Excitement leads to engagement

Pradita Nambiar

When I look back at my childhood and fondly recollect the teachers I loved in school, I realize they were women who were excited about their work and wanted to make the learning experience of every child in the class joyful. When I decided to become a teacher, I set out to look for the meaning of excitement in the context of a teacher’s work. bell hooks in her book Teaching to Transgress says that the idea that shaped her pedagogy was that the classroom should be an exciting place, never a boring one. She believed that excitement could co-exist with and even stimulate serious academic engagement (hooks, 1994, page 7). It was this excitement that I was chasing as a teacher. To make this happen, it was essential to consider every classroom as unique and recognize the presence of every child as an active participant of the classroom. And therefore I had to imagine new ways of teaching and enhancing the learning experience of all the children in my class.

Just as children are faced with an explosion of knowledge, I too face challenges to keep abreast of the changes in curriculum, instructional methods, materials, and research in growth and development of children. There are many ways to stay updated: taking up college courses, participating in workshops, being active in professional organizations, and travelling. Cogan and Anderson argue that one of the often overlooked areas to continued professional growth is a regular and conscientious program of professional reading (Cogan, March, 1977, page 254-271).

As a beginner teacher, the first task that the school gave me when I joined was to read a list of 20 books on education which included Paul Freire, Ivan Illyich, Krishna Kumar, J Krishnamurti, M K Gandhi, K T Margaret and so on. The first email from school said that “The list of books below is SHORT! This is the minimum that teachers in our school ought to have read.” I was already a lover of books, but this communication made me aware that the job of the teacher is first to be a reader herself.

The school library subscribes to a number of periodicals and magazines like the National Geographic, At Right Angles, Teacher Plus, and Down To Earth, thus providing me access to professional reading material. As a novice in this profession, I was constantly on the lookout for best practices. It was in these books and magazines I sometimes got many pragmatic ideas that could be directly implemented in the classroom.

Reviews of the articles or books read are shared in the teachers’ meetings and subject specific meetings. Such reviews and discussions provided scope for a critical engagement with the latest literature in the field of education.

Co-teaching for two years in the kindergarten has provided opportunities to learn to teach better. In their book Teaching to Learn: A View from the Field, Tobin and Roth maintain that co-teaching offers a structure for teachers to access the resources that foster enhanced opportunities for them to become reflective and proficient teachers (Tobin & Roth, 2006).

For me it provided immense possibilities for individual and collective development. While in the class with a co-teacher, it created a collective responsibility and there was a shared sense of purpose. Unconsciously, I tended to appropriate new ways of teaching as there was not only sharing of the physical space, but also a temporal understanding with my co-teacher. I have realized that the collective responsibility that comes in co-teaching is very different from splitting the work as is typical of team-teaching approaches.

While being caught up in the rush to cover content during the year, there is a tendency to ignore a number of questions that keep cropping up: Why do I teach the way I do? How did it come to be like this? What is the impact of my teaching on the children I teach? How can I improve? I started maintaining a journal of my classroom processes and vignettes. Sometimes there is an idea swimming in my head or a problem that I am unable to solve in my teaching practice. Putting it down in words, helps me get hold of the idea so that I may think deeply about it or get more ideas without losing it. Can journal writing by teachers be considered as an act of professional development? If any activity that supports teachers to reflect, learn, and then enables improvement can be considered as professional development, then this one definitely does. These jottings in the journal help me write about my experiences and insights in magazines like Teacher Plus and also contribute to peer-reviewed journals. As a result of this practice I went on to collaborate with a researcher and publish a paper ‘Reading Aloud as a Leading Activity with Preschool Students’ in the journal Learning Landscapes.

Mentoring of teachers is an important role to play in the identity formation and professional development of a teacher. The work of a teacher is not an individual enterprise but a community of practice. The mentor-teachers assist in the complex process of teacher professional learning by providing a safe space to examine my practices and make appropriate changes for improvement. The mentor-teachers actively listen with empathy and open mind. My mentors also signpost resources like specific courses (Coursera, Future learn) or webinars on areas of education and general wellbeing. I have done courses like Art & Inquiry: Museum Teaching Strategies for the Classroom and Supporting Children with Difficulties in Reading and Writing.

Participating in conferences and interacting with academicians working in the area of specific disciplines like the History for Peace Conference has helped me to look at non-traditional methods of teaching. Children were exposed to the songs of Meerabai, Guru Nanak, and Kabir, while discussing the chapters on the Bhakti movement. These conferences help re-conceptualize certain pedagogical approaches.

My class has a neurodiverse population; apart from the predominant neurotype, there are autistic and dyslexic children. A number of children have varying types of learning difficulties. My understanding of their needs was limited and I felt the need to view the child through the lens of their issues. There was also an urgent need to look at my own misconceptions/beliefs of autism and dyslexia. With a better understanding of these children, I would be able to work on how I can change my practice for the better. I therefore signed up for a course on dyslexia with the Maharashtra Dyslexia Association. These kinds of courses equip me to become informed and responsive to the social, psychological, and emotional needs of the children in my class.

Earlier, we had to leave our classrooms to attend workshops and webinars and therefore only a few could attend them. Now with publishers of textbooks (Orient BlackSwan) organizing pedagogically rich courseware and designing workshops that meet our requirements appropriately, it has helped tide with the various demands in the recent years like managing a remote and hybrid classroom and responding to the health and mental impacts of COVID on children and teachers.

Am I a teacher who is a subject expert or is there more to me than that? Can I make learning more than gathering information and presenting to the children? My task involves not just implementing but also reflecting and deliberating on the nature of learning and classroom pedagogy. At teachers’ meetings in small groups, we work on producing our own curricula that suit the cultural and social contexts of the children in our class. I remember the discussion the teachers had In the English language meeting on the method of teaching grammar rules. Should it be prescriptive or should it be derived by the children from the usage? We learn to raise questions about the principles underlying the different classroom methods and not be preoccupied with only classroom discipline and organizing a day’s activities.

If the world is to acknowledge the role that teachers play in transforming the minds of young learners, I need to combine scholarly reflection and practice. My aim then as a teacher is to ensure that every child in my class has an active voice be it loud or a whisper in my ear.

References
• Cogan, J.J. (March, 1977). Teachers’ Professional Reading Habits. Language Arts, 54 (No.3), 254-271.
• hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to Transgress. Routledge.
• Tobin, K., & Roth, W.-M. (2006). Teaching to Learn: A View from the Field (K. Tobin & W.-M. Roth, Eds.). Sense Publ.

The author is a teacher at Vidyaranya High School, Hyderabad. She can be reached at pradita_n@yahoo.com.