Structure, control, and flexibility
Usha Raman
No matter what the role, I suspect that most of us veer between a need for structure, a sense of order and clear boundaries, and the freedom of flexibility and space to move things around, to push those boundaries a bit, or even break them, and the excitement of disorder. It’s like the promise of an evening out at a familiar restaurant where we know we can experiment a bit in the certain knowledge that there will be the usual favourite dishes to come back to if we so desire. As teachers, this ambivalence – this co-existing desire for order and disorder – expresses itself in our syllabi and lesson plans, which offer a clear pathway to where we need to go with our teaching while also holding space for the minor adjustments that must be made for individual students and gives us some room to account for the mood of the group. We – and our students – are steadied by the presence of the map, yet can feel the power of holding the steering wheel as we manage the speed of the journey.
As someone who teaches at the university level, I may have a little more flexibility than the average school teacher in navigating that space between the structure of a course outline and its customized implementation in the classroom. In a recent class, for instance, I went in with my prepared presentation, and an activity planned out, with clear time allocation for the doing and the discussion. But five minutes into the class, a question threw us off course, and a discussion ensued that went in many fascinating directions, none of which had anything to do (ostensibly) with the planned lesson. If I had insisted on returning to my PowerPoint slides, or on shepherding the 50 students back into an activity that now seemed irrelevant, I would have lost the opportunity to let them explore a different set of ideas that seem to have captured their imagination. So, I let it go, and instead focused my energies on drawing from this unplanned discussion a different set of points that could be tied back to the larger goals of the course.
At the institutional level, the responsibility is to provide sufficient structure so that individuals can perform their roles with creativity and a degree of flexibility. This structure can be physical – walls around classrooms, or dividing different parts of the school – as well as conceptual – scheduling the day or the week. It can take the form of rules and regulations that mirror the expectations of society and state.
But even as we respect those boundaries, observe the rules, and cooperatively work by the regulations, it’s important that we find and keep the spaces we can for our own little digressions, our own interpretation of what is possible, and what is doable. Those are the spaces where innovation resides, and surprises emerge. And while we may return to the overarching structure routinely, and even feel comforted and anchored by it, we do so with a bit of bounce, an energy that comes from the unexpected flavour of experimentation.
