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Teaching, our different selves, teaching difference

If our identity is constantly being negotiated, if our stories are constantly in the process of being told, if our experience as teacher is only one of our many “multiple ontologies,” we must recognise this fluidity in our students as well.

If I have learned the story of myself as a teacher through rehearsing the stories of myself as manager, editor, youth worker and listening for new inflections in those familiar stories, then what of our student’s other stories?

To return to one of my original statements: at its most fundamental level, teaching is about the negotiation of a series of relationships. Or expressed slightly differently: it occurs in the unfolding of a set of inter-related stories.

In the current academic environment with its focus on the achievement of efficiencies and its emphasis on the measurability of learning “outcomes” it is easy to neglect broader narratives of teaching and learning.

As Stephen Rowland has written these narratives “concern, for example, the purpose of teaching, the values which might underlie it, the kind of academic community and the kind of society we are involved in creating, as well as the immediate questions of what to do with a group of students.” (Rowland 2002)

Rowland reminds us that while the broader questions may be dismissed as armchair philosophy to concentrate only on the “what to do” questions runs the risk of producing competent technique without real professionalism. He goes on:

“In order to be professional teachers, academics need to understand how practice relates to wider social values and purposes. Without this, teaching may merely serve purposes which are beyond the teachers’ ken, which may be quite at odds with their own moral values, and which may merely recreate current fads and fashions about teaching. Such an approach to teaching would be uncritical: learning about it would be only a surface learning, like that of the undergraduate student who learns how to perform experiments without understanding their wider significance. Teaching, from this point of view, is no more than a technical activity.” (Rowland 2002)

Even practices, such as the preparation of teaching portfolios, which may at first seem to be an excellent way of exploring narratives of teaching, are often co-opted by the discourse of measurement and accountability.

In a fascinating article about the construction of a discourse of “the good teacher” Nicoll & Harrison (2003:32) point to one narrative of the “educator as assurer of organisational quality and efficiency” who is encouraged to “keep appropriate records of their teaching and support” and “monitor their own teaching”. They argue that far from actually leading to good teaching this leads to a “scientistic” framework “within which both learners and teachers can be regulated and controlled”.

In a field of activity characterised by diversity of settings and discourse communities, teaching might be better understood not as teacher centred and curriculum led, but as “a mediating domain”, a set of complex and contextualised negotiations in which what is meant by learning in higher education is worked out (Lea, 1998, p. 156). Generic statements of outcomes, principles and values effectively marginalise these more dynamic, contingent, and located accounts of professional settings and actions by promoting a generalised and abstracted view within which they can be adequately encompassed.

It is in story telling, to ourselves and to each other as colleagues and with and to our students, that we learn to navigate beyond the generic concepts of either teacher or learner. The narrative approach to development as a teacher moves us quickly beyond metaphors of delivery and moves towards a critical ethical framework. As Nicoll & Harrison write:

Systematic and universalised pedagogic practices are seductive in appearing to offer the possibility for efficiency in delivering learning, but fail to engage with ethical and critical dimensions that are central to processes of teaching and learning. Separating out the “how” from the “why” and “what” of higher education allows questions about the meanings and purposes of education to be marginalised.

The why of teaching is often marginalised in the current managerial culture but it is at the heart of an integrated narrative approach to reflective practice.

If we begin to establish a lattice narrative that brings together the “how”, the “why” and the “what” of our teaching – life – experience this will form the best basis for understanding and valuing the complexity of both our own and our student’s stories.

Identity and Practice

So back to those off-handed comments with which I began.

Both the romantic view of teaching that comes from Dead Poet’s Society and the subversive view of teaching that goes with the playful notion of corrupting young minds hark back to Socratic notions of teacher as identity. Jorn Bramann makes this connection in his description of Robin William's John Keating:

Besides being a Romantic in the spirit of the New England Transcendentalists, Keating is also a significant Socrates figure. Not that he aspires to repeat the martyrdom of the Athenian gadfly, but his love of teaching puts him eventually in the same position in which his archetypal forerunner found himself. In the conservative environment of Welton, Keating is an intellectual subversive; his practices and pronouncements challenge the assumptions and habits of the community in which he lives. Like Socrates he lives out of his own individual conscience; he deliberately stays clear of running with the herd. He is aware of the unsettling effect of his presence and his special status, and he explicitly defines his usefulness in terms of being a gadfly: "Every school needs someone like me."

Much of the contemporary literature on teaching and learning has worked hard to posit a diametrically opposite view of teaching as a set of learned practices. This contemporary model critiques the Socratic view as idealist, essentialist and almost quasi-mystical. And there are obvious dangers.

While the romantic model posits a teaching identity invested with too much assumed power - even in its self assigned subversion - the new model, which seeks strength in technique, is also flawed.

While we have much to learn by paying attention to the latest research in teaching scholarship our success as teachers (as much of this research itself would suggest) lies in our ability to match technique with reflection and reflection and technique with passion.

And our reflection, as teachers and as human beings always begins with our narrative identity – our story making self inextricably enmeshed in the collective web of storytelling.

References

Gergen, Kenneth J, 1996, “Technology and the self: from the essential to the sublime,” in Debra Grodin, & Thomas R. Lindlof, (eds), Constructing the self in a mediated world, Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.

Gergen, Kenneth J, 1991, The saturated self: dilemmas of identity in contemporary life, New York: Basic Books.

Nicoll, Kathy & Harrison, Roger, 2003, Constructing the Good Teacher in Higher Education: the discursive work of standards Studies in Continuing Education, Vol. 25, No. 1, pp. 23-35   

Rasmussen, David, 2002, ‘Rethinking subjectivity: narrative identity and the self,’ in Richard A. Cohen & James L. Marsh (eds) Ricoeur as another: the ethics of subjectivtity, Albany: State university of New York Press.

Ricoeur, Paul, 1976, Interpretation theory: Discourse and the surplus of meaning, Fort Worth, Texas: Texas Christian University Press.

Ricoeur, Paul, 1988, Time and narrative, (volume 3) translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Ricoeur, Paul, 1991, A Ricoeur reader: reflection and imagination, edited by Mario J. Valdes, Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Ricoeur, Paul, 1992, Oneself as another, translated by Kathleyn Blamey, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Rowland, Stephen, 2002, ‘Surface learning about teaching in higher education: The need for more critical conversations,’ The International Journal for Academic Development, Vol.6, No. 2, pp. 162-167