Teaching and the Heart (Or the Love Part of All This)

"Dialogue cannot exist, however, in the absence of a profound love for the world and for people...love is at the same time the foundation of dialogue and dialogue itself...Because love is an act of courage, not of fear, love is commitment to others."
- Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Recently, I've witnessed (or have been involved in) a number of conversations where the notion of "caring" about students came up. In particular, when I was discussing the fact that I was particularly worried about one student who had shown up to class only a few times, but who, whenever he came, always offered really wonderful comments, and for whom I had no idea what was going on, a colleague (who, I should say, I respect as a teacher) said to me: "Your job isn't to take care of your students: it's to teach them." This has led me to wonder, though: How do we define the verb "to teach"? And does "caring" have any role in this? (What does it mean, then, "to care"? It's more than just a feeling, of course, but...isn't there some role that "feeling" also plays in it?) I agree that it is not our job to "take care" of students--here at the university, they are adults, they are beings who take care of themselves, and/or have other people in their lives who care about them. Also, as we have discussed in our class: a teacher is not a savior, a saint, a liberator (although our work itself hopefully becomes liberatory).

And yet: the idea for me persists that part of my job as a teacher is to care about my students. (In fact, one 4th grade teacher I worked with as an instructional assistant in Vermont gave me a little memento which says on it "Teaching Is a Work of Heart," in response to the year that we had spent working together, and thus, she also seemed to think there was something to this). Anyway, to care about how the students are doing in life, the extent to which they feel able to participate in class; to care about what they say and think, and to relate to them in a mode of caring that also suggests compassion toward the world..this seems to me to have something to do with teaching. But teaching critically and lovingly...I think that these also involve a RADICAL acknowledgment and practice of the FREEDOM of others!!!

So, again: What does teaching mean? And where does caring...or really, I mean LOVE--that revolutionary, committed love that Freire discusses--fit in all of this? Even if I "succeed" at "teaching" lovingly and toward the freedom of others, have I taught my students anything? (And, I know this question of love probably walks a very fine and problematic line, but...I think we need to think about it, and try to define love in other terms, which I think someone like Freire helps us to do).

I ask all these questions in light of a class today that didn't seem to go very well. I mean, we did a number of different things: the first part of class involved one student giving a song presentation, then I handed back some old essays which students had done, and we discussed those. In light of the "read aloud" model that we heard about in seminar, I had one person read his essay to the class (because of time I didn't ask more students to do it (a moment of banking?)), but I did have everyone go around and share a little bit about his/her paper, so that all the students would get a sense of each other's work. We talked about the process of writing this essay and what had been challenging about it. (Perhaps I should've also asked if there was anything fun about it, but I didn't. I worry that "fun" seems to exist to a lesser extent in my class than in a lot of other folks' classes...Last semester in my class we had a lot of fun (or at least it felt that way), but this semester, I just don't think students are having fun...although, on a positive note, they are chatting with each other a lot.) Anyway, I actually thought it'd be really good for students to hear about each other's work, which I think it was, and folks liked it, but...the energy of the class still seemed really low.

Sometimes I feel that in my class we don't "DO" a whole lot of things other than dialogue. I do move around the room, I often have students meet in small groups (though we didn't do this today), we sometimes look at film clips or images, and we try to shift gears often through the course, but the particular mode remains one of dialogue...In the Freirian sense, this dialogue should always be a praxis, and thus a kind of doing, but...how does dialogue become "loving"? And what does it FEEL like for a class to be a space of love as opposed to fear, hurt, shame, distrust, and/or even indifference? Should I care if my students care? And, would it help if I showed more how I feel about the material...the extent to which I care about it and why? I don't feel like I did this very well in the second half of the class today, where we discussed the reading I had assigned.

Indeed, content-wise today, I kind of bombed; there wasn't a whole lot of "precision" in what we did...we kind of felt our way through things. We were talking about Tales from the 1001 Nights, and because I had spent all night trying to finish grading my students' prior essays, and trying to offer a lot of comments to them, I didn't come in with as well prepared a set of points as I would've liked. Or maybe, I didn't have any points, just some questions. The students had quite a number of interesting things to say, but...I feel like we didn't really get at some of the more critical points and questions that this reading addressed...and the stakes of such a mis-step is huge. I fear I may be hovering at the edge of Orientalism, even as I try to caution my students to resist it! (Maybe I can simply talk through this with them next time). Indeed, we'll be spending a lot of time next class talking about this concept specifically (which we haven't really discussed in particular terms yet), because I just wanted to give students the time and opportunity to wrap their own minds around the text and to have their own responses, before imposing "mine" on them. However, I do really think I need to be clearer about the STAKES of what we're doing, and why we're even reading such texts in the first place.

Clarity (especially in spoken words) is a big challenge for me, and...I wonder about how "being clear" might relate to this larger question of caring and/or "teaching well"/ i.e. loving in a liberatory way. I guess I'm just realizing how very much more practice I need in dialogue! How can I propose this as something I want my students to do, when I'm not very good at it myself? Or, is it something that we can teach each other? But aren't I failing my students if I don't offer them some bit of information and material and/or a practice that they can then work with? What if the part I play in the dialogue is itself a poor one? I sometimes worry that I'm remaining fearful as a teacher by operating in a pace comparable to the musical "andante"...or perhaps even more as an "adagio," rather than in a more seemingly active, vigorous pace. Is this pace suffocating to students rather than calm? Or, is my pace okay? How can I change my own pace?

