On Intimacy in the Classroom
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| Title: | On Intimacy in the Classroom |
|---|---|
| Language: | English |
| Authors: | Lessing, Avi Desai |
| Source: | Schools: Studies in Education. Fall 2013 10(2):192-209. |
| Availability: | University of Chicago Press. Journals Division, P.O. Box 37005, Chicago, IL 60637. Tel: 877-705-1878; Tel: 773-753-3347; Fax: 877-705-1879; Fax: 773-753-0811; e-mail: subscriptions@press.uchicago.edu; Web site: http://www.press.uchicago.edu |
| Peer Reviewed: | Y |
| Page Count: | 18 |
| Publication Date: | 2013 |
| Document Type: | Journal Articles Reports - Evaluative |
| Descriptors: | Intimacy, Teacher Student Relationship, Classroom Environment, Personal Narratives, Affective Behavior, English Instruction, Relaxation Training, Educational Change |
| DOI: | 10.1086/673330 |
| ISSN: | 1550-1175 |
| Abstract: | What is the lived experience of teachers and students in school? How does that lived experience constitute a kind of learning on its own apart from any particular outcome? This article addresses the ways teachers and students encounter one another in schools and why the quality of those encounters is paramount in both the child's and the teacher's intersubjective experience. It is a first-person teacher account that looks at a progressive pedagogy within a public school classroom, drawing on fields in a number of disciplines to discuss both the opportunities and perils of a classroom designed to increase our capacity for intimacy. (Contains 2 footnotes.) |
| Abstractor: | As Provided |
| Number of References: | 12 |
| Entry Date: | 2014 |
| Accession Number: | EJ1015486 |
| Database: | ERIC |
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| FullText | Links: – Type: pdflink Url: https://content.ebscohost.com/cds/retrieve?content=AQICAHj0k_4E0hTGH8RJwT4gCJyBsGNe_WN95AvKlDbXJGqwxwE89JC3E6jHmFnAOftSAelNAAAA4TCB3gYJKoZIhvcNAQcGoIHQMIHNAgEAMIHHBgkqhkiG9w0BBwEwHgYJYIZIAWUDBAEuMBEEDPkzfzWx96QXogafuwIBEICBmQHcuhPgZIX_Dd2Zw215L2bK9NcrZZIKQI9J433IspLGlVYG3fykekAuPZV1ERZqzVTXfptNdmKZjpT__6UslpYw1Rq2pJx9uZCMbp6KOwk36G3KfQ2fUFEBfOLO-OLt30Mr7b-rwjX-EoVs1pV-W_TQ1sDiAjU4gDUKXSM9xwPCObSboic6UIlj3TYVJElb8Eh92sJHx8ch0g== Text: Availability: 1 Value: <anid>AN0091649726;[64yk]01sep.13;2018Oct25.08:26;v2.2.500</anid> <title id="AN0091649726-1">On Intimacy in the Classroom. </title> <p>What is the lived experience of teachers and students in school? How does that lived experience constitute a kind of learning on its own apart from any particular outcome? This article addresses the ways teachers and students encounter one another in schools and why the quality of those encounters is paramount in both the child's and the teacher's intersubjective experience. It is a first-person teacher account that looks at a progressive pedagogy within a public school classroom, drawing on fields in a number of disciplines to discuss both the opportunities and perils of a classroom designed to increase our capacity for intimacy.</p> <p>An ordered world is not the world order.</p> <p>—Martin Buber ([<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref1">4</reflink>], 82)</p> <hd id="AN0091649726-2">Intimate Encounters</hd> <p>I told a colleague of mine, not prone to hyperbole, about a book I wanted to write that would take place over one school day from the perspective of a beleaguered but well-intentioned teacher.</p> <p>"You mean you?"</p> <p>"More a version of me."</p> <p>We were eating lunch on her patio, surrounded by dozens of jade plants. "Call it <emph>The Search for Intimacy</emph>!" she boomed. <emph>The Search for Intimacy</emph>? Was she being sarcastic? I looked around squeamishly. Could I say that with a straight face?</p> <p>"How about <emph>The Social Emotional Life of School</emph>?" I offered.</p> <p>"No, <emph>intimacy</emph>," she insisted. She said it a little too loudly again. "Isn't that what we're all seeking? Closeness?" she said, tilting her head in and taking a bite of her cucumber roll. "If we settle for less than intimacy, then our whole endeavor is compromised." Glyniss (I'll call her) could be elegant, even archaic, in her speech. It gave everything she said a certain authoritative panache. As if she were speaking from the high vantage point of legitimacy.</p> <p> <emph>Intimacy</emph> fit (a lot more than <emph>social emotional intelligence</emph>). Teaching and learning are by nature personal endeavors. From the day I somewhat by luck substitute taught at my old high school, I've seen teaching as a profession where I could bring who I am into work. I saw immediately that kids were seeking a kind of closeness and connection with their teacher. It was not only a boon for me; it was a necessity for them. Besides parents, teachers are often a young person's main resource for providing safe travel on the rocky bridge from childhood to adulthood. Too often teachers bow to the cliché of not being a student's friend (what's wrong with a friend?) and succumb to a needlessly generic, obscure, and self-protecting image of the adult in charge. This model only reinforces kids' sense that an adult is not someone they want to be.</p> <p>I have become convinced over the past decade that what resonates most with students when it comes to my building a relationship with them is not advice giving, or moral character lessons, or a single heroic act, but rather my moment-to-moment presence and my call for their moment-to-moment presence. The degree to which, as teachers, we can be transparent and open about the parts of our lives we both understand and don't understand will help normalize our students' path into adulthood and make the classroom a place that is important to them, not merely a jumping-off point into the future, but an experience that could have the power to transform and shape both teachers and students in the present.</p> <p>As both a student and a teacher, my own transformational educational experiences carried this quality of heightened presence. Sometimes it was aesthetic, for instance, the light in the room. Or physical, like the slow gesture of my teacher's hand asking for more. Or sensory, the silence of 26 students writing. Most often as a student it was marked by a meaningful encounter, some real human contact; for example, my teacher's attention on me, or a spontaneous sudden laughter that cut into the seemingly endless toil and tedium of the day. In short, I believe the way a classroom experience feels for both the students and the teacher is as important as its content and shouldn't be separated from it.