Category: Teaching

On Teleology: V. Setting

Click here to read Pt. IV. Source?

On Teleology: V. Setting

Pretty recently, Science helped us understand two separate but related things in a more holistic way, and I think you’ll see what Science means once we dub the two things as ‘space’ and ‘time’.

Science merged these two fundamentals into one singular mind-bending concept, then imaginatively called it spacetime. Think Einstein and gravity and General Relativity although don’t think Newton and gravity and the falling apple… except of course, in our case, do think a falling acorn.

Don’t trust me… trust Science!

Let’s fall back down to Earth, ourselves, to swirl about in the gravity well as we revisit Part I’s analogies of schools and shipbuilding and students K-12, and our culture’s hankering obsession with Science and efficiency.

Being a teacher, I think a lot about efficiency, particularly for things like lessons and planning and short- & long-term objectives. Of course, in the Scientific here-and-now of the 21st century – ours being that hard core Sciencey culture of efficiency: a purpose for everything, nothing wasted – whenever I think about lessons and planning and short- & long-term objectives, naturally I think of spacetime… although maybe not quite the way you’d expect, with sole respect to ‘time’. I think of spacetime with sole respect to ‘spacetime’.

Try it, yourself, by swapping out temporal ‘short-term’ & ‘long-term’ objectives for physical ones, such as ‘nearby’ & ‘further afield’. I also swap out the emptiness of ‘space’ with the tangibility of ‘place’ although, no, I’m not trying to make placetime a thing.

And this then, finally, is what I’ve been wondering about teleology: as time and place sometimes combine into one thing that we call setting, I wonder how we’re teleologically set for some kind of fulfilment or completion by our passage not simply in time but across space through time: what is our purpose as we find ourselves set within some place and time? Naturally, this includes all those with whom we’re set alongside – as I pointed out once before, we can’t all be Thoreau.

To explore all this, I’ve been using analogies. For instance, inasmuch as we might consider any teacher a so-called ‘shipbuilder’, we might ask by analogy, within the geography and economy of the setting, what kind of ship a teacher intends to ‘build’ of each student. As we would never build a ship apart from its filling some function or purpose, we might ask by analogy what function or purpose teachers envisage or intend for K-12 graduates – what kind(s) of people do we want K-12 graduates to become? And what kinds of people do teachers actually end up ‘building’, and how much are the students involved? What kinds of people finally cross that diploma stage? What is their telos, and who gets a say?

To consider telos further, I compared people to acorns that fall from trees, themselves born of acorns. By analogy, someone might suggest our broader telos as something similar – a kind of cyclical propagation as we hang and ripen from so-called trees and eventually fall to rest upon some unique spot of ground, there to grow roots of our own.

Nothing’s carved in stone

Falling to land and coming to rest as each of us does, each in place at some moment in time, what is our purpose not only there but then? And how do we assess our surroundings as capable of providing suitable conditions for root and growth? And, in whichever conditions we actually find ourselves placed, how do we know what we are or aren’t supposed to do next? How are we even brought to know – much less to ask – anything more specific than this cyclical continuance of reproduction and propagation before we die? I ask only because… well, only because I asked.

And, amidst all this, all around alongside us, as mentioned, are our neighbours… every other acorn, landed in place across time, the same as we are – a homogenous lineage of heterogeneity, all of us together, if not all at once: each as different, and unique, and persistent, and curious, and as full of intention as you and me. For every one of these, what is their source of telos?

Or maybe better to ask, who is their source?

Who is yours?

Click here to return to Pt. I. Efficiency

Conceptualising the In-Between: III. Relationships

Featured Image Credit: Clker-Free-Vector-Images on Pixabay

Click here to read Part II. Logos

If the engine or dynamic force of the In-Between (IB) is purpose, the fuel is surely motive. Together, purpose and motive suggest more about the IB dynamic than mere cause-and-effect, which is a fitting place to refocus upon students and teachers.

For instance, a student’s ownership of their learning and a teacher’s duty to help students learn are overlapping facets of their joint relationship, e.g. “Finding myself involved with [this other person], what is the situation asking [e.g. of me, of them, of us]?” What a teacher purposes alongside a student[1] Aoki characterises not as “instrumental action” but as “situational praxis” (p. 40).[2] From a “bureaucratic device,” he reconceives curriculum enactment into being “a form of communicative action and reflection set within a community of professionals” (p. 40) and, I would add, students too. And he recasts discrete instruction of mandated Curriculum, e.g. ‘covering Chapter 9’ or ‘going over the Study Questions’, as something holistic and shared, e.g. interpreting the relevance for each student of a History text, a Math equation, a Science lab, or a Shakespearean play.

