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Talking With: The Heart of Teaching
Alison Preece (Canada)
“Simplify, simplify.” H.D. Thoreau
“One ‘simplify’ would have sufficed.” —
Ralph Waldo Emerson, in response.
From Let My People Go Surfing
by Yvon Chouinard
Recently, while sorting through the proliferating piles of papers that seem the inevitable accompaniment of the academic life, I came across a quotation I had tucked away, years ago, for safekeeping. It struck a chord for me then, and does again now. The words of the late Garth Boomer, a deservedly influential and much missed literacy educator from Australia, cut through the clutter of the overburdened, often frenetic, curriculum that is the daily reality for too many teachers and students to remind us of the simple things that should lie at the protected heart of teaching. He wrote:
In a time of increasing complexity in society, I crave simplicity in schools. Simplicity that values conversations between teachers and children . . . . simplicity that allows time to talk about the way the world wags; simplicity that spurns the enticing laboratory and exercise books, preferring the humble wisdom of the teacher and the real materials of life. (Boomer, 1973)
Although most classrooms have moved far from the “sit-still-and-listen” model that used to pass for instruction, it’s worth asking ourselves just how much space and provision we make for real conversations between teachers and children, or amongst students. These would be conversations that move beyond the exchange of superficial or safe observations; conversations that make possible the raising and airing of issues that we as individuals truly care about, get excited about, worry about, or can’t make sense of. A few years ago a teacher taking one of my graduate courses conducted an informal survey; she asked students in Grades 6 and 7 whether they ever had a chance, in any of their classes at school, to talk about the things they wanted to talk about and considered important. Overwhelmingly, distressingly, the answer was “No.” Several students went on to comment that it was the teacher, and only the teacher, who chose the topics for discussion, and that most discussions were more a ritualized exercise than any genuine exchange of views. Sadaf Pourmand, a Canadian high-school student, made a similar point in her response (in issue 8-4 of this journal, p. 6) to the question of whether schools were preparing students for the complexities of the world they would inhabit. Her stance was unequivocal: “From my point of view, school barely talks about different cultures, racism and indigenous peoples’ issues. When they do talk about these things, they talk about them only in the past tense. They never speak about how the issues are still here in the present. They stick to textbook material, and not social concerns relevant to the life of the community. . .”
I can’t help wondering what’s lost, what’s at stake, if these conversations don’t happen. What’s lost if we fail to make space, and take time, to hear each other out, and find ways to actually listen? Where else, if not in school, might we learn how to uncover, probe, question, sort out and weigh up, navigate and negotiate the opinions, perspectives, and positions of those we must live and work with? At what cost do we stick to textbook material that may not touch on the things central to our students’ lives and the realities they’re grappling with? And what do our students lose if we don’t share with them the issues that we’re grappling with — and why?
I’m not naive about the challenges that we all face as teachers in bringing about such conversations, and far too often I leave my own classes knowing that I’ve talked more than my share, frustrated when what I thought should have been a provocative and rousing discussion turned out to be flat or pedestrian, involving only the same few who always take the floor. There are many factors that work to derail even the most sincere efforts to engage students in meaningful conversations. With large classes it is a struggle to know all the students by name, never mind finding out enough about each one to relate as individuals. Peer pressure can be a powerful inhibitor. The curriculum can be relentless in its demand to be covered. Not all discussions will be grand conversations. Nevertheless, it matters enormously that we try.
Boomer (1973) asks not just that we make room for “conversations between teachers and children,” but that we value those conversations. It seems to me that this requires recognizing that there are things that we, as teachers, will never know or understand about our students if we neglect to invite them to tell us. Similarly, it requires recognizing just how important it is that our students have opportunities to learn how to participate in frank, extended, exploratory discussions on matters they care about; that they learn how to counter and challenge a position they find lacking; that they learn how to embrace and build on the ideas offered by others; that they experience directly the virtues of judiciously and gracefully abandoning a previously held idea in response to a genuinely better idea proffered by another. All of this can be learned… or not, if the occasion to do so isn’t offered. As teachers, we’re uniquely positioned to make such conversations central to our teaching and to our students’ learning, challenging though it may be. My experience is that students are hungry for such encounters—and acutely aware of their rarity. As St. Augustine reminds us, talk with is a powerful teacher: “I learned not from those who taught me but from those who talked with me.” Taking my cue from Boomer, in these times of increasing complexity in society, I also crave simplicity in our schools—the simple recognition that talk, real talk, between teachers and students, is teaching.
References
Boomer, G. (1973). Language, learning and the hyperactive. In Metaphors and Meanings, AATE (Australian Association for the Teaching of English).
Chouinard, Y. (2005). Let My People Go Surfing. NY: Penguin, p. 94.
Pourmand, Sadaf (2007). Perspectives. Thinking Classroom 8(4), 8–9.
St. Augustine, quoted in R. Fisher (1992) Teaching Children to Think. Hemel Hempsted: Simon and Schuster.
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