I'm also feeling a bit confused, and/or my heart feels some dis-ease because of what one student came up to talk with me about today. It's that he is "looking for an A" in this class, and was really surprised that he got a B+ on his essay. Apparently, he needs to get an A to stay in his program, which I didn't realize before. We had a pretty good conversation about this, but he still seemed upset at the end of it. He wanted to know: What can I do to get an A? Will this essay "destroy" my A? The student was also concerned about the way I had graded the essay, noting how often when there is no grading rubric (which I didn't have for this one), teachers tend to grade by "comparing" the essays of students, and place them on a kind of scale with each other. While in a general sense I do read all the papers first to get a sense of what people have done, I always try to grade a paper on its own terms, in line with the requirements I've set out. I tried to talk with this student about how one "A" is very different from another A, but...this student still has concerns. I gave him the option of revising, and per his request I said that for the next essay, I'll prepare a rubric, but...yes, all this gave my mind--as well as my heart--pause. Yes, I am hurting mostly because I feel like I failed my students, because I didn't recognize the assumptions within my own grading practices, and the social, political, and racial stakes that they carry. How can I now respond in a vigorous and critical way to this mistake?

Due to everything above, I'm wondering about the place of the heart in all of this. The heart is what seems to be calling out for another possible truth, another way of living, teaching, being. And yet, sometimes I feel that neither my heart or mind are "educated" enough to be doing this; sometimes, I feel that they know nothing! But then again, it is all a process...it is something that we have to be honest to ourselves about, something we have to recognize that we are always learning...But where and how does one find the COURAGE to inhabit that space of always learning??? What is the place of something like courage in the Freirian act of love? How does one let go of fear? Or, do we walk right into it?

There is so much more to be said and thought on this matter, but...I wanted to put this concept out there as a question. How do you define "to teach"? "To care"? "To love"? Do these things have any relation to each other, and if so, what does that relation look like?

Some Prompts I Use In Class

I thought I'd share some of my materials I use in my classes to place students into groups. I use very similar kinds of prompts almost every class, so while these won't show everything we do in class, they at least point to the kinds of things I'm asking students to take up with me.

Grading Day:

Based on your group’s article, please cover the following information in your poster:

· Name of Author and Article

· 3 main points they want us to think about regarding grading

· 2 critiques of their proposed grading strategy/ideology

Lastly, reserve the bottom 1/4^th or so of your poster to make this chart:

Thumbs Up	Thumbs down

Once all groups have completed their posters, we will move around the room and mark whether we give the article, in light of the main concepts and critiques, a thumbs up or thumbs down.

Tensions in Ladson-Billings’ Yes But How Do We Do It?

Teacher as Savior

Beliefs About Students

Socio-political consciousness

“I can’t tell you how to do this”

Thinking about your group’s tension, please do the following:

First, come up with an understanding of what the two sides of the debate are. What are the logical reasons behind either notion? Which of these things feels the best? The Hardest? The Easiest? Why?

Then, come up with a strategy to help others understand the tension, and how it is possible for it to be resolved. If we face these challenges in classrooms, what will we do with them?

Finally, discuss other reactions to Ladson-Billings that your group has. We will share out our work in these groups to kick off a larger conversation about “doing” versus “being.”

Anyon Discussion Questions

First: What should be the relationship between social class and schooling?

Then, based on school type (Working-Class, Middle-Class, Affluent Professional, and Executive Elite)…

1) How would you characterize the school setting? What kinds of things are in the school? In the classroom? What do students bring with them (in a material sense) to school?

2) What sorts of teaching practices sound like they fit with Anyon’s depiction of this school?

3) Can we think of local examples of this kind of school?

a. What are these schools like?

b. How do we talk/hear about them?

- These questions are always only a part of the conversations students have in groups, as I always encourage them to bring their own questions with them to class and to discuss those with their groups and with the large group as well - I also believe that teachers from different schools/districts/grade levels/disciplines rarely get the chance to talk seriously with one another, and so while the groups often finish their tasks at different times, I like to think of these times as solidarity building activities.

Framing our discussion around these kinds of questions also frames the direction the class will go in the larger discussion that we have at the end of every class. By posing questions (or problems) to students, and then centering everything on what students do with these questions, I'm able to shape the direction of the class without controlling it, thus enabling students to self-appropriate what is meaningful for them without running into me banking the answer to any of the above questions.

Short Assignments Can Be a Problem

Above are a pair of assignments that I assigned for our 'Reading Culture' class. I've not a whole lot to say about them, other than the fact that, as this was a one-day a week night class, the one page responses could best be described by a bell curve, a few great ones, a few weak ones, and a number of 'could-be-better' ones. The class being on Monday did not help the environment of 'coming prepared,' that I hoped this assignment would foster (about 1/3 of the way through the semester we switched to using texts read for the upcoming week). That being said, the final papers on the whole turned out quite well. I put most of the failure of the weekly prompt on my shoulders, as I only really pecked at it from week to week, and probably should have spent more time in class discussing it--My view at the time was that what we were doing in class was representative of how one could go about writing. I do have to say that I think the most useful part of asking them to pick their own cultural object did help to get some idea about what parts of culture they were most concerned about--Politics/Comedy (The Onion) and negative representations of women's bodies were the two biggest--though the latter could also be clumped into the framework of advertising. Were I to do this again, I think I would have them write to each other throughout the semester, rather than to an abstract audience.