by Bill Baker
“For whom is it well, for whom is it well? There is no one for whom it is well”- Achebe
I have always viewed the profession of teaching as a call to a particular way of living. There is no question that there are conflicts within our working lives. We are, as teachers, “called” by the students, by the content we teach and its communities, and by the institutions within which we live out our work lives. It is perhaps the call of content and its communities which have the strongest hold on community college teachers, many of whom aspired to teaching in a different atmosphere, more like the one in which they were bent to the discipline and the power of those who held the hoops through which one must jump to attain credentials. The call of the institution is a fainter call except for those who seek to follow an administrative path, or periodically for others who walk along the prescribed administrative path to earn promotion or favor. The call of the student is , for me, the primary call upon which all the others are predicated.
Dwayne Huebner writes clearly on the matter of the vocation of a teacher in an article entitled "Education and Spirituality", which appeared recently in The Journal of Curriculum Theorizing. He sees the response to the call of the student as “‘the work of love.’...The work of love is obvious. The teacher listens to the student, and speaks with great care, that the gift of language is jointly shared, may reassure and disclose a world filled with truth and beauty, joy and suffering, mystery and grace. The teacher makes promises to the students. The journey of the student is filled with hope rather than despair; more life rather than less. The teacher introduces the student to the ‘otherness’ of the world, to that which is strange, and assures the student that the strangeness will not overpower, but empower.”(Heubner, 1996, page 28) Conversely, the teacher, primarily through listening to the student, learns that otherness which is alien and not deeply known through the teacher’s prior experience. Thus both the teacher and the student are instrumental to one another in the transcendence which learning represents.
For me the creation of a learning community within the class room has become paramount in my work. Our students, for the most part, are less aware of what going to college means in terms of changing the way they have lived their lives, than we were when we embarked on our journey. Students need to know what possibilities a college represents for them; they need to know what they need to be able to do in order to take advantage of these possibilities; and they need to know what they have to do in order to prosper. By thinking of our work as a continuing orientation to the college, to the content, and to one another, I believe it is possible to create a sustaining community which breeds trust.
I have found that learning communities which I have helped to form in my classroom have been places where students filtered potential disagreements and misunderstandings between an individual student and the teacher. It has been reassuring to ignore an unreasonable outburst on the part of a student at the end of a class, and to return to find out that other students have clarified the matter. Sometimes students apologize for the actions of other students. Sometimes students clarify the response or lack of a response on the part of another student which results in my better understanding of the situation. As I move out of the center of the classroom to make room for more active learning on the part of the student, one of the things that happens is that students begin to assume more responsibility for the action of the community. I do not find that I lessen my authority within the classroom by inviting students participation. I am still the one who judges; I am still the initiator of most of the activities; my perspective continues to be the one more sought after. Yet I find more harmony and possibility within such a space. Dialogue becomes the central modality through which we interact with one another, with the texts and within ourselves.
I have noticed more and more of my colleagues are centering their being in their classrooms because they have found the nature of the institution and the size of the department unresponsive to their needs. There is no question that the perspective of others engaged in similar work is very important to our growth as teachers and as human beings. So we seek out other like minded people to listen to us as we listen to them. Just as such associations can sustain hope and possibility within us, so too they can diminish hope.
We live in a world which pays less and less attention to human needs , so our struggle to become more human must intensify. We must move beyond expecting institutions to solve our problems by becoming more a part of their solution. At the same time, we need to continue to keep pressure on our institutions to make them more just. This continuing struggle becomes more joyous when we approach it within communities of trust which we work to establish within our classrooms.
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