During our orientation, we heard at least a dozen times that we are (graduate students/teaching assistants) first, and (graduate students/teaching assistants) second. We heard it both ways, depending on who was talking. The people giving us this advice had a heartfelt purpose in mind: As we get overwhelmed with the rigors of graduate work, the day-in-day-out of planning, grading, reading, writing, publishing, submitting to conferences, dealing with student complaints, producing our own student complaints, etc. etc.--we need a basic hierarchy in our head, a way to prioritize our responsibilities.
But I also think they fundamentally get something about this work wrong. The two roles coexist in a symbiotic relationship--and I do not care how specialized your research is, or what you intend to study. I don't just mean this in the sense that a PhD is, ostensibly, a glorified teaching certification (although it sort of is). I mean by this what Paulo Freire meant when he said, "Whoever teaches learns in the act of teaching, and whoever learns teaches in the act of learning." Anyone who teaches communication, literacy (spoken or written), or other forms of rhetoric walks not into a classroom, but a microcosm of the very subjects he or she hopes to study.
A few years ago, I judged a high school speech tournament where I saw possibly the silliest impromptu speech of all time. A girl received a quotation about social progress, and proceeded to tell us the history of race relations in the United States. Her three points were:
1) Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves.
2) Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had a dream.
3) Barack Obama was elected President.
Obviously, this oversimplified (and over-hopeful) history of race relations cut out quite a bit of tragedy and trauma. My ballot to her probably said as much, and I don't recall giving her a very good rank in the round. But there are a few things about this that, in reflection, I missed; and that, as a scholar, I can pose questions about.
1) The student had put herself in a social setting and competitive environment in which she courageously spoke her ideas--however limited, however simplified--to an audience of critics and peers who would provide her open and direct thoughts on her work. Undoubtedly, she probably reflected on her naive history of race in America after losing this round; even if she didn't go out and read books about it, she certainly understood why her perspective was limited.
2) The student told a narrative that actually exists in American public consciousness. That is to say: for a great many Americans, the three-point story of racial progress might actually be the way they consciously understand race in America. And this would, of course, be a direct byproduct of how our education systems teach people to think, or how our media environment discusses these issues, or whatever sphere of influence you hope to consider. And so: this simplistic speech should give us pause and cause to reflect.
So often we hear students say things and think, "That's so dumb, I can't believe she thought that!" We return to our offices or go to the bar and share stories of misconceptions students had in class, laughing about the decline of intelligence in America. But we can learn from this. Because our students come from a society and a culture; they come from a media environment we seek to study, a political milieu we hope to transcend, and a nation with values and stories and myths we hope to tap into as authors ourselves. To listen to students talk about history, about politics, about education--even in an uninformed way--can still teach us something about ourselves and the culture we inhabit.
My favorite philosopher, Wittgenstein, decided he solved the problems of philosophy and took off to take on various odd jobs as a gardener, a schoolteacher, and an architect. It astonishes me as I read his work how much the act of teaching youngsters shaped his philosophy just as much as the work of master logicians at Cambridge. By suspending judgment and paying attention to our students with a more comic frame, rather than an admonishing one, we can supplement our studies with the glow of lived experience.
3) As educators, we proactively then can battle the very misconceptions we find ourselves combating in the classroom. We are here to challenge students to think more critically; that is our purpose. We write papers about democracy, about the dismal state of public discourse, about the collapse of the modern education system, about this and that. But we so often forget that the classroom is our vehicle to respond to these very issues; it is the direct application of our studies, a venue for critical thought and the opening of minds.
As you consider your role as a graduate student, then, I beg of you: do not see your roles as of differing levels of importance. Do not even see them as coexistent but equal. Rather, see them as an ongoing cycle of application and reflection; a laboratory for your ideas.
You teach in order to learn, and you learn in order to teach.
It's an easy mistake to get so nervous about classroom management that we over-play our power and forget that students are also people with valuable insights, stories, and reality to add to our classroom society. Even when they say things I want to summarily dismiss, it's always an opportunity to peer at the world from an angle my head isn't normally at.
ReplyDeleteI appreciate your reminder that teaching is learning and learning should be teaching (at least self-teaching!). :-) We are wholistic beings and wholistic scholars.