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Emerging Lessons (cont'd)
Because questions of neutrality and bias are endemic to teaching, I want to say at least a few words about those problems here, though I will not pretend to a full discussion. Two main points orient my own thinking and attempted practice in this regard:
a. No teaching can be purely objective or value free, although aspirations to -- and apparent belief in the possibility of – objective teaching continue to be voiced in the literature and at the water cooler. I am convinced that even the most earnest attempt to teach without communicating values is doomed -- at best to instructive failure, and at worst to deception of self and others. Perhaps most worrisome is the fact that claims to objectivity, and rules that purport to require it, function most often to reinforce existing systems of privilege by masking them as neutrality.
b. On the other hand, even though no teaching can be objective or value free, good teaching should open up lines of inquiry, not shut them down, and teachers should strive to put wide information and multiple perspectives into the hands of students and should encourage students to make their own well-informed decisions. The impossibility of a viewpoint unaffected by one’s own position does not mean that “anything goes,” or that unchecked subjectivity – the teacher’s or anyone else’s – should reign.
These two complementary and sometimes tension-filled insights translate into real dilemmas for teachers about how they should handle and communicate their own values and commitments in the context of their teaching. It is hard enough to verbally frame reasonable-sounding resolutions to these dilemmas. Needless to say, it is much harder to bring good answers to life in one’s actual face-to-face teaching. Below are a few attempts of my own to arrive at reasonable verbal resolutions -- or anyhow defensible verbal observations -- about these questions and dilemmas. I hope it is clear that I do not claim to have achieved what I want in my own classrooms. Humility is in order, and I have tried to make sure it is in evidence below.
The teaching relationship should be one of mutual respect and learning, and the frank exchange of ideas. Teachers should therefore avoid imposing – whether consciously or unconsciously – their own values on others. Likewise, they should avoid seeking or eliciting student performances that parrot or coddle the teachers’ views.
Most students (like most people generally, including us teachers) need more practice at unearthing and examining unstated assumptions and values. This need is particularly great in relation to matters that appear at first encounter to have no questionable assumptions behind them, but seem rather to be grounded in self-evident truths or unassailable common sense. Good teaching will therefore include activities and environments that encourage critical thinking about assumptions, and good law teaching will specifically encourage this kind of critical thinking to extend to law, the legal system, legal ideologies, the profession, and legal education.
Students should be given fruitful and challenging opportunities to identify and question their own values as part of this general effort to see and think consciously about assumptions. Teachers should try to provide unsettling contrasts and enlarge the range of alternatives that students know about, so they can perceive and question their own existing assumptions in a better-informed and wiser way.
In all these endeavors, the teacher needs to recall that the ones who need to be doing the questioning, the ones who need to be constructing the answers, are of course the students themselves. Whatever lessons the students draw, whatever assumptions they reject, alter or embrace, will be built not only on the new experiences that come to them through the small window of one class, but also on their past experiences and convictions. The teacher should strive to make clear to the students, in word and deed and body language, that their moral autonomy and their authority over their own learning outcomes are recognized and respected.
A teacher who models habits of noting and questioning her own assumptions, and who invites challenge and conversation about them, is more likely to succeed at communicating the above assurances to students.
However, none of this is easy! It can be difficult for a teacher to share her own passions and convictions while also making real room for other voices – not only for the expression of different ideas, but also for the silence and conceptual groping that may be required for students to find their own way. If one of the challenges is how to avoid domination by the teacher, another is how to encourage mutually respectful interaction and well-distributed participation among the students. It is inescapable that course activities will be full of the power relationships that predominate in the larger society. Class members, teacher included, will therefore be burdened, fortified, and blinded in various ways by their respective social positions, and the teacher may have to do more than sit back and say “Play ball!” if she hopes to avoid dynamics that mostly mirror and reproduce existing patterns of privilege and power.
As one way of trying to navigate these challenging shoals, I have begun surfacing some of my own course-related assumptions more explicitly as my students and I begin the semester together. I have generally received positive feedback about doing so, for which I am grateful. But the truth is that I continue to struggle with how to make good on my invitation to free-wheeling dialogue. To see an example of one “assumptions notice” that I distributed in a fieldwork class, click here.
Some helpful resources that touch on the questions discussed in this section are:
Stephen Brookfield, Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass (1995)(Brookfield is insistent on the need for transparency with students. He describes compellingly his own experiences in education classrooms.)
Orville Vernon Burton, “Teaching Philosophy Statement”
http://www.history.uiuc.edu/fac_dir/burton_dir/philos.htm
(This is an attempt by a venerated history teacher to examine and reveal some of his own assumptions and convictions. Burton is a Distinguished Teacher/Scholar at the University of Illinois and was a member of my cohort at the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning)
Myles Horton & Paulo Freire, We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change. Philadelphia: Temple University Press (1990)(Horton was one of the founders of the Highlander Folk School (now the Highlander Research & Education Center). Freire was an innovative literacy teacher in Brazil, and became perhaps the world's primary theoretician of "popular education." Both men spent lifetimes attempting to uncover and upset the deep biases they saw embedded in mainstream education.)
Patricia Meyer Spacks, ed., Advocacy in the Classroom: Problems and Possibilities. St. Martin’s Press, New York (1996)(Spacks provides a range of views on this vexing subject.)
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