Teaching with Tea

How bringing tea for my students challenges expectations of who counts as a ‘serious thinker’

I started teaching with tea in my last year of graduate school. I was teaching an Introduction to Critical Thinking class Monday to Thursday from 9am to 9:50am. It was a course that fulfilled a General Education requirement and so all of my students were there because they had to be.

The recipe for a great class is certainly not one that is taught early in the morning in a windowless room with no air circulation and with students whose main goal is to just get through it.

And so, I brought tea to share. It was a rainy Oregon winter and I definitely needed some tea to buoy my spirits.

Some of my students started bringing their own cup to class in anticipation of the tea. I would bring different teas for different occasions: I brought a calming herbal tea for test preparations and highly a caffeinated black tea when it was particularly grey and gloomy.

Did it become a bit of a gimmick? Sure. Did I care? … Not really.

Midway through term, a student brought me two boxes of tea at the end of class. She had chosen her favourite green teas to share with the class.

That same student came to talk to me at the end of the term about her experience of sexual harassment at work. We talked through different options and I helped her make an appointment with the university’s counselling services.

I’m not saying that bringing tea to class played a small role in her seeking help, but I’m not saying it didn’t either.

I’ve been teaching with tea for the past two years now and groups respond differently. Every course has its own distinct character.

Some students get very excited about the prospect of a cup of tea in their philosophy class and bring their mugs every week.

Other students affirm their strong preference for coffee over tea and ask when I’ll start bringing coffee instead.

Some students act as though this whole tea thing is a trap. Or, even worse, that I’m treating them as children (although who is serving strong black tea to kids???) and not as the very serious philosophy students they are.

Here are some reasons why I love bringing tea to class:

1) I pour students tea at the beginning of class and we get to have a quick human moment before returning to our parts of ‘student’ and ‘professor’.

2) I do my best to treat my students like the individual human beings they are and the tea helps show that.

3) It helps create a sense of community.

I seek to create a teaching environment where students can be open and vulnerable — how else do you learn? It helps put students at ease. Mine is not a class where there is one and only one person talking (me) while everyone else dutifully quietly listens. And I care about my students (well, most of them… there are some difficult ones, too).

Here are some worries I have about this tea-sharing business:

1) I’m a woman in a male-dominated field, whose canon almost exclusively includes those who believe that women, people of colour and other minorities do not have access to reason (Thanks a lot, Aristotle).

2) In my current department, I am 20 to 30 years younger than most of my colleagues.

3) I’ve been mistaken for a student more than once. It’s why I’ve started to wear a blazer. I’m a real philosopher professor. I’m wearing a blazer — what more credentials do you need?

I worry that wanting to be a caring teacher in a male-dominated field might work against me. I’m concerned that students (especially those ‘very serious philosophy students’) won’t take me seriously as a thinker or scholar because I do the emotional labour of trying to create a caring environment. We already know that teaching evaluations reflect students’ prejudices of who counts as a real professor or a successful lecturer.

I have good reason to worry and that fact makes me furious.

A caring learning environment is essential for many students to actually lower their walls and do the terrifying work of challenging their own beliefs. I don’t think this can happen it if they feel like they don’t matter.

I wholeheartedly believe in a pedagogy of kindness: of believing my students, of trusting that they are not trying to deceive me.

I had a student tell me that a lot of his classmates were surprised that I was a tough grader. They thought, he told me, that my grading would reflect my in-class persona of … what exactly?… care and support??

I smiled and told him that I could be caring in the classroom and have high standards. Those two things are not incompatible.

He got angry.

Do I think that the tea played a small role in his frustration at getting a B+ (!!!)?…maybe.

Did my students think that if I bring tea to class, then I must be a pushover?

When did caring become so firmly coded as weakness, a soft touch, or a lack of rigour?

I call bullshit.

For me, providing a caring environment for my students is more important than trying to convince a few students that I’m a serious professor.

Bringing tea to class as a junior faculty member is an act of defiance. It’s a symbolic gesture that pushes against dominant culture within academia where students are considered annoyances who get in the way of the real business of being a scholar.

I’m going to carve out my own way of being a professor and of occupying this position of power. I want to model a new vision of care — one where caring and high writing standards are mutually enabling, rather than mutually exclusive.

I know for myself that I can only get down to the work of philosophy with a nice cup of tea in hand… and this is true for some of my students too.