The craft and the art of teaching joyfully
Shree Deepa
Once a teacher, always a teacher. Being a teacher is not a job but a personality trait or our persona that we tend to take with us wherever we go. As teachers, we are easily identifiable as has happened to me often. Our mind perpetually makes connections about how this incident, or that, can be turned into a teaching-learning experience for our students. This is where we try to spice up our classrooms with our wisdom as an ingredient. An informed, well-read, up-to-date teacher is incomplete unless her wisdom is added to her classroom hours. We must ask ourselves whether ‘teaching’ is an art or a craft before we look at stabilizing ourselves in this profession. Degrees, diplomas, and training sessions make it a craft, but if we have yearned to be a teacher, and have started enjoying our profession, we are on our way to making it an art. The craft of teaching is easy to pick up, but maintaining it as an art requires our conscious engagement with the craft by adding creative dimensions to it so that we enjoy ourselves. Any profession requires us to stay updated and focused in our discipline and keep ourselves in the loop of new developments in the field. This, however, is easier said than done. How do we keep ourselves updated? It sounds difficult, but is actually very easy. I am going to reflect on my own experiences and use them as examples of how I stayed updated.
As a child, I always thought I would be a doctor or a teacher. All my playtime was spent role playing these two professions alternately. I could not get into the medical profession but went on to do my graduation in microbiology, botany, and chemistry. After my graduation, my first job was that of a schoolteacher, where I began my career as an ‘untrained’ teacher because I did not have a ‘B.Ed’. Since I did not like being called, termed, and treated as an ‘untrained’ teacher, I went ahead to pick up degrees in education that served to hone my teaching skills with the necessary theoretical backgrounds that strengthened them. Later on, I had to shift to the discipline of language and literature teaching as my master’s degrees and diplomas were in this field. This accounted for teaching as a craft for me. I was still restless unless my teaching included the artistic perspective because it always excited me to go that extra mile to make every class of mine a memorable performance. This was done not to score brownie points from the principal or parents but to keep me on the satisfaction graph and free me from the monotonous droning or data-dumping exercises that are paraded as teaching hours. The one thing I always consciously did was to find ways of teaching in class that kept me excited every day of my career. Often I had to repeat the courses that I had taught previously. Since I get bored quickly by monotony, I made sure I did things very differently from the previous time or improvised on earlier successful class hours whenever such course repetition had to happen.
This internal compulsion of ‘trying-to-beat-boredom’ and better my best propelled me to constantly look for ways of making my classroom teaching-learning experiences interesting for me and my students. I would look for ideas everywhere, way beyond the classroom hours or the academic calendar and keep a diary of all the ideas. Sometimes the ideas came when I shopped in the vegetable market or a supermarket. I would pick up pamphlets, newspaper inserts, and newspaper articles for classroom materials. This economics worked out well because these were freely available and did not cost me any money. I would discuss with my co-teachers how they made their classrooms exciting and adapt from their suggestions if they seemed plausible. I would activate multidisciplinarity, which came as a craft due to my excellent academic track record as a student, to spice up my classes. Sometimes I would read books that had a bunch of ‘idea tasks’ or five-minute tasks, surf the internet, or try to repeat the tasks that were used as ice-breakers in teacher training workshops. I would understand the demands and needs of my students and adapt, or adopt from my experiences as the task-taker and modify them to suit my students. These exercises and the mindset behind such an act by the teacher will help her hone her skill sets while motivating her to add the artistic element to keeping herself updated professionally. No amount of training or the number of degrees that we pick up will compensate for this mindset.
Staying up-to-date as a teacher is a multipronged approach; it is not just what we can/will do, but linked with who we are as teachers. It is the right attitudinal mindset that will prod us to outperform our previous performances. This mindset will create newer and creative untrodden paths and also foster divergent thinking. Such a mindset in the teacher will automatically inspire the students to think and act creatively. Artistically creative teachers foster and reward originality in the teaching-learning processes. It does not matter what the sources are, but a resourceful teacher is an artist who is deft in the craft of teaching.
The goal of education in 2023 lies in creating thinkers that are original in their ideas because data-dumping and content-regurgitations are outsourced to search engines and Wikipedia; we need to wake up to the reality of artificial intelligence that is becoming more human-like in its responses. As teachers of this generation, we need to focus and work on changing our mindset and merge the craft and the art of teaching so as to protect human originality from the realities and intrusions of artificial intelligence. Let us assume that as teachers, we are progressive and we are able to practice divergent, vertical, horizontal, and lateral thinking in everyday teaching. When this happens all of us will build a generation of students who will not only be prepared to handle technological advances but think of living their lives in meaningful divergent ways. The technological advances of the 21st century are here to stay, and we cannot compete memory-wise with its data-holding capacity. However, as humans in this day and age, we need to be wiser than what machines can offer on various platforms. The paths to this destination can come from educating ourselves through training workshops, self-taught skill development or reading in the area and/or doing certified courses – the destination matters, not the path. But such courses will only contribute to the craft of teaching. Teaching-learning can and will become joyful and satisfying for both the teacher and the students if we merge the art and the craft with a dash of our wisdom gathered through our experiences. We have to put back smiles on the faces of our students and any effort to do that is a worthwhile pursuit in the life of a teacher, and no step can be seen as complete if that joy is removed from the classroom space. We need to move from perceiving our teaching as a chore, to not just fulfilling it as a craft, but enjoying and experiencing it as an art. We owe our students that much!
The author is an associate professor in the Centre for English Language Studies, University of Hyderabad. She has been a school teacher in the earlier years of her career. Her current research interests include language potentiality, equitable, inclusive education, anthrogogicity, teacher education, materials development and testing. She supervises research in English language teaching and education. She can be reached at shreedeepa@uohyd.ac.in.
