For the past eight years I’d been preparing myself to work in a non-interventionist school, and I’d just landed what I thought was the perfect job. But almost as soon as I walked into the classroom, I had an uneasy feeling.

This online lecture is the story of what happened after I walked into that classroom, and of the ideas that helped me to make sense of, and to survive, the revolt.

The student revolt: Part One

In this first part, you’ll see references to a unit you’re not doing (PPLE) and hear about a lecture you haven’t heard yet (‘The Sticky Tape Poem’). Ignore these. I made these videos last year.

A.S. Neill

As you’re listening to the story of the student revolt, notice the way my assumptions were being challenged. I had assumed that all my preparation for those eight years was going to mean that this job would be easy. I’d worked with a world-famous non-interventionist (R.F.Mackenzie) and I’d read widely some of the current non-interventionist literature, particularly that of R.F.Mackenzie’s good friend A.S. Neill. But my expectations were disappointed; my assumptions turned out to be inadequate.

Some thinking/writing prompts

1. I make a distinction between ‘freedom to’ and ‘freedom from’, and suggest that being clear about this distinction makes a difference in our teaching. What do you think about this? Can you imagine a situation in your own classroom where this might become a crucial distinction to be making, for yourself and/or for your students? Have you had any experiences yourself where this has been an important distinction?
2. I finish Part 1 by describing how things slowly changed, and imply that it was because I stuck to my guns and didn’t compromise. Did my explanation sound convincing? In Part Two I suggest that maybe there was more involved. What other explanations for the turnaround can you see, even before viewing Part Two?

_______________________________________________

The Student Revolt: Part Two

So, I’d assumed that this school would be the perfect place for me, and then ran into unexpected difficulties. In Part Two I explore other ideas that have helped me to make sense of what happened then, ideas that have continued to be useful to me as a secondary teacher.

In particular, I talk about three ideas:

1. a natural resistance to the unfamiliar
2. the flight-fight instinct
3. the mother-teacher’s need to survive

Some reading/thinking/writing prompts

1. In Part 2 I suggest that there are three further ideas that help teachers understand some of the dynamics of classroom management: a natural resistance to change, the flight-fight instinct, and the mother-teacher’s need to survive.  Do any of these ideas illuminate experiences that you have had? Have you seen any of these processes evident in our own unit, during our first month?
2. What articles are you finding in e-Reserve that are helping you to understand more about classroom dynamics and how to work with these? [For those of you with access to the Ning, here's an excellent example by Claire of how you might like to write about one of these articles.]
3. Towards the end of Part 2, the image of a shoot sprouting from a burnt tree appears on the screen. [This was taken after the Victorian bushfires a few years ago.] Did the image seem appropriate to the subject matter? Did it speak to you?
4. 

   Donald Winnicott

   Here are some of Donald Winnicott’s own words, when describing how crucial it is for the baby (student) that the mother (teacher) to be able to survive attacks:

The subject says to the object: ‘I destroyed you’, and the object is there to receive the communication. From now on the subject says: ‘Hello object!’ ‘I destroyed you.’ ‘I love you.’ ‘You have value for me because of your survival of my destruction of you.’ ‘While I am loving you I am all the time destroying you in (unconscious) fantasy.’… The subject can now use the object that has survived. It is important to note that it is not only that the subject destroys the object because the object is placed outside the area of omnipotent control. It is equally significant to state this the other way round and to say that it is the destruction of the object that places the object outside the area of the subject’s omnipotent control. In these ways the object develops its own autonomy and life, and (if it survives) contributes-in to the subject according to its own properties. [Winnicott (1971). Playing and reality. London, Tavistock. p91]

I’ll be saying some more about this strange but very useful idea in a subsequent lecture. What thoughts, memories or responses do Winnicott’s words evoke in you?

Theory is all very interesting for some people, and I guess I have to know it because it’s required for our assessments. But really I think what’s going to make me a good teacher is the experience. I learn from doing, not from reading about stuff.

It’s a sentiment I hear a lot from students.  As I slept my way through my undergraduate degree, some forty years ago, it’s a sentiment I used to share. I learnt a little theory in order to pass my assessments. Any deeper connection between theory and practice pretty much passed me by.

But my relationship with theory changed as soon as I started teaching and I realized how little I knew. In some ways, I was like a doctor who snoozed through the lecture on how to treat a broken leg and then found himself in a war zone.

I discovered three important things about theory.

Good theory is consolation. When I found myself becoming overwhelmed, it was wonderful to discover that other teachers had felt similar feelings and were trying to think their way to a more powerful practice. In my early years, I read a lot of John Holt, George Dennison, A.S. Neill, Neil Postman and R.F. Mackenzie, and I discovered a whole community of teachers who struggled with some of the same issues as I did, and who found consolation in exploring relevant educational ideas. It felt better to be a part of a community of such thinkers. Ever since I’ve had a preference for theorists who convey a sense of the complexity and unpredictability of our work (Barbara Comber, Elizabeth Moje, Rudolf Dreikurs, Carl Jung, Howard Gardner, David Perkins) over those who imply that the art and craft of teaching is just a matter of using a model.

Good theory brings courage.  We feel most discouraged when we feel alone, without help. In my early weeks with Andrew, I just wanted him to go away; I didn’t know what to do. As I read the paragraphs from Dreikurs’ book about possible motivations behind a power struggle, I no longer felt alone. Dreikurs knew about boys like Andrew! There was a way through this tangle! Even before I’d read about his suggested approaches, I felt a sense of relief and renewed optimism. This was explored territory.

Good theory builds effectiveness. As a young teacher, I kept experiencing situations for which I had no strategies.  Discovering ideas that led to more effective action made a difference.  Holt taught me that certain kinds of teaching makes children say stupid things. Dennison taught me that apparently random acts of violence in the playground are governed by an intricate set of unspoken rules. A.S. Neill told me that a certain kind of self-government is not only possible but builds a sense of ethics. Neil Postman showed me how to use questions to enliven learning. R.F. Mackenzie encouraged me to link learning to bodies. Each of these ideas changed my teaching for the better.