The work that students do alongside teachers, typically (but not solely) daily and face-to-face, is a dynamic that occurs in the shared IB space. The ensuing dynamic interaction of that student-teacher relationship (STR) I conceptualise as relational curriculum, the dynamics of which are pedagogical: lessons planned, activities tried, questions asked, decisions made, and a buzz that enlivens the classroom. Aoki describes students and teachers as travelling back and forth across a “bridge” (Irwin, p. 41) that spans a gap between two ‘places’: curriculum-as-planned and curriculum-as-lived, or as I alternatively label them, mandated Curriculum-as-designed and relational curricula-as-occurring.

While crossing that bridge, it falls to the teacher to decide how best to guide a student, to know whether, when, and from which angle in the clearing they might cast any shadow and obscure a student’s light. So while they cross that bridge, how much better that a student and teacher have come to know their together selves before deciding upon some purpose or destination, i.e. some assessment outcome? This is the gist of relational curriculum.

The relational notion of ‘curricula-as-occurring’ can apply as well in the world beyond as within the classroom, making the IB space a temporal concept as much as a spatial one, i.e. we can only ever be one place at a time. Teaching, then – inclusive of the past, motivated by the future – (and thus, presumably, learning too) is presently spatio-temporal: both at once. Teaching is Aoki’s multiplicitous curricular landscape (Irwin, p. 41, added emphasis) that helps students to reconsider ‘what has been’ in order to renovate ‘what now is’ into ‘what may be’:

… entering back… in full reciprocity by re-including [what has been] once again as active participant in [what now is].

(Aoki, p. 409)

In this way, the IB dynamic can bear influence upon our very identity – not by reaching for it to grasp hold but by reaching out to grapple and grow.

For one as for all, identity comprises coinciding constituents: the past-present-future of one’s been-being-becoming and, simultaneously, the suffusion upon oneself of others’ influences. Identity is an endless chorus by which we share ever more constituencies: this-or-that ‘other’ plus however many ‘others’ besides. To grapple with such concerted complexity, Irwin denotes concurrent possibilities by way of Aoki’s graphic slash symbol [ / ]: a giving-way of the simplistic false dichotomy, either/or, to more intricate “transformative possibilities” (Aoki, p. 406) that weave and intertwine between us: and/not and.

Being “neither strictly vertical nor strictly horizontal” (p. 420), a place both to the left and to the right, the slash symbolises an angle or perspective that is somehow in between. And/not and is a scope in which we might find connection/opposition, concurrence/challenge, or cooperation/competition. The range of what is possible in between is plausible, negotiable, and available to the imaginative decision-making of those involved, e.g. to teachers and students yet also to people paired up in any number of imaginable ways. In between [ / ] is choice, x/not x.

However, the qualification that relational curriculum poses an ethical choice between desirable alternatives makes curricular enactment an empowering decision. So let’s understand relational curriculum as a scope and scale not in the negative, x/not x, but rather in the positive, x/y. In this way, each or both alternatives make possible something new, something more, something different.

In between, we help each other to make decisions, choose directions, and set courses to uncharted places. In a shared IB space, where students and teachers reciprocate, the prescription-paralysis of either/or dualism can give way to the reconciliatory presence/absence of x/y dialogue:

… not in the sense of a verbal exchange, but to denote a process in which there are interacting parties and where what is ‘at stake’ is for all parties to ‘appear’.

(Biesta, p. 43)

Rather than the instrumentality of Curricular implementation as some coarse techno-logicality, IB is conversational process in a ‘place’ where what it means to dwell “in between” is compellingly inclusive. IB is dialogue with those present and with those tangibly absent; it is listening to voices as well as seeking voices that are heard and not heard.

In the back-and-forth of x/y dialogue, the more-than-one constitutes one: in a word, a ‘unit’ or ‘united’. Dialogue sustains the past, to keep it alive and well and with us each present moment. Fuelled not simply by what just happened but also by what could happen, by what could be, IB is a compelling imperative for people to listen and respond, not just as joint actors but also as contributors.

With respect to others, with respect for others, we can reiterate, disagree, misunderstand, or absorb in muted silence, or we can contribute and propel others from this present moment into the next, and the next, and the next thereafter. Remembering the past in the present dresses the future for its arrival.

Click here for Part IV. Interest

[1] Note the syntax and structure of the sentence describing the dynamic of the STR: “What a teacher purposes alongside the student… .” To have written “What a teacher purposes between themselves and the student…” would betray teacher-centered bias, ill suited to IB. Moreover, although the sentence as-is takes a teacher’s perspective, it remains honest since I am a teacher and cannot assume a student perspective. What I can do is empathise and respect the student perspective; if I have earned any genuine respect from students, then – hopefully! – they will empathise and respect my perspective in return.

