Tbers,
A reminder that the first Teaching Breakfast of the semester is tomorrow at
8 am in Morris Hall. The topic: Teaching. Hope to see you there. To get the
discussion going I offer the following by Professor Jeff Kerssen-Griep, of
the Department of Communications Studies at the University of Portland in
Portland, OR. The article first appeared in the September 2006, issue of
Portland magazine. It was commissioned after Kerssen-Griep received a number
of teaching awards. (http://www.up.edu/portlandmag/2006_fall/index.html --
which was twice recently named the country's best University mag). (C)2006,
University of Portland. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
Teaching as an Imposition
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 USAmericans'
"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: Soİ 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, tooİ 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.
Portland, OR 97203-5798
Mr. James B. Greenberg
Director Teaching, Learning and Technology Center
Milne Library
SUNY College at Oneonta
Oneonta, New York 13820
blog: The 32nd Square at http://aristotle.oneonta.edu/37_the_32nd_square
email: [log in to unmask]
phone: 607-436-2701
fax: 607-436-3081
IM: oneontatltc
"Ignorance is curable, stupidity lasts forever"
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