Learning Philosophies

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.