Good theory does all these three things. Theory learned just to pass a university assessment does none of them.

Carl Jung

Jung reminds us that, of course, no theory explains everything.

The moment one forms an idea of a thing and successfully catches one of its aspects, one invariably succumbs to the illusion of having caught the whole. One never considers that a total apprehension is right out of the question. Not even an idea posited as total is total, for it is still an entity on its own with unpredictable qualities. This self-deception certainly promotes peace of mind: the unknown is named, the far has been brought near, so that one can lay one’s finger on it. One has taken possession of it, and it has become an inalienable piece of property, like a slain creature of the wild that can no longer run away.

Jung ‘On the nature of the psyche’ CW 8, 356.

But it would be a mistake to imagine, as I once did, that therefore theory has no uses at all.

************

[Images from Antaryamin's blog]

]]> http://degreesfiction.wordpress.com/2012/02/20/thinking-about-theory/feed/ 1 steveshann theory Carl Jung theorypractice http://degreesfiction.wordpress.com/2012/02/13/the-mythopoetic-function-of-storytelling/ http://degreesfiction.wordpress.com/2012/02/13/the-mythopoetic-function-of-storytelling/#comments Sun, 12 Feb 2012 22:48:55 +0000 steveshann http://degreesfiction.wordpress.com/?p=124 ]]> We dimmed the lights for the 150 education students in the lecture hall, I paused for a few moments to get myself out of the day-to-day and into the storytelling space, and then I began.

Once upon a time a strong and powerful Tzar ruled in a country far away. And among his servants was a young archer, and this archer had a horse – a horse of power, a great horse with a broad chest, eyes like fire, and hoofs of iron.

Well, one day long ago, in the green time of the year, the young archer rode through the forest on his horse of power. The trees were green; there were little blue flowers on the ground under the trees; the squirrels ran in the branches, and the hares in the undergrowth; but no birds sang. The young archer rode along the forest path and listened for the singing of the birds, but there was no singing. The forest was silent, and the only noises in it were the scratching of four-footed beasts, the dropping of fir cones, and the heavy stamping of the horse of power in the soft path.

“What has come to the birds?” said the young archer.

He had scarcely said this before he saw a big curving feather lying in the path before him. The feather was larger than a swan’s, larger than an eagle’s. It lay in the path, glittering like a flame; for the sun was on it, and it was a feather of pure gold. Then he knew why there was no singing in the forest. For he knew that the firebird had flown that way, and that the feather in the path before him was a feather from its burning breast.

The firebird, the horse of power, the Princess Vasilissa

For the next 30 minutes, I told the story that I had learned, pretty much off by heart, over the previous couple of days.

After it had finished and I got back to my room, I found that a colleague had sent me an email.

You broke all the rules, you know. Academics don’t begin a year’s course like that. It was uncomfortable, unsettling, and I watched as, at the beginning, a number of the students in the lecture hall reached for their mobile phones, or swapped puzzled looks. I was uneasy myself, and found myself struggling with my own cynicism and impatience. At first I wanted the story to move faster.

Yet I found that your story-telling put me in a different time and place.  I’m not sure it’s my time and place, but once I let my resistances loose from their moorings, once I dropped my cynicism and doubt, I did notice that I’d entered the dreaming realm, where connections are made and many things are possible.

In the week that followed (last week), I listened to the students as they talked and wrote about their reactions.

A couple were incensed by the implicit sexism or questionable political and moral messages.

But being a stickler for the rules, it did irk me that the archer got an entirely happy ending and did not seem to learn any particular moral lesson- he did the wrong thing initially picking up the feather, then he captured a beautiful innocent bird, then he kidnapped a girl, whilst HOP solved all of his problems for him and the archer triumphed and reaped all of the rewards in the end.

Others were impatient with all the repetitions, and talked about how, in today’s world, stories are told quite differently now, not just with words but with sound and fast-moving images.

My response to the story was less about what the story could mean and more to do with my own feelings while listening to the story. I found it hard to settle into listening mode and felt myself more interested in the responses of the people sitting around me. Some people were concentrating on Steve and you could tell that they were listening intently. Others around me were fidgeting and seemed to be looking to others for reassurance. It was a strange situation for the majority of the lecture. For most of us, storytelling without accompanying images or sound is uncommon.

Some enjoyed the ‘time and place’ created by the story and found themselves thinking about it afterwards.

… it seemed to reflect one of the assumptions that I bring to the course and that I had been thinking about.  That assumption being that (in my opinion) some of the real learning that I have done has been facilitated by something that was stressful – whether it was a test, exam, trying something new, getting out of my comfort zone, being wholly responsible for something – and this is both in education and in employment.

Finally, many wondered why I had told it, and what was the moral of the story.

This is a common reaction, an offshoot (I believe) of our living in a society that values the instrumental above the mythopoetic. We are taught (partly through the stories we are told when we’re young) that every story has a moral, that the purpose of storytelling is to teach children the rational rules of living together. We have lost touch with the other function of stories (and dreams), which is to put us in touch with the mythopoetic. This is less to do with how we ought to live and more to do with how life (even the life of the invisible and unconscious) actually is.

Stories are like dreams. They reflect (often in weirdly wonderful ways) hidden realities about life.

At the beginning of the story, the Horse of Power tells the young archer ‘Don’t pick up the feather. If you pick up the feather, you will know the meaning of trouble.’ The archer picks up the feather, and the Horse of Power then guides the young archer through all the trials that comes his way. This is enormously confusing if we’re looking for the moral of the story. Should we listen to advice, or ignore it? Should the archer have been punished for picking up the feather, or rewarded?

