BELIEFS ABOUT TEACHING:  A PERSONAL STATEMENT

Noreen B. Garman, Ph.D.

            In 1990 I was nominated by the School of Education for the University Outstanding Teaching Award. I was asked to give a statement of my beliefs about teaching. The following is my response:

I began my teaching career as a high school English teacher.  I really can’t remember a time when I wasn’t teaching.  “Doing” teaching has been my occupation:  “understanding” teaching has been my preoccupation.  In 1968 I began supervising teaching both in the public schools and the University.  My dissertation research focused on an instructional supervision program for teaching assistants in the English Department at Pitt.  Since then I have been teaching courses in instructional supervision, curriculum studies, adult learning and qualitative inquiry initially for the Curriculum and Supervision program and, since the reorganization of the School of Education, in the Department of Administrative and Policy Studies.  APS is a graduate program and the majority of our students are postmasters and doctoral candidates.

            I like to think that I bring an interpretivist orientation from my roots in the arts to my research and practice in education.  Yet, the longer I have studied teaching, the more confounding, even awesome, the educative act is for me.  A decade ago I was more certain.  I was influenced by the behavioral/mechanistic language of teaching when I constructed a schema known as “Instructional Scenarios” for supervisory practice.   Although the schema is useful as a way to talk about good teaching techniques, it doesn’t get at the essence of good teaching.  I think good teaching is embodied in us, in our beliefs and the way our beliefs are consistently manifest in our actions.  For the purpose of this nomination I have had to bring to consciousness the primary beliefs which seem to govern my actions with students.  In my present state of thinking about teaching I would offer the following:

Teaching is building habits of learning.  Orientation to scholarly learning is perhaps one of the crucial activities we can provide for our students, most of whom come to us as mature educational practitioners.  (There is still a tremendous gap between the habits of thinking in social abstraction and the need to find solutions to practical problems.)  To address this, I have, in recent years, begun to invite my students to take on the role of scholar/practitioner, to begin to think in different ways about themselves as “learners” rather than “performers” of educational practice.  Habits of inquiry are important, problem-setting as well as problem solving.  I try to help them cope with and manage large, disparate, amounts of information.  I try to help them articulate the embedded theories of their own practice as well as the formal theories of disciplined literature.  I try to help them know that we belong to a “community of scholar/practitioners” and that we are obliged to take part in the discourse of educational scholarship.  I try to help them find meaning in their own intellectual and emotional energy.

Teaching is creating a “community of learners.”  When people come together to learn for 15 weeks there is a real opportunity to engage them in collaborative learning.  I work hard to develop a sense of belongingness in my classes.  The first day I generally ask students to talk with and introduce one another to the class.  Each student has a name card.  I circulate a directory of names and addresses of class members.  I attempt to give the message that class members can learn from one another in a variety of ways.  They can hear how others think about an idea; they can share information from individual and group projects; they can, in an existential way, represent a particular type of educator within the community at large.  I have found that after members of the group begin to gain a commitment to one another, there are more intellectually challenging ideas that emerge from class discussion.  As individuals and small study groups begin to work on projects, they share resources far beyond what I could give them if I were the only source of information and intellectual nourishment.  Perhaps most poignant are the ways in which our international students become part of the community of learners.  They express their pleasure in being able to contribute to American students from their own experiences.  Most of all, they enrich our time together.

Teaching is directing classroom drama.  Classroom events, like dramatic presentations, are contrived.  Schooling implies that all participants “encounter” learning in contrived ways (even the most traditional, taken-for-granted method represents an artificial setting for learning.)  Classroom events are constructed by educators to create a representation with a heightened sense of reality (not a replication of ordinary, every-day activities,) much like the playwright who recognizes that meaningful human action is theatrical in nature.  I think that learning happens when the events of the classroom unfold, when participants feel the nuance of conflict and motive, dissonance and emotion, as part of the intellectual process.  I ask students to understand this phenomenon in which we are the actors.  They keep journals of each class activity.  They are asked to write reflective papers as part of their final portfolio, to “theorize,” if you will about the events which they have helped to construct.  In each course I design one or two formal simulation-like sessions for them to practice reflective theorizing.  I researched these classroom events, calling the inquiry, “The Mousetrap Study” which appears in several of my publications.  As I have said in my chapter, “The Drama of the Classroom:  Dramaturgy as Curriculum Inquiry”  we are actors in the most fulfilling drama the education establishment can produce.

Teaching is a moral craft.  As teachers we are continually confronted with moral dilemmas.  If it is possible to define good teaching I would posit that it resides in the struggle to come to terms with our dilemmas.  We struggle to balance a sense of duty to our students on one hand and the integrity of our discipline on the other.  We recognize that there is an intentionality about teaching which cannot guarantee learning, so we are obliged to be vigilant during the time we have with our students.  We try to balance the high intellectual standards of the university on one hand with the self-esteem of the learners on the other.  We recognize the high degree of manipulation in what we call teaching.  We confront ideologies which conflict with our own.  We wonder how much we do to enhance our own egos.  We are passionate about ideas and try to infuse intellectual rigor with a sense of compassion.  We are too often overextended and tired.  We get annoyed with superficial thinking and self-promoting behavior.  Still we recognize the importance of mutual respect.  The moral struggle is central to the craft of teaching.

            As I reflect on what I have constructed as my beliefs about teaching, at least for this moment in time, I realize that one constant is clear:  teaching is a way of life as well as a career.  A beloved colleague, Morris Cogan, once said to me, as an elevator door was closing between us, “When I think about teaching, I know that it’s wonderful to be paid to do something that I love so much!”  I’ve never forgotten his words.

SEE ALSO A RECENT THINK PIECE AT www.doc-r-us.com. This is a web site that features information and documents from a dissertation study group that I began with  my advisees in 1980, which has involved several iterations of members over the years. The current group continues with a membership of both doctoral students and post “docs” who continue to produce “documents” for presentation and publication.