What I learn from my teaching
Pradita Nambiar
When I was asked to write on ‘what makes a teacher’ I realized that the number of years of teaching has been very minimal for me to prescribe any doctrine or theory. However, I would like to share the ways in which my practice of teaching has been shaped.
One of the things I cherish doing as a teacher is keeping my daily journal. The time spent on maintaining my diary is quite sacred. It is an inviolable space where there is a constant dialogue between my classroom experiences and my thoughts. My initial entries in the journal were aimed at just record keeping and focussed on what I did in class. I do not remember when, but slowly this act of writing shifted focus and I started writing about the children and their experiences with learning. I became the actor and the witness at the same time allowing me to look at my practice objectively and this involved dealing with a number of questions that arose within me like questioning my own assumptions and theories that I held valid (scholars sometimes call these overarching theories) – is there one ‘best way’ in which I can teach? Are some children born intelligent? Is ‘the textbook’ the only resource available to me for teaching? Is my role as a teacher to continue everything the way it is? Am I a passive onlooker subservient to the text and the system?
I was teaching the various states of India to grade 4 children as part of the geography syllabus in my first year at a formal school. The next year when I was to teach the same to another set of students, I realized that as a teacher I could run the risk of teaching and responding in a mechanical and repetitive manner with every passing year. When my students are not the same each year and their responses and contexts also are different, then how can my way of approaching learning be the same? In a tribal school near Coimbatore, the teachers meet every year to discuss how they would teach the theme of ‘soil’ to children from class 1 to class 5. Despite the theme being the same every year, the activities, songs, poems and games differ. The children are thus implicitly made aware that knowledge is not static and knowledge is the organization of experiences through concepts. The teaching process thereby becomes a learning experience for the teacher as she sets out on a new journey each year. This enables a teacher to experiment with new ideas and strategies of teaching. When learning is not a mechanistic process of acquiring knowledge, then how can teaching be monotonous?
This was a time when the family was noticing the birds around us. My instant reaction was to get hold of a book and read about the characteristic physical features of the birds that we spotted near our house. I would go strictly by the size of the bird and the beak, the wingspan, the colour and so on. One day, whilst we were inside the house, there was a particular bird- call; one of my sons went out to recognize the bird, but the other one just stayed put at the dining table and said, ‘that is a raket-tailed drongo!’. Both the boys recognized the bird but in two different ways. By appreciating the different ways of learning and making room for as many kinds of learning, my repertoire of teaching strategies expanded and made teaching more exciting. If I had a test on the physical characteristics of birds, then one of the boys would have done better; if I had tested on identification based on bird calls then the other one would fare better. Hence, we understand children’s learning is based on the kind of questions that are asked. When the way of teaching is open-ended, then the children become active participants and they generate ideas and are also able to see various perspectives from the same source. Working closely with my own children has allowed me to see that the debate on whether intelligence is innate is a futile exercise. My effort as a teacher has been to find ways to provide a meeting ground for nature and nurture and not treat them as watertight compartments.
For me the first thing that came to my mind when I had to construct the image of a teacher and a student was a textbook. There have been times when I started the class by asking children whether they brought their textbooks and those that did not were admonished. There was the impression that knowledge that is contained in the textbooks is supreme. During the course of my fieldwork at a school in Tamil Nadu, I was trying to unravel how teachers functioned in a school that did not emphasize on prescribed textbooks for teaching. The head of the school had this to say to me, ‘When I say no textbooks, I mean that the resources that the teachers have access to is not just the singular textbook, but it includes other books in the library, other teachers, other subjects, people in the community like parents and grandparents of children, the sources are finite to the extent of the limitations of the mind of the teacher and the students.’ My ability to teach more creatively is enhanced when I view what I teach not as a unitary concept, but as being related to many other things. I need to help children find these connections. This would mean going beyond the prescribed textbooks and the teaching learning materials.
A teacher asked the children what they liked about the rain. So, the children said they liked to play in the rain, tell stories during rainy days, eat mushrooms and flies that come during the rains. The children then discussed how they identify edible mushrooms and the different ways of making this into a curry and a sweet dish which is made from the flies that collect around light bulbs and fall and die. She wrote each of these things on the board in small sentences and asked them to copy it. She then asked them to write a riddle, a poem, a song or a story appreciating rain. The children were from the Irula tribe for whom writing was a challenge as their language was a predominantly oral tradition. This was a perfect instance of a teacher considering the rich and varied experience of the children as important in the process of teaching. Learning was understood as knowledge construction rather than assimilation. Israel Scheffler in his Philosophical Models of teaching argues that even if we were to assume that the mind is blank at birth, then as a teacher one would be concerned with making the experiences that the child has had as ‘the known’ to grasp that which might be in their realm of ‘unknown’. Learning becomes inert if there is no active participation of the learner and the child’s brain is considered as ‘tabula rasa’ a blank state.
