Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages
357. "just how complicated these notions of authority might be": "our female colleagues tell us that students are sometimes upset when they discover that their teachers enforce late paper penalties, whereas our male colleagues enforce the same such penalties with less student complaint. the students in male-taught and 'male-marked' classes seem simply to expect that class policies will be enforced....grade grievances are brought more often against women than men (roughly three to one), and many of them involve the students' anger at their teachers who enforced late penalties and attendance policies and reflected these in final grades. in female marked classes, we surmised, students believed that they wouldn't be held to those policies, even if those policies were clearly outlined in the syllabus"
360-1. why the heck not?!? who in the world would discussing & negotiating questions injure? --> "complying with IRB requirements about the interactions of teachers and students meant that we could not, as feminist qualitative research encourages, negotiate our questions with our students and refine them as we went along"
370-1. "when we analyzed our syllabi...we saw more clearly the spaces in which we acknowledged or even touted our authority and the comparable spaces in which we decided to give it away. what became most clear in this analysis is that we were in control. empowered as we are by the institution in which we work, the positions that we hold, and the imbalance of power in the student-teacher relationship, we were the ones who determined what authority to exhibit and when. maybe our classrooms were, more than we had realized, marked male....as we listened to our tapes and read our transcripts, we were at first disconcerted to find that we not only [sic] exhibited authority, but that our students sensed this authority, expected it, and even embraced it. most importantly, their interpretation of our stance was the deciding factor in how we were 'marked.' sometimes they found authority in spaces where we meant to give it up, and other times they sought authority in places where, despite our attempt to negotiate shared responsibility, they expected us to be unyielding....they claimed confusion: they saw that sometimes we were authoritarian; sometimes we were not"; ultimately "we found...that even when we consciously attempted to be nonauthoritarian, we punctuated our approachability with authoritarian moves....and we found, that in our attempts to be nonauthoretarian, students sometimes interpreted us as nurturing, sometimes as irritating"