</p> <p>Still, I couldn't quite picture standing up on parent night and saying, "Hello, I look forward to a long year of intimate encounters with your children." And yet, when I think back to the specific moments from my own schooling that changed me, the best ones left me with a feeling that I would call intimacy. In Mr. Shallenbarger's class, we played theater games, and each day I left feeling more connected to my classmates (and saw for the first time as a teen that connection was even a possibility in school). In Ms. Loris's history class, we learned about modern history, and I left with an image that still resonates with me: her holding back tears as she talked about the war in Iraq. Mr. Downey, my middle school English teacher, wasn't trying to teach me anything when he sat down with me after class and said, "Avi, are you ok?" I remember these moments because afterward I felt somehow more in the world and more in my own skin.</p> <p>In classes where I had teachers who cared about me, I tried harder, and I learned the material the teacher wanted me to know, and often even more. For me, the quality of the relationship between the teacher and the student, and that of the students with one another, in great part, determines the success of what happens in a classroom. That relationship, like that of parent and child, is, at its best, close, immediate, and intimate.</p> <hd id="AN0091649726-3">I-You and I-It</hd> <p>While interviewing for teaching jobs in the late 1990s, I always pointed out (in the required serious tone) how much I loved kids, though, once I got the job, I never told kids I loved them, nor based my curriculum on love (dozens of units on identity but none on love). After all, that could be seen as perverted or sick. Why, though, if we talk about loving kids, do we not figure out ways to do it?</p> <p>Loving your students truly, honestly, and wholeheartedly can take many forms. It could look like giving a student a hug after a tough day. Or it could be giving a kid the benefit of the doubt even when the kid is pushing every one of your buttons, or, in rare cases, making your life miserable. Or it could be taking the time to tell a kid she is worthwhile and lovable. Within the context of school, with all of its norms, rules, and procedures, and within the context of my own life that's full of its own complications, duplicities, misunderstandings, and confusions, to show up in a way that kids can connect to, relate to, and push against is vital. To offer the chance of love and intimacy and closeness is near impossible. It requires a heightened attention, what Martin Buber ([<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref2">4</reflink>]) calls an I-you relation with students. In this relation, we are in reciprocity with our students, potentially in perpetual participation with them. The opposite is what he calls the I-it relation, where we are set apart from others. Buber rightly says we cannot remain in the intimacy of the I-you world at all times. The fire of its intensity would burn us up. The I-it world allows us to function, make transactions, generalize, and act in the mundane world. The morning commute is the I-it world. The penetrating gaze of a child is I-you. Too much of the I-it world though drains life of meaning. Buber says, "Whoever lives only with that (it) is not human" (<reflink idref="bib85" id="ref3">85</reflink>). How problematic that our negative stereotype of teachers is exactly that! Teachers, so go the clichés, live under their desks, don't smile until Christmas, speak in lifeless monotones.</p> <p>It's difficult to engender the I-you relation in a school of 3,000 students when I teach five classes, all with 25 or more students. There are days I wake up looking forward to my classes, to the action of school, to being with the students (I-you). There are other days I wish I could set myself apart, sort through papers and books, listen to music, block out everything (I-it). On rare days I wake up and think, I can't. None of this, I know, is unusual. Who wakes up particularly wanting to do anything? But in teaching, it seems to me, the question of whether we want to be there or not, and to what degree we are, truly matters. This can mean a whole slew of things—one's preparation, presence, commitment, attention to detail, willingness to listen; however, it cannot be simply added up, or tallied, or checked off like a list, but rather its essence exists in the uniquely human relation between people.</p> <p>Students learn through the quality of our attention and the consistency of our care. They instinctively know how into it or out of it we are. They take our lead and respond. Now, the teaching profession tilts more and more to the world of I-it. I believe we need more I-you so that it can be humanized. What I mean is that there is much talk about content, skill development, and academic progress (not to mention the endless talk about rules and procedures) and far too little talk, or at least sanctioned talk, about the students themselves, who they are, their aspirations, and their limitations. As teachers who grew up in school systems that similarly denied conversations about who we were as beings, our strengths and weaknesses, our mental health, and the like, we must both notice and take responsibility for the way we conduct our relationships with students.</p> <p>Intimacy requires intense effort but not the kind we associate with achievement. Classrooms in which one can encounter oneself and others in a heightened, sometimes even dramatic, way, where selfhood, existence, and life all around oneself is experienced as extraordinary, or at the very least significant, are intimate spaces. They are not intimate all of the time—nobody wants intimacy at every moment—but when they are, they can impact everyone, however ephemerally and momentarily, in profound and transformational ways.</p> <p>Education is a fundamentally moral profession. As educators, there is an imperative to create meaningful experiences for students that matter in the present moment as they are happening. I have to be there with students and to get them to be there with me back. I'm talking about engagement not only through the contours of a lesson plan but through the relationships between people. I'm talking about the mood or the vibe in the room. In this state, we are less distracted, less preoccupied, more attentive, more available, and more compassionate than we might be in the rest of our lives. The moral cause célèbre for education should not simply be preparing students for the twenty-first-century economy but for each student to become an I and a you, mirrored by a teacher who is an I and a you.</p> <p>Of course, we would all want to be better than we are, but limitations, habits, and personality traits dictate that we are not. Worse, sometimes wanting to be better is what makes us worse: for example, when I beat myself up for not being a good teacher, I may feel shame about my classes, I may blame myself, but I may also blame the students, and the topper—I may take out my aggression on them. Or, a simpler scenario with less psychodynamics: I place too much importance on the results I achieve with students; I lose sight of the process; I lose sight of who my students are, where they're at, and what they need; kids may get the message that they are the work they produce instead of the kind of person they are; maybe the students who struggle in school internalize that school is worthless, or, worse, that they are. The school becomes an it, their teachers are its, and they are its, too.