Reimagining teaching
Spring break musings for the love of and in defense of the craft
Note: This comes from my drafts folder, which means I have been chewing on this one for a while :)
Dearly beloved readers,
It’s spring break, and I’ve been thinking a lot about teaching (OK, I am always thinking a lot about teaching!). I have been thinking about its devaluation as an art, even within educational spaces. I have been thinking of my need to sometimes defend it as a vocation. As something people can be good at. As something worthy of our attention and study. As something that can be learned, and that if it is something we are doing, that we should, in fact, learn something about it.
As something, with great respect and love and care, worthy of our reimagining.
If we want to reimagine education, among other things, we need to reimagine the role of the teacher.
Last month, during a presentation (slides here) for a group that was visiting campus, I shared about some of the things I practice in the classroom. Chatting later with someone who shares an affinity for embodied and creative pedagogies, we talked about how, when we do these things in higher education, we can be seen as out there. Not taken seriously. Not rigorous. Dismissed. Devalued. The dominant expectation is still so oriented towards what Brazilian educator Paulo Freire called the banking model of education - that the professor holds all the knowledge and shares it with the students, and then they are expected to be able to repeat this knowledge at the end of the class. This is often, still, what is seen as rigorous with the academy.
This is why at the start of each course (and many presentations), I talk about redefining rigor. How I believe we can be academically rigorous and rigorous in our relationships and care for each other1, and that these are not only not mutually exclusive but rather mutually reinforcing. The intellect is one way of knowing, but there are other ways, such as the affective (emotional), embodied, and intuitive pathways, which are not “less than,” (or better), just different. And when we are rigorous in our relationships and in our care for each other, we actually create more space for rigorous learning. More becomes possible when it is grounded in relationships based in care, because all learning happens in relationship, and we are all participating in the teaching and learning process, learning from and with each other.
I recently asked my peace education students about what has felt essential to their experience in our program. They expressed that they put more work into the class in an atmosphere based on love (for each other and for learning) rather than fear, when their intrinsic motivation is tapped into rather than external motivation of grades or punishment, which is built into most formal schooling structures.
For me, this is what holistic teaching and learning means. That we teach and learn for our whole lives, our whole selves. That we are all teaching and learning together. We remember that we are bodies living on the land and are part of the earth and we are connected, not just heads detached, thinking thoughts and reading words.
Don’t get me wrong - words are a beautiful way of knowing. I love words, as I hope is abundantly clear by virtue of Enchantable’s existence. But they’re not the only ways to learn or understand or value knowledge. In fact, they’re almost always insufficient.
Nor is there only one way to use them. For example, poetry allows us to access ways of understanding that direct lines of logical reasoning cannot. Whether we are talking about beauty or pain, some things cannot be directly explained (which is one of the reasons I love dreamwork as a pathway of touching things that are hard to access directly, rationally).
This is perhaps especially true when we are talking about conflict and violence, when wounds might still be fresh, tender. We can’t always touch the wound directly. Sometimes we need to dance around it, give it space and air to heal, while still tending to it, watching it, perhaps touching some place near it that doesn’t hurt so much.
I love what I do, and I feel very lucky for every moment I get to do it. It can have many different shapes and forms, but its current form (as resident professor of the peace education programme at UPEACE) is a favorite expression so far in my life, of planting seeds of peace and justice and liberation through education, and getting to experiment with what this can look like together.
I spend a lot of time reimagining education, on my own and with others, in my classes, in communities I’m a part of, at conferences, and here, with you. Recently I had the chance to facilitate a dialogue at the Gross Global Happiness summit on this theme (the notes from which are spread throughout this post), and one of the threads of the discussion was the need to reimagine teachers alongside, concurrent with, reimagining education.
I am trying to reimagine education through my teaching, in how I engage in my craft and in how I show up, and in my relationships with students and colleagues.
What I do is less “teaching” than it is facilitating, holding space, (co)creating conditions for well-being, thriving and collaborative learning. This is my favorite part. In most classes I teach, students take turns facilitating class, and it is really powerful to watch each of them shine in this role, to bring their own lives and contexts and homes and interests to the learning environment. This happens daily, but when they have half of a class session to contribute their learning, interests, passions, and perspectives, they really knock it out of the park, and we are all better for it. This year, the most magical moments for me have been in collaboration and co-creation - the article we co-authored, poems we wrote collaboratively, our feedback sessions on re-imagining the curriculum, and so many other moments of co-creating our learning.
When I teach, I am trying to co-create conditions for students to grow and thrive, to create a space that enable and enhances this possibility. I encourage them to draw out the best in each other, what my students recently described as upliftment. In our class, we uplift each other, they said, regarding the feedback they give each other on the facilitation projects, and just in general. We try to create a supportive atmosphere where everyone can be themselves, and we support each other in doing this, and try to pick each other up when needed, and encourage each other to be our best. Shining light on our best qualities, offering words of encouragement. I see you.
