The answer to this is that it's not your sole responsibility to bear your instructor's and peers misreadings of your work. One of the main reasons I dislike the workshop model in the first place. The workshop centers and favors the instructor as the authority, the bearer of correct and good, and relegates readings of the text to assumptions and possibly stereotypical readings by the author's classmates.
The workshop is a community space where parameters may be set to minimize misunderstandings and to empower the author as much as possible. It's the workshop instructor's job to create and institute guidelines—safety bumpers, as I think of them—so workshop is useful and productive for everyone.
If you have an instructor who you think would be receptive, I recommend reaching out to them and talking about this issue. Some of us are just following the format that we've been taught: the author is silent while everyone else speaks, but this doesn't have to be the case. I really liked the example structure Emperatriz shared from a workshop with T Kira Madden (https://yanyi.substack.com/p/the-writing-what-do-you-wish-you/comments#comment-425754) a couple weeks back: "an open workshop with dialogue encouraged where the author always has space to respond, ask for clarity, or move the discussion to a new topic." Allowing the author to bring their own questions and to moderate, with help from the instructor if desired, the terms of how their work was discussed, can be very empowering and make the workshop more community-oriented.
Of course, more likely you're in a situation where this is not the case. I've talked a little about this in this letter: https://yanyi.substack.com/p/how-do-i-get-through-my-mfa-program. Aside from leaving the program or class, you can be careful about contextualizing your work with specific questions about what you want discussed when you send others the work, or even write the questions in a note before the actual piece, similar to how footnotes make function to help contextualize the piece.
If you want to stay in the class and see merit in it still, even if the class format won't change, you have to ask yourself what exactly you want from workshop and be honest with the limitations of your peers and professor and play to their strengths. I wouldn't bring work in that would likely be misread—save those pieces for the people who can truly understand its depths.
As a participant, I haven't found an easy answer to this. I've gotten the most out of a process when I've included epigraphs or short summaries of historical events at the beginning of a piece. I've found the downside to be that other participants may not look any further than that, or only discuss how your piece exists in conversation with the references you give.
Even if the instructor doesn't let the author speak, there are things you might ask to do! I've been in workshops where the author doesn't speak but contextualizes the piece with a written summary and questions they want to be answered. It's sometimes best for me to ignore what people discuss in the workshop and focus on the written feedback, where there's both more detail and more insight to the peer's entry point.
I've had peers misunderstand my work before, but there's a bizarre flip side where some will be overly enthusiastic or cheerleader-y about my work based on its subject matter and still not provide in-depth feedback!
The answer to this is that it's not your sole responsibility to bear your instructor's and peers misreadings of your work. One of the main reasons I dislike the workshop model in the first place. The workshop centers and favors the instructor as the authority, the bearer of correct and good, and relegates readings of the text to assumptions and possibly stereotypical readings by the author's classmates.
The workshop is a community space where parameters may be set to minimize misunderstandings and to empower the author as much as possible. It's the workshop instructor's job to create and institute guidelines—safety bumpers, as I think of them—so workshop is useful and productive for everyone.
If you have an instructor who you think would be receptive, I recommend reaching out to them and talking about this issue. Some of us are just following the format that we've been taught: the author is silent while everyone else speaks, but this doesn't have to be the case. I really liked the example structure Emperatriz shared from a workshop with T Kira Madden (https://yanyi.substack.com/p/the-writing-what-do-you-wish-you/comments#comment-425754) a couple weeks back: "an open workshop with dialogue encouraged where the author always has space to respond, ask for clarity, or move the discussion to a new topic." Allowing the author to bring their own questions and to moderate, with help from the instructor if desired, the terms of how their work was discussed, can be very empowering and make the workshop more community-oriented.
Of course, more likely you're in a situation where this is not the case. I've talked a little about this in this letter: https://yanyi.substack.com/p/how-do-i-get-through-my-mfa-program. Aside from leaving the program or class, you can be careful about contextualizing your work with specific questions about what you want discussed when you send others the work, or even write the questions in a note before the actual piece, similar to how footnotes make function to help contextualize the piece.
If you want to stay in the class and see merit in it still, even if the class format won't change, you have to ask yourself what exactly you want from workshop and be honest with the limitations of your peers and professor and play to their strengths. I wouldn't bring work in that would likely be misread—save those pieces for the people who can truly understand its depths.
As a participant, I haven't found an easy answer to this. I've gotten the most out of a process when I've included epigraphs or short summaries of historical events at the beginning of a piece. I've found the downside to be that other participants may not look any further than that, or only discuss how your piece exists in conversation with the references you give.
Even if the instructor doesn't let the author speak, there are things you might ask to do! I've been in workshops where the author doesn't speak but contextualizes the piece with a written summary and questions they want to be answered. It's sometimes best for me to ignore what people discuss in the workshop and focus on the written feedback, where there's both more detail and more insight to the peer's entry point.
I've had peers misunderstand my work before, but there's a bizarre flip side where some will be overly enthusiastic or cheerleader-y about my work based on its subject matter and still not provide in-depth feedback!