Re/membering the Effective Teacher

by

Erica McWilliam
Faculty of Education
Queensland University of Technology

I want to begin with a description of a person regarded by his colleagues and students as a highly effective teacher:

He] explained his [success] as being due to "never having done anything for the sake of giving pleasure to another". . . he did not allow himself to be deflected by anything which might injure his health . . . but also refused to be troubled by other people's praise or blame or by the intervention of a fact which might disturb his thought . . . . [H]is moral character and his genius attracted to him such affection that he was followed by many disciples. (Untersteiner, 1954: p. 94)

 

The word 'disciple' is a bit of a give-away here, locating this teacher as it does in another time and another place. The place was Greece and the time was ancient and the teacher was a sophist called Georgias, who was also ancient, living as he did to 109 years of age. Sophists like Georgias cared a lot about the effectiveness of their teaching - as much, indeed, as the philosophers like Socrates who criticised them for not living up to a pedagogical ideal because they accepted fees. But as E.B Castle (1970) sees it, the sophists were good teachers precisely because "[their] sights [were] always directed to the achievable, always a little lower than the ideal" (p. 27). Whatever about their differences, there was one measure which counted as the measure of effectiveness for both philosophers and sophists alike, and that was the ability of the teacher to overcome all physical and intellectual passions in the indifferent pursuit of wisdom.

In the days of Sandstone, Vanstone and (un)Kemped universities, such ideas are bizarre and troubling. Teachers don't have disciples these days. And as for the idea that our effectiveness is bound up with "never having done anything for the sake of giving pleasure to others" - that has become unthinkable. It could only be selfishness, not ethical high ground. "Indifference at its best" could not count as best practice. It is absurd that a teacher be regarded as effective because s/he ignored student demands for a more relevant curriculum, or the lure of more money or the need for positive feedback. Not a single teaching evaluation form in sight? And not a single thought for the self-esteem of any of his students? Outrageous!

 

Learner-centredness?

Thank goodness we are now so much wiser about effective teaching. We can relegate all this 'indifference' to the dustbin of history and get back to what really matters - meeting the needs of students and helping them reach their full potential. Because if there is one thing we have come to know, it is that student-centredness teaching is to be preferred over teacher-centred teaching. So a teacher could not teach effectively without being 'distracted' by thinking about the learning needs of any individual student or group of students. This is how we have come to understand the proper enactment of an ethic of pedagogical care. As a result, there have been unprecedented efforts in universities in recent times to tailor curriculum and pedagogical technique to respond to learners as having 'different needs as individuals'. 'Catering for needs' is the ubiquitous metaphor found in progressive prescriptions for effective teaching. The fact that catering for needs would be damning as a criterion for sophistic teaching need not worry us, because effective teaching is no longer precisely synonymous with wise instruction about the nature of the human condition. Moreover, as a keynote presenter and university professor, I am a beneficiary of the fact that the student cohort is no longer an exclusive male elite, as it was in ancient Greece. I am, naturally, both humble and grateful.

As a school-teacher in the 1950s, my mother hit children. She did not hit them often and she did hit them properly (ie, not too hard and not too softly). She was an effective teacher, and in her day this was what effective teachers did. In the 1990s an effective teacher would never hit a child. One way of explaining both this difference and the difference between the sophists and ourselves is by believing that our knowledge of teaching and learning has progressed. Teachers are now more enlightened, realising the error of old, intimidating ways because of our new understandings about the student experience of learning and how this experience ought to matter. We know, because of the foundational work of Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, Jean Piaget, and others like Lev Vygotsky and Barbara Rogoff, that teachers' desires (including the desire to exercise power over others) have mattered far too much. It is the perspective of the learner that matters, not prescriptions of good teaching practice,. Carl Rogers's views may not have been well received when he first expressed them over forty years ago, but they now stand as the common sense of many progressive teachers:

 

W]hen I tried honestly to review my [educational] experience, teaching seemed of such little importance, and learning so vastly important . . . It seems to me that anything that can be taught to another is relatively inconsequential and has little or no influence on behaviour. (Rogers 1957, cited in O'Neill 1983, 256)

 