When my son was eight years old and he first went to school, the teacher told us that his reading of sentences was broken and lacked fluency. I looked at all the things that could be obstructing him from reading. Reading was a chore that the school was engaged in with sounds, spellings and fluency. Very rarely was it considered as a means of communication or artistic expression which the writer was conveying to the reader. I set about intentionally planning to teach him to read and bridge the distance between learning and teaching. I first picked up the picture strip book Up the Faraway tree by Enid Blyton and started reading aloud to him at bedtime. Both of us would peer into the book and explore the world of words, sounds and feelings in the story. He became so engrossed with the characters and all the events that happened to the characters that he would jump with excitement when Dame Washalot poured dirty water down the tree trunk or was upset with Angry Pixie’s violent behaviour. A teacher engages in a systematic and deliberate effort to teach the many things that she wants children to learn. In ‘Teaching’, Hirst and Peters emphasized that it would be foolish to assume that students will be able to access the complex and abstract nature of knowledge by just exploring or by simply experiencing without it being made deliberately and systematically taught. For e.g., a child may have a very limited understanding of a tree, but when the teacher says that it is a living being, it makes its own food, much more is being said about the tree which is embedded in the linguistic structures, traditions and social contexts. A teacher plans consciously and intentionally to achieve learning about the tree. Karl Popper speaks of a ‘bucket theory of mind’ where some believe that you have only to open your eyes and truth will come sliding in. The teacher on the other hand draws the student into the world of theoretical concepts through conscious and goal oriented efforts. For a teacher, teaching is a highly goal centred activity with the active engagement of the learner. If I were to seek out a docile and passive learner, I would no longer then be teaching, it would be indoctrination or conditioning.
Teachers are struggling to devise strategies to ‘make learning fun’ which include making fun activities to follow the lesson. Just as ‘what is being learnt’ is important to a teacher, so too is ‘how it is being learnt. This is where the experience of the learner counts. I was teaching the ‘States of India’ as part of the social science curriculum to 9/10 year olds. The questions that kept popping in my head were ‘do I want the children to just know the facts as a physical construct or do I want them to understand the inter-relatedness of the physical with society’. I decided to embark on a project of making a map of India showing the various states with the cultural, historical and geographical diversity. The children asked some interesting questions like ‘How do we know where one state finishes and another one begins?’, or an even more fundamental question such as, ‘Who drew these boundaries, can we see them on ground when we travel?’, ‘Why do we need states and borders? ’Why are state capitals near rivers? How frequently do rivers or mountains form natural boundaries between countries? The generation of these questions enabled children to engage as socially aware actors. The pleasure of teaching is not in informing or disseminating information to children, it is a process of ‘consciousness raising’.
When a text talks about the ‘biography of ‘Life of Johnson’ by Boswell to 10 year olds in a school in Tamil Nadu or when activities like ‘imagine that you were a journalist’ or ‘imagine that you are a dalit.’ are given to class VIII students, then it is obvious that there has been a complete disregard of the cognitive state of the learner. When a teacher is concerned with only what is to be learnt and takes the cognitive state of the student as granted it results in memorizing what is to be learnt without understanding it. These students are thus motivated only by rewards, marks secured or about the image that others have of them. But however, there is no learning in the sense of the word. For me being acutely aware of the pace of learning of each child in my class has been one of the main energizers in the complex yet satisfying task of teaching.
Some teachers use examples, some enable experiences, some instruct, still others demonstrate, the possibilities of teaching and learning are as varied as the students and teachers engaged in this enterprise. It would be a futile and restrictive exercise to enlist specific characteristics that make a teacher as we all are continuously involved in developing practices that fit our idea of good pedagogical practices. Lastly, when I reflect on my own practices, thoughts and experiences, it makes me a master or should I say mistress of my own professional growth and I am no more just a cog in the wheel. I learn more than I teach, I study the minds of children.
Pradita is a teacher at Vidyaranya High School, Hyderabad. She is keen to make teaching joyous and looks for ways to meet children at the level they are at and build on what they know. Her other interests include connecting research to practice. She can be reached at pradita_n@yahoo.com.
