Centre stage papers – Days 3, 4 & 5: Extending the vision

Nurturing the seeds of our future

 

 

‘We do not inherit the earth from our parents, we borrow it from our children.’
Chief Seattle

‘Children are the seeds of the world. Let them grow, let them blossom.’
Lucy, year 10, academic peer tutor

Every age is unique and some seem more special than others. Ours is characterised by the fact that we are living it, by awe-inspiring technological communication opportunities and by the unprecedented responsibility on the human race to find a better way of cohabiting with, and on, our planet. Unless we do, there will be no more discussion, for our world will cease to exist. Global warming, whether or not caused by us, could eradicate us, as could nuclear war or accident. Slow destruction from over-fishing the oceans and over-engineering our food is generally having catastrophic effects on our health. It is estimated that this generation of children will be the first to die at a younger age than their parents.

It is time to act decisively and what more appropriate place to do it than in our schools? It is here that we find in abundance the seeds of our future and, because a sustainable future is now an unavoidable responsibility, school needs to provide the medium for examining and manifesting the type of tomorrow we desire. If we are to go beyond uneasy survival and actually thrive in this cataclysmic period of history, we can no longer propagate the ills of society - we have no choice but to create a better one.

In this paper, I wish to consider the profile of a 21st century educator, one of a versatile, courageous and innovative body of like-minded people who can successfully manage the transition from the Victorian factory model of education to a highly personalised system; a system that understands the dynamics of relationship - between people and things, between ideas, actions and consequences. Relationship is the engine of life and positive change can only occur if we prioritise, in all ways, the study of what makes it run smoothly. 

The 21st century educator is a teacher who embraces the necessity of his or her own lifelong learning and becomes a facilitator capable of meeting the needs of tomorrow’s adults. He or she is a life coach, someone who empowers students to acquire the necessary skills and attitudes for the task of leadership in their own lives, and beyond. He or she is a lead mentor in a community that accepts that teaching can be done by intention, where the teacher’s offer of information and/or inspiration is accepted by the student, or by example, whereby the teacher’s values and expertise are responded to by the student.

The efficacy of each form of teaching depends upon the quality of relationship between the educator and the learner. This applies both to the relationships between individual people, be they teachers or students, and the relationships between individuals and the embodied values that become the education ethos of the school as a whole. If more students are to gain more benefits from their 12-year compulsory stint in formal education, certain important factors must be taken into consideration. 

Personalising learning only has meaning if we involve the ‘person’, that is, the student, at all levels of decision-making. It is their life; we are there to assist them in living it to the full. We are the stepping stone between today and tomorrow. In this way, we make agreements with, rather than impose upon. The potential for deep learning is increased in an atmosphere of consensual creativity and experimentation and reduced by the chronic reactivity of an ‘us and them’ model. The conceptual division between ‘teacher’ and ‘learner’ is a crude and limiting one, emblematic of the Victorian school where children are empty ‘vessels’ and results are elicited from them by external management. 

This last point is summarised by Carl Rogers, the acknowledged founder of modern person-centred thinking, and the possibility of this approach’s short-term benefits is eclipsed by its demotivating side effects.

Almost all of education, government, much of religion, much of family life and much of psychotherapy, is based on a distrust of a person. Goals must be set, because the person is seen as incapable of choosing suitable aims. The individual must be guided towards these goals, since, otherwise, he or she might stray from the selected path. Teachers, parents, supervisors must develop procedures to make sure the individual is progressing towards the goal – examinations, inspections and interrogations. The individual is seen as ‘someone who must be constantly watched over’ (1).

The fall-out from the above approach can be devastating for students. Beyond the labelling and manipulation that are its hallmarks, it also stifles growth and instills fear, both of which will provoke often violent emotional reactions. With the right support, all students would want to learn but many have been systematically deprived of the means. What we call disaffection and disruptive behaviour are, on some level, a rejection of external control which, until replaced with self-control, can leave students floundering with nothing to do but rebel against any symbol of authority, with teachers being the favoured target. The 21st century educator knows this.

Of course, students benefit from guidance, but a different kind of guidance, one that is predicated upon trust and respect and leads them to a deeper self-awareness. It is the difference between putting someone on a train to a destination where all the stations are known beforehand or setting off for the same place in a car with a map. One journey is timetabled and occurs along a set route, the other is an adventure into the unknown. One is generally predictable, the other unravels and is full of challenges and surprises. Crucially, in one we are a passenger, in the other we are steering the course ourselves. The first can make us lethargically passive, the second self-reliant.

For many, enforced passivity can only lead to problems, since it undermines our learning requirements as curious beings. This causes deep disturbances in our relationship to ourselves and others, particularly those in power. It is arguable that every known malaise is the result of some or other relationship imbalance, be it between the cells or processes of the living body or between the members of a family or state. Every part is dependent for its wellbeing upon its relationship to the components of the whole. And, when something goes awry and the system is ‘sick’, the symptoms of an illness are not the illness itself but localised signs of the presence of an underlying relationship problem.

