Each of us, to get our teaching job in higher education, has
had to write the dreaded ‘teaching philosophy’ statement. But now I wonder when
students will start writing their learning philosophies.
This comes to mind because a student wrote to me (in my capacity
as Department Chair) asking to be moved to another section of drawing because,
after a week of meetings, he felt that the instructor wouldn’t ‘challenge him
enough’. Apparently, this student had sought a schedule change from advising
but been turned down and had finally gotten to me. There was no mention of
having spoken to the instructor in this request.
I wrote back and said the department works very hard to
ensure consistency across the various sections of a course number and that we
don’t make changes for reasons of personality conflict. I added that an
implicit part of the curriculum is teaching students to deal with diversity of
approaches and methodologies in the making and discussion of art and design.
I am taking this opportunity to reflect on this statement.
It would seem to me that the student has a learning
philosophy in place: classes are confrontations in which the students are
challenged by the teacher. This is buttressed by a lot of language we use in
classes – the idea of assigning ‘problems’ for which students need to provide
‘solutions’. In one way or another, the teacher is responsible for motivating
the student by providing a challenge, either in the form of assignments or in
the form of a learning atmosphere that suggests competition.
This kind of thing turns up in discussion about crits, too.
A great many students complain that people are soft in crits, and give the
impression that if they are not called out for something then the critique is,
in some fatal way, not ‘honest.’ The implicit assumption here is that critique
has a toughening-up function to fulfill, and that students need to learn to
‘defend’ their work…presumably against some imagined, adversarial viewer. In my
long experience as a teacher and critic, I can honestly say that the greater
challenge artists face is learning to be generous enough to engage the
indifferent viewer – who cares about your
work, anyway? – but that’s another essay…
The confrontational class model, and its accompanying
assumption that challenge motivates students, is just one of the possible
myriad ways to think about running a class…and it’s one that is frankly at odds
with a lot of what is going on in the world where collaboration is being
stressed over confrontation and the ability to work in a group to achieve
objectives that exceed the talent and skill of the individual is becoming more
and more important.
So what if you want to run a class in which you nurture your
students into moving from their comfort zone of familiar (and boring) habits
into a new kind of creative identity? Where you work to get them out of the
defensive crouch typical to students who are novices in a discipline and into a
stance where they are willing to realize that the solutions they have are not
entirely sufficient to solve the problems the class – as a whole – faces? In other words, to a place where they are ready
to really learn, rather than
repeating bad habits or sharpening useless, outmoded skills?
And what if your student has an unexamined assumption that classes
are supposed to be bootcamps or trials by fire and you just don’t want to play
along with that macho fantasy by being turned into the evil center of the
class? I signed up to be a teacher, not to play a supporting role in some
teenager’s private version of The Hunger
Games by providing 'challenges'.
Teaching is not just transmitting information. It matters
how you run your class (and that’s why those teaching philosophies are not
going away), but it also matters what students expect from classes. They need
the chance to think about that, to examine their assumptions about the role of
the learner (which is utterly, completely different from the role of the
consumer…which society expects them to play all day, everyday). A student-centered
class isn’t a euphemism for making happy customers or taking away faculty
research – it’s about making sure students know that they are active participants
in their education and that they have work to do…and it might be harder than
some ‘challenge’ handed down from a teacher. It might actually involve
learning.