</p> <p>The combined intrusions of my head (pressing worries, preoccupations, daydreams, food fantasies, deadlines, despair, feeling underprepared), the school (constantly noisy, constantly busy, a general authoritarian vibe, the ever-increasing pressure of assessment, committee work, and spatial constraints verging on claustrophobic), and my role in it (the imbalance of power brought on by age, grades, gender, etc.) heavily impinge upon even the most expert teacher. No matter how much I want to be more attentive, engaged, and attuned, so that my students can be more attentive, engaged, and attuned, it doesn't always happen, and the reasons are rarely simple.</p> <p>Recently I have become curious about everything that distracts me or throws me off balance. As a teacher, I learn the most when things go wrong, as painful as those experiences can be. If I am reflective and open to the ways I fail, without too much shame, self-recrimination, or blame, then I have the real possibility of becoming a better teacher.</p> <p>Lately I've thought of my classroom as a rehearsal space for a play. The process is as much about doubt and mistake-making as it is about making things run smoothly. In this kind of classroom, both teacher and student work on expanding their perceptions, illuminating worlds that have been dark, and extending our horizons of what we know and our power to know it—what Philip Jackson (in Jackson et al. [<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref4">7</reflink>]) called "expressive awareness." The teacher not only becomes aware of her thoughts, actions, and beliefs in the classroom, but she also is transparent about them, even, when appropriate, with her students. As teachers, our ability to nurture those expressive capacities in students, even in the face of substantial obstacles, is an important factor in a child's ability to emerge intellectually and emotionally.</p> <hd id="AN0091649726-4">Knowing Oneself</hd> <p>The teachers who had the greatest impact on me were the ones who knew me best. They knew I used humor to deflect attention; they knew underneath all my clowning, I could be serious; and they knew, as insensitive as I could be to others, I was actually walking around deathly afraid of what people thought of me. Most of all, they pushed me to be there as myself, to stay engaged, no matter how hard it might be.</p> <p>That they loved me didn't mean they gave me a free pass or that they eschewed the work of the classroom for personal connection. It often meant the opposite. They called me out, named my defenses, urged me on, and nudged me further than I thought I could go. They had good intentions for me in a time when the seas were rough. They were truly, as Max van Manen ([<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref5">12</reflink>]) says, in loco parentis.</p> <p>The classroom is meant to be the one democratic institution available for each student to better herself or himself, a portal where we walk in one way and come out another. We can't write before; afterward, we can. We learn to read, we learn to compute, and we learn to exist socially. Less spoken about is our need to cope with our own uncertainty about how to live in the world; to know our gifts and limitations in the context of our lives; to manage our private and public selves; to deal effectively with inevitable suffering, loss, and hopelessness; and to live on, not in spite of the harshness of life, but taking some measure from it. Those skills often get short shrift in today's educational landscape.</p> <hd id="AN0091649726-5">Being Uncomfortable</hd> <p>Eight years ago, I devised an elective English class called Experiments in Reading Literature and the World, which attempts to create a culture of intimacy through storytelling and experiences that intensify the students' awareness of themselves and others. Colleagues, with a certain amount of skepticism, called it Avi's World. All the kids call the class Feelings.</p> <p>We write personal essays, tell stories from our childhood that we convert into monologue performances, practice empathy, meditate, play theater games, and talk openly about race, gender, sexuality, and class. At the center of each classroom activity is an attempt to increase and broaden the ways in which students connect with each other. Through these connections, they extend their awareness about who they are and who others are; they cultivate awareness around the obstacles in their life. We also continually develop our ability to empathize with others and ourselves, and we celebrate and consider what leaving high school and, more importantly, what leaving childhood may mean.</p> <p>There are a number of techniques, leadership paradigms, exercises, and disciplines I use to reach these goals. The major shift is this: instead of making the first day a getting-to-know-each-other occasion before we start the real work of the semester, I make the whole semester, and thus the real work, getting to know each other. Compassion, intimacy, and imagination are no different from writing thesis statements, solving equations, or analyzing texts in the respect that they are crafts that take time developing. They require explicit instruction and constant practice.</p> <p>Interpersonal connections, learning with and through the interactions one person has with another, which is as old as the mother-child relationship, is the main pathway through which we learn. Making real, honest, and meaningful connections, and learning to solve problems within those connections, is an important skill a young person can acquire. The best conversations, even the ones where we contest each other's ideas, happen in the context of relationships that we have invested in. Even reading and writing are interpersonal acts, between you and a text.</p> <p>I use a lot of techniques and models from outside traditional education to foster this kind of learning. Frankly, there aren't many models inside of formal academic learning for designing and implementing this kind of education. We begin most every class with either an exercise from theater or with meditation. This year the school has provided me with tables that fold up so that we can stand up, face each other, and move easily around the space. We also read essays that evoke our personal experiences with family, peers, and relationships, subjects often taboo in school. What we write is read aloud to each other; all of us, not just the teacher, are the audience for each piece. The class is tailored to seniors, who are often hungry for relevant conversation around their hopes and fears of life after compulsory education.