David T. Hansen
In this article, the author elucidates the idea of bearing witness to teaching and teachers. The orientation derives from a philosophical and field-based inquiry pivoting around the questions What does it mean to be a person in the world today? and What does it mean to be a person in the role of teacher? From 2012 to 2014, the author interacted closely with 16 teachers from 8 different state-funded schools in a large, culturally diverse US city. The endeavor included extensive classroom visits, whole-group discussion meetings, and a systematic series of individual interviews. The article shows how the orientation of bearing witness calls fresh attention to the person who occupies the role of teacher. It illuminates the easy-to-overlook truth that it is persons, rather than roles as such, who educate. The author argues that bearing witness contributes importantly to remembrance of deep educational values.
1. Introduction
‘Bearing witness’ is a familiar term. There is the witness in court who attests to the facts of a case. There is the witness at a wedding, a bank, or a law office, who signs a formal document and attests, thereby, to the validity of what has transpired. The religious witness expresses a revelation or an insight into scripture. The social witness rejects a hierarchical social order and elects to live amongst the poor, the downtrodden, and the marginalized. Many persons have sought to bear witness to large-scale human trauma, such as the atrocities of World War II. Here, the witness calls for a moral awakening, for justice, for remembrance, even while meticulously recording the facts of violence (Agamben, 2002; Felman & Laub, 1992; Hatley, 2000; Oliver, 2001; Simon, 2005). Significantly, in all these uses of the concept, the witness is not ‘complete’ until it has been shared and acknowledged by others. Witnessing comes to life in communication (Peters, 2001).
Scholars have begun to draw out the educational ramifications of forms of witnessing associated with historical trauma. Their work foregrounds a normative rather than merely descriptive framing of the concept (see e.g. Berlak, 1999; Di Paolantonio, 2015; Hansen, 2012; Ropers-Huilman, 1999; Zembylas, 2006) The idea of bearing witness to teaching and teachers that I elucidate here takes its point of departure from a different though morally allied origin, especially with respect to fundamental questions of human dignity and recognition. The context for the study is a recently completed philosophical and field-based inquiry involving myself, two doctoral research assistants, and 16 teachers from 8 different state-funded schools in the same culturally diverse metropolitan setting. The animating questions for the inquiry were: What does it mean to be a person in the world today? and What does it mean to be a person in the role of teacher today? For two years, my assistants and I sat in on several hundred classes taught by the teachers. I myself devoted 74 days to classroom visits, typically spending 2–3 h on each occasion bearing witness to a teacher’s world. We met with the teachers as a group 21 times for wide-ranging discussion of the project themes. Each meeting included a modest catered dinner and lasted 3 h. We also recorded and transcribed 42 individual interviews with the participants.1
The questions about being a person were born from a fusion of philosophical wonder and practical concern. Much of my career has involved working with teachers. I remain endlessly struck by a wondrous, dynamic fact that goes unremarked because it is so familiar: namely, that there are human beings who render themselves into what we call ‘teachers’, and who have a genuinely positive influence on other human beings. Behind this source of wonder is the timeless question of who or what we are as beings, encompassing in turn the questions of why we are here at all (the profound mystery of why is there something rather than nothing) and how we should conduct our lives in light of the primordial fact, or gift, of our ‘isness’.
Alongside reverberating wonder, the concern motivating the two-year-long study emerged from an increasingly unsettled sense that the integrity of teaching as a practice, indeed as a calling to many of its practitioners, is in danger of being sundered (at least in the US) by today’s so-called ‘accountability’ policies. These policies are premised upon cost-benefit and bottom-line business mentalities that are constitutionally unable to approach teaching as the complex intellectual, moral, and social endeavor it has always been. Good teaching requires a continuously developing sense of judgment regarding how to engage students in subject matter, how to interpret their understanding, how to draw upon their experience to help them perceive the significance of their studies, how to cultivate a supportive learning community in the classroom, and much more (Hostetler, 1997, 2011; Sherman, 2013; Sockett, 2012). But instead of creating mechanisms to enrich the development of good judgment in the classroom, current policy marginalizes or undermines it (Santoro, 2011a, 2011b, 2013; Wills & Sandholtz, 2009). The moral baseline in the present article is the view that teachers are singular persons who, with the right support, bring commitment, knowledge, a sympathetic outlook, and other human offerings to their work with the young.
