Most teachers are not ‘great teachers’, or not yet great teachers, because most teachers feel they are, or desire to be, satisfied by being seen as a teacher and that alone, their boundaries strengthened by borrowed authority. They borrow this authority from the role description of the teacher – a description of what a teacher is – not of the qualities of the process. It is a lifelong process, after all, that of teaching and learning.
Bad teachers aspire to see themselves as distinct from learners they teach, although they use positive words such as leading, guiding and modelling a supposedly state of achieved knowledge, skill and value, as if they were the goal to which learners must aspire. This role mistakes the goal of learning which is not a state of being but of becoming, which can be facilitated by acquired knowledge, skill and values but not substituted for by a person playing the role of acquired knowledge, skill and values.
Hence a teacher who is not equally and primarily a learner can never facilitate learning. That is because, I think, teaching and learning are aspects of the same becoming. A great teacher knows how to make learners into teachers of themselves and others too and be capable of learning from them and that means that they not only model the uses of desirable knowledge, skills and values but are still visibly showing their performance of an attitude and aspiration for learning. Knowledge, skills, and values are a communal and interpersonal object and aspiration. Plato described them in the allegory of the cave, a cave in which we see only the appearances of the ‘truth’ we pursue, which exists only outside the cave.
Pedro Blas González says of ‘effective (‘good enough’ but not yet ‘great’) teachers’ that they are those capable of facilitating learning:
.., — but the burden falls on the student. There must exist a reasonable measure of the commensurable between student and teacher, where both seek to attain the same understanding and knowledge. Genuine learning requires the desire to know. [1]
Whilst I totally agree that learners have responsibility for their own learning, this characterisation (though probably certainly true of Plato’s thought) is unsatisfactory. Maybe that is because for Plato there is a realm of absolute Truth to pursue, whilst for our contemporary world the One Truth which stands outside the cave of our world of appearances is a myth. With no aspiration possible other than in fable for a perfect world represented by the SUN shining outside the cave in which we are fixed, learning is a constant and never-ending (and therefore impersonal because it continues after the passing of individuals and even hegemonic social groups) act of trans-personal becoming, not an enactment of being. In such a situation, learning that requires external teaching is lifelong cannot meet the needs of our situation: teaching and learning must look more like what they are: two aspects of the same thing that cannot be distributed in a binary, so that one person is only a ‘student’, whilst the other is only a ‘teacher’. A great teacher is the teacher who is also a great learner, modelling not the knowledge, skills and values but the process of their acquisition and the state of vulnerability of not yet having them as proximate to us as we desire them to be.
Of course, the teacher will have acquired partial knowledge, skills and values that can be taught. Even better the way to discover those elements of knowledge, skill and values can be facilitated across a group that includes teacher and learner often working at uneven levels of attainment and capacity and some dependent on more teaching from others than those others. However, the comprehensive range of what can be learned means that the distribution of beginners, novices and those with a recognisable attainment of any one part of them will mean that sometimes experts in one thing to be learned and taught (or shared) might be beginners in another thing to be learned and taught (or shared).
That’s all for today
With love
Steven xxxxxxxx
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[1] https://kirkcenter.org/essays/platos-idea-of-the-teacher/
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