[2] Praxis is “the aspect which ‘resides in’ the knowledgeable actor or knowing subject” (Carr & Kemmis, p. 44), an “‘informed, committed action’” (Robertson, p. 14) that feeds the dynamic of joint action, like fuel to an engine.

Learning As Renovation

Featured Photo Credit (Edited): Monica Silvestre on Pexels

I have already offered an analogy for learning as a kind of renovation. It’s no perfect comparison – no “analogy” is meant to be – so feel free to use your imagination. What I like about renovation is the suggestion of integrity and the potential for improvement: something original remains, upon which we build and rebuild.

From that earlier post:

“Renovation also happens to suit a constructivist perspective on learning, i.e. learning as an active process during which someone integrates new experiences with what they already know. Yet this distinction between ‘what is known’ and ‘what is new’ has also been an avenue for critiquing constructivism’s overwhelming predominance, as has the general notion that active learners mean passive teachers, as has the nuance of what ‘active’ even means – thinking about stuff or doing stuff. Other nuances distinguish something learned from something experienced and something internal or uniquely derived from something external or belatedly accepted as consensus.”

With all that said, what statement about learning is credible without some thought afforded to teaching – I began sketching that out, too, at the time. So, today… Take 2: ‘learning as renovation’ means what for teaching? What exactly is teaching?

Photo Credit: Brett Jordan on Unsplash

For me, these questions just prompt more questions. One, well known to educators for being contentious, asks ‘What is worth teaching?’ As compared to the die-hard habits of so-called traditional teaching, our 21st century constructi-verse might hone a laudibly more nuanced sensitivity for whichever teaching better suits the thing being learned. But since education today seems wholly fixed upon the future, we might better proceed from ‘What is worth teaching?’ to the deeper complication that Pinar carves inside the politics of curriculum: ‘What knowledge is of most worth?’ By this, of course, I take him really to be asking, ‘Whose knowledge…?’ and on it goes, that contention.

Of course, values change, even as change takes decades or more. But what these particular questions implicate – or, rather, who they implicate – seems to be haves and have-nots as the future sends the past on its way. Put another way, the general response to ‘Whose knowledge is of most worth?’ seems to be one more clarification: ‘At which moment in history do you mean?’ which prompts questions further still, such as those arising more recently about Truth and Reconciliation and how educators might most appropriately respond, given the unknowable future.

In my doctoral work, I conceptualise curriculum as relational, i.e. an interpretive process underway between and among each student-teacher pairing, such that each person involved is contributing to every other by sincerity of their shared interests, i.e. “whose interests…?” Of course, since everyone has a backstory that no one else can know completely, peoples’ lives are more complex than first glance can suggest. That means any assumption made is a leap to conclusion, which is true, for instance, of even our closest relationships, much less between students and teachers.

Less commonly posed than ‘What knowledge is of most worth?’ is a question that seems to reach a likelier core of contention: ‘Whose knowledge… ?’

Likewise, as each teacher has a unique perspective on learning – like this reflection of mine – a teacher in the classroom is bound to know their school and its students in a way the rest of us never could and, thus, that teacher will apply their perspective in ways the rest of us never would. This, too, is true of us all in relation to each other, and any constructive way forward would seem to rest upon a sincere and joint interaction.

In that way, as teachers are able to grant each student’s unique perspective and backstory, they are also obliged to acknowledge each student’s needs, then offer a curricular experience that informs and persuades while still leaving space for each student, i.e. “whose needs, whose space…?” in order that each might make more meaningful sense of their own learning.

By analogy, then, this would seem to make teaching a kind of renovation plan, loose yet backed by at least two key factors: (i) sound foresight, which translates to careful, informed planning that aims for some defined vision, i.e. “whose vision…?” and (ii) a set of reliable tools, which is really to say not the tools, themselves, but the resourcefulness, compassion, and patience required to apply each tool in the most suitable way at the most appropriate time.

… that ‘Toolkit’ you hear so much about? For me, in fact… no, not exactly
Photo Credit: Todd Quackenbush on Unsplash

Of course, all this as metaphor sounds ideal whereas, in practice, nothing is guaranteed; renovation is seldom so tidy a business. More famously, it tends to get more complicated and even turns out some rather untimely outcomes.

Classrooms, by comparison, while complex can also be the most enjoyable places, and unlike renovations as we typically know them, I’m not sure learning needs to get more complicated than respecting the dignity of everyone involved. Beyond that, the rest is up to us as teachers and learners, albeit in distinctive roles, as we nonetheless learn and teach each other in ways that leave space where everyone is able to build and rebuild.