But if we approach the story in a quite different (mythopoetic) frame of mind, it’s not confusing at all. If we think about the characters in a story as if they are all different aspects of the one consciousness (different parts of ourselves, if you like), then the fact that we have a voice inside us that tells us ‘don’t take risks’ and another that says ‘live life to the fullest, even if that means a less secure existence’, makes perfect sense.

One of the reasons I told this story at the beginning of a teacher education unit is that my students arrive with a cacophony of competing voices in their heads, a mixture of yearnings and doubts about what a university course can give them, of hopes and fears about what this choice to become a teacher might involve.

One of the students put it this way:

Perhaps also when we have suspended belief in the real world logic and science we have left space in our minds for the content of the story to move in, often bringing with it useful knowledge or behaviours.

The phrase “and the moral of the story is” points us at a group of stories which all cultures seem to have developed, stories designed to impart a moral lesson. Other stories convey skills or provide advice appropriate to the cultures which tell them. Even a tale such as this has obvious moral trends, the cruel and greedy Tsar and the brave archer. We are told of the perils of blind greed and of the rewards not only of being faithful to our duty, but of listening to others. The Tsar is alone in his greed while the Archer in his virtuous behaviour attracts people, well People and Animals to his cause.

I don’t think it is Steve’s intent to pass on a moral message with this story, perhaps he merely wants us to be left thinking of as many reasons this story could be relevant as possible.

Making the decision to become a teacher is making the decision to pick up the golden feather. The story tells us that we’re about to experience life more fully as a result.

The story

‘Didn’t I ask you to read the paragraph and then respond to the stimulus question?’ I asked the blond-haired boy in desk at the back of the room.

This was my first year of teaching English, and this day (somewhere into week 3) was the first lesson with my Year 8 class when I’d felt that at least most of the class were engaged in the task I’d set them.

But not Andrew.

He slowly turned his head as I spoke, and looked calmly and challengingly at my face. He didn’t say anything.

‘Andrew, didn’t I ask everyone to read the paragraph and respond …’ For some reason, I could feel the confidence draining out of me.

‘Mmm. Let’s see,’ he finally said slowly. ‘Yes, I think you did say something along those lines.’

The casual way he tossed this back at me was confusing. So were the feelings of anger welling up inside me. How dare he speak to me like that! What was going on here?

‘So?’ I said.

‘So?’ he replied.

‘So do it!’ I said, struggling to stop myself from shouting.

He smiled and picked up his pen, then held it up as if saying, ‘Here’s the pen. See, I’ve picked it up, and I’m now going to write some meaningless words in order to show you what a pointless exercise this whole thing is.’

I walked away from the desk, feeling utterly defeated.  Why couldn’t he see that I didn’t want him to be doing meaningless work? What was going on in this exchange that had left me feeling so weak?

It’s now forty years since that exchange, yet I still remember the boy and I still remember the feelings of helplessness I felt on that day, and on subsequent days, as I struggled to control my urge to win the battle with Andrew.

Moments like this one help force us to examine our assumptions. I entered that Year 8 classroom with a number of assumptions about students, about my subject, and about teaching, and not all of them were helping.

My assumptions included:

1. I’m young and enthusiastic, and my enthusiasm will infect my students.
2. Students need a classroom environment that is relaxed and friendly, where they can express themselves freely and explore ideas without fear of ridicule.
3. If a student is not responding to what I’m teaching, there’s a reason for it, and trying to see things from the student’s point of view is going to help.
4. I need to be flexible and responsive in my teaching.
5. Students like to succeed, and if I show them how, then they’ll work hard.
6. Teachers generally talk too much.

Looking back now, I can see where some of these assumptions came from. When I was at school, I was bored by teachers who talked too much, and at university I fell asleep in lectures (until I stopped going to them). If I was given the freedom to explore things in my own way, I loved learning and worked hard.

There was another reason why I assumed that, if I took an interest in my student, then they would respond. At the age of 10 I was sent by my parents to boarding school. My father was a diplomat, he was regularly posted overseas, and my parents believed that I needed to be brought up in my native country and that my schooling needed ongoing stability. To begin with I hated it, and found the teachers distant and their teaching uninspiring. But then, as I entered my later secondary years at the boarding school, I was taught by teachers who seemed interested in my ideas and development, who loved their subjects, and who thought deeply about education. I responded immediately to these teachers, and assumed that all students would respond like this, given the right circumstances.

Of course I didn’t articulate these assumptions at the time. I was not really aware that I had them. It was only after my tangle with Andrew that I began to began to see that my asssumptions were inadequate.

Andrew’s quiet, successful rebellion continued, and it continued to get under my skin. I tried different tacks – chatting with him about things that had nothing to do with school, ignoring him, threatening him with school punishments, keeping him in at lunch time – but he continued to quietly undermine my confidence, my sense that I had any legitimate authority.

One day I wrote a long letter to my aunt, who was a teacher herself and was now working as a teacher trainer, telling her of my struggles with Andrew, and asking her advice. She sent me a book and suggested I read a chapter from it, and encouraged me to write or ring her to talk through the issue.

The book was by Rudolf Dreikurs, and was called Psychology in the Classroom. That night, I read the chapter recommended by my aunt.

Rudolf Dreikurs

Dreikurs suggested that all student behavior had a purpose, that it was all aimed at gaining some sense of belonging or connection, but that some students pursued this in irrational ways in the mistaken belief that their behaviour would result in them achieving the acceptance they yearned for.

At first, I found this confusing. If Andrew was wanting to belong, why was he going about it in ways that not only angered me but also seemed to alienate him from many of his classmates? But then I realized that in fact he had earned some kind of respect or recognition from those around him; his classmates could see that he held some kind of power, that he knew how to undermine authority.

I read on.

Dreikurs looked at those students whose behaviour was in some ways troubling, and suggested that these students fell into four categories. There were those students who attempted to achieve recognition by attention seeking. There were those who continually displayed feelings of inadequacy. There were those who were motivated by feelings of revenge. And there were those who challenged the teacher’s power.

