Why Teaching Matters

A Philosophical Guide to the Elements of Practice

Paul Farber, Dini Metro-Roland

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350097780
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Théorie et pratique de l'éducation

Why Teaching Matters is an introductory guide to core elements of teaching, getting to the heart of what teaching is, and why it matters. Paul Farber and Dini Metro-Roland introduce the following 8 elements which encompass the many issues, themes and social complexities of teaching: - Conveying Care
- Enacting Authority
- Cultivating Virtue
- Interpreting Subject matter
- Rendering Judgment
- Articulating Purpose
- Establishing a Sense of Place
- Engaging Presence The focus on the elements of practice frames discussion of teaching as an essential human activity and highlights the kinds of significant issues that teachers face, including technology, social inequality, and the management and evaluation of their work. As a philosophical guide, it introduces and draws upon a range of thinkers, including Nel Noddings, Hannah Arendt, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Danielle Allen, and James Baldwin whose work informs a deeper understanding of teaching. The theoretical discussions are grounded with examples and anecdotes from the classroom so that theory is always connected with practice, and questions for further inquiry appear at the end of each chapter. Intended for students of education and for new and experienced teachers alike, as well as anyone interested in the impact of teaching, Why Teaching Matters explores the inherent complexity and challenges of teaching, offering a comprehensive account of the many ways in which teaching matters.

1

Conveying Care

In Iris Murdoch’s Sandcastle, Mor is teaching a lesson about virtue in an adult education program. He begins by addressing a comment made by one of the students:

“Freedom,” he said, “is not exactly what I would call a virtue. Freedom might be called a benefit or a sort of grace—though of course to seek it or to gain it might be a proof of merit.”

The greengrocer who had made the remark that surely freedom was the chief virtue, and wasn’t it thinking so that differentiated us from the Middle Ages? stared intently at Mor as if drinking in his words. Mor thought, he is not really listening, he does not want to hear what I say, he knows what he thinks and is not going to reorganize his views. The words I am uttering are not the words for him.

He felt again that sad guilty feeling which he had whenever he caught himself going through the motions of being a teacher without really caring to make his pupils understand. How well he knew that many teachers, including some who got high reputations from doing so, contented themselves with putting up a show, often a brilliant one, in front of those who were to be instructed—and of this performance both sides might be the dupes. Whereas the real teacher cares only for one thing, that the matter should be understood; and into that process he vanishes . . .

“I’m sorry, Mr. Staveley,” said Mor, “I’ve said nothing to the purpose. Let me try again. You say surely freedom is a virtue—and I hesitate to accept this phrase. Let me explain why. To begin with . . . freedom needs to be defined. If by freedom we mean absence of external constraint, then we may call a man lucky for being free—but why should we call him good?”

“This is the condition of virtue, and to strive for it is a virtue. But it is not itself a virtue. To call mere absence of restraint or mere kicking over the traces and flouting of conventions a virtue is to be simply romantic.”

“Well, what’s wrong with being romantic?” said Mr. Staveley obstinately. “Let’s have ‘romantic’ defined, since you’re so keen on definitions.”

I’ve failed again, thought Mor, with the feeling of one who has brought the horse round the field a second time only for it to shy once more at the jump. He felt very tired and the words did not come easily. But he was prepared to go on trying.

Iris Murdoch, The Sandcastle¹

To those who teach, this classroom scene is unexceptional. We have all experienced the sense of frustration, incompleteness, and impending failure evident in Mor’s exchange with his adult students. Caught in a conflict of motives, teachers must decide what matters and how far one is prepared to go on trying in the face of a seemingly lost cause. The pressure to put up a show and keep students in their seats is a persistent feature of today’s classrooms. It is tempting, sometimes irresistibly so, to simply go through the motions, treating teaching like any other job. And yet Mor is not alone in his dogged resolve to push forward until the matter is understood; for him this is what teaching requires, “vanishing in the process” even if it likely means “bringing the horse round” yet another time.