The 21st century educator will understand this and is also, in the broadest and deepest sense, a literacy teacher. This is because, in school, one of the most vivid local indicators of a deeper sickness within the system is illiteracy, the result of a rupture between the self and the wider world, which becomes internalised as an obstacle to self-expression. Literacy involves more than the manipulation of letters, it is also an outward symbol of an individual's ability to confidently handle their transition through self and into the outer world.

Literacy is a critical process of organising information, leading to an act of expression. The outcome of this operation, from internal source to written sentences on a page, is dependent upon the fluency of movement from inside to outside, and this is partly reliant upon a person’s unconscious perception of the reception their literacy will encounter. The experience of repeated meetings with the external becomes internalised as self-judgement, thus the origin of a person’s literacy is not a neutral position but rather a point at which influences cluster to initiate a fluent or fragmented process. This locus may also be called the voice.

Literacy, then, is a state of potential inextricably linked to voice, and a fluent state of being that enables people to move within, and between, things, be they relationships or ideas. This transformational process is more easily managed by a confidently inquisitive, independent person (like the car driver in the earlier example) than by someone whose self-esteem has been constructed by negative messages or whose self-image relies solely on external references. Because our self-evaluations so readily become habitualised, we need compassionate guidance in our literacy development.

The 21st century educator supports students on their journey to becoming internally referenced individuals, people who make informed decisions based on a self-realised moral code. He or she assists their fluency of movement in their relationships with themselves and others. He or she teaches them how to access information, as well as presenting them with ideas and subject knowledge which he or she then teaches them to interrogate for meaning. 

Teachers of the 21st century, unlike their Victorian counterparts, expose the mechanics of assessment to their students, teaching them how to utilise externally set criteria, such as exam grade boundaries, empowering them to choose their grade and tick off met criteria, instead of predicting their grade, thus closing off other possibilities. These teachers replace the pursuit of results, which yields too little for countless thousands of our students, with the practice of critical questioning, which naturally leads to sustainable progress and sound results. Teachers of the 21st century educate students for stewardship and teach, through example, the gift of service, be it in school or the wider world. One person’s success is everyone’s success.

The implications of this for teacher training are vast and far-reaching, involving a re-examination of its content and purpose. Is it primarily to teach people how to transmit knowledge, in which case a portfolio of techniques might suffice? Is it to teach people how to implement other people’s policies? This would require familiarity with those policies but not necessarily an understanding of, or agreement with, them. Or does the training of a 21st century educator require something fundamentally different in nature? I think it does.

Teacher training needs to be provided by visionaries for visionaries. It is person-centred, involving the person, the training teacher, at every stage of decision-making. It elevates the development of ethical value systems and sustainable learning. It believes that every student is capable of excellence; and trainers model the attitudes and skills they wish their training teachers to discover within themselves, enabling teachers to do the same for their own students. Integral to the training is the concept of coaching, the intention to explore with people ‘how’ more than ‘what’, so they can achieve independence, just as their students will. 

Like it or not, teachers teach by example. Children listen to what we say and absorb who we are, so it important that we acknowledge our projections and fears to limit their negative impact. We must respect the nature and extent of our power in the lives of our students, at all times reflecting on the part we play in our classroom outcomes. We are clearly no longer able to change the situation of chronic failure in our education system using the methods we have employed to date. So, as Viktor E. Frankl explains, ‘When we are no longer able to change a situation - we are challenged to change ourselves’ (2). 

The biggest threat to this long overdue move to a 21st century education system is fear: fear of breaking entrenched habits, fear of the demands or failure of the new way, fear of losing advantageous positions within education’s existing interlocking hierarchies, fear of giving students too much power, fear of our new role making us obsolete, fear of change itself - paralysing, endemic fear.

All of which is understandable for we have all, to a greater or lesser extent, been educated in the old way. That is why so many of us become teachers in the style of our own teachers, some of whom were exemplary. Despite the straitjacket of Victorian ideology, they still managed to teach us how to be excellent students and better people. At the dawn of our new millennium, it is time to commit unequivocally to a new paradigm for the sake of all our students. The ultimate question for anyone who decides they want to be a teacher is: ‘What, and how, will you teach them?’

Notes
1. Rogers, CR. In The Carl Rogers reader. Ed. Howard Kirschenbaum & Valerie Land Henderson, p136. First published in Great Britain 1990, Constable and Company Limited.
2. Frankl, V, as quoted in Left to tell Immaculee Ilibagiza. (2006). Hay House, UK Ltd: London

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ms Jacqueline Andrews works for APT4schools, in London, in the United Kingdom.

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