Undergraduate Students’ Perceptions on Student Evaluation of Teaching (SET): Implications for Meaning Negotiation as Critical Pedagogy
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Abstract
Scholarship indicates the existence of implicit biases against nonnative English-speaking teachers (NNESTs). Those biases are revealed in terms of their ethnicity impacting their perceived comprehension by US native English-speaking students (NESSs) and how students’ prejudices against perceived “foreign” accents undermine NNESTs’ performance on Student Evaluation of Teaching (SETs). However, little research examines students’ abilities to detect implicit biases. To fill that gap, a qualitative study where 47 undergraduate NESSs from Midwestern University (pseudonym) were surveyed. On the survey, they were asked whether they have had experiences with NNESTs. Based on their answers, students were divided into 1. an Experience group who had experiences with NNESTs and 2. a No Experience group who had not had experiences with NNESTs. Both student groups were asked to interpret an existing SET question related to the English-speaking abilities of the instructor. The original hypothesis was that the Experience group would be more capable of detecting the question’s implicit bias and less inclined to reveal biases against NNESTs than the No Experience group. Feminist theory and a general inductive coding were operationalized for analysis. The findings indicated that though both groups revealed implicit biases in the shape of an imbalance in what Lippi-Green calls NESSs-NNESTs communicative labor, the Experience group expressed willingness to exert such labor, whereas the No Experience group did not. The implications present critical pedagogy as a potential intervention in the use of SETs where students are made aware of their implicit biases prior to evaluation.
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