Whether a “real teacher cares only for one thing” is another question entirely. Mor’s intentions are far from simple. He not only attends to the subject matter which he persists in trying to openly explore but he also shows concern for the students themselves, even the obstinate Mr. Staveley. Mor probably also feels some responsibility to the civic purpose of this occasion and to what he believes are his obligations as a teacher. What motivates these adult students is no doubt complex as well. Murdoch wisely leaves this to her readers’ imagination, but it is clear that Mr. Staveley’s prickly remarks put Mor to the test. Like teachers everywhere, Mor must prudently but forcefully meet this challenge and defend his commitments as if his authority as a teacher, and the values he represents, depend upon it. His students will surely notice if he gives up the fight.

Care is fundamentally a disposition to attend to something; to care for or about something involves the giving of attention. Iris Murdoch describes this elsewhere as “a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality.”² When we attend to something outside of ourselves, we are responsive to its qualities, interests, and demands. Teachers convey care by acting on their varied pedagogical commitments in explicit ways. A teacher’s care directs the attention of others; it invites active engagement and creates and strengthens mutual concern. One might even say that teaching matters to the extent that teachers care, care about what they teach, whom they teach, and why they go on teaching in spite of it all.

In this chapter, we are primarily interested in how the cares of teachers motivate and shape the educational experience. We begin with the notion of care as a disposition to attend, and consider the kinds of things that teachers tend to care about. Teachers, we argue, often convey their care with sharing intent—they invite students to participate in their commitments. Why the diverse cares of teachers matter is then put in the context of how their work, motivated by those cares, affects their students and can impact the course of their lives. We end the chapter by raising some unsettling questions about the ethics of teacher attention as their cares play out in the lives of those they teach.

The Elusive Object of Care

What does it mean when a student says that her teacher really cares? It may be that what she is actually saying is, “This teacher cares about me.” But that’s probably not the end of it. Few students can respect a teacher who couldn’t care less about what or how she teaches. And while teachers often do care in certain respects about their students, that is rarely the whole story. Teachers also care about the conditions and context of their work and their standing as teachers. And, of course, they cannot avoid caring in any number of ways about what they teach. But what does it mean to care?

A prominent view has been offered by Harry Frankfurt. He suggests that the mark of caring about something is the sense of pain or loss one would feel in having to give it up, turn away, or let it go. In the case of one’s deepest and most enduring cares, the object of care is something to which one feels willingly committed; in that state, we desire its continued existence and we are moved to identify with and act in its best interests. For Frankfurt, the objects of such care can be many kindsof things—for example, one’s child, a pet, a particular person or people, some activity or practice, certain objects in the world or abstract ideals, say truth or justice.³ In caring about any of these things, or anything at all, it matters that they exist, and we desire what is in their interest in continuing to exist, and if possible, to do well or flourish. Because of this, the object of your care motivates your sustained attention and makes you mindful of other things in the world that are important to you, precisely because they bear on the interests of what you care about.

That determination is strengthened by another key feature of care. Frankfurt reminds us that human beings are by nature reflexive beings. This matters greatly where care is concerned. As he puts it, “Caring manifests and depends upon our distinctive capacity to have thoughts, desires, and attitudes that are about our own attitudes, desires, and thoughts.”⁴ Simply put, we care about our cares, which lends shape to our identity. Affirming that “this is what I care about” deepens the sense that “this is who I am,” and vice versa. Recall Mor’s frustration whenever he finds himself caring more about putting up a show than making the subject matter understood, which for him is what truly matters in teaching. It would seem that it is his second-order conviction that he not only cares about the matter being understood but also that he should care, that drives him to go on trying. That is who he is as a teacher.