</p> <p>As a kid shooting baskets in my backyard, desperate to escape my loneliness, the possibility of examining my private world would have been unthinkable. If someone asked me to tell a story about myself, I would say, "Story? About me? I don't have any." As a child, inwardness felt dangerous. Any kind of real conversation about myself was scary, nerve provoking, and dangerous. Back then, I thought, if I don't think about the things that scare me, then maybe I can keep myself from being so scared. That system probably protected me in the short term, but it made me quite limited in terms of what I could think about, or talk about, or be. Intimacy with others seemed equally terrifying. I fell into the role of the class comedian. School was essentially homework to hand in, not somewhere I learned, and certainly not about myself. I tried to stay away from what scared me, which left me, looking back, with precious little to say or do.</p> <p>Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist, captures this fundamental human drive in the landmark book, <emph>The Emotional Life of Your Brain</emph>: "Whether to approach or avoid is the fundamental psychological decision an organism makes in relation to its environment" (Davidson and Begley [<reflink idref="bib6" id="ref6">6</reflink>], 39). My personality was organized around keeping people away from me. To an extent, it still is. It makes sense that everything that scared me as a kid I avoided. And even as an adult there are a huge range of things, people, and situations to avoid. But in most situations now, I want to approach life more than avoid it. And I think we want our students to do the same, with the qualification that what we want most is for them to be safe. But spaces in which we are uncomfortable and topsy-turvy, unpredictable and open, are often where we grow the most. What makes us most uncomfortable is often what's most valuable.</p> <hd id="AN0091649726-6">Meditation and Mindfulness Are Intimate Practices</hd> <p>I learned how to meditate at the Naropa Institute, while I was enrolled full time at the University of Colorado. Naropa is the college started by Trungpa Rinpoche, the Tibetan monk, who helped bring meditation to the United States in the 1960s. Class went like this: 40 minutes of meditation, a short lecture on some of the principles in Buddhism, and then a short question and answer period. I came out of each session clear-eyed. It's a cliché, I know, but the leaves on the trees really did seem brighter, like they were waving gracefully at anyone willing to notice. I would stare up at them and feel equally shaky and alive. I learned more in that class about how to be in the world than in any other class I took in college for credit.</p> <p>The scary thoughts about my life that I had habitually and willfully ignored because they threatened me now paradoxically freed me. Touching the fear didn't paralyze or kill me. It made the world feel somehow more real, and I suddenly cared about myself more, experienced intimacy as a feeling of spaciousness in my body. At the same time, I noticed that after meditation I became far more aware that other people were living around me. I knew intellectually that others lived, but before (I learned to meditate), they were mere objects: now they were as fascinating and important as my own self. Partly that was brought on by the act of meditation itself—breathing in and out, naming thoughts, feeling bodily sensations. It increased my capacity for feeling and widened my understanding of my thought patterns. It made me more observant, mindful, and patient.</p> <p>And in large way it was also the acknowledgement of suffering that unlatched an important door for me. It shocked me that my teacher readily said life was suffering because we all die and that everything is always changing. Nobody had ever said that to me so directly. I suppose I knew those things somewhere in the recesses of my consciousness, but I had been trained to believe that those were the dirty secrets of the world, like the family relative whose existence you neither confirm nor deny. Not only did these open revelations not depress me; they actually freed me and sharpened my attention. They also made me far more more compassionate to come in contact with the stuff that made me miserable. The thing that was so obvious and so hard to talk about, I was now freely examining. I understood more deeply how human beings protect ourselves from what scares us. And looking at my own mishaps, suffering, despair, and eventual demise paradoxically freed me to be more alive and in sync.</p> <p>I want my class to be something that makes them more peaceful, more at ease, more in connection, not the thing that causes further stress, strain, and paralysis. The change in the students when we meditate is similarly noticeable. Meditation is markedly different from most educational practices, which ask you to think, strain, and do. It asks you to do nothing but pay attention. It's surprisingly difficult.</p> <p>As an extra bonus, meditation is a far less coercive way of increasing students' attentiveness than any classroom management program. While both meditation and classroom management are discipline-based, the former fosters self-discipline, while the ladder often demands only compliance, without leaving the student any real self-managing skills that he desperately needs. At a time in life where the plasticity of the brain is at its height, teachers literally are shaping young people's minds. We need to offer students worthwhile practices that have staying power after they graduate.</p> <p>Coda: During the semester my own students plead with me to meditate for an entire class period. We often do. And on that day, many of the students fall asleep, exhausted from not getting enough sleep for months. When they wake up, they look refreshed. They look around at each other as if they just got away with something (the ultimate digression). But I'm not so sure they haven't done significant learning just by lying down. The chance to integrate disparate forms of knowledge, experiences, anxieties, and hope in an embodied way seems seriously lacking in traditional educational environments.</p> <hd id="AN0091649726-7">The Context of the Reform Movement</hd> <p>The hopes of the progressives—open classrooms, freedom schools, arts education, the whole child movement—have been squeezed by the language of the marketplace: annual yearly progress, learning targets, testing. In the face of this tidal wave of so-called reform, when I argue for a dialogical relationship between teacher and student, I am liable to be asked how that will help us compete with China—or Finland.