This is also an act of disrupting and unlearning the competitive and individualistic nature of many formal education settings. Individualism and competition are baked into modern formal schooling, which is pervasive in most formal contexts from the moment you walk into a school as a child until you leave university. The emphasis, implicitly or explicitly, is on individual achievement, on learning as an individual act.
Collaboration and co-creation are radical acts of unlearning separation and relearning interbeing.
We are never learning alone. Yes, we each have our unique paths and strengths and gifts and growth edges. But we are always learning in relationship, in community, whether we are conscious of this or not. For me, creating an environment with collaboration and co-creation at the center is the heart of unlearning separation and relearning interbeing (which will be the theme of the talk I give at the Earth Charter Re-Imagining Education conference in a few weeks. As I type this, I realize I am working out my presentation :)
Most schools still follow forms adopted 150 years ago to get people to fit into factory models of working. To train people to function within capitalism. They weren’t designed to draw out our best. They were designed to get us to stay in line, to function as workers within capitalism.
If we want to see other worlds exist, we have to train ourselves otherwise.
We have to teach otherwise.
I know that I am always teaching as much, if not more, in the ways I am showing up for class (and outside of it), in the ways I relate to students, than in the actual “instruction” I give. Yes, there are times of instruction, presentation, facilitation. There are models we look at and apply, articles we critically analyze. But to me, the heart of teaching is this: it is how I show up, my being, the things I practice outside of class that seep out while I am holding the space, the ways we are in relationship with one another in our learning space and beyond it (because it is all learning space).
I also know that my way is not the way - that I have strengths that I offer, and other teachers will offer differently, and all of us can provide valuable experiences while offering our unique strengths and gifts. When I think about reimagining teaching, authenticity feels essential, and so does approaching the classroom based on trust rather than fear and control.
My mom, a lifelong teacher, actively discouraged me from becoming a teacher (not-so-spoiler alert: it didn’t quite work, and she’d probably say that it was yet another example of me doing the opposite of what she told me to do, lol). I remember being in grade school and declaring that I wanted to be a teacher, and her saying that the administrative aspects of it took all the fun and joy out, and that she couldn’t in good faith encourage me in this direction.
Everyone always thinks they know better than me how to teach, she would complain. The parents, the administrators who had never set foot in a classroom, were always telling her how to do her job. Always thinking, because they had been students, that they knew how to teach. Everyone has an idea of how to do it. No one respects it.
She was right, and I have experienced this. There seems to be this underlying fundamental assumption that anyone can teach. That it is not worthy of our study, our effort, our practice, our reflection.
I have been thinking about this a lot lately when encountering a few instances like this, where, when I have brought up something about the art of teaching, I have been scoffed at, dismissed. Why would anyone need to learn how to teach?
Perhaps this is particularly rife in academia. While most people who get a Ph.D. end up doing some form of teaching as a professor, you can go through a whole Ph.D. program and not have a single class on teaching. Which can mean, at times, that there can be a lack of respect for the art of it, for the craft.
(I know my educators reading this are nodding, saying tell me something I don’t know. This will not be surprising to them, nothing new).
Those of us who are in roles where we are teaching have the responsibility for learning and honing our craft. There is always more to learn. This is why a colleague and I have started a faculty pedagogy club, a space to share inspiration and things that we try in our classrooms that work well, in addition to questions about challenges. It is a space for us to exchange, which to me, is the heart of teaching and learning. We do it together. Faculty pedagogy club is a space for us to nerd out about our teaching, a space to share ideas of what is working in our classrooms and what we are struggling with. It is a space of encouragement and support, where we can exchange ideas and collaborate. It also helps us build community among faculty, which I have no doubt will make us all better teachers.
To reimagine education, we also must reimagine the role that teachers play within it. I don’t think reimagining education means there are no teachers. But our role becomes different. We let go of the need to control. We lead, but we don’t need to dominate. We offer what we can with humility, and with a willingness to not know and be wrong. With a willingness to learn ourselves. We become facilitators, guides, space holders, circle keepers. Our role is not to control or force or uphold imaginary standards and rules. Our role becomes fostering a space of care and love - of learning, life, and each other - a space of possibilities, where everyone can thrive, and where through bringing our full selves and our stories and curiosities and passions, we can become more, together.
I am on spring break, and I am headed off on some adventures, one being a re-imagining education conference, the others being a return to one of my many homes (Colorado Springs) and the humor conference. I am sure I’ll have stories, inspiration, and ponderings to share with you along the way :)
With love and care,
Stephanie
Ideas I have drawn inspiration from Bianca Suyama of Unidiversidade das Kebradas of Ecoversities Alliance and the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective