According to Dewey’s (1916) “theory of experience”, I learn from every experience I have, which, for better or for worse, shapes me and my subsequent actions. Using this lens, I can see that every time I interact with another person, he or she becomes my teacher. If they behave in ways I have often seen before, they further stabilize that way of being for me, as I gradually form general understandings of things in the world through direct experience. These generalizations then become the basis by which I construct further experience, as Eisner (1997), paraphrasing Neisser (1976) explains: “The expectations we acquire from our examination of the particular become a part of our anticipatory schema” (p. 7). However, if I encounter someone doing something uncommon, they show me an alternative way of being in the world. This different way of being presents itself as a possibility, destabilizing slightly my customary schema.
What those around me teach me can be called a “cultural curriculum.” “Curriculum” had traditionally been thought of as the plan a school has for implementing learning (Jackson, 1992). However, the definition of “curriculum” has been significantly stretched and split apart in recent decades (Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery, and Taubman, 1996). The notion of the curriculum as a ‘plan’ has been thoroughly problematized (see, for example the ‘hidden curriculum’ in Jackson, 1968), as has the concept that a curriculum is a formative technology limited to learning that occurs within schools (Schubert, 1986). Schubert insists that a curriculum is present in different organizations, from businesses to families. I would add that it is also present in culture, and that it is this curriculum that is taught to me in my interactions with others, forming the basis of Dewey’s argument for the transmission of culture (1916).
I participate in the cultural curriculum not only as a learner but also as a teacher. For the same reason that I am always a learner, I am also always a teacher. Everything I do has some influence on those who come into contact with me, whether I reinforce their old experiences, present them new ones, or find ways to bridge the old and the new. At this time, I am writing this this blog, which I adapted from an old thesis proposal. I am teaching those in this internet cafe through my choices of when and how to study, what to eat and how to relax, and so on. In each case, I am presenting ‘how Ramsey writes a blog.’ Some of the staff here have seen me come in repeatedly over the last few years and have undoubtedly formulated a fairly sophisticated way of understanding my way of "being in the world" -as I have similarly done for them. It is really quite impossible to imagine a circumstance where those who observe me do not learn in some way. You, the readers, are also learning from me, so in some sense I am your ‘teacher.’ Perhaps you have never seen a blog like this one, in which case, you may come to some new understandings as to what the format or topic a blog can take. I believe that embracing the fact that the human relationship is essentially (though not exclusively) pedagogical is important because this perspective allows us to conceive more easily the mutually influential nature of human interaction and the responsibility that goes along with it.
In an extended sense of the word then, I am at all times presenting a “curriculum”. While the overall trend in Curriculum Studies has been away from curriculum development and towards attempting to ‘understand’ what curriculum is (Pinar, et al. 1996), some scholars, particularly those involved with action research (ex. Carson, 1990), realize that understanding requires that we engage in doing curriculum and that these two concepts really need to be united. In a sense then, I am conducting autobiographical action research, in that my goal is to understand what my curriculum is through trying to make it what I want it to be. In other words, my practice and my theory will be in a dialectical relationship, each one informing the other. I hope to show this process through the writing of this proposal. I can think of no more elegant a way of expressing this than in the well-known quote of Freire, which is applicable far beyond the emancipatory, Marxist context for which it was intended: “Action without theory is blind, just as theory without action is meaningless” (1970).
Moreover, because all of my observers are also teachers, also living and interacting and presenting ways of being in the world continuously, it is also true that they are my ‘student teachers’ insofar as they come into contact with me. When I realize this and take responsibility for it, I become a teacher educator. This way of framing our relationship is useful because it prompts me continually to remember that the interactions I have with those around me reverberate far beyond the fixed domains that are usually conceived of. I do not usually consider, in my daily interactions with others, that we are nodes within a cultural entity and that nothing I do or say to another stops when our interaction does. At all times, I am then a student, a teacher, a student teacher and a teacher educator. Each of these perspectives sheds a different light on the pedagogical nature of my relationship with others. My relationship with others is each of these four modes simultaneously, occurring phenomenologically prior to my grasping of these relationships with language. These relationships are inherent in the biological fact that we are co-interacting sensory systems.
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