As "learner-centred" teachers, we are suspicious of anything that looks like teaching as a personality cult. "Every eye on me" is no longer a measure of teaching excellence - it has become a measure of teacher regress, a troubling pedagogical moment that a teacher should not prolong beyond what is absolutely necessary. The progressive teacher is now a facilitator of learning, not a one-woman or one-man show. It is as a facilitator that the academic teacher is most useful and relevant to the knowledge work of a university, particularly at a time when there is heavy investment in technology, not tenured bodies. As a facilitator, academics meet the requirements of a learning organisation, where action learning, learning theory, learning styles, lifelong learning, learner-centred classrooms, and needs-based education frame what they ought to be doing. The effective teacher is one who is successful in using pedagogical techniques (including new technologies) that turn students' eyes away from the teacher's own performance and back toward their own individual or group performance, because we are now sure that this is the best way to guarantee valuable learning outcomes.

The present chorus of calls to more effective teaching in higher education is unequivocal about this sort of shift. For example, Paul Ramsden (1998a, 1998b) insists that the means of identifying effective teaching should be the one measure of performance that counts in any business organisation -- feedback from the client, the customer, the student. He notes with consternation that "students and graduates consistently complain about ... poor quality of assessment procedures ... failure to encourage active, independent learning ... unclearly specified aims ... [and] ineffective and unenthusiastic delivery" (p. 39).The hallmark of the ineffective teacher is the inability to respond positively to these complaints. Yet those academics who are guilty of "the bleakest of bad teaching" (p. 39) are not the only impediment; those bureaucrats whose management practices either protect such academics or fail to provide them with incentives to them to teach better are also a case for treatment (p. 39).

 

From cloister to cover story

It is interesting to note that, at the same time that the cult of personality has been almost completely displaced in the literature, we see government sponsored moves to shopfront the highly influential academic in the public domain. "The world's largest government-sponsored awards for university teaching" (Teaching Award Media Release Website: 1) has recently been established in Australia to "recognize and reward university teachers who strive for excellence in their teaching for the benefit of their students" (Teaching Awards Website: 2). The awards, and the high profile media coverage that has accompanied them, are now doing important work in making over the Australian academic as an active and enterprising individual. There are a number of key elements to this work, not the least of which is the idea that best pedagogical practice takes risks, and transcends traditional classroom boundaries. One of the earliest in an extended series of media reports: "Not just a job -- it's an adventure" (The Australian, 26 November, 1997: 41) shows an athletic and attractive young female, a senior lecturer in Law, abseiling down the outside wall of university building. The purpose, as the award winner herself put it, was to "give the lawyers the chance to step outside their comfort zones and try new things" (University News, 2 December 1997: 1). Other winners were hailed for their attempts to bring the outside into their classrooms, either by way of computer-assisted learning that "keep[s] track of the changing discipline of multi-media" (The Australian, 17 December 1997: 44) or by "choos[ing] not to go by the book," even getting into "a bit of trouble" for bringing "unusual props" into lectures (The Australian, 3 December 1997: 39).

Just as the real innovator is identified as a teacher who defies conventional classroom limits, so too the award-winning effective teacher defies the normal demands an individual might make of themselves in academic teaching, and thereby troubles the acceptable working standards of academics as white-collar professionals. One award winner is described as "sleeping four hours a night and running 5 km a day" (The Australian, 7 December 1997: 13), while another speaks of "work[ing] 10-12 hours a day" as necessary to "fulfill[ing] [our] responsibilities" (The Australian, 10 October 1997: 42). The Law lecturer's abseiling and related exploits demand a level of physical fitness that was once held to be the antithesis of academe. To be excellent is to be both physically fit and to stretch the limits of teaching-as-work, including what has been "normalised" as the working day by both traditional practices and industrial legislation.

The explanations winning academics give for their special capacities are telling, because they both exemplify and subvert the version of teacher effectiveness that Ramsden and others advocate. While some speak properly (ie, in student-centred ways) about "mak[ing] students capable of teaching themselves" (The Australian, 17 December 1997: 44) and of "know[ing] and car[ing] about their students in order to best meet their needs," others express a much more teacher-centred philosophy than "student-centredness" implies or sanctions. For example, one winner speaks of her ability to "out-talk" her students, insisting on "always tell[ing] [them] that although [she is] more than twice their age -- and [has] the wisdom, the knowledge and the experience -- inside [she] feel[s] the same way as they do" (The Australian, 7 January 1998: 13). Both articulations of the sources of an excellent teacher's inspiration and success suggest -- somewhat dangerously for visions like Ramsden's -- that a few teacher-centred individuals may be turning up among the ranks of the highly effective.

It is clear that teachers who are so effective as to be award-winners must now learn how to make a proper (media) spectacle of themselves. The irony is, of course, that effective (ie, 'srtudent-centred') teaching is now rewarded by putting the individual teacher on public display. Any public identification of individual teachers is risky, given that it places the individual teacher in the centre of public imag(in)ing of effective teaching just when so many universities are looking to on-line pedagogies to do much of the work of the teacher. When the reluctant hero is made over as Oscar winner, one sort of romance with teaching is overwritten but another becomes possible.

 

The death of desire?

Despite the above paradox, effective teachers are no longer to instruct, nor are students supposed to want to be instructed. Thus the idea that a teacher's desire to instruct and a student's desire to be instructed might be duplicitous has become impossible to inspect. Esther Faye's research on Australian women's experience of education in the 1950s comes as an awkward remembering in the light of such clear 'student-centred' visions of pedagogical excellence. In expressing her sense of 'missing out' in her schooling, one woman participant in the research says: '[s]ometimes I have this incredible desire to always have had someone there that will teach me' (Faye, 1994: 55). This seems to indicate that, for this student at least, the desire to be engaged with by a significant other is paramount. Such an idea is not speakable in the language of facilitation, grounded as it is in Rogerian notions of the self-directed, autonomous learner. Could it be that a teacher's desire to instruct is not quite so perverse after all?

Whether or not a space exists for restoring the desire to instruct, teacher desire as a generalised concept is highly suspect now that it has been caught within the sexual harassment narrative with which we are now all very familiar. We know that teacher's desire is likely to lead to abusive pedagogy. We also know that abusive pedagogy most often takes the form of sexual harassment in the classroom, and is generally perpetrated by male lecturers exercising their institutional and gendered power over female students. Meaghan Morris (1994) puts it bluntly: "'Fuck me or I'll fail you' is the brute message of abusive pedagogy" (p.24). What then are we to make of her other memory of university life 'the one I remember so well from my own days as a student in the 1970s - 'pass me or I'll tell...' (p.24). And how should we react to Jane Gallop's teasing reminder of the pleasures that arise from our own perverse desire to impose order on students?

 

I]t does not seem inappropriate that an arithmetic perversion should arise in a discussion of pedagogy. School presents us with a world of numbers: grades, curves, credit hours, course numbers, class hours, and room numbers. I suppose not all teachers experience as I do a diffuse yet unmistakable pleasure when calculating grades at the end of the term. (p.128)

 

More troubling still, in times where there is heightened concern about sex and teaching, is the disturbing evidence that the teacher's material body can play a very positive role. Through our bodies, teachers are at times able to model the pleasure (and pain) of knowing by striking a range of scholastic poses through which the learner is mobilized to desire to learn. An account of teaching provided by Zora Neale Hurston, writing about her experience at a night school in Baltimore. In Jill Kerr Conway's anthology of autobiographies, Written by Herself (1992), Hurston indicates that an elating and elated teaching body seems to be a crucial part of effective teaching, at times propelling future scholars into an on-going scholastic or creative career in a particular disciplinary field:

 

There [in night school] I met a man who was to give me the key to certain things . . . . There is no more dynamic teacher anywhere under any skin. He radiates newness and nerve . . . . Something about his face killed the drabness and the discouragement in me . . . . He is not a pretty man, but he has the face of a scholar, not dry and set like, but fire flashes from his deep-set eyes. His high-bridged, but sort of bent nose over his thin-lipped mouth . . . . Caesar or Virgil in tan skin.

That night, he liquefied the immortal brains of Coleridge and let the fountain flow. I do not know whether something in my attitude attracted his attention, or whether what I had done previously made him direct the stream at me. Certainly every time he lifted his eyes from the page, he looked right into my eyes. It did not make me see him particularly, but it made me see the poem . . . .

But he did something more positive than that. He stopped me after class and complimented me on my work. He never asked me anything about myself but he looked at me and toned his voice in such a way that I felt he knew all about me. (pp. 44-45)

 

The teacher's desire to teach meets the student's desire to learn, to be instructed, in a mutual embrace. The teacher described here did not seduce his student by overtly flattering her, but rather by performing his scholarship with his body ("he has the face of a scholar") and by acknowledging her approximation to his pose, his love of the discipline. Importantly, the student does not mis/take the teacher's performance as an invitation into a relationship with him ("it did not make me see him particularly") but experiences it as a irresistible invitation into the love of poetry. Nevertheless, the metaphors she uses are troublesome, because we can no longer recognise eros as speakable within effective teaching.

Others have also reported "seeing [a] union of learning and joy" (Harrell Carson 1996, 13) performed through the bodies of their university teachers. In "Thirty Years of Stories: The Professor's Place in Student Memories" (1996), Barbara Harrell Carson provides a number of detailed recollections of the importance of the physicality of a teacher to the student's on-going learning. One 1982 graduate student describes her favourite professor thus:

 

small, rather comical looking man enters my classroom, literally throws his books on the table, scuffs off both his Birkenstock sandals, kicking one across the room. He leaps onto the teacher's desk, and what follows is almost literally a dance of ideas. His energy captures me even after 10 years -- wow! Almost 20 years later. At that moment I was seduced into following the path of truth the path of [his academic discipline]. I will never forget this teacher . . . . You felt his joy, you believed in his commitment to the subject because it was manifest in the very air of the classroom . . . . After this . . . class, I was frequently exhausted and exhilarated by the energy of both the ideas and the expression of those ideas. Emulating this total joy coupled with such total physical and mental concentration and commitment has since been [my] ideal. (p. 13)

 

My point is not to revive a romance about the re-membered teacher to counter the growing fascination with screen-based pedagogies, but rather to note what sort of engagements are being supplanted as we invest more heavily in technology to do the work of the material teacher. Screen-based pedagogies have their own special seductions1, some of which can be a godsend to the professor whose material body works more as impediment than enhancement. For many teachers, on-line education comes as a blessed relief from anxious confrontations with what their bodies cannot do. Barthes (1978) writes:

 

can do everything with my language but not with my body. What I hide by my language, my body utters. I can deliberately mould my message, not my voice. By my voice, whatever it says, that other will recognise that "something is wrong with me". . . . My body is a stubborn child, my language is a very civilised adult. (p. 45)

 

Barthes' "stubborn child" is a spectre that can haunt university academics who may have performed well in the textual work required of them but find embodied teaching to be nerve-racking and debilitating. Through new systems of communication technology, such persons can have the hope, and sometimes the pleasure, of the cyber-body's ability to perform in a much more effective way.

Two recent studies serve as useful illustrations of the power of both a teacher's physical presence and a teacher's physical absence to work on behalf of marginalised social groups. The former is well illustrated by the "exploration of the difference that difference makes for the complex dynamics of pedagogy" (Simon 1995, p. 92, his italics), which Roger Simon provides in his article, "Face to Face with Alterity: postmodern Jewish identity and the eros of pedagogy." Simon considers the way in which "teaching as a Jew" focuses his attention on how the performative invocation of his own embodied identity is both valuable and troubling as an enactment of a politics of difference (p. 93). His argument is that the face-to-face encounter matters because it allows the display of how he performs with his body and utterance a Jewish identity with the purpose of rupturing totalising categories like "Jew" that produce the effects of marginalisation (p. 102).

Patrick Palmer's "Queer Theory, homosexual teaching bodies, and an infecting pedagogy" (1996) proceeds from a similar marginal politics, but his enactment of a subversive pedagogy on behalf of homosexual bodies involves technology that removes the teacher's material body from the pedagogical event. He considers how insisting on the homosexual teaching body as a viral transmitter within the virtual realities of cyberspace can open up spaces of radical pedagogical possibility. He pushes "the essentialist and homophobic notion of homosexual = infection = virus = ?" to serve the cause of "an effective and infective pedagogy" (p. 87). Palmer states his purpose thus:

 

sing the metaphor, and the literalness, of the infectious homosexual body allows us to locate a body that is conscious of its own manufacture . . . . By insisting on the need for a corporeal pedagogy for emergent orders in tertiary teaching, I hope to stimulate educators to look for more flexible and disparate pedagogies for open learning. (p. 87)

 

In this case, a gay male teacher uses the negative logic of the stereotypic male homosexual body against itself, insisting on the doubleness of the "infectious teacher." It does not matter here whether the anatomical body of the teacher in question is HIV positive or whether it is not. The screen can offer a space to do and say the things that the material body is not permitted to do or say with impunity.

 

'Sentencing learners to life'

Despite our best efforts to expunge it, it seems that teacher desire keeps turning up in one form or another to trouble 'best practice' versions of effective teaching. Likewise, just when we thought that learning was either 'deep' or 'surface', we hear from pedagogical analysts like Shoshona Felman, who tell us that learning is about 'breakthroughs, leaps, discontinuities, regressions, and deferred action' (Felman, 1997, 23). What are we to make of our upward and forward march to excellence when confronted by the idea that regression is part of the move from ignorance to knowledge? What do we do with the Lacanian idea that ignorance is an integral part of the very structure of knowledge? And what precisely does this imply about that most valuable of our new knowledge objects, 'lifelong learning'?

Lifelong learning now has a very important place in the sustaining the idea that self-improvement is both necessary and desirable and should be done through on-going programs of professional development. In the context of constant and accelerated change, so the logic goes, the professional development in teaching, or any other profession, is always an unfinished project. This is good news for the growing army of consultants and entrepreneurs who offer their services to reconstruct the academic as 'truly professional' (eg, Burke, 1997). The idea that one has sufficient knowledge, skill and judgment after more than three decades of teaching to be absent from the next workshop or seminar is no longer acceptable. What used to look like the wisdom of the experienced campaigner now looks dangerously like semi-retirement.

So lifelong learning takes its place as a cornerstone of the new vision of effective teaching provided in the current piles of glossy brochures and professional growth and development programs which call us to 'excellence.' According to the logic in this literature, academics should throw off the dreary clothes of the unrecognised and unappreciated drudge and dress themselves in the smart suits of the corporate professional, newly inspired, as dynamic and enterprising individuals, to implement standards of educational excellence in the business of higher education.

However, just when teachers and students alike are trying so hard to be lifelong learners, Chris Falk's 'Sentencing Learners to Life' (1997) cautions us against consuming this diet whole:

 

L]ifelong learning is a central ideological and pedagogical apparatus (discursive device) for the promotion of [a]... radically diminished vision of human experience and of a disintegrated conception of human good. [My paper] argues that 'disappearing (delimiting) subjectivities' is the unstated goal of lifelong learning. It posits that the womb-to-tomb state supported projects of instrumental learning that increasingly define lifelong learning ... . Far from assuaging the demons loosed by global competition, [it] will excite them even more, leaving its purported goals of fostering individual empowerment and personal and social security receding ever further into a bleak though hi-tech future. (Falk, 1997: 1)

 

Whether or not we share Falk's fears of a dark side to lifelong learning, it is certainly a sobering thought that 'development' might not mean progress. Anthropological critiques of the work done to 'develop' Third World communities show that development often contributes to the deterioration of those same communities (Hobart, 1993). Could it be that the knowledge presumed to be relevant to the 'development' of academics as effective teachers might undermine some worthwhile local knowledge in a university department or faculty? Or are we now unable to imagine that a seminar on 'health and safety' might actually be unsafe?

 

Remembering and dismembering

Clearly much has changed since the time of Georgias the sophist. In recent years, we have seen teaching impacted upon by a host of disciplinary ideas, each of which has its particular sins of omission and commission. Many psychologists have drawn attention to the importance of cognitive processes, insisting that teaching is most effective when it works out of an understanding of such processes. Feminists have sought to uncover the politics of knowing and being known as they apply in the classroom, insisting that effective teaching be more democratic and more attentive to 'women's ways of knowing'. We have also seen teaching made over for the global market. Teaching has become massified and managerial, feminised and flexible, corporatised and competitive. Each imperative comes with its own set of truth claims, none of which are innocent and all of which inform us and our students for better and worse.

Remembering other tales and other times is dangerous because it is a means of dismembering. It works like a post-mortem, asking questions about the familiar landscape of ideas which render that landscape strange. To do this sort of thinking is to interrupt any possibility of a headlong rush to a new pedagogical order of best practice. There is no call to a newer, better order to things, only a sort of active pessimism that protects us from the moral majority within, whether that moral majority is wedded to psychological, feminist, liberal humanist, corporatist or any other 'enlightened' version of effective teaching. Remembering other versions of effective teaching is faithful in the same way that as blasphemy is faithful. As Donna Haraway argues:

 

Blasphemy protects one from the moral majority within, while still insisting on the need for community. Blasphemy is not apostasy. Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. (p. 149)

 

It is important both to advocate new versions of effective teaching and to insist on their inventedness, their partiality and their fictive status. Remembering is one way to underline and undermine those ways of speaking and thinking and being that have come to characterize effective teaching -- all those formulas and visions and truths and knowledge objects that we use to make ourselves into quality professionals, or nurturing caregivers, or ethical workers or reflective practitioners or critical feminists or facilitators of learning. They are all necessary, true and temporary.

 

References:

Barthes, R. (1978) A lover's discourse: Fragments. Translated by Richard Hurley. New York: Hill & Wang.

Castle, E. B. (1970). The teacher. Oxford University Press.

Falk, C. (1997) Sentencing learners to Life: Retrofitting the Academy for the Information Age, Theory, Technology and Culture, 22, (1-2), 10-19.

Faye, Esther (1994) 'I have this incredible desire to always have someone there that will teach me': the Psychology-Education Expert and the 'Adolescent Child' in Early Post World War Two Australia. In Jane Gallop Seminar Papers, Proceedings of the Jane Gallop Seminar and Public Lecture 'The Teachers Breasts', June, 1993, (J.J. Matthews, ed.). Canberra: The Humanities Research Centre, 47-60.

Felman, S. (1997) Psychoanalysis and education: Teaching terminable and interminable. In Learning Desire: Perspectives on pedagogy, culture and the unsaid, (S. Todd, ed.). London: Routledge, 17-44.

Haraway, D. (1991) Simians, cyborgs and women: The reinvention of nature. London: Free Association Books.

Harrell Carson, B. (1996) Thirty years of stories: The professor's place in student memories. Change, 28 (6): 11-17.

Hobart, M. (1993) Introduction: The growth of ignorance? In An Anthropological Critique of Development (M. Hobart, ed.) London: Routledge, 1-30.

Kerr Conway, J., (ed.) (1992) Written by herself -- Autobiographies of American Women: An anthology. London: Vintage Press.

Morris, M. (1994) Discussion: Jane Gallop, 'The Teacher's Breasts'. In Jane Gallop Seminar Papers, Proceedings of the Jane Gallop Seminar and Public Lecture 'The Teachers Breasts', June, 1993, (J. J. Matthews, ed.). Canberra: The Humanities Research Centre, 23-30.

O'Neill, W., (ed.) (1983) Re-thinking Education: Selected readings in the educational ideologies. Iowa: Kendall/Hunt.

Palmer, P. (1996) Queer Theory, homosexual teaching bodies, and an infecting pedagogy. In Pedagogy, technology and the body, (E. McWilliam & P.G. Taylor, eds). New York: Peter Lang, 79-88.

Ramsden, P. (1998a) Out of the wilderness. The Australian, April 29: 39, 41.

Ramsden, P. (1998b) Learning to lead in higher education. London: Routledge.

Simon, R. (1995) Face to face with alterity: Postmodern Jewish identity and the eros of pedagogy. In Pedagogy: The question of impersonation, (J. Gallop, ed). Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 90-105.

Springer, C. (1996) Electronic Eros: Bodies and desire in the postindustrial age. London: Althone.

Teaching Awards

The Australian. Newspaper. Sydney, Australia.

Untersteiner, M. (1954) The sophists. Translated by Kathleen Freeman. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

 

 

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