When I hear about education, I immediately think about learning, and about the similarities and the differences between both words. For a long time the focus was in education, understood as the activities of educating or instructing or teaching; activities that impart knowledge or skill.[1] Learning, on the other hand, can be called the experience of the one that learns.[2] Whereas the first one appeared to place the student in a more recipient position, the second one makes him or her jump to the forefront of the process. Getting and sharing information is a collective as well as individual endeavor, but the processing and final product that changes the way we act and perceive our world, is personal.
Education has two parts, a philosophic and a practical one. As a philosophy, it answers questions such as: Which education is more appropriate? Education, for what purpose? As a practical tool to achieve some capacities to function successfully in our societies, education has to provide state of the art resources, even if they not always reach all those who need them, or if it is used to perpetuate a system that makes the students barely functional, to support an ideology.
Since the beliefs that people sustain regarding the purpose of education define their teaching philosophy and practices, and since as Judith Lloyd Yero wrote in her essay The Meaning of Education[3] (2001-2002), people are having a very difficult time agreeing on what education is, other related questions that have great influence on the decisions we take regarding our beliefs and practices become very difficult to respond as well. For example: What is knowledge? And Can knowledge be “passed along”, or does it have to be constructed?
How much is the purpose of education to draw out what is already there (potentially) within the students, as Socrates[4] proposed, and how much it is to provide students with the necessary skills and knowledge to gain positions in life, as the old Sophists[5] teachers proposed?
Our answers to those questions are beliefs, not a absolute facts, and beliefs are constructed out of paradigms and life experiences.
Paradigms are constructed by societies to regulate their interactions, including the meaning of their existence. It is in the best interest of society that useful means of interaction persist, even better ones be found, and undesirable ones be extinguished.
Society has mechanisms to insure that those desirable goals are achieved. Some means are repressive, others proactive. Within the proactive, one of the most important ones is the mechanism to replicate the values and practices used to be part of society. We do so by designing a course of information to be shared with young (impressionable) members of our communities, along with a set of rules that define the best way to influence them. Then we train some of our citizens, to run the program, and others to control it.
The “shaping” of desirable values, attitudes, and practices follows a process approach that intertwines with both formal and informal activities and situations. It usually takes many years; pressure is applied by different means (home/parents; school/teachers/peers/; community/living styles/propaganda).
The decision of what is desirable is established by those who are in control of society, and it is meant to perpetuate, expand or deepen said control. They do it through fear, coercion and bribes. They get away with it because they build apathy and greed in people, trough the methodologies and within the outcomes of the process.
But, just as with those flowers that find a way to bloom even through rocks, so does change challenge the will of perpetuating the control of the powers that govern a society. It might take many years, but as the poet Langston Hughes expresses in What Happens to a Dream Deferred[6], Change will eventually find a way to subvert the control and create new paths of material and spiritual growth.
As a teacher, you might be able to have a choice and be part of the wheel that spins along the well trodden path, or the spark that helps reach out towards new, unexplored territories. Ever since I was a little girl, I had difficulties with routine governed activities. I am the eternally curious, part chameleon, part sponge. Life and learning are inseparable for me. It is what differentiates me form those who are the walking dead.
For me, learning is about observing, and asking yourself questions, about looking for answers, about running information through your head and that of others, so you can once more process what results, and come to your own conclusions. It is about embracing your successes along with your mistakes, because from everything you ca n learn.
And then the question begs… learning? About what? For what? I suppose that’s everyone’s ultimate question, no? For me, the answer is about everything I can get my intellect into. It is about learning to find out who we are, and what we are meant to do in this world. But it is a sort of “catch-22[7]”, because we are always changing, and as our knowledge causes part of this change, the learning never ends.
Life is a stage that offers different scenarios so we can explore and experience things that allow us to learn about life and about ourselves. Since we go through this process not in isolation, the compounded experiences ripple through out our societies, impacting even our physical world.
I wanted to be a teacher because I’m the perpetual learner, because I love life, and I find humanity fascinating. I use the practical abilities I have been able to develop, and the accumulated experiences that living in different countries and cultures have created, to attempt to communicate and explore life with young people who have in their hands the future of our world.
There are few professional activities I can think of that might be more honorable, rewarding, and worthy. My current excuse is English, but my true aim is to canvas the microcosm that is available to us in educational institutions for opportunities to discover, expand, and deepen children’s capacities to know themselves, and the world that surrounds them so they can make informed, thoughtful, emotionally intelligent decisions with regards to how to honor and celebrate life.
I’m adaptable, eclectic, driven, and so is my teaching style. I’m constantly on the lookout for different ways to maintain the children’s interests in taking increasing control over their own lives and learning processes.
When trying to think about my teaching philosophy, I can think of many practical strategies, and pedagogical theories, and activities, such as the ones that you can find in books that deal with pedagogy, such as Learning and Teaching: Research Based Methods[8]but what sustains all of that and allows it to shift, shed, grow and change, is one: Life, teaching Life.
[1] Merriam – Webster dictionary on line: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/education
[2] Merriam – Webster dictionary on line: http://www.merriam-
[3] Lloyd Yero Judith. The Meaning of Education. (2001-2002): http://www.teachersmind.com/education.htm
[5] Encyclopedia Britannica: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/554705/Sophist
[6] Huges, Langston. Dream deferred. Poem 1951. http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/dream-deferred/
[8] Kauchak, Donald P., and Eggen, Paul D. Learning and Teaching: Research Based Methods.1998. Viacom. Needham Heights, MA 02194.
Cristina,
ReplyDelete"I’m adaptable, eclectic, driven, and so is my teaching style. I’m constantly on the lookout for different ways to maintain the children’s interests in taking increasing control over their own lives and learning processes."
You have a lot of interesting statements on teaching philosophy but what I want to comment is on the statement that you made of about your teaching style. Teachers never stop learning or seek knowledge that is what makes a teacher different from other people /professions , teachers need to learn in order to teach and to teach in other to survive.