[<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref7">1</reflink>] I cannot answer a question that seems to me to have little to do with the endeavors of teaching and learning.</p> <p>Creativity and compassion and intimacy may not raise test scores. But test scores most certainly cannot measure dynamic teaching. The progressive private schools bypass this conundrum. It is an education that is thoughtfully considered around what children need, as opposed to how the economy can grow. For the most part, the same politicians and other educational reformers who want to make schools and teachers more accountable and devoted to educational outcomes send their own children to private schools, where they are nurtured in forward-thinking, progressive environments that value creativity, care, and the children's lives first and foremost, because (no surprise) they, the parents, went to private school, too. (Here's a short list: President Obama; Secretary Duncan before he moved to Arlington, Virginia; Michelle Rhee; three of the four congressmen who sponsored No Child Left Behind; and Davis Guggenheim, who made <emph>Waiting for Superman</emph>.) Instead of calling for the same quality of education they received and their children receive, they perversely do the opposite. The children and teachers who attend and work in public schools are given a mandate of outcomes (provable results) and value-added evaluations; teachers' salaries are partly dependent on their students' test scores. The private school kids go on retreats and do service learning projects.[<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref8">2</reflink>]</p> <p>The way we discuss learning as if it were a matter of priorities and targets bears little resemblance to what happens in a classroom, which almost always includes specific contexts, real people with bodies that carry emotional and physical states and lives we can only begin to comprehend. This gap in education between what we think school is and what it actually is seems to me especially large; it causes a lot of the confusion that gets amplified in casual education talk.</p> <p>What is dangerous, particularly in schools, is when you think you have the answer, particularly when those answers come from those who have not studied what they are purportedly trying to solve. I've been a teacher for more than a decade, and there are many things I don't know (and don't expect to know). How can someone who doesn't spend time in schools day after day pronounce nationwide changes? That's not unlike a doctor who spends no time with patients declaring that he has a new way of treating the flu.</p> <hd id="AN0091649726-8">What Is Immeasurable</hd> <p>Finding an intimate language to talk about the life of lived education as opposed to its abstract goals and aims is sorely needed. In a <emph>New York Times</emph> column, Tim Jackson ([<reflink idref="bib8" id="ref9">8</reflink>]) wrote: "The care and concern of one human being for another is a peculiar 'commodity.' It can't be stockpiled. It becomes degraded through trade. Machines don't deliver it. Its quality rests entirely on the attention paid by one person to another. Even to speak of reducing the time involved is to misunderstand its value." As my mentor, Bill Schubert, put it to a group of graduate students once: "Efficiency is about getting things done fast. But anything you want to do really fast you probably don't enjoy."</p> <p>No quantifiable data points can measure the qualitative experience of being in a school. How, for instance, do we measure the way a student feels about himself or herself? Not all learning can be tested: for instance, one's self-awareness, resiliency, or grit; also, how and when to trust our intuitions, how to make a follow-up phone call, how to deliver feedback, how to confront biases, how to build the capacity to take in new information, and how to solve one's problems without causing more problems. There are no tests for this nor for the way we treat our parents, our girlfriends and boyfriends, and our teachers, but these skills are crucial to life success, too. These aren't airy-fairy add-ons, but basic life skills everyone should have a chance to learn intentionally.</p> <hd id="AN0091649726-9">Making Meaning</hd> <p>Each time a student walks into a classroom, especially over time, he develops certain expectations having spent some time in that teacher's room. His heart rate perhaps rises or falls, depending on the teacher, her approach, her mood, the way she evaluates; also, how the room feels, its size, proportions, the amount of space between each desk; and the subject matter, what constitutes learning, what activities one has to do, what sense the student has that he is good at this. Since a feeling permeates everything we do, and facilitates rather than obstructs learning, what we feel and experience in learning spaces is important. When the Dalai Lama ([<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref10">5</reflink>]) accepted the Templeton Prize, he told the audience that compassion "will not materialize through prayer and meditation, but through education ... [we have to] educate [young people] holistically. ... A person's mental state changes, their blood pressure reduces, stress also reduces. We are not talking about the next life; we are not talking about heaven. We are simply talking about how to build a healthy body through a healthy mind." Now there's a curriculum worth pursuing.</p> <p>While I had fine teachers in high school, and a few who were even remarkable, I reflected little on what kind of a learner I was, or on how learning happened in the first place. I did, though, often find myself loving or hating my teachers. I remember, for instance, physically shrinking each time I walked into my sophomore year geometry class. My teacher, whom I'll call Mr. Putanell, seemed as far and remote to me as if he were a bank teller behind a plated glass. His class was dedicated to testing who was intelligent and who wasn't. And of course the students understood the rules and cast aside students like me who weren't cutting it. Not only was I socially ostracized and couldn't concentrate there, I also, as a result, couldn't concentrate in the three classes before it. During class, I buried my head in my book pretending to solve the problems. My breathing became shallow. I prayed that I wouldn't be humiliated. What I learned had more to do with managing shame than learning the fundamentals of geometry.