Teaching and Learning: Exploring spaces for individual and collective interrogation of assimilated educational perspectives

 

 

 

 

It’s Teacher’s Day in India – Wishing all the TEACHERS a day to Remember, Rejoice and Renew.

When did you last feed somebody? We are not talking about family and friends. This question, I suspect, may seem odd to the western mind. In India, feeding the other, despite vestiges of despicable want and misery, is quite common place, from insects to evolved and evolving simians, everybody get a bite!

What is your image of a teacher? Have you ever imagined the teacher as one who feeds his/her learners? What If teaching in India, is understood as feeding? All of a sudden, one makes sense of the range of models that account for the act of feeding - the charity model, the throw away model, the religious compunction model and what have you … trust the diversity and complexity of our Nation to account for all the permutation and combination of models. Feeding in India is fine, but what about teaching in India - Teaching in India is, at best, a contested construct.

The systematic denigration of public education, notably by the States’ own acts of commission, omission and neglect, has led to the corporate takeover of public education resulting in myopic curriculum standardization. William Ayers, ‘In Teaching Toward Freedom’, contends that this promotes “a curriculum of facts: incontrovertible ‘Truths,’ uncontested and measurable, inarguable and beyond dialogue or debate” and vitiates against the development of the learners and "their fullest democratic humanity."

How many Teachers do you know of, who view their calling as organically related to teaching and learning, as concerned with internal capacity building in response to state-imposed accountability pressures, and as an existential process of writing one's autobiography through their day-to-day work?

Teaching and learning continuously challenges us to redraw the lines concerning how we teach, why we teach, and what we find when we help students become independent, restless, and engaged learners.  

The vision of the school should speak of the extraordinary possibilities awaiting discovery. Education is not simply about educating minds, but about developing whole persons - cultivating meaning, community, and moral responsibility.

While Teachers Day calls for Celebrations, the call to Renewal is a tough one – it demands of teachers to “let go” of the need to be right, safe, and certain. The call to renewal is a call to engage with Truth Skills.

Susan Campbell’s Truth Skills, in ‘Getting Real: Ten Truth Skills You Need to Live an Authentic Life’, could well applying to teachers in India. ONE Stop Being Right and Start Being Real TWO Experiencing What Is: To Get Where You Need to Go, Be Where You Are THREE Being Transparent: Freedom’s Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Hide FOUR Noticing Your Intent: Is It to Relate or to Control? FIVE Welcoming Feedback: It’s How We Learn SIX Asserting What You Want and Don’t Want: Supporting Your Feelings with Action SEVEN Taking Back Projections: Discovering Your Other Side EIGHT Revising an Earlier Statement: It’s Okay to Go Out and Come In Again NINE Holding Differences: Seeing Other Viewpoints Without Losing Your Own TEN Sharing Mixed Emotions: You’re Not Crazy, You’re Complex ELEVEN Embracing the Silence of Not Knowing: Entering the Fertile Void TWELVE Serenity, Presence, and Compassion

Teachers, in India today, and I suspect elsewhere as well, are at risk of intellectual docility and passive acceptance of assertions and assumptions that are arguably raised without substantiation. A tryst with Susan Campbell’s ‘Truth Skills’ could set off convictions - critical and visionary, dystopian and utopian.

An individual and collective interrogation of the assimilated educational perspectives and the world offers an ethically compelling vision with concrete proposals that can rally, empower, coordinate, and guide the efforts of activist educators and innovative teachers as they contribute their own brand of action to school reform, democratic community, and social justice.

Wishing all the TEACHERS a day to Remember, Rejoice and Renew!