Pedagogy of Peace

We have to acknowledge the potential power of the group, our classes, and the potential that exists there for wisdom and healing.  Students often genuinely come to love and support each other and can provide much to each other, beyond what we can offer as teachers.  This does often happen but must be allowed for and supported.  We teachers have to be able to create space for this.

What do our students need?  What is required for the present and for the future? What do we need to do as teachers for their future and for a chance that the world will be closer to peace?  What can we do for the chance that our world can be restored and renewed and for hope for our children and our grandchildren?  How do I need to alter my thinking about my students and their needs?  How must I change my practices?  What does it mean to engage with my students and their learning in the ways that I have been exploring?

I propose that possibly, probably it begins with adopting humanistic elements back in to pedagogy.  I suggest that maybe it involves loving our students – as a necessity and not a luxury. It is good, common-sense, humanistic pedagogy to love our students and to employ the golden rule with them.  We must treat them as we would like to be treated because we would like to be part of the change that needs to happen on this planet.  Multiply the number of students you work with each year by at least 20, the number of people whose lives they most likely strongly influence.   You can do the math of how many people we can potentially have a positive impact upon through our teaching.  Let each of us do this in whichever ways we feel are right.  But let us, together, teach with a pedagogy of peace.

Angeles Arrien, a cultural anthropologist and writer, talks about different ways of engaging with the world.  She breaks them down in two four categories, the ways of the Warrior, Healer, Visionary, and Teacher.  I’ve come to see them all as elements of what a teacher must be and do in these times.

Arrien describes the way of the Warrior as showing up and choosing to be present.  This means a great deal more than showing up for class and more than getting up on time and “punching in” at school.  It means bringing your full presence to those students there with you.  It sometimes means leaving personal issues behind and sometimes it means bringing them in to the classroom