Narratives of teaching
This is a first attempt to weave together some story telling and theory about coming to teaching. It is a story about story telling and a narrative about theorising. Like the very notion of identity that it attempts to describe, this text is provisional and hopefully the first part of a larger project that gathers together a series of narratives into a hypertext structure - more accurately reflecting the enmeshed web of storied identity.
Joking around: circling a narrative of teaching
At my day job in a community newspaper I work in a convivial – some might say nutty – office and we say all sorts of things to each other, make all sorts of jokes. Like a close family we celebrate our familiarity by talking in a private sort of short hand code that is crafted with overstatement and replete with allusion to popular culture.
I’ve been known to say as I go off to teach a class at UTS:
“Well I’m off to corrupt young minds.”
A colleague has said to me on more than one occasion apropos Dead Poet’s Society:
“How was class? Did they stand on their desks and shout ‘Captain my captain’?”
Pretty standard stuff at one level but dig a little deeper and it’s quite interesting.
Both jokes assume that teaching and learning are a powerful experience, or put that slightly differently: they’re about empowerment or trying again: they’re about power.
These jokes also assume that teaching and learning lead to change.
They also assume of course that the locus of power and the impetus for change lies primarily with me the teacher.
Having acknowledged that, they none-the-less assume that teaching demands a particular intimacy between student and teacher. An intimacy that is transformative.
There are other narratives lurking around the edges of these jokes, narratives of allegiance, exchange, propaganda, authority, leadership, exuberance, youth and age.
Starting teaching starting learning
I was thrown into teaching: rung-up two days before classes started and asked could I fill the gap created by a last minute drop-out.
The lecturer I was working with was very supportive but mostly I had to learn on the hop. I guess I made-up how to teach partly from common narratives of teaching – corrupting-young-minds/captain-my-captain amongst others! But I also drew from my professional and personal experience.
I am a journalist who currently works as an editor with a significant staff and company management function. I have previously worked in health education design, delivery and evaluation and a long-time ago I was involved with, and employed by, the Catholic Church in justice-oriented youth work.
So I know something about the principles of communication and learning. I’ve designed behaviour modification campaigns and run peer education groups. So I know the drill: information alone isn’t enough.
As a manager I know that directing staff will get so much out of them while encouraging, empowering and providing the right environment gets a whole lot more. I have also learned that good management requires you to be clear about expectations and to affirm both when they are met and when they are not. I’m a good manager, an open manager, I encourage staff to take a lot of individual responsibility but I’m no big fan of open-ended collective decision-making.
As a church youth worker I learned that personal development happens in communities that provide openness, support and questioning. In our church, judgement was a dirty word. I read Paolo Friere and Ivan Illich. We even had a method: action/reflection/action
Some of these experiences are education specific, some even begin to provide a theoretical framework for thinking about teaching and learning. But success in managing, writing, running a youth group and teaching also comes down to basic human communication skills.
Apart from all this I’ve been a friend, I’ve been a lover, I’ve been a neighbour, I’ve been a customer, I’ve been a brother and a son.
Significantly I’ve also been a student and certainly some of the practices that I have adopted have come from things I appreciated about the ways I was taught.
Two other metaphors
At a party, someone once asked me what an editor does and I spontaneously said: “They’re a bit like an air traffic controller. They make sure everything goes in the direction it’s supposed to so that there are no crashes”. Copy in, copy out: take-off and landing.
When I was quite new to staff management I was speaking to an old church friend and I said: “Managing staff is just like pastoral care”.
Having said that, editorial management is in fact very particular. On the one hand it is very collegial, stories are always being negotiated, teased out explored together but on the other hand editors are the ultimate buck-stops-here managers. Issues of editorial integrity and editorial independence mean that there is a common acceptance of a kind of declarative authority that comes with the editorial mantle.
So there’s the air traffic control function: well-timed, strategic actions and directions that ensure there are no mid-air collisions. And there’s the pastoral care: listening and encouraging. The take-off and landing functions if you like.
Personal narratives teaching narratives
It seems to me the most basic thing that can be said about teaching and learning is that it is a relationship. Having said that, who I am, who I want to be and who I am becoming are critical to my model of teaching.
Even this brief set of anecdotes, metaphors and descriptions reveals a fractured narrative. A confusing web of meanings.
I am of course a set of contradictions.
So why am I circling these anecdotes, these metaphors, these memories?
Because I believe that we think best metaphorically, comparatively, mythically. Our stories never quite make sense until they are told and compared with others.
I can only think about teaching and think about learning by thinking about how I act and react in a range of situations, professional and personal.
My story is cumulative. Entering teaching in my early forties I bring with me my experience of church youth work, which influenced my role as a health educator, which led to my role as a communicator of a different sort as a journalist, which led to editing and management.
This storytelling is what French philosopher Paul Ricouer calls “narrative identity”.
