Tag: experience

41/365 We Must Be Our Whole Selves in the Classroom

Remember when you were in school and saw a teacher out in the real world? Do you remember that feeling of awe as you realized this person existed outside of the classroom? It was a mind-bending experience for me, filled with questions – Could they still grade without the classroom? Were they talking to everyone in the grocery store about the quadratic formula? Were they hiding our homework in their purses?

Then, when I was safely back in our roles as teachers and students in the classroom, I could say, “I saw you this weekend!” as though we’d caught them out of bounds. Those are times burned into our memories.

They have no place in the schools we need.

As much as we can, we must be out whole selves in the classroom.

It is easy to step into a classroom and decide, “This is my teacher self. This is who the students will see.” Then, when the day is done, we return to our nerdy appreciation of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, meet up with our kickball teams, or join with our fiction writers’ workshop as though the two identities are completely separate.

The separation of our professional selves and our private selves must be maintained, to be sure. Taking the problems and worries of every student home with us each night creates martyrs, not teachers.

Still, there is a place for our whole selves in the classroom.

This is the support to which our students must have access. We bring social capital with us. To ignore that and deny our students access is to do them a detriment and limit their access to the “real world.”

Whatever we were before we were teachers, we must take these roles with us into the classroom. In fact, we cannot help it, so we might as well make it explicit.

No matter the social standing of our students outside of school we must consider ourselves as conduits to the cultures they might access when they leave us. Much has been made of the “funds of knowledge” in which our students exist outside of schools, in their daily cultures. To be sure, these are cultures from which teachers should and must learn.

Little to nothing has been mentioned of the funds of knowledge existing in the non-school lives of teachers. Learning lives there. Whatever can be used by students to access the lives of their teachers can be used by teachers to access the lives of students.

As much as we must be our best teacher selves, we must consider how much of our whole selves we can be in the classroom.

A former student recently asked about how much she might share regarding her past. Now in college and preparing for student teaching, this student knew the hardships she’d known in childhood could act as anchors for her students. She knew she would have found it easier to navigate the difficult and tumultuous psychological spaces she’s encountered if she’d had a teacher in her life who’d said, “I’ve been where you are, and I found the way out.” Realizing she was about to enter the lives of her own students, this young woman wanted to make sure she was as transparent as she could be so that her students saw her as a source of strength if they were working through some of the same personal crises.

Certainly, teaching does not require we lay our lives bare for our students in hopes such nakedness of spirit will help them at our experience. When possible, though, whether it be a favorite television show or a traumatic event, begin our whole selves in the classroom gives students access not only to who we are as people, but to who they might become.

18/365 Back to Dewey 1.6 – ‘The Meaning of Purpose’

Since freedom resides in the operations of intelligent observation and judgment by which a purpose is developed, guidance given by the teacher to the exercise of the pupils’ intelligence is an aid to freedom, not a restriction upon it.

– John Dewey

Experience & Education

This post continues a mini-series examining John Dewey’s Experience & Education chapter-by-chapter.

For Chapter 6, Dewey continues clarification of terms, setting his sights on purpose.

The chapter provides yet another clarification of the frequent view that Dewey was proposing a melee approach to learning, letting students loose in a situation and then cleaning them up for learning later on. In Ch. 6, we find the opposite as Dewey highlights the importance of pausing in moments of impulse so that those impulses might lead to desire.

If the earlier chapters were instructing readers on the importance of a philosophical and critically considered approach to the broader scope of progressive education, here we find that need translated to the individual classrooms and students. What is being done, at all times, must be considered thoughtfully. While this is not surprising from a philosopher, Dewey’s considerations are not philosophical as much as they are practical.

If we are to have purpose in education, we must consider our impulses regarding our experiences, hold tight to them, and reflect on how (or whether) we would like to see them enacted.

To do this, Dewey asks that teachers and students observe the surroundings of the learning and move from there to collect knowledge, organize that knowledge and then set out with purpose driven by that knowledge.

He sets it out in clearer terms:

 The formation of purposes is, then, a rather complex intellectual operation. It involves (1) observation of surrounding conditions; (2) knowledge of what has happened in similar situations in the past, a knowledge obtained partly by recollection and partly from the in- formation, advice, and warning of those who have had a wider experience; and (3) judgment which puts together what is observed and what is recalled to see what they signify. A purpose differs from an original impulse and desire through its translation into a plan and method of action based upon foresight of the consequences of acting under given observed conditions in a certain way.

 

Rather than rejecting tools of traditional education wholesale, Dewey asks for a blending. Attend to the impulses and nature of students, yes, but do not do so without an eye to judgement, observation, consideration and guidance.

Things I Know 93 of 365: I should do as I ask students to do

Experience is one thing you can’t get for nothing.

– Oscar Wilde

I laid across a bean bag chair in my room today trying to conjure up a memory.

My G11 students are writing reader autobiographies as their quarter three benchmark projects. The assignment calls for them to write from 7 to 15 vignettes inspired by moments of their readerly lives.

As it’s been a while since I’ve written a vignette, I committed to completing the assignment as well.

Thus, I was sprawled on a red pleather bean bag at the end of the day.

My first vignette was about the brown leather recliner in my grandparents’ living room. It was the chair where my grandfather would read to me before bedtime when I was little.

I tried to pull that memory to me through the years and carefully mold it back together on the screen. I attempted to make it something someone would want to read.

As I was typing, one of my students, Luna, was in the multi-colored bean bag opposite me. Having difficulty framing her first vignette as a single literary photograph because it took place over a stretch of time, Luna kept asking me to look over what she was writing.

Her vignette detailed a span of her middle school years and I offered suggestions and feedback a few times as she was composing.

After each piece of feedback, I returned to my writing, attempting to convey the image of footy-pajamaed me learning to sight read as my grampa read “just one more book.”

Finally, toward the end of the class period, I got it where I wanted it. Well, I got it as close to where I wanted it as I could hope of a first draft.

I had that feeling of one who has created – that need to share.

And so, I turned to Luna and handed her my laptop. I didn’t say anything or preface her reading with any comments. I handed her my laptop and asked her to read.

I’ve had students read pieces of my writing before. I’ve shared journal entries. This was different. I’d written a memory in all its first-draft roughness and turned and shared it with my student.

If I had to guess, I’d say the vulnerability in that moment is close to the vulnerability my students feel each time they submit a piece of work in class. For that reason, I’m glad I’ll be writing my remaining vignettes and submitting them to my students.

I should be doing more of that. While grading, planning and the rest of being a teacher often prevents me from completing every assignment I ask of my students, crafting these moments and embracing the vulnerability of sharing them with my students is a stiff reminder of the openness I ask of my students each time I ask them to write or share in class. It’s a reminder I’ll use next time I’m tempted to breeze through a stack of assignments for grading.

If I’m going to ask them to share their ideas with me, I need to remember (and experience) all the rawness inherent in that sharing.