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Article Excerpt
"I suppose," she faltered, "there are as many kinds of good teachers as there are of artists."
"It is an art," Miss Finch responded, for once, instantly. And then with her usual unexpected slant, she added, "It is also an art to be a student. I wonder sometimes if we think enough about that. Learning is such a very painful business. It requires humility from people at an age where the natural habitat is arrogance."
Sarton, 1961, p. 110
This willingness continually to revise one's own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education. One submits oneself to other minds (teachers) in order to increase the chance that one will be looking in the right direction when a comet makes its sweep through a certain patch of sky.
Scarry, 1999, p. 7
Our students in the teacher education classes we teach are not unlike the general population in associating vulnerability with weakness and passivity, qualities and states of personhood to be assiduously avoided; they clearly see vulnerability as a liability. They appear to be in complete agreement with the Oxford English Dictionary in defining being vulnerable as someone "that may be wounded; susceptible of receiving wounds or physical injury." Furthermore, as prospective teachers, they also appear to associate vulnerability in the classroom with an absence of control, control over the students they will be teaching, and control over the material that the [State-mandated] curriculum will require them to teach. Control over the mastery of content knowledge and the "effective delivery" of a piece of prescribed content dominate their conception of what teaching is. They are encouraged in this way of thinking within our Teacher Education program by a Conceptual Framework that begins with the declaration that teacher education is "committed to the development of expert educators." The subsection, of this framework document, Novice to Expert, continues by stating, "Our students rely on us to assist them as they acquire the necessary knowledge, skills and dispositions required to become expert members of the professional community of educators."
As the teachers of prospective teachers, we, too, are expected to be masters of content; in fact, according to our Conceptual Framework, "We [teacher educators] usually serve in the capacity as Experts, guiding Novices as they navigate through unknown terrain." Although this emphasis on mastery and expertise does not generally lead to anything like the arrogance that oftentimes accompanies the acquisition of power, including the power of knowledge, it is also true that our students do not usually think of learning or of teaching in terms of humility or being humble. Here again, the Oxford English Dictionary captures the commonplace sentiment connected to these qualities in the halls of academe. To be humble is to have "a low estimate of one's importance, worthiness" Something servile seems to color a notion of humility (the humble servant), and the idea as Scarry (1999) puts it, that "one submits oneself to other minds (teachers)" strikes many of our students (and no doubt a fair number of teachers and readers) as slavish and antithetical to the notions of freedom and "thinking for oneself."
These lines of thinking are of course simply an extension of the prevailing institutional conception of learning that has shaped our students (and us) over 12-plus years of schooling. To learn is to master; to control one's knowledge of facts, concepts, and theories to prevail in the arenas of testing and teaching what one is supposed to know. Thinking for oneself--what education allegedly intends as an outcome--means precisely not submitting to others. And in a society increasingly dominated by consumerism, one learns to sell oneself and to assert and exalt one's attributes. The marketplace has little room for humility and is an arena in which asserting control and controlling vulnerability are prized actions.
Learning and teaching, however, are radically different undertakings. As Kelchtermans (2005) writes, "the 'pedagogical' relationship can never be fully controlled, nor can one be sure that one's actions will convey the meaning they were intended to have for the students. As such the educational relationship implies a dimension that radically escapes control and intervention" (p. 998). That means that vulnerability is an inescapable condition of teaching and of learning (Helsing, 2007; Kelchtermans, 2005; Liston, 2000). Yet as Helsing (2007) points out, "this view of teacher knowledge and practice contradicts the ways most teachers are trained, where knowledge and skills are presented as fixed and certain" (p. 1324). She goes on to rightly point out,
... the importance of addressing issues of uncertainty and dilemma with teachers, despite our incomplete knowledge of the constructs. If they are not explicitly mentioned in teacher training and professional development, it is likely that teachers will continue to feel that uncertainties are anomalous, indications that they are not teaching well, or are aspects of the job which should vanish with time and increased expertise and experience. (p. 1330)
Prospective teachers must not only examine the conditions of uncertainty and vulnerability inherent in the pedagogical relationship, as learners in colleges and universities and teacher education programs, but they must also experience the joys and the delights as well as the discomforts and tensions of vulnerability and uncertainty.
Our intent in this article, and more important, our deepest desires as teacher educators, is not to deny the fact that on one level "ignorant teacher" is indeed an oxymoron; nor are we promoting notions of thoughtlessness and self-abasement as desirable characteristics of learners and teachers. We do agree with Kelchtermans (2005) that "vulnerability is not only a condition to be endured, but also to be acknowledged, cherished, and embraced" (p. 999)--embraced by both learners and teachers.
In our reading of and conversations with our students about May Sarton's (1961) The Small Room (and other books), we want to acknowledge...
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