Teachers are not all cast in the same mold, however. Teachers can care about many things. First, there is the job itself. Many consider teaching to be an attractive kind of work, providing plenty of the benefits one can reasonably hope for in a job—for example, that the work is stable, that the conditions are appealing, and in the case of teaching, that it is personally meaningful and fulfilling. For those whose object of care is the job itself, it becomes a matter of genuine importance to them that they do the job well, fulfilling the terms of employment and meeting the prevailing professional and institutional expectations for this kind of work. Matters of importance arise from this kind of care. Teachers need to develop reliable expertise in doing the work, negotiate and monitor the terms and conditions set out by their administrators or employers. Teachers want to get paid of course. They also desire recognition for the work they do and often wish for greater influence over the direction of their profession. There is nothing especially demeaning or surprising about this; these same practical concerns motivate members of every profession.

Caring about the job may be a start, but when looking for the object of care in teaching, it is sorely limited. Cares also emerge from the specific nature of teaching itself. Even teachers who care exclusively about the job recognize that they must concern themselves with whom and what they teach—matters of clear importance to the teaching profession. Given the nature of the practice, it should come as no surprise that the central objects of care for many teachers are students, the subject matter, or the ways in which the two interact in practice. They have reason to care about the job, too, but it is not the principal focus of their care.

We all expect teachers to attend to their students in some way. At a minimum, we hope that they will pay heed to their students’ grasp of a specific domain of knowledge and skills. An effective chemistry teacher will likely work hard to provide her students with a foundation of scientific principles and practices. She displays care for students by meticulously developing in them a familiarity with lab equipment and their usage, certain powers of observation, organization, and measurement, and knowledge of the elements and the various effects of different combinations and conditions. Of course, she can care for her students in other ways as well. She might take a keen interest in their personal lives, or work to bring out other qualities in them not directly related to science. She can do these things simply because they are pedagogically effective—that is, because building relationships promotes better student engagement—or because she is genuinely interested in their lives beyond the classroom, or some combination of the two.

Nel Noddings, a renowned scholar of care, envisions a more prominent caring role for teachers.⁵ She is less interested in care as an individual attribute—such as whether one possesses a caring personality—than she is in understanding and promoting caring relations between individuals.⁶ For Noddings, genuine care takes place as a particular form of interaction between the carer and the cared-for. Both parties have a role to play in realizing the relation. The carer must attend to the person in need with what she characterizes as engrossment and motivational displacement.⁷ That is, the carer should be prepared to become fully receptive to the cared-for, and establish what is required of her at that moment (engrossment). Setting aside her own projects and designs, the carer must then align her actions with goals that are relevant and beneficial to the cared-for (motivational displacement). This can be as simple as reminding a student to write his name on his paper this time, or as drastic as scrapping an entire lesson to help students cope with a sudden tragedy. We convey care by counseling a student to give up his earlier goal of becoming a writer when that is the right thing for him to do as well as by allowing a conversation to wander into uncharted territory if that is where the students’ interests lead.

To complete the caring relation, the person cared for must acknowledge the gesture of care. Absent such recognition the caring relation is liable to break down. Few situations are more deflating to teachers than when their best efforts are met with cold indifference. Recognition here would require at least a modicum of responsiveness to what is being taught, otherwise the teacher might succumb to apathy, the opposite of care.

Noddings believes that schooling provides ideal sites for the enactment and strengthening of caring relations. By demonstrating care for students this way, teachers create open spaces for inquiry that build on students’ natural interests and encourage them to discover and exercise their unique talents, pursue their chosen goals, and show appreciation for caring and being cared for in and outside the classroom. However, current trends in schooling are mostly incompatible with this vision. Adopting Noddings’ particular form of caring as a guiding principle of teaching would require a significant shift away from standardized curricula, pseudo dialogues (where the teacher knows the conclusion before the conversation begins), and other heavy-handed pedagogical strategies utilized by teachers to leverage student energies and attention toward predetermined ends. The boundaries separating school from community would also have to become more porous and formal teaching more reflective of the kind of interactions that take place organically between those who possess knowledge and skills and those who genuinely desire to acquire them.

There are other ways to care about students, however. Some approaches to teaching entail widening the horizon of what students care about beyond their immediate concerns. Sensitivity to student interests is thereby balanced by a teacher’s disposition to attend to matters far apart fro...