Tag: Classroom Speech

By: Emma Pettit | The Chronicle of Higher Education After taking a social-work course at Colorado State University in 2023, one student had striking words to share in a course evaluation: “I don’t feel safe in this classroom,” they wrote, adding that “judgment and rejection” came from the two instructors. “This makes me shut down.” One of those instructors was Quinn Hafen, then a Ph.D. student at Colorado State and now an assistant professor at the University of Wyoming. Hafen, who uses they/them pronouns, was surprised by the comment. Their counterpart, a senior instructor named Marie Villescas Zamzow, was not. She receives this sort of comment every semester. “I can actually predict who’s going to write that it’s not a safe learning environment,” she said, according to a re...