Bearing witness has a family resemblance with several well-known modes of research: phenomenology, portraiture, connoisseurship (with its close relation, educational criticism), and arts-based inquiry. The orientation resembles phenomenology in its attention to fundamental signs and indices of what is sometimes summarized as ‘being-in-the-world,’ in this case the teacher’s. Phenomenological method involves scrupulous, detailed description of human action, undertaken not with an a priori hypothesis or with a desire to explain on a cause-effect basis, but rather with the aim of helping others perceive the easy-to-overlook concreteness and complexity of lived experience (Van Manen, 1990, 2014).
Witnessing resembles portraiture in that both aspire to present an educator’s world in a spirit of critical sympathy, with an equal accent on both of those terms (Dewey, 1985, pp. 127, 128, 155, 1989, p. 270). Portraiture seeks to capture educators’ efforts ‘to do the right thing’ from a professional point of view (Lawrence-Lightfoot, 2005; Lawrence-Lightfoot & Hoffman Davis, 1997). Portraiture and phenomenology, as I understand them, entail neither approval nor disapproval of teachers and teaching. They differ from social engineering research that presumes a deficit model of teachers, and they differ from what become, in effect, hagiographies. Phenomenology and portraiture illuminate the poetics of teaching (Hansen, 2004; Stillwaggon, 2016): how a teacher’s aesthetic, moral, and intellectual sensibility finds expression through the most (seemingly) ordinary things she or he enacts in the classroom.
The orientation to teaching I call bearing witness also evokes what Elliot Eisner dubs connoisseurship with its attendant capacity for fine-grained criticism (Eisner, 1976, 1991). Connoisseurship, at first glance, may conjure an elitist image of a moneyed collector of paintings or fine wines. However, Eisner democratizes the concept in showing how it points to a human potentiality that can apply equally to one of the arts, to plumbing, to building roads, to piloting an aircraft—and to undertaking educational research. Connoisseurship denotes how a person can develop, through extensive experience and reflection, a rich, nuanced feeling for and understanding of a particular activity. This immersion positions the person, in turn, to become an insightful critic of that activity: thus Eisner’s emphasis on what he calls educational criticism, mirroring the deeply grounded perspective of the literary or art critic. The inquirer-as-witness to teaching must bring to bear an experiential as well as scholarly intimacy with the dynamics of the practice.
Finally, bearing witness resembles arts-based research (Barone & Eisner, 2012). It does so, in part, by taking the artist as an exemplar of disciplined inquiry. Successful artists are no more interested in ‘subjective impressions’ and ‘anecdotal evidence’ than are successful scientists. Rather, their extraordinary focus, their persistent self-questioning, their commitment to truth, their command of technique, their sheer hard work, and more, constitute a warrant for trusting them that is every bit as significant as what scientists construct through their methods. Science attempts to explain. Art illuminates meaning. Human beings live in and by meaning, including the meaning they ascribe to explanations. Arts-based inquiry attends to the meaning people variously find, lose, create, discover, and yearn for in their lives.
The modes of research touched on above have yielded valuable insights about educational practice. They have widened the circle of what counts as research, demonstrating why the social sciences have their value but not a monopoly on how to grasp educational reality. These modes echo John Dewey’s wise remark: ‘Truth telling is a duty for all, but it is not the duty of all to tell the same truth, because they have not the same truth to tell’ (1971, pp. 317, 318). The orientation of bearing witness is not reducible to the other forms addressed here (just as they are not reducible the one to the other). The overt emphasis in witnessing is on ethical rather than solely epistemic matters. The very idea of ‘bearing witness’ to teaching and teachers opens up fertile ground for remembrance in a policy era that seems in a headlong rush to abandon long-standing, profound educational values. One of these values is the significance of the person in the role of teacher, a truth which embodies, in turn, remembering that it is persons rather than roles who educate.2
The section that follows introduces the orientation of bearing witness that I enacted in the field-based study (and see Hansen, in press). The ensuing section elucidates the orientation through argument and illustration. In order to best capture the gestalt of bearing witness to teaching and teachers, I draw on field-notes from one teacher’s classroom. I deploy these notes throughout the discussion as snapshots or sketches wherein the reader can observe my own witnessing. I do not claim to have succeeded in meeting the ethical and epistemic requirements of bearing witness. My hope is to make plain the contours and consequences of this orientation for educational work.