</p> <p>Making meaning is as much a tactile, living, breathing experience as it is a cognitive one. Only a small aspect of a child's experience in school (a teacher's, too, for that matter) is the intended lesson or the academic goals of that particular day. No doubt goals are important, especially to the teacher. But to ignore the immediate, lived experience the students are having is akin to keeping only one room in a whole house clean while the rest of the house is in total disrepair. We should teach academic content that trains students in various disciplines, sharpens their minds, awakens them to nuance, and deepens their reading and writing ability. We should also be attuned to students' emotional states and our own, should tell and listen to our stories, and should invest our attention and awareness in the experience of being together. We should prepare students for the future, all the while knowing we have little idea what the future will entail. And so we should also prepare them to live in their present, right now, something they can know with far more immediacy.</p> <hd id="AN0091649726-10">Demechanizing</hd> <p>School too often mechanizes. There are divisions upon divisions of time and space; there are rules and bells that govern the class periods. The operating principle seems to be uniformity and repetition. Teachers are encouraged, if not outright instructed, to implement class procedures and management that make learning regimented. On one level, this makes sense. At my school, for instance, 3,000 students each day come and go. But on the personal level, it can be disastrously boring. Relationships too often become transactional, a virtual representation of Buber's I-it relation.</p> <p>For Buber, the I-you relation can happen when "we are drawn to and full of love for the intimate person. The world, lit by eternity, becomes fully present to him" (Buber [<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref11">4</reflink>], 82). I had one such moment recently with my three-year old daughter, Raiva. She wanted me to come upstairs to help her put three pennies in the piggy bank. I demurred and said either she could go now by herself or she'd have to wait. Her arms slumped down exaggeratedly and turned away from me. Neither of our strong points is dealing with setbacks. We watched each other somewhat suspiciously, more like strangers on the street than father and daughter. I took a deep breath and consciously let go of the desired result (that she do it by herself or wait, as I told her the first time). This reset—seeing her as her own person, and outside of my notions of regimented time (how things should get done and when), had a powerful effect on me. I stopped doing the dishes and watched her. My body slackened. I felt like I was seeing her face more clearly. The moment I stopped asking something from her, I began enjoying her.</p> <p>She, too, was weathering the blow. She turned around and looked at me. Her lower lip twisted a little. She lifted her striped dress over her belly button and then let it drop. I smiled at that, and she smiled back. There would be no meltdown. We were in an I-you relation of intimacy and presence and love. I can't remember if she went to the piggy bank alone or if we went together. It hardly seems to matter now; after all, eventually she would.</p> <p>In the classroom, it works similarly. Often the moments where there are obstacles to our targets (piggy bank trip = paper to write) are the sites where the most intense learning happens.</p> <hd id="AN0091649726-11">Some Examples</hd> <p>Often I begin class this way: I turn off the lights. Then, I say: "OK, everyone let's close our eyes and take your attention inward." Daniel Siegel, a psychiatrist who has studied meditation, talks about attention as a kind of hub. On the outer wheel are all the things we think about, and in the center is the mind that observes the hub. This is what makes human beings extraordinary and what allows the brain to change. Our neurons fire and wire together based on what we think about. The more that becomes a conscious choice, the better.</p> <p>I'll make the following suggestion: "Think about where you just came from, a class, your home, the hallway, and bring some attention to any friends or family that are on your mind." And then I will ask them to scan their attention to each part of their body before letting that attention go with an exhale. Then to their senses: the smells in the room, the sounds inside and outside of the room, and so on. I'll ask people to breathe with particular attention on the exhalations. I'll say "Notice when your thoughts go adrift, and bring your attention back to your breath, to your body." At the end of the five minutes, I might say, "Ok, take a last inhale and sigh out the exhale." Finally, I say: "Slowly open your eyes and remain quiet." If it's well into the semester and they are comfortable, I'll have them do a few sighs. And maybe rock forward and yawn. This is a calming practice that makes everyone feel ridiculous, like little kids not yet embarrassed of doing ridiculous things.</p> <p>I have been meditating with students since I started student teaching more than 12 years ago. Then, I called it Rest and Relaxation. Now I call it what it is—meditation. It used to be taboo. Now it's scientifically proven to increase our self-awareness, which is good if you need a buzzword to help prove something you already know intuitively.</p> <p>Perhaps the most endangered resource in school is the space to reflect quietly. A mostly silent space, whether through reading and writing, or meditation, or other contemplative practices, gives students a chance to think, slows down the gears of their mind that have been whipped into a hazardous pace by the very nature of the school. (Imagine walking through Times Square nine times a day on your way to nine different bosses in Manhattan, each of whom each day have new, important directives to tell you. Now do this everyday for four years, and you'll have some idea of what it's like to be a student in high school.) We all need places to integrate our experiences.</p> <p>One needn't meditate with students or teach English to create meaningful spaces that use silence and reflection. The best exercises are embodied, reflective, and recursive. For instance:</p> <p></p> <p>• •</p> <p></p> <ulist> <item> The silence after we ask a question and no one has the answer.</item> <p></p> </ulist> <p>• •</p> <p></p> <ulist> <item> Dialogue writing back and forth on a single notebook about a reading or idea (groups can use chart paper).</item> <p></p> </ulist> <p>• •</p> <p></p> <ulist> <item> Many of the best theater exercises by two of the most innovative practitioners of our time, Viola Spolin and Augusto Boal, are done in silence (Spolin [<reflink idref="bib11" id="ref12">11</reflink>]; Boal, [<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref13">1</reflink>], [<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref14">2</reflink>], [<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref15">3</reflink>]).</item> <p></p> </ulist> <p>• •</p> <p></p> <ulist> <item> The Spectrum Activity, or Where Do You Stand? Students respond to questions silently with their bodies. For instance: how much do you like to socialize (not at all <emph>over here</emph>, all the time <emph>over there</emph>)? This a great way to silently dialogue about difficult topics, for example, race and class.