In this essay, I reflexively narrate my personal travails as a Teaching Associate (TA) in a Midwestern US university and, later, an Assistant Professor in the Southern State of Georgia. I argue that, as a foreign-born TA and, later, an Assistant Professor, I carry extra layers of identity markers that distinguish me from the homegrown professor. Thus, the masked and the overt demands by the hegemonic institutional forces for conformity to the Anglo-American speech forms and narratives suppress those unique identity markers. So as not to create tension and friction in the classroom, it is challenging not to be seduced to veil those unique identity markers in the cross-cultural intersections of pedagogy. However, unlike the homegrown professor on familiar terrains, by concealing those unique identity markers about myself, my true self is veiled from students and I become a mystery to them in the ensuing pedagogical encounter. With this understanding, I have always positioned my true self as rhetorical act of anchoring that demystifies the strange and invites the native to the never-ending dialogue of discovery.

1. Teaching from selfhood: A personal growth
journey with unimaginable dividends
Dr. Prosper Yao Tsikata
NAAAS Conference, Dallas, Texas

2. ]
[ Story Board
• Opening narrative/New York Times Caption
• Speaking voice postcoloniality
• Personal narrative
• Teaching from Selfhood
• Revisioning professional seminars for foreign-born
• Discussion and conclusions

3. ]
[ New York Times caption
•
• “Smoothing the path from foreign lips to American ears” (Perez-Pena, 2012, August
28).
• “For hundreds of grown men and women here, work can mean sticking fingers into
models of the human mouth, or trying to talk while peering at their tongues in mirrors
or while hopping up and down the stairs” (Perez-Pena, 2012, August 28).

4. US higher education
Statistics & requirements Knowledge & hegemony
» ’05-06 564,766
» ‘15-’16 1,043,839 (IIE,2016)
» Teaching Assistanships (TA)
» Test for English as a Second
Language (TEOFL)
» Graduate Record Exams
(GRE) and others.
» Cultural missing links in
orientations
» Bodies as ideological
sites
» Institutional hegemonic
structures
» Difference, tension, and
friction
» Relics of colonialism
» Liminality

5. ]
[ The speaking voice and postcoloniality

6. ]
[ Theoretical tensions

7. Personal narrative
Requirements Teacher-student role
• Midwestern university as a TA
• GRE and TOEFL requirements
• Language placement test and
language accessibility
• Three weeks orientation
• Theory, methods, and professional
pedagogy
• Teacher and TA
• Winter 2011 evaluation
• Thick accent and accessibility
• Experiences, ways of knowing, & crisis

8. ]
[ The courage to teach
• The pedagogical process: interrelation between self, subject, and student in the
fabric of life.
• Self knowledge: my identity, my selfhood, and the I who teaches the thou
Identity: “an evolving nexus where all the forces that constitute my life converge in
the
mystery of self: my genetic make-up, the nature of the man and woman who gave
me life, the culture in which I was raised, people who have sustained me and people
who have done me harm, the good and ill I have done to others and to myself, the
experience of love and suffering. (Palmer, 2007, p. 14)
Integrity: “Whatever wholeness I am able to find within that nexus and its vector and
re-form the patterns of my life. Integrity requires that I discern what is integral to my
selfhood, what fits and what does not—and that I choose life-giving ways of relating
to the forces that converge within me. Do I welcome them or reject them?...By
choosing integrity, I become more whole, but wholeness does not mean perfection. It
means becoming more real by acknowledging the whole of who I am” (p. 14)

9. ]
[Anchor selfhood via self-questions
• How can I be trusted if I try to veil my identity markers?
• Can I be taken seriously by mimicking the hegemonic voice?
• Does mimicking not remove me from the anchor of my selfhood?
• What is the language community that birth me and my experiences?
• What are the narratives that constitute my selfhood?

10. ]
[ The pedagogical process
• Much-KAAR-theism versus Ma-KAAR-theism
• Dialogical space—questions, feedbacks, follow-up questions, etc.
• Sacrificial vessel for scapegoating
• Window: Cornfields of Athens and the prairies of Georgia
• Intersection of voices, histories, cultures, and ideologies
• Resistance, celebration, and implications

11. Revisioning professional seminars
Activities Debriefing & connections
• Curriculum, selfhood, and cross-
cultural tensions
• Readings on selfhood
• Introduction—disclosed &
undisclosed
• Reflection—identity and ideology
• Choice of disclosure
• Selfhood as impediment?
• Culture and tensions
• Lack of anchor and pedagogy
• College experience & real-world

12. ]
[ Discussion and Conclusions
• Anchoring ones identity is essential to pedagogy
• Helps students untangle from the relationship
• Makes instructor feels valued and true to self
• Democratic citizenship and diversity of voices