When I started teaching future teachers at the University of Delaware about 23 years ago, I was faced with a puzzling phenomenon. Like many other teacher educators (e.g., Pinar & Grumet, 1976), I wanted my students to learn from good and bad teachers they had experienced or observed in their past. I asked my undergraduate students to remember their good and bad teachers and to provide instances or events of their distinct teaching, characterizing these teachers as good or bad. In addition, I asked them to develop a reflective analysis of why they judged these teachers as good or bad and what made these teachers good or bad from my studentsâ point of view. My students usually liked this exercise. They provided many keen observations on their past teachers and a thoughtful analysis of what made these teachers âgoodâ or âbad .â Good teachers were often portrayed as knowledgeable and passionate learners of their academic subject who deeply and personally care about their students. Good teachers were interested in their students: how they think and feel about the studied topics, what was going on in their lives, and so on. Good teachers allowed their students to deviate from the prescribed assignments and school rules and made the assignments and classroom rules situationally meaningful, fair, and compassionate for their students. In contrast, bad teachers were portrayed as dull, disinterested, distrusting, and uncaring, if not even mean, at times. Bad teachers were rigid with the prescribed assignments and school rules and did not want to change them regardless of circumstances or a lack of meaning for their students. So far, so good.
However, when I provided my students with diverse problematic scenarios, asking them what they would do as future teachers if they faced these situations, they often proposed pedagogical actions similar to those that they had described as actions of their bad teachers in their past. For example, in a scenario of a first-grader, advanced in math, who does not complete his math assignments because âthe assignments are boring,â as the boy tells, most of my students would punish the boy with bad grades rather than diversify the assignment to make it interesting and challenging for the boy. My students justified their pedagogical decision by fairness to the other students and compliance with the universal school rules. They often described the boy in the scenario negatively as a disrupter of the classroom discipline, a troublemaker, a beggar for adult attention, a kid who tries to take advantage, and so on, rather than as a good learner of math who needs a different type of instruction. Many of my students were concerned about their professional reputation in the eyes of the school administrators, parents, and other students. They were also concerned about the amount of work and their own pedagogical mastery should they take the other pathway of the development of an individualized assignment for the boy.
My puzzlement grew when I provided them with their own descriptions and analyses of good and bad teachers that my students had experienced in their past. However, my students refused to see any parallel between their descriptions of their own bad teachers and their proposed pedagogical actions! As one student of mine eloquently put it, âWe didnât like it [the pedagogical actions of their bad teachers in the past], because we were students. We didnât understand what was good for us. Students often try to take advantage of their teachers and lazy out of schoolwork.â âSo, they [those bad teachers] were actually good? Right?â asked I. âNo, they were bad teachers . But now, as weâre learning to become teachers ourselves, weâve realized that it [i.e., actions of bad teachers ] was necessary,â replied one of my students. âSo, are you saying that itâs necessary to be a bad teacher when you become a teacher?â I continued challenging their position. âNo,â they replied, âitâs not like that.â However, they could not explain to me, and apparently to themselves, what exactly they meant. The frustration was growing in the classroom. It was not their frustration with the apparent contradiction between their judgments as former students and their proposed pedagogical actions as future teachers, but rather their frustration with me, their professor, who kept challenging them in a Socratic dialogue. It was very rare when a student or two could see this contradiction at all. And even worse, my studentsâ rather oppressive pedagogical actions, in my judgments and their own judgments as past students, were not only limited to given scenarios but often spilled out to their teaching practicum of working with real and not just imaginary children.
I was frustrated and struggled with this paradox for a few semesters. How come my students could not see the obvious contradiction? Why couldnât they see a discontinuity between their portrayal and critique of their past bad teachers and their willingness to do exactly the same when they faced a problematic situation as future teachers? Were they stupid?! Guided by a Socratic pedagogy, I worked hard to develop a smart intellectual argument, a smart intellectual provocation, a smart intellectual twist to help them realize that they contradicted themselves. I tried to apply my new creative ideas in class , but nothing helped. I consulted with my colleagues, teacher educators, but in vain. I felt pedagogically helpless.
Then, one day, I turned my puzzle around. Instead of asking myself why my students could not see the obvious discontinuity between their past student school experience and their current proposed pedagogical actions as future students, I asked myself what the continuity was between their experiences as students in the past (and the present) and them imagining themselves as future teachers. The answer came to me immediately: it was their survival. In their past (and present), they had tried hard to survive as students in their schoolsânow, they were trying to imagine how to survive as teachers. If I were correct, the survival made their apparently conflicting experiences continuous and, thus, non-contradictory!
Hence, in order to help my students see the described contradiction, I needed to move them away from their survival mode. Reflecting on my studentsâ current classes, including my own, I came to the conclusion that all their classes were mostly driven by survivalâsurvival to pass successfully their classes and get good grades. The survival mode was masterfully calculated, designed, and induced by their teachers, including me, and built into their school experiences via an elaborate system of rewards and punishments by grade marks, tests, exams, assignments, and classroom management. But not only school life; life outside school, with its jobs, bureaucracies, and obligations is highly driven by what can be broadly called âsurvival.â Survival is omnipresent in our society, if not our historical existence as Homo Sapiens for the last 300,000 years of our biological, cultural, and historical existence on planet Earth. It has created a powerful ideology. I will develop this central theme of the book later.
In order to move my students away from the grip of survival, I had to change the pedagogical regime of my classes and introduce ontological, rather than intellectual , provocations. âOntological educational provocationsâ challenge the studentsâ lives rather than just a state of their reason (Matusov, 2009). Descriptions of my experimentation with my pedagogical regime away from designing studentsâ survival mode can be found in this book and elsewhere (Matusov, 2015; Matusov &am...