I read the chapter several times. I did this not because I was going to be tested on it, not because I was going to do an academic assignment and needed to demonstrate that I was ‘keeping up to date with the research’.I did it because my previous thinking was inadequate and I was experienced distress as a result. I was reading it to help me to solve a real problem in the real world.

As I read, I kept looking to see what Dreikurs might say about a student like Andrew At first it seemed to me that Andrew fitted into at least three of the four categories. But the one that resonated the most was the last.

Andrew had sucked me into a power struggle.

I remember, still, the moment I read a sentence which said something like this:

The moment the teacher engages with the power struggle, the teacher has lost.

Dreikurs had concrete advice about what to do in situations like this one. I followed the advice, and my relationship with Andrew changed markedly. He did all right in that class, and I survived.

 ****

All of that happened in my first year of teaching, exactly forty years ago. I’ve still got the book, and my teaching was permanently affected by what I read in it, and by what happened with Andrew.

Dreikurs helped to free me from the limitations of some of my assumptions. His ideas helped me to survive the challenges of those early years, and gave me ways of being more effective with students like Andrew.

Dreikurs was no a panacea, of course. He helped then, but he didn’t help with other students and other situations. I continue to find aspects my assumptions about teaching and learning inadequate. I continue to have to learn and adjust.

But his theories helped, as do all good theories, whether they come in books, lectures, conversations with more experienced colleagues or our own flashes of insight.

No theory is universally true, always applicable, the solution to every problem. Yes, we learn on the job. But without theory, we remain relatively trapped by the inadequacy of our underdeveloped assumptions.

Then, last week, I received a reviewer’s response to an article I’d submitted to a journal:

… the approach appears innovative but the article lacks substance. .. there is very little analysis here … There are also far too many rhetorical claims … The teacher’s role here needs to be given far more detailed treatment … [Ideas tend] to be unproblematically and somewhat naively dealt with.

I’ve been wrestling, since receiving this feedback, with two opposing tendencies.

The first is to worry that I don’t know enough, haven’t read enough, haven’t understood things deeply enough. The danger here is that I end either being frozen into inactivity or setting on the impossible quest to know everything before I write another word. The article under review at the moment is about Spinoza’s ideas and their applicability to education. I have read a fair bit of Spinoza’s work and many commentaries; I intuitively sense Spinoza’s grasp of something deeply true, and his ideas illuminate my experience. But there are parts of his writing I don’t understand, and no doubt there are important commentaries I haven’t read. There is an internal voice saying that I won’t be ready to say anything until I’ve understood everything.

The second tendency is to go in the opposite direction. I catch myself becoming too superficially accommodating. Because my job depends on me being published, the temptation is to pacify the reviewer in whatever way will get the article past the gatekeepers. I imagine that this is what students in my classes are tempted to do when I critique their work; if that’s what Dr Shann wants, well, I want to pass this unit, so that’s what I’ll give him!

But I’m 65, have read and taught and lived a bit, and I know from experience that resisting these temptations and taking the critiques seriously always improves my writing. (I rewrote the paragraph that Hilary found embarrassing, and many of the other paragraphs in that draft as well, and she published a book that we all, I think, felt reasonably pleased with.)

Usually an unfavourable comment is the result of flaws in my writing that have led to misreadings and misunderstandings.

In the case of last week’s reviewer’s comment, I’m guessing that the critic has misunderstood what I’m trying to do, and that’s probably because I haven’t been clear enough myself about what it is about Spinoza’s ideas that I think are so useful for classroom teachers struggling with the complex world of the classroom.

Spinoza

What is it that Spinoza’s worldview offers the teacher? I think it’s his idea that everything is a part of nature.

Most who have written on the emotions, the manner of human life, seem to have dealt not with natural things which follow the general laws of nature, but with things which are outside the sphere of nature: they seem to have conceived man in nature as a kingdom within a kingdom. But they believe that man disturbs rather than follows the course of nature …[But] nothing happens in nature which can be attributed to a defect in it; for nature is always the same and one everywhere …

Spinoza Ethics Third Part

The complex and often challenging world of the classroom seem, especially to the beginning teacher, a place beyond comprehension, an unnatural world where motivations are malevolent or mysterious, and where ideals are luxuries best quickly abandoned. Talk in the staffroom tends to re-inforce this unhelpful view of things. ‘They don’t want to learn. They’re just hedonists. There’s no point in trying to teach them anything.’

I struggled with this during my early years as a secondary teacher. My aims, I was sure, were noble, my methods were raw but on the right track, my subject-matter was relevant and intrinsically interesting. So why did some of the students resist?

Over time, and with the help of writers like John Holt, George Dennison, A.S.Neill, Michael Armstrong, Rudolf Dreikurs, R.F. Mackenzie, Virginia Axline and many others (all of whom encouraged me to understand the lived life of actual children, and to see that their actions, including their resistances, made sense if we took the effort to observe and think), my experience of the classroom shifted. I became more able to work with what was there.

Spinoza, when I discovered him while working as a psychotherapist, helped make sense of all this. Spinoza reminds us that all creatures in nature are intent on persevering in their own being, that all of nature is working towards increasing its own potency. When we know this in our bones, we experience the classroom differently. We’re less likely to be discouraged by the student who is challenging, and more likely to wonder how we might reach his natural urge to become a more powerful and successful adult. We assume that powerful positive natural processes are present, that these include doubts, resistances, uncertainty and instability, and that understanding and working with these is possible, healthy and likely to lead to greater teacher effectiveness.

