Dressing the Part

Over the course of my life, I have developed a sense of what kind of outfit is appropriate to specific situations and varying levels of formality; however, my personal sense of propriety does not necessarily match that of others. This distinction most often surfaces and comes to matter at work.

I am a graduate teaching assistant at a fairly large state university. I teach English courses (mostly freshmen and sophomore, although this semester I've taken on a senior level course as well), go to faculty meetings, meet with students, and do a lot of my own work as a grad student here on campus, among the undergraduates I teach. I am the teacher of record for the classes I teach. I design and plan the classes, teach them myself, do all the grading and deal with the students myself. There is no senior professor who is officially or actually in charge. It's all me.


As such, I want to be professional and I generally tend to dress up more than I might if I were only a student at the university. (That doesn't bother me at all, of course, because I like to dress up.) This tendency toward dressing up is encouraged further by the fact that I am only a few years older than the students I am teaching. At the beginning of the semester, I dress more conservatively, more formally, and more like I think students think a teacher should dress. I do this to make the distinction between myself and the students in the class as clear as possible and establish the power dynamic of the course from the start. I can and do relax this distinction as the course develops, but without a clear foundation it is far too easy, I have found, for the students to get too comfortable, which means getting lazy and sometimes presumptive. In short, they think they can walk all over me if I give the impression of being too friendly too soon.


All that being said, though, I want to dress like myself and I want to be myself when I'm teaching. As a teacher I am playing a role, enhancing certain elements of myself, but I want to be as true to myself and as honest with my students as I can be. So I do relax after a couple of weeks and start to experiment with outfits.


It is here that I break with my peers. I know many who go through a similar process of laying down the law at first and then relaxing as the semester progresses (and they often reflect this process in their clothing, too), but there are just as many who retain the same level of formality or business-like attire throughout the entire semester. One fellow graduate teaching assistant (male) would not teach without wearing dress pants, a buttondown shirt, and a tie. Some students have similar ideas about how teachers should appear. In fact, on a recent student evaluation I had a female student write that I should dress more professionally because my outfits were often distracting.


Despite these differences within my department and my field, I truly have a lot of freedom. During the training course when I began this job, which was several years ago now, the director of the First-Year Writing Program, the program I was entering into, told us that how we dressed was mostly a personal decision, one we could determine as part of developing our teaching personae. Her only recommendation was that we not expose ourselves to the students. And although students do have certain expectations of instructors based on their prior experience, they seem much more willing to accept experimentation from instructors in the liberal arts like myself. Just as there is a stereotype of the buttoned-down professor with tweed and elbow patches or the plain teacher in glasses, there is a counterstereotype of English teachers, as well as art teachers and music teachers, as hippies and artists and free spirits.

But others have less freedom: instructors in other departments, people who work in other fields altogether, people who must wear uniforms.

I know how I deal with this issue. I use my own best judgment for what will be appropriate (while teaching, this frequently means something that won't distract too much from the topic at hand) and sashay through my life with the confidence that I look good and no one can stop me from doing so. But how do others deal with this isssue in their lives? How concerned are you with appropriateness in dressing yourself on a regular basis? How do you work your personal style into the workplace? Does it cause problems? Or does it bring positive attention?