Over these past months (and before), I have been thinking about several aspects of the way we organize learning in the university and more generally that I find inimical to real learning, as well as to collective action. These are: the way education divides up people by age, generation and presumed levels of knowledge; and also the view of learning as a kind of acquisitive process of individual accumulation, leading to the achievement of a credential, which has an exchange value in the labour market—or at least, is assumed to do so. I’ve been struggling to think about the relation between these two. I keep encountering new perspectives as I read and think about these questions, so these thoughts are provisional, but they start from my experience as a teacher and as a student.
In my first semester as a teaching assistant beginning my PhD in sociology, I had four tutorial groups for one course. Two of the groups were completely uncommunicative and uncooperative (with many students sitting at the back of the class) and in the other two, a significant proportion of students were lively and responded to my questions about the texts we were reading. As a new sociology student (I hadn’t studied the discipline before) I felt quite ignorant. Certainly, my questions tended to be overly complicated, and sometimes required restating, and I was undoubtedly too willing to jump in and fill awkward silences with talk. At the time, I attributed my ‘failure’ to get the first two groups speaking to my inexperience (and incompetence) as a teacher. Having now studied methods of teaching, I know of lots of ways of getting groups moving, writing, group work, pair work etc. that might help address such a situation.
Of course, students have many reasons for choosing to be silent or being afraid of speaking up in class. The competitive character of university and life in general may be among them, as well as potential embarrassment or feelings that one has nothing of value to contribute. But in that first year of teaching, with the silent groups it felt to me more often like a collective norm of non-cooperation. I wondered, did those students just not want to be there in that room with me? Did they not feel any responsibility for what happened in the class? Were they not interested in what they had read? What were the divides between us that hindered communication, and made them feel so little empathy with me struggling to get conversations going?
As a teacher, I have instinctively been resistant to the idea of myself as a supplier of knowledge, someone who provides answers, rather than asking questions. But in that situation, I felt forced into that role. Partly my orientation is because I have always felt most attracted to teachers who asked me to read and enquire and find my own answers, rather than providing them.
One of my own inspiring experiences as a student was in a course on Tang poetry taught by A. C. Graham, a noted scholar of Chinese literature and Daoist philosophy known for wonderful translations of the work of some Tang (AD609-918) poets (Poems of the Late T’ang, 1965). Ours was the last such course he taught prior to his retirement. The teaching method was very traditional: we were expected to have read the poems prior to the class, and each class was spent going through the texts for that week one by one, with students taking turns translating a few lines each into English. The poems use very condensed and descriptive language, and often preparing for the class entailed looking up almost every character in the dictionary, a painful and boring process. But what I remember is the excitement of discovering these marvellous texts. In response to our struggles to translate them, Prof. Graham would occasionally remark, ‘Oh, I never thought of it that way before!’ In other words, he was discovering the texts anew with us, and was open to our readings in a way few other teachers were. For me, this created a really different atmosphere in the class.
My resistance to offering answers is also a rejection of a formulaic type of learning: as if you can acquire knowledge like something you buy and incorporate into yourself. Such an acquisitive approach obviously fits into the idea that students should get ‘value for money’ at university. But what if I really don’t know the answers? And what if they could learn even if I know nothing about the subject they are studying?
In fact, in the book I’m reading, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Jacques Rancière (on our Resource List) describes a teaching method pioneered by a late 18th century French educator called Joseph Jacotot that is exactly like that. Under Jacotot’s ‘tuition’ a group of Flemish speaking students learned French by reading a contemporary novel in a bilingual edition. Jacotot knew no Flemish, so his students essentially taught themselves through reading and talking about the novel. What Jacotot came to call ‘universal teaching’ started from a presumption of equality of intelligence, where learning relies on observation, verification and sharing understandings with fellow students. He contrasts this with ‘stultifying teaching’ that relies on ‘explication’, which always presumes that the teacher knows more than the students, and thus is based on an assumption of inequality and incapacity.
I think the formulation of ‘knowledge’ as an abstraction outside the processes of learning is part of the problem. By contrast, ‘thinking’ and ‘learning’ are more active and situated. For most of human history, people have learned through active engagement with common tasks, through stories, through debates, through festivities, through traversing and navigating a landscape—in other words, collectively, often cross-generationally. Much of children’s learning is through observation and imitation, rather than through instruction. Language is acquired through talking and listening, not through being told how to speak.
But generally children want to learn to speak and understand language. They have an intrinsic will to communicate; this desire is fundamental in the process of learning. As Rancière puts it: ‘The method of equality was above all a method of the will. One could learn by oneself and without a master explicator when one wanted to, propelled by one’s own desire or by the constraint of the situation’ (p.12). The role of the teacher (or master, which is the formulation Rancière takes from Jacotot) is not to provide knowledge, but to create a ‘circle of power’ in which the capacity of intelligence to recognize itself can be realized, through responding to the questions: ‘What do you see? What do you think about it? What do you make of it?’ What is required to respond to these questions is ‘an absolute attention’ (p.23).
One of the features of our sessions in semester 1 that struck me the most was the quality of attention in the room. This is really something unquantifiable, and I’m sure not everyone felt it in the same way. But unlike in my uncooperative tutorial groups, mostly I had the sense that people were fully present and listening to each other. This, I think, is a manifestation of a kind of respect for each other that we brought, and a willingness to be there in the sessions. If only more of my teaching experiences could be like that, I have felt. I’m looking forward to bringing that quality of attention—and the sense of equality it reflects—into more in-depth reading and analysis in our sessions in the coming months.