All of this is linked with having some adequate understanding of the nature of things. Spinoza begins his unfinished work ‘On the improvement of the understanding’ (1677) with these thoughts:

… seeing that none of the objects of my fears contained in themselves anything either good or bad, except in so far as the mind is affected by them, I finally resolved to inquire whether there might be some real good having power to communicate itself, which would affect the mind singly, to the exclusion of all else (3)

love towards a thing eternal and infinite feeds the mind wholly with joy, and is itself unmingled with any sadness, wherefore it is greatly to be desired and sought for with all our strength. (5)

The chief good is … the knowledge of the union existing between the mind and the whole of nature. (6)

A story that a former student of mine, Aaron Kingma, tells about one of his earliest teaching experiences illustrates this very well. He’d been assigned to a very tough class of Year 8s.

There were ten boys, all of whom had been placed in the class due to some combination of behavioural and learning difficulties … The boys “fed” off each other, and I was informed in no uncertain terms that it was an administrator and not a teacher who decided that it was a good idea to put them in class together; I heard quite a few jokes about teaching them being an extreme sport!

The first few lessons were a trying time for myself as a young teacher …

Midway through my second week with the boys, I had arrived early at school, was the only one there and had forgotten my key to the science block. I was sitting on the back of my car and trying to prolong the remnants of my morning coffee because I had nothing better to do than wait for my colleagues to arrive. “Jake”, something of a ringleader among the year 8 boys, shuffled past me saying “mornin’ Sir” in the gruff manner of a year eight boy. I watched him sit down on the steps of the science block, where to my amazement, he pulled out a dirt bike magazine and began reading it. This was a boy who claimed to hate reading, and vocalised his objections forcefully when someone tried to make him.

After a couple of minutes, I went over and joined him. I managed to strike up a conversation with him about riding, and he seemed to know everything about every bike on the market. I joked that I was looking forward to next year so that I could afford a new one, and much to my amusement he was quick to offer his opinions about which one it should be. I ventured a bit further and asked him where he had learned all of this, and he held up his magazine and said “from these”. Another teacher arrived at that moment, and I went into the staffroom with a new perspective on not just Jake, but his classmates as well.

Has this student read Spinoza? I don’t know, and that’s not the point. It’s more that Spinoza’s view of things helps us to understand our experience. Student behavior makes sense. There’s a reason why some students resist. Students want to learn. Our students are potentially teachable if we work intelligently and courageously to improve our understanding.

These are offshoots of an eternal and infinite truth ‘which feeds the mind wholly with joy’.

I just finished a chapter about a young noble woman being drawn, despite her French education and artistocratic background, into the spirit of a Russian folk dance. The scene is full of hints of the unconscious.

Rilke

The scene, the book, the day spent in the internal space of my bedroom with the door shut, took me somewhere near a place that Rilke described as

… increasing depths
where life calmly gives out its own secret …

I love the dark hours of my life
which deepen my senses;
in them, as in old letters, I find
my daily life already lived
and, like legends, distantly beyond.

Certain literature deepens the senses and takes us into these dark hours.

Mark Edmundson, in Why Read?, suggests that this is one of the functions of the humanities in general and English teaching in particular, to help us grapple with the big existential questions like What does it mean to live a good life? How are we made happy? 

Humanism is the belief that it is possible for some of us, and maybe more than some, to use secular writing as the preeminent means for shaping our lives. That means that we might construct ourselves from novels, poems, and plays, as well as from works of history and philosophy, in the way that our ancestors constructed themselves (and were constructed) by the Bible and other sacred texts.

Mark Edmundson, Why Read?, p. 86

Thinking about English teaching like this (instead of thinking about it exclusively in terms of gaining literacy skills or learning how texts are constructed) opens the windows of the classroom and lets fresh air in. Students sense the relevance of the subject; it’s then connected to the questions that matter to them as they make the transition into adulthood.

1985 BBC 'Bleak House'

After reading the War and Peace chapter, I turned on my iPad and browsed through some old BBC TV programs. I found a 1985 adaptation of one of my favourite novels, Bleak House, so I watched the beginning of it.

I’ve tried to find a clip from the beginning that I could post here, but can’t. Let me try to describe it.

The beginning of the first episode is slow and dark, and I found it utterly absorbing. We see a close up of the thoughtful face of a young girl. There’s a grandfather clock ticking slowly in the background –  no music, just the sound of the clock –  and then we hear a woman’s voice telling the girl that her life is going to be a life of drudgery and duty, and that it would have been better if she’d never been born. We then see the child grown up and arriving in London for a meeting about a new line of work (no doubt involving drudgery and duty). She makes her way to the meeting, but we see only glimpses of her through a thick fog, various people picking their way through the mud of a London street.

By the end of ten absorbing minutes, I found myself asking questions: Was this really what London was like 150 years ago? Is this what some parts of the world are like now? Is such a life inevitably ‘nasty, brutish and short’, or is there room for kindness, as Dickens implies, on streets like these? Are people born to lives of inevitable drudgery? Does duty imply drudgery? They were my questions; another viewer would have others.

Then I looked again at the beginning of the more recent (2005) BBC adaptation. (You can view it here.)

2005 BBC 'Bleak House'

This 2005 version is so different from the 1985 one: the breathless pace and anxious mood, the switching back and forth so that we’re introduced to many principal characters and central themes (as opposed to the handful of characters and the single theme we experience in the 1985 version).

The 2005 version evoked new questions for me. Are the differences between the two versions reflective of differences between 1985 and 2005? Why do Esther and Nemo stare at each other in the street; is life full of encounters that aren’t planned but are somehow meant to be? Are there undercurrents in life that our rational minds know nothing about? Why are some people (like Lady Deadlock) apparently trapped in a life that they despise? Again these are my questions; a class of students would have so many different ones.

After watching both versions, I wanted to be reminded of how Dickens himself begins the novel, so I re-read his opening paragraphs:

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor
sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As
much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from
the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a
Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine
lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots,
making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as
full-grown snowflakes–gone into mourning, one might imagine, for
the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses,
scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers,
jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill
temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of
thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding
since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits
to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points
tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits
and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls deified among the
tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and
dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights.
Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on
the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping
on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and
throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides
of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of
the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching
the toes and fingers of his shivering little ‘prentice boy on deck.
Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a
nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a
balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.

