troubling questions

This week, for personal, learner reasons, I am full of questions and, frankly frustrations. I began this semester questioning whether kids (and whether I) could learn this way. Now I realize that I don't even know what “this way” really is. Two weeks ago, Eleanor asked the class if anyone had learned with this method. Two or three people raised their hands; I found myself thinking, snarkily, “Oh really?”

On reflection, though, I wondered what these colleagues' educations had looked like. It seems like this part of the semester is about opening up the method to application in our practice—bringing elements and values of critical exploration into our classrooms. There is a recognition among numerous students, even if Eleanor is often vague and cryptic about her own opinions, that she means critical exploration to be a tool in our kits. If test culture means that we cannot lead our class in critical exploration of subject matter all of the time we spend with them, we can at least infuse it as often as possible so that students get a hint of the richness of a subject matter and the joy of discovering things on their own.

But how is this different from the education I received? The curriculum of many of the classes was project-based and self-directed. True there were rubrics and expectations; we could do what we wanted but we had to do something, and it would be evaluated. There were high expectations implicit in the culture of my school, but there was considerable freedom to explore what interested us and encounter subject matter (as opposed to writings about subject matter). Does this mean that I experienced this pedagogy as it looks in public school practice?

The most salient difference would seem to be the presence of expectations. I fully believe that when Eleanor “teaches,” she is happy with whatever learning happens, so long as the learners truly explore and stay engaged. But how many teachers—even ignoring external assessment pressures—are happy no matter what their students come to? Even Lisa Scheiner, when asked about the “Black” theme in “Progress Report” revealed that she would not have been happy if the students had not explored this. Scheiner, who is dedicated to and values critical exploration as a pedagogy, is hardly typical.

This issue raises the question of transparency—how clear should we make our goals for students? Meg, Kathryn, and Todd have been vocally struggling with as school teachers who place a lot of value on emphasizing class understanding goals, course throughlines, etc.. When we have discussed transparency in section, however, I think we have been doing so falsely. It isn't that the teacher-researcher using a pure form of critical exploration conceals goals, it is that the only goal is to keep the learner exploring and coming up with new questions. Therefore, it is not only meaningless, but I argue dangerous, to remove visual and spoken enforcement of goals while maintaining expectations for students. Unspoken expectations are unfair to learners. At best they result in frustration, at the worst, they could result in extreme self doubt and academic disidentification.

But then, this raises Delpit's point about gatekeepers. Even if a particular teacher doesn't have specific learner goals, the other teachers likely will—to say nothing of society as a whole. If we pretend gatekeepers don't exist, Depit says, we are ensuring that some students will not make it through the gates.

Fundamentally, then, I think these are issues of the philosophy of education, what defines a “good life,” and what are the competing (ethical) responsibilities of teachers. If we accept, for example, that a teacher has a responsibility to prepare students to succeed in a capitalist structure and also to help those students define their own passions, be happy, and be citizens—local and global—who have a commitment to justice and understanding, then the teacher who takes on these responsibilities will find that they sometimes (often?) conflict. Is it in the hand of the teacher to establish a hierarchy of responsibilities? How can this be anything other than a recreation of the inherently biased value structure of the teacher? Standards, however they have been misused in education, exist in theory to protect students for bad teachers (in whatever form 'bad' takes). Coming back overtly to critical exploration—is there a way to standardize such an individual process? Would we want to?