Week 2: Professional identify crisis recovery – a work in progress
Coming to the end of Week 2 and some fascinating exploration of the teacher-tech relationship and the numerous critical approaches to it, I feel like I’ve gained a significant insight into some of the underlying reasons for the unease I’ve experienced over the past few years while teaching English to adults in a private academy. I suppose it could be considered a professional identity crisis, during which I have been plagued with questions concerning the teacher’s role in language learning/acquisition and the value and effectiveness of classroom-based language instruction/practice. I can now clearly recognise the cumulative effect of this as a growing sense of subordination and marginalisation. I began to feel partly invisible, as if only a fraction of my efforts and work with students was being validated and appreciated. I felt like just another resource – a walking dictionary, an error detector, an instruction giver, a timekeeper, a homework monitor, a provider of answers (a,b or c), an awarder of grades and authoriser of advancement through the level system. I often asked myself whether this is what it meant to be a teacher, to feel like a resource rather than a fundamental human element in the educational process. While I didn’t harbour any deep psychological need to see myself at the centre of the process, neither did the sensation of being peripheral sit easily. But rather than protesting against this, I resigned myself to my new role of learning facilitator, even trying to sell it to myself with reference to learning theory, largely constructivist as it turns out!
Against this background, it was a breath of fresh air to read Biesta’s essay Giving Teaching Back to Education (2012), in which he sets out a powerful defence of the importance of the teacher and teaching against its perceived erosion and distortion within constructivist and conservative models of education, and the trend towards what he calls ‘learnification’. His observation of the shifting emphasis from the activity of the teacher to the activities carried out by learners resonated with my own experience, prompting the question: if the role of the teacher is reduced to merely providing learners with activities, what happens if those activities then become more cheaply and conveniently accessible via a different source (uhh…the internet perhaps? language-learning apps? a free language exchange in place of a pricey language academy?). My professional identity crisis was beginning to seem like a logical reaction to being subject to a process of institutional and ideological deprofessionalisation.
At the heart of Biesta’s argument for the need to reinstate the teacher in educational discourse is his redefinition of education to include not only learning, but learning something from someone for a particular purpose. The teacher is thus granted “a central role in engaging with the question as to what is educationally desirable in each concrete situation, both with regard to the aims and with regard to the ‘means’ of education (Biesta, 2012:39)”. Arguably this is more convincing when applied to primary education than adult education, since an adult, unlike a child, may be capable of making such decisions independently: identifying their own learning needs, formulating objectives and identifying an effective means by which to achieve those objectives. Having said that, many adults admit that they struggle to do these things without the assistance of a teacher, hence their decision to invest in pricey language classes at an academy instead of relying on the self-teaching approach or the free language exchange.
Biesta makes another interesting distinction between ‘learning from’ – whereby the learner is in control and draws upon the teacher as resource – and ‘being taught by’ – which involves the introduction of something ‘other and strange’ to the student, as determined and controlled by the teacher. I agree with Biesta’s contention that it is in the latter where the most transformative educational potential lies, in the experience of resistance between the familiar and the new and the process of ‘working through’ that resistance. But this is not easy, either from the perspective of the learner or the teacher. That may be why the ‘language of learning’ has taken such a strong hold, because it enables students to stay in their comfort zone, to shy away from resistance, and simplifies teaching to the level of “an intervention working towards the perfect production of certain pre-specified outcomes (Biesta, 2012:44)”, thus making it easier to measure and improve its perceived effectiveness and efficiency.
The implications of Biesta’s ideas, both for my self-perception as a teacher and for my teaching practice (including my use of technology), are potentially significant. As a teacher I may now feel more confident in justifying my decision to create challenging experiences for my students which offer them the resistance necessary to optimise their learning. In this process I will be more likely to see a role for myself considerably more complex than that of facilitator, as the best placed professional to decide on a suitable nature and level of challenge, as well as the means by which I can best support my students through that challenge. My increased confidence may also give rise to a more creative use of technology in my teaching which enhances rather than undermines my human capabilities as an educator. After all, I am in agreement with Selwyn (2017) that it is creativity combined with good judgement and insight which characterises the indispensable, unautomatisable ‘art’ of teaching.
Biesta, G. (2012). Giving teaching back to education: responding to the disappearance of the teacher. Phenomenology & Practice, 6(2), pp. 35-49.
Selwyn, N. (2017). Education and technology: key issues and debates, 2nd ed. (London, Bloomsbury): pp. 99-124. (e-reserve)
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