This is rather like the 1985 TV adaptation. More questions. Were we in 1985 less aware of the possibilities of story-telling in film? What does the 2005 version do that is missing from the 1985 version? Is it qualitatively better, or just different because it reflects a 2005 perspective rather than a 1985 one?

***

We talk a lot about making questions the centre of our teaching. But , at least in the recent past (has the new English National Curriculum started to redress the balance?), these tend to be questions about texts as objects for analysis: how they work, their forms and features.  The questions that Edmundson is encouraging, and the questions that animate me (and, I’m suggesting, animate students) are questions that are more to do with life, with the real world, than with the texts themselves.

http://www.chalkboarddad.com/2011/05/story-or-what-i-have-in-common-with.html

Texts as windows rather than texts as objects.

Professor Kerri-Lee Krause

‘To survive in the classroom, every teacher needs to have a clear, well-thought-out plan that provides an effective framework for maintaining discipline’ (Krause, 2006, p. 458)

Every year, my education students ask for classroom management skills to put in their toolboxes. ‘Please show us what works, what’s tried and tested and can help me survive the challenges of difficult students,’ they say. I remember feeling the same myself when I first started teaching in the early 70s, and the awful feeling of being in a classroom and feeling totally unprepared to deal with what was happening.

So, to help alleviate the students’ anxiety, I have in the past used Professor Krause’s three models of classroom management in my unit, and earlier this week, as part of my preparing for the new year, I drew up the following mindmap to share with the students.

Models of classroom management (Krause)

But how useful are models like these? Do they help student teachers begin the process of gaining the pedagogical skills and knowledge that will help them run their classrooms? Or is the claim that every teacher needs a well-thought out plan in order to survive misleading?

Professor Deborah Britzman

A second teacher education Professor, Deborah Britzman, seems to think it’s the latter.

… normative notions collapse the distinction between acquiring pedagogical skills and becoming a teacher by objectifying experience as a map. In this discourse, everything is already organised and complete; all that is left to do is to follow preordained paths. (Britzman, 2003, p. 30)

My own experience as a teacher tells me that following preordained paths does not work. It didn’t work if I decided that I’d ‘just be myself’ in the classroom (the ‘self’ I thought I knew suddenly felt unknown and unstable once I found myself in unfamiliar territory); it didn’t work if I tried to be someone else either. What worked with one group of students would fail utterly with a second; what worked one day in first period fell flat the next day in the last period of the day.

John Holt, author and teacher

I remember John Holt (an early educational hero of mine) writing in one of his books that teaching was like batting in baseball; you could count yourself a success if one in five attempts produced a ‘home run’.

Krause’s approach reduces an enormously complex field into something graspable. It’s an approach that has the potential to reduce anxiety by naming different ways of being in the classroom. It gives preservice teachers the opportunity to ask important questions as they prepare for their careers. Is there just one way to teach, the way I experienced as a student? What teaching styles best accord with my values? What are my aims as a teacher, and what models might best support those aims? Can I learn from many models so that I have the capacity to adapt in different contexts?

Britzman’s approach, though, is radically different. Where Krause seeks to to simplify (and therefore reduce anxiety),Britzman wants to complexify and problematize (26).

For those who … enter teacher education, their first culture shock may well occur with the realization of the overwhelming complexity of the teacher’s work and the myriad ways this complexity is masked and misunderstood (p. 27) … learning to teach is not a mere matter of applying decontextualized skills or of mirroring predetermined images; it is time when one’s past, present, and future are set in dynamic tension. Learning to teach – like teaching itself – is always the process of becoming: a time of formation and transformation, of scrutiny into what one is doing, and who one can become (p. 31).

I agree with Britzman. Krause’s models, it seems to me, take us into territory full of  unsupportable generalisations and over-simplifications.

So why do I continue to include them as part of my unit? It’s true that the discussions we have about them in tutorials, and the questions they raise, seem helpful. But could it be that the real reason is that I’m trying to reduce anxiety (my own and my students’) by teaching something concrete, whether or not it’s actually useful?

I’m hoping that some of my former students will read this blog post and comment on their experience of the Krause models.

***

Britzman, D. (2003). Practice Makes Practice: A critical study of learning to teach, revised edition. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Krause, K. (2006). Managing behaviour and classrooms Educational psychology: for learning and teaching (2nd ed.). Melbourne, Victoria: Thomson.

Restless Sleep by Samuel Durkin http://www.redbubble.com/people/samdurkin/works/746577-restless-sleep

I’m standing in front of a class of secondary students, sensing their restlessness and desperately trying to hold their attention. I’m pulling out every trick I’ve learned: cajoling one sub-group, trying to beguile a second with a story or an interesting fact, and threatening a third. But I feel weak and dreadfully underprepared; I don’t really know the content or where the lesson should be heading, and I can sense the students seeing through my bluff and bluster. They’re about to walk out, I’m convinced, or give up, or maybe even riot. I redouble my efforts, but I can see that I’m losing them and that nothing will rescue this hopeless situation.

[My dream last week.]

I’m now nearly 65 and have been working with students for over 40 years now. I’ve loved teaching and the academic job I’ve got at the moment. Yet I still have anxious nightmares before the beginning of every teaching year.

This underlying anxiety used to feel neurotic. Why would I have these dreams unless, underneath the surface, I felt insecure and unstable. I’ve come to think more recently that the dreams are healthy  and help motivate me so that I prepare well.

Because it’s fear rather than logic that’s driving my feet, my anxiety dreams trigger a process that is idiosyncratic and, in its early stages, not as immediately productive as it might be!

I can illustrate this by describing the five stages – familiar to me now – that I’ll go through between now and early February, when I meet the 200 students doing my Teacher Education unit on managing classroom.