</item> </ulist> <p>Theater games and exercises, as I mentioned earlier, if done right, are a great way of filling your classroom with a sense of connection and intimacy. These games are often done in silence and involve touch. It is important that students, particularly older students, have the opportunity to touch in a way that is neither violent nor sexualized. Our heart rates decrease from desirable touch. The close proximity of our bodies to each other creates trust.</p> <p>For instance, one such game is called blind finger lead (Rohd [<reflink idref="bib10" id="ref16">10</reflink>], 34). In this exercise, the teacher sets up two lines of an equal number of participants facing each other. One line shuts their eyes and holds their pointer finger up on their right hand as if ringing a doorbell. The instructor taps people from the other line to go across to someone and make contact with their pointer finger to theirs and lead them somewhere in the room that is safe. They can only use their adjoined pointer finger to do this. Halfway through, they switch—the leader becomes the follower, and the follower becomes the leader. Through this exercise, students are engaged actively within the confines of clear instructions but explore those confines in different ways. For instance, one set of partners may move quickly through the space, going high and low over chairs and touching various objects in the room. Another pair may stay in a comparatively small section of the room, moving very slowly and carefully. There is a sudden explosion of joy and laughter and release of tension when I tell them to stop and open their eyes. I often use these silent activities as a segue to telling personal stories or having dialogue around an issues or idea. Doing something physical with your body before working with your mind creates more opportunities for honest conversation.</p> <p>Telling or listening to a personal story makes meaning-making more possible. If you can tell a story about yourself, you may be making meaning from your life and sharing it with others. And if you can do that, you often have more agency in your life. In the beginning of the year, when I inform students they will be telling stories from their lives, they look at me blankly, as if to say: "I don't have any stories to tell." I can relate: it would've been the same for me in high school. I'll often do an exercise like the one I shared above first. After a short feedback session (What was that like? What did you feel?), I use their responses (adventurous, trusting, vulnerable, scary, etc.) as prompts for a story to share with their partner. For instance, think about a time you felt scared to do something because it was unusual. Almost always every student in the class, given some time, will have a story to tell. Telling stories in this way, first in partners, while everyone else is telling a story, creates a bond not only between each partner with one another but also for the class as a whole, because everyone is engaged in the same thing at the same time in completely unique ways. These stories are opportunities for the students to reflect, think about, and make sense of their lives, while also accruing numerous skills, such as the ability to remember, describe, and make sense of people, places, and things. Most important, students learn to listen and make meaning of someone else's life. That's empathy. And empathy is a skill we can learn, sharpen, and hone, not just an ability we either have or don't have.</p> <p>For me, the most impactful learning is done in connection, not in isolation. There are many ways to be trained to facilitate connections between students. Another basic principle that I find useful is to encourage one-to-one connections in the classroom with the group watching and listening. In a classroom with 28 students, if everything goes through the teacher, you only have 28 connections. In a classroom where the teacher connects students to each other, the number is exponential, 378. Too often, the first number represents a best-case scenario of how classrooms are run (it's highly unlikely that even 28 connections are forged every day in class). Imagine if one of our goals for the year was to forge some kind of connection, however loose, between the 378 that are possible in the scenario above.</p> <hd id="AN0091649726-12">Conclusion</hd> <p>Recently a teacher told me about the method of planning she has been versed in. Before she goes to sleep, she pictures each child for a moment and sees what emotions, thoughts, and ideas come into her head. This inspires plans for the next day. As she was telling me this, I became excited by the notion of my daughter attending that school. To have a teacher who is aware of her presence and who summons her thoughtfully in her mind each day is a powerful tool indeed. What a shame that this teacher taught at a Waldorf school; our public schools lag woefully behind in engendering mindfulness among their teachers and students.</p> <p>The best kinds of teaching take students into different kinds of shared encountered consciousness: from I-it to I-you, from passive receivers to active searchers, from despairing everydayness to a sense of being in an encounter. They provide spaces and tools for students to be imaginative and alive in the present.</p> <p>Much of what happens in education that has meaning cannot be quantified. Instead it must be described meticulously from our own local and immediate perspective. In attending to the intuitive process of observation, I found that what I value most in the shared life of teachers and students are our subjective experiences of intimacy. These need not be counted since they exist in their own spheres for their own reasons, without the need of proof or tally. These I-you encounters reinvigorate our capacity to live in the world and thrive.</p> <ref id="AN0091649726-13"> <title> Footnotes </title> <blist> <bibl id="bib1" idref="ref7" type="bt">1</bibl> <bibtext> Never mind that the obsession with Finland's educational system is laced with this irony: Finland borrowed many of its most valued ideas from the United States, such as equality of educational opportunity, individualized instruction, portfolio assessment, and cooperative learning (Ravitch [9]). John Dewey's ideas may have lost in the United States, but they have gained traction in Finland. We're trying to copy the very thing that originated here.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib2" idref="ref8" type="bt">2</bibl> <bibtext> I have taught in both public and private schools.</bibtext> </blist> </ref> <ref id="AN0091649726-14"> <title> References </title> <blist> <bibtext> Boal, Augusto. 