourse actions of facework. Face may be viewed as our public self-image; it is the view of ourselves that we present to others and that we and they act upon in specific contexts (see Goffman, 1959; Brown Levinson, 1987; Ting-Toomey, 2004; Domenici Littlejohn, 2006). Face is mutable, fluid, and variable. In given situations, face accrues and evolves as community members enhance concepts of individual and collective face over time.
In a classroom group, students conduct facework to establish, honor, and affirm the positive values of both the individual face and the group facein this case, the face of students in a particular class or major. People use facework to enhance their own faces and to respond to the facework of other individuals with supportive or non-supportive facework strategies.
All individuals have two general face needs that appear to conflict: (1) independence, or the need to operate autonomously, unimpeded by others; and (2) involvement, the need to be seen as connected to a group, an identity, or an idea. As individuals use facework strategies to enact and display identity, they are constantly negotiating these two needs (Scollon, et al., 2012).
All communication presents potential risks or threats to face. Individuals typically draw on one of two types of culture-driven discourse strategies to address these threats: solidarity strategies and deference strategies. Individuals can express solidarity in conversations by claiming common ground and by expressing agreement with the speaker. Individuals can express deference by hedging or apologizing, by flattering, and by using honorifics (or formal titles of address such as Dr. or Professor).
An individuals selection of discourse strategies in a particular situation is also informed and constrained by perceptions of power and social distance. When there are asymmetrical social relations between individuals, one person may talk down to the other person, who may be expected to reciprocate by talking up to the other, depending on the context.
As communication acts and relations continue, individuals may engage in preventive facework designed to protect from threats to self-face or group-face, or they may engage in restorative facework designed to rebuild face after an attack. The Western concept of saving face is related to these goals.
So how does this framework help us understand what happens in the online classroom when students and professor address each other?
Honoring the Face of the Professor
Patterns of facework strategies are reflected in and influenced by student perceptions of power and authority in the online classroom. Students facework is constrained by these perceptions. In order to understand how this happens, I analyzed the facework of students in their discussion board postings in my recent online class, COMM 495: Senior Seminar in Communication Studies.
When I teach face-to-face, I typically introduce myself to the class with something like: Hi, everyone. My name is Dr. Linda Di Desidero. Feel free to call me Linda, or Dr. Di, or Professorwhatever makes you feel comfortable. This puts the ball squarely in the students court: Each student can make the choice, and I wont have to do it myself. However, when I teach online, its up to me to assert how I would like to be addressed.
The given authority in this specific class was the professor (me). I saw these senior scholars as competent and talented adults, and I did not want to emphasize my authority and the social distance between us by using my title. I consistently used my first name (Linda) in signing the class announcements and in signing my individual discussion board posts to students.
I was rather perplexed to see that most students continued to address me as Dr. Di Desidero or Professor persistently throughout the course. I had anticipated that, eventually, they would feel a reduced social distance between us and become comfortable enough to address me by my first name. Almost none of them did.
The persistence of most students in using a term of deference with me has led me to doubt my own facework strategy of using my first name with them. While my facework in this regardthe decision to use my first name and not my titlehad been grounded in a motivation to reduce distance and threat to face as well as to create an atmosphere that would be inviting to senior scholars in a seminar setting, it did not work that way at all. In fact, my own facework had the opposite effect: I only succeeded in presenting continued threats to face by persisting in using my own first name and in resisting their attempts to defer to me.
Some students seemed unfazed by my ill-advised attempts to reduce social distance, and they simply addressed me by my title throughout the course, in all discussions. But some students were clearly confused by how best to honor my facethat is, they did not know if they should continue to defer to me, or if they should honor my obvious breach of power distance and begin to address me by my first name, even though it seemed to flout some of the cultural constraints against this behavior. Not wanting to insult me by using my first name, and not wanting to insult me by not behaving as I clearly wanted them to, these students stopped using a form of address with me altogether. They did not address me by name in discussion board postings or in other messages at all.
Several students employed additional facework strategies to honor the face of the professor in their posts. In addition to using my title, some students displayed deference by acknowledging my need for autonomy. For example, Sarah posted Thank you for your time following every post that she made to me. She did not post such a message to her peers.
Conclusion
What does this brief analysis mean for adult education? The implications here are that the undergraduate adult students in this particular capstone course preferred to behave within the traditional boundaries delineated by a cultural recognition of the professors authority within the classroom. My experience in this class leads me to understand that professors may need to provide students with the comfort of a certain degree of social distance. Professors can cooperate with their students in facework that allows the students to defer to the professors authority. A students refusal to engage with a professor on a first-name basis should not be viewed as defiance, but rather as a sign of respect and honor.
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