Stage 1: Collecting resources

The logical place to begin would be to think about the purpose of the unit. What am I trying to achieve?

But that’s not where my underlying anxiety takes me.

Instead, with a kind of unconscious desperation, I collect my resources, scores of them, as if the more resources I have to throw at the students, the more prepared I’ll feel. I’m a bit like the warrior my son creates in his online game Skyrem. Before he goes into battle with an unknown enemy, he first gathers together an ebony dagger, an orcish battle axe, a dwarvish sword, full battle dress (including an invisibility shield) and various spells and potions. The more he collects, the more confident he feels.

I’ve taught this unit before, so I’ve already collected a fair few weapons. I revisited them this morning, and, like the pre-battle soldier polishing his weapons, I made a mindmap of them, trying (unsuccessfully) to resist the urge to keep adding to them as I went.

2. Imagining the resistances

The relief from my anxiety which this manic collecting affords is temporary.

I'd like to say that this is me, at my writing desk while I imagine Janine, Greg and my other future students. In fact it's a drawing of my hero Charles Dickens, imagining his various characters.

After making this mindmap this morning, I began to imagine characters, some of my future students, responding to the resources very much like the students in my nightmares. I could see  (for example) Janine, the student whose hard work and ability to play the game had got her top marks, being angry at the lack of guidance, at the assumption that she would have the time to wade through the resources and make independent decisions about which were relevant to her and which were not. I could see Greg, the practical down-to-earth student who had already decided that university learning was unconnected with the real world, and that he’d learn the job once he got into a classroom rather than by wading through an old man’s reading list. I could imagine conscientious Elizabeth, full of zeal and idealism about a new teaching career, quickly becoming overwhelmed with the mountain of stuff being thrown at her. And finally I could see Allan, happy to take seriously anything which immediately appealed to him as being interesting or useful, but more interested in talking about teaching than in reading about it. What would I say to them? How would I keep them engaged?

 Stage 3 Revisiting the aims of the unit

I hate Learning Outcomes and include them in my unit outlines only because they are compulsory. Here are the official Learning Outcomes for the unit I’m about to teach.

My unit's official Learning Outcomes

The spectre of the four resistant students forces me to think about purpose. What am I wanting to achieve in our 10 short weeks together?I understand the thinking behind Learning Outcomes (make the purpose explicit so students know what’s expected), but always find them lifeless and limiting, like trying to package a mystery in a formula. In this case I find them particularly useless because these Learning Outcomes spring out of a view about teaching as performance that tells only part of the story. Clear verbal and non-verbal directions and generic practical approaches and strategies are important, but they’re a fraction of what I’d want this unit to be about.

Here’s my list:

1. Tolerating complexity: I want the students to know that there isn’t a single box of tricks, or a failsafe method of classroom management. There are different approaches that work with different teachers, different students and in different contexts.
2. Embracing critical analysis and self-reflexivity: I want the students to examine their own assumptions about what works. The research says that many young teachers, once they get into the classroom, quickly revert to teaching styles that are familiar to them, based on the teaching styles of their former teachers and parents, and that these often result in the repetition of ineffective teaching practices. I want my students to understand and critically examine what comes naturally to them, and to begin the work of shaping a teacher-identity that is both authentic and effective. I want them to think about what they want to achieve in their classrooms. Is it just about control? How central is learning? What implications flow from what they value? What kind of a teacher do they aspire to be?
3. Thinking holistically: I want them to see the important links between pedagogy, content knowledge and classroom management, rather than see these as unconnected components which need individual and separate attention and skills.
4. Becoming creative and informed makers of meaning: I want them to notice the way our unit assumes that the learner (which is them!) is an active inquirer and meaning-maker rather than a passive recipient of the teacher’s wisdom and knowledge, and how this inquirer’s stance stimulates motivation and creativity … and then to reflect on what this means for the way they are going to run their classrooms. I want them to know that our profession requires this inquirer’s mentality for the whole of their professional lives.

Stage 4: Basing the unit around fertile questions

Yoram Harpaz

Yoram Harpaz suggests that our classrooms should become places of where communities of thinkers research fertile questions together. They define a fertile question as having six main characteristics:

1. Open - there are several different or competing answers.
2. Undermining - makes the learner question their basic assumptions.
3. Rich - cannot be answered without careful and lengthy research. Usually able to be broken into subsidiary questions.
4. Connected - relevant to the learners.
5. Charged - has an ethical dimension
6. Practical -is able to be researched given the available resources.

Here the work has been done for me, as last year our teaching team came up with the following fertile questions or Nine Provocations. These provocations form the basis of the teaching course within which my unit is situated.

1. What kind of a teacher do I want to be?
2. Will I be allowed to be the teacher I want to be?
3. To whom am I accountable?
4. Am I ready to teach?
5. Is teaching a profession or a trade?
6. What will students want and need from me?
7. Should we teach students or subjects?
8. To what extent is teaching an intellectual pursuit?
9. How will I control my students?

Once I get to this fourth stage of articulating the central research questions, I begin to feel some of the anxious impulse to do all the work beginning to dissipate. I no longer feel I need to understand all the material, have all the answers, or accumulate a mountain of resources; I’m going to be guiding a community of researchers, not force-feeding my students with my own knowledge and experience. It’s not that I imagine that there will be no moments of challenge or discomfort with Janine, Greg, Elizabeth or  Allan. But I see my role more clearly now. The ground feels more secure.

Stage 5: Checking the alignment of assessment and objectives

Will my assessments give my students opportunities to show that they have tolerated complexity, embraced critical analysis and self-reflexivity, thought holistically, and become creative & informed makers of meaning?

I think so. We’re asking them to explore some of the Nine Provocations and to share the results of their explorations with us, using a number of different media. We’re requiring them to build their understanding on their critical analyses of their own and others’ experience and assumptions, gleaned from conversations, course work and time spent in the classroom. There are no short answer questions, no single mandated texts that they must study and master: they’re to pursue the questions that matter to them and to map the way their thinking evolves as a result of their labours.