1979. Theater of the Oppressed. New York: Urizen.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Boal, Augusto. 1992. Games for Actors and Non-actors. London: Routledge.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib3" idref="ref15" type="bt">3</bibl> <bibtext> Boal, Augusto. 1995. The Rainbow of Desire: The Boal Method of Theatre and Therapy. London: Routledge.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib4" idref="ref1" type="bt">4</bibl> <bibtext> Buber, Martin. 1970. I and Thou. New York: Scribner.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib5" idref="ref10" type="bt">5</bibl> <bibtext> Dalai Lama. 2012. Speech presented as a Templeton Prize Acceptance Speech in St. Paul's Cathedral, London, May 14.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib6" idref="ref6" type="bt">6</bibl> <bibtext> Davidson, Richard J., and Sharon Begley. 2012. The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live—and How You Can Change Them. New York: Hudson Street.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib7" idref="ref4" type="bt">7</bibl> <bibtext> Jackson, Philip W., Robert E. Boostrom, and David T. Hansen. 1993. The Moral Life of Schools. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib8" idref="ref9" type="bt">8</bibl> <bibtext> Jackson, Tim. 2012. "Let's Be Less Productive." Editorial. New York Times, May 26.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib9" type="bt">9</bibl> <bibtext> Ravitch, Diane. 2012. "Schools We Can Envy." Review of Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland? by Pasi Sahlberg. New York Review of Books, April 5, <ulink href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/mar/08/schools-we-can-envy/?pagination=false">http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/mar/08/schools-we-can-envy/?pagination=false</ulink>.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Rohd, Michael. 2002. Lecture presented at the Community Theater Workshop, Portland, OR, July 15.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> Spolin, Vola. 1963. Improvisation for the Theater: A Handbook of Teaching and Directing Techniques. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibtext> van Manen, Max. 1991. The Tact of Teaching: The Meaning of Pedagogical Thoughtfulness. SUNY Series in the Philosophy of Education. Albany: State University of New York Press.</bibtext> </blist> </ref> <aug> <p>By Avi Desai Lessing</p> </aug> <nolink nlid="nl1" bibid="bib85" firstref="ref3"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl2" bibid="bib12" firstref="ref5"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl3" bibid="bib11" firstref="ref12"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl4" bibid="bib10" firstref="ref16"></nolink> |
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| Items | – Name: Title Label: Title Group: Ti Data: On Intimacy in the Classroom – Name: Language Label: Language Group: Lang Data: English – Name: Author Label: Authors Group: Au Data: <searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Lessing%2C+Avi+Desai%22">Lessing, Avi Desai</searchLink> – Name: TitleSource Label: Source Group: Src Data: <searchLink fieldCode="SO" term="%22Schools%3A+Studies+in+Education%22"><i>Schools: Studies in Education</i></searchLink>. Fall 2013 10(2):192-209. – Name: Avail Label: Availability Group: Avail Data: University of Chicago Press. Journals Division, P.O. Box 37005, Chicago, IL 60637. Tel: 877-705-1878; Tel: 773-753-3347; Fax: 877-705-1879; Fax: 773-753-0811; e-mail: subscriptions@press.uchicago.edu; Web site: http://www.press.uchicago.edu – Name: PeerReviewed Label: Peer Reviewed Group: SrcInfo Data: Y – Name: Pages Label: Page Count Group: Src Data: 18 – Name: DatePubCY Label: Publication Date Group: Date Data: 2013 – Name: TypeDocument Label: Document Type Group: TypDoc Data: Journal Articles<br />Reports - Evaluative – Name: Subject Label: Descriptors Group: Su Data: <searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Intimacy%22">Intimacy</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Teacher+Student+Relationship%22">Teacher Student Relationship</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Classroom+Environment%22">Classroom Environment</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Personal+Narratives%22">Personal Narratives</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Affective+Behavior%22">Affective Behavior</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22English+Instruction%22">English Instruction</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Relaxation+Training%22">Relaxation Training</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Educational+Change%22">Educational Change</searchLink> – Name: DOI Label: DOI Group: ID Data: 10.1086/673330 – Name: ISSN Label: ISSN Group: ISSN Data: 1550-1175 – Name: Abstract Label: Abstract Group: Ab Data: What is the lived experience of teachers and students in school? How does that lived experience constitute a kind of learning on its own apart from any particular outcome? This article addresses the ways teachers and students encounter one another in schools and why the quality of those encounters is paramount in both the child's and the teacher's intersubjective experience. It is a first-person teacher account that looks at a progressive pedagogy within a public school classroom, drawing on fields in a number of disciplines to discuss both the opportunities and perils of a classroom designed to increase our capacity for intimacy. (Contains 2 footnotes.) – Name: AbstractInfo Label: Abstractor Group: Ab Data: As Provided – Name: Ref Label: Number of References Group: RefInfo Data: 12 – Name: DateEntry Label: Entry Date Group: Date Data: 2014 – Name: AN Label: Accession Number Group: ID Data: EJ1015486 |
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| RecordInfo | BibRecord: BibEntity: Identifiers: – Type: doi Value: 10.1086/673330 Languages: – Text: English PhysicalDescription: Pagination: PageCount: 18 StartPage: 192 Subjects: – SubjectFull: Intimacy Type: general – SubjectFull: Teacher Student Relationship Type: general – SubjectFull: Classroom Environment Type: general – SubjectFull: Personal Narratives Type: general – SubjectFull: Affective Behavior Type: general – SubjectFull: English Instruction Type: general – SubjectFull: Relaxation Training Type: general – SubjectFull: Educational Change Type: general Titles: – TitleFull: On Intimacy in the Classroom Type: main BibRelationships: HasContributorRelationships: – PersonEntity: Name: NameFull: Lessing, Avi Desai IsPartOfRelationships: – BibEntity: Dates: – D: 01 M: 01 Type: published Y: 2013 Identifiers: – Type: issn-print Value: 1550-1175 Numbering: – Type: volume Value: 10 – Type: issue Value: 2 Titles: – TitleFull: Schools: Studies in Education Type: main |
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