Teaching is an
unnatural act, an incursion on another person's learning-in-progress: it's a
yippy little dog, a surprise water balloon, a telemarketer on a sunny day. Each
persuasive attempt to get students learning about barium or facework or Hegel
or genderlects or sine waves or Afghanistan comes with a built-in demand that
they stop thinking - for a while - about what yesterday's unexpected smile
really meant, or why mom and dad are divorcing, or lunch. It's a challenge to
teach while suspecting my students may cast my dignified self as a
waterfighting sales terrier, but teaching is no doubt an imposition, a
sustained redirection of other curious creatures' voracious cogitation. In
curling terms, they're sentient rocks slowly cruising; I push/glide/sweep my
way alongside and a little ahead, strategically melting patches of frigid path,
aiming for productive 'clicks' at the end of things.
I am Teacher; hear
me impose. This presents a daily dilemma not easily resolved: research shows us
that students' purest motivations and richest learnings emerge best when we
impose least, when they're given as much autonomy as we can muster during the
process - especially given our "don't fence me in" prickliness about
being told what to do. This is an uncomfortable truth for those of us called to
smart 'em up, since each course's learning objectives lasso students' otherwise
free-ranging interests. How do I direct without dictating? Even
better, how can I teach in ways that help them fall in love with seeking?
Okay, in truth,
sometimes I just cop out and dictate (ab-dictate?). Teachers, like ranchers and
nations, sometimes wave off the gnatty and knotty realities of imposition and
simply pull rank to get others looking and sounding like we think they should.
For example, sometimes I find myself corralling what happens in class by
talking at my students, who diligently write my stuff down. I'm not alone in
this, mind you. Like most of us, I was socialized to believe that
"teaching" equaled "telling." There's the story of a new
dean who, after 20 minutes watching an experienced professor facilitate small
groups expertly working on a problem, sidled up to whisper that he would come
back to observe on a day when the professor was "actually teaching."
That's been a
powerful addiction for verboso-me to kick: the teach/tell/talking belief that
defines "learning" as "students memorizing my
understandings" instead of constructing their own. It resembles belching
in its effects - satisfying for the manufacturer, but less so for belchees.
What are the costs
of this mere exhaling? Students' love of learning can wither in that breeze,
and they often come to resent their teachers' authority (and the things
teachers value, like fresh ideas), just as citizens of occupied countries look
askance at their overseers' virtues. Teaching as an occupation, indeed. Nor
does abdicating one's rank and course goals to curry students' friendship bring
anything more than a new set of problems.
But yea, though I
have walked through the noisome valley of teaching-is-all-about-me, there is
another path - a co-creation, a dialogic practice of building new knowledge and
relationships by exhaling and inhaling as teachers with our ever-learning
students. Tending those pesky teacher-learner relationships is at the
unmissable heart of our work. We negotiate them constantly in the guise of
messages about due dates and message design logics, weekends and paper topics.
One memorable
early experience of such a parley involved trying to re-collect an exam failed
by Jon, a charismatic, disturbed, sweet, and lousy student. He refused to give
back his test, on which were questions I was charged with keeping secret for
other teaching assistants to use. Jon trumpeted to the class that he had done so
poorly he was too ashamed to let me have his test back. When I (young and
foolish) tried to grab it from him, his face lit up as his bug-eyed classmates
held their collective breath, and we knew he had me. After class, I stopped
talking at him:
Me: So* what's the deal here?
He: My samurai self is too shamed by
this performance; I won't be able to show myself at synagogue. I can't let
anyone see this ever again.
Me: Well - that's what I want, too*
what should we do?
He: Can we burn it?
Thus did we find
ourselves seated side-by-side on brick steps, briefly parting the puzzled river
of incoming students with a torched test and secret smiles.
Felicitous
classroom relationships also change what we learn there, morphing teachers from
mainframes to mentors in the process. A novice teacher in class once challenged
(yea!) my claim that all teaching is values-laden. I asked Aimee her favorite
book to use with her kindergartners (Goodnight Moon), we queried the 'moral' of
that story (peace, calm care, and ever-present love), then asked whether she
gave angst, hate, and indifference equal time in her class. Those two minutes
were an epiphany for all of us, and they'd arisen from conversation, not
lecture.
One good colleague
argues that most of the time we don't talk our way into good relationships, we
listen our way into them, one conversation at a time. This is always a
challenge where there's a built-in power difference, especially if I just can't
s*** up - but I know by now that I earn more genuine influence over my
students' learning by judiciously giving up some control over how they get to
epiphany. Though I shiver a bit as I floss my ears and prepare to dance with my
students each teaching day, I'm convinced that responsive-yet-goal-focused
guidance is best for their learning, for them, for us, and for me. Healthy
learning relationships need room to breathe, so to give my students air I'm
learning to s*** up. And perhaps it's time I do that now.
Jeff
Kerssen-Griep, Ph.D.
Associate
Professor & Graduate Program Director Dept. of Communication
Studies University
of Portland 5000 N. Willamette
Blvd.
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