2. A witness to teaching and being a teacher
Let me begin with the following vignette drawn from my field notes.3
Karolina and I were finishing a late morning walk in March in her K-5 school’s immediate neighborhood. She had had a break in her teaching schedule, and had suggested we stretch our legs. As we wound up our conversation and stepped back through the old school building’s heavy doorway, Karolina stopped abruptly and turned to me. ‘Look, I know this is a research project and all that,’ she said, ‘but can I just ask: how am I doing? I mean, I really wonder if I am a good teacher with these children. If you have any suggestions for me, I’d really welcome them.’ Karolina’s tone of voice matched the sincere questioning in her eyes. She was not seeking flattery or easy comfort, nor was she requesting a battery of new classroom techniques. She wanted to know how she was faring—whether she was doing right by her students in both academic and moral terms.
My response was immediate. ‘You know your students, you’ve just been talking about them again on our walk. I’ve seen the many educational things you do with them individually, in groups, and as a whole class.’ Karolina looked down for a moment. She gave her head a shake as she turned to lead us toward the stairway up to her classroom. Several adults and children were coming and going. She half-smiled, half-frowned, and said: ‘Okay, well—I just don’t know, you know?’
I did not anticipate Karolina’s direct question that morning, with its vivid overtones of vulnerability and uncertainty. Her question startled me, on first hearing it, because she is an experienced, thirteen-year veteran in the profession whose work I had come to admire, and also because my self-assigned role in the endeavor did not include being a pedagogical adviser (see below). However, I did not stop to think before responding to her. I had done the thinking already through the hours I had spent in her classroom, the hours of conversation with her individually and with the larger group of teachers in the project, and the hours writing up my notes based on these encounters. I had seen that Karolina listens closely to her Grade 2 students and speaks with them mindfully. She is adept at picking out confused or frustrated voices amidst the lively cacophony that obtains during small group work. She places herself near the children during one-on-one tutorials, which are frequent in her classroom, while maintaining the dignity of space. Karolina regards her students. That is, she does not just monitor their external behavior, but looks at their doings with critical sympathy. She encourages the children and, without using the term in so many words, she expresses trust in them. When she addresses a child who is off task or disrupting another person, she does not insist they make eye contact with her. She manages the clock prudently as the class moves through the day’s activities.
Karolina (who is a white woman in her 30s) sometimes misreads her students intellectually and emotionally, as she herself pointed out in our interviews. Some of her lesson activities do not connect with the class. She remarked on a number of occasions that she continuously seeks to improve her pedagogical techniques with regards to the subjects she teaches: mathematics, writing, and reading. On a different platform, she also had much to say during our two years together about how tense her work environment has become under the current auditing system in American public education (cf. Sockett, 2012), with its testing and related standardizing imperatives. All of this comes on top of the very real challenges—and joys—she encounters teaching her 27 students, most of whom are first-generation Americans, who bring to the classroom varying and ever-changing degrees of academic readiness, social maturity, and general life experience.
Mindful of these complexities, the sense I increasingly had after each visit to her classroom (on eight different days all told) was that there was no better place for her students to be on a given weekday than with Karolina and their classmates. Karolina herself stated, more than once, that she could not imagine doing anything better with her days than teaching these children. By the time Karolina and I took our walk that March morning, and she asked about her teaching, I was in a position to respond as a witness.
This term pertains to something other than observing or cataloguing a teacher’s behavior. Rather, it has to do with discerning expressions of the person in the role. Through the course of our ongoing interaction, I had come to see that Karolina is a person in her work as a teacher. This fact is both peculiar-sounding and elusive: peculiar because it is patently obvious she is a person, but elusive because this kind of truth is obscured—it is not treated as obvious—in much of today’s research and policy environment in education. In today’s zeitgeist, as touched on in the introduction, teachers are perceived as interchangeable ‘parts’ rather than as unique professionals who, with pertinent support and motivation, can contribute in distinctive ways to the education of children and youth, including from marginalized and immigrant groups in society who (at least in the US context) have often received unequal educational provision. Karolina and most of the other teachers in the undertaking I organized work directly with such young people. The teachers are purposive human beings: they bring to the classroom a serious pedagogical sensibility, a craftsperson’s know-how, and an abiding sense of commitment that when witnessed makes it impossible to picture teachers as mere hired hands carrying out the dictates of others.