My job, between now and the first class, is to make possible resources available, and to structure week-by-week events that will stimulate research and collaboration.

Perhaps, tonight, I’ll sleep more peacefully.

D.W. Winnicott

It is creative apperception  more than anything else that makes the individual feel that life is worth living. Contrasted with this is a relationship to external reality which is one of compliance, the world and its details being recognised but only as something to be fitted in with or demanding adaptation …

This second way of living in the world is recognised as illness in psychiatric terms.

Donald Winnicott Playing and Reality, 1971 p65

I got an iPad for Christmas and have spent the past couple of weeks playing with it.

Just mucking around, really.

I’ve downloaded dozens of apps, some of which I think will be useful (iThoughts, Evernote) some of which are just beautiful (Flipboard), and others which will sit unused until I get round to deleting them.  I’ve played table tennis with my son and chess with my nephew, then watched two of my family members play digitized Monopoly. I’ve created an iThoughts mindmap of some of the characters of the novel I’m reading (War and Peace), and then a second to organize my thoughts about work for 2012. I got carried away, for several hours, by my discovery that I could import images into iThoughts, and so imported scores of them, some of which were simply aesthetically pleasing and a few which actually conveyed something of the concept or task I was trying to illustrate. I’ve been begun to populate my new Evernote account with websites and documents, and covered a Goodreader documents with dozens of meaningless annotations, just to see what can be done. I keep discovering stuff I want to tell my family about; occasionally they’re infected by my enthusiasm but usually they’re mildly amused.

I’ve been like a little boy in a sandpit.

For Donald Winnicott, British psychoanalyst and writer, play mattered.

Play, said Winnicott, is the process whereby we learn, and where the self is formed. It’s where the inner world of a person is brought into healthy relationship with the outer world of external reality.

… on the basis of playing is built the whole of man’s [sic] experiential existence. … We experience life in the area of transitional phenomena, in the exciting interweave of subjectivity and objective observation, and in an area that is intermediate between the inner reality of the individual and the shared reality of the world that is external to individuals. (p64)

This describes very nicely the playspace created by my engagement with the iPad: transitional, exciting, experimental, connecting inner preoccupations and interests with outer possibilities and affordances.

The therapist’s task, said Winnicott, was to help the patient to play. We might extrapolate and say that this is also the teacher’s task: to create the space where the student can make connections between the emotion-charged and highly significant inner world and the realities of the external world.

In three weeks, our students will arrive at university for their 2012 teacher education units. This year, some of the classes will take place in our media-rich Inspire Centre.

As teachers, we will have pressures to ‘deliver’, and the students will feel the pressure to comply. Will we have time to play?

I hope so.

Foucault notes early on in his career, following Nietzsche, that the ‘fact’ is already an interpretation. In other words, his writings are based on elements which are already ‘fictions’, things that have already been selected, fabricated and organised in certain ways. There are no primary sources or even physical artefacts that one can accept without question. Everything is already a secondary source, an interpretation. (p84)

I was thinking about this as I drove down to Melbourne a couple of weeks ago, listening to a Late Night Live interviewwith Mark McKenna, the biographer of Manning Clark.

Part of Heidi Smith’s Portrait of Manning and Dymphna Clark, taken at “Ness,” Wapengo, NSW in 1989.

I’ve always loved the history writing of Manning Clark; Australian history came alive for me when I read his History of Australia. I felt the presence of real people in his accounts, whereas in other histories I’d been made to study at school and at university, there was something bloodless about the way the past was described. (I’m reading War and Peace at the moment, and am similarly thrilled by the way Tolstoy helps us understand that what happened in the past was experienced and shaped by people just like us.)

So I’ve never had much sympathy for Clark’s critics who have taken him to task for not having all his ‘facts’ right. It has seemed to me, as it apparently seemed to Foucault, that ‘everything is already a secondary source, an interpretation’. Clark’s history didn’t have to be always literally ‘true’ in order to be stimulating and important.

But when I got to Melbourne, I went online and read ‘On reading Mark McKenna’s biography of Manning Clark’, by Nick Gruen. Gruen makes the following claim:

 But the ultimate shame is not that Manning got some facts wrong about his characters. Rather, the problem is that his archetypes – whether it is Alfred Deakin, John Curtin or Henry Lawson – never really expand into well-rounded characters who are uniquely themselves. The archetypes are a side of Manning in fancy dress. Hell in the heart, uproar in the trousers, wondering what went on in the mind of a woman, wondering what it was all for. Clark cannibalised the material for scenes that he could transform into stories he wanted to tell.

Gruen suggests that Clark’s characters are just versions of Clark himself, ‘Manning in fancy dress’.

Is this what I do in some of my writing?

Last year I had an article published which began with a piece of fiction (based, I claimed, on a student and teacher I knew). Here are the opening paragraphs:

Alison sat in the pale green vinyl-covered 1970s armchair outside her lecturer’s office, drumming her fingers impatiently on the thin wooden arm rest. ‘This was such a stupid idea,’ she thought bitterly to herself. Everything about this was stupid. The decision to email Alec to ask for an appointment. The risky admission that she found the idea of having to write an essay terrifying. Allowing herself to feel vulnerable.

The door opened and Alec invited her in.

He was a portly man in his sixties, squinting, but not coldly, from behind thick glasses. The word around the campus was that he had an eye disease and was going blind. Certainly, in the one lecture they’d already had, it was clear that he couldn’t read the screen easily, and held his notes so close they almost touched his nose. Alison murmured an awkward ‘thanks for agreeing to see me’, then sat at the small round table opposite Alec.

‘How can I help?’ he asked.

I’m wanting to use this kind of fiction-based-on-what-I’ve-experienced-and-known more in my academic writing.

But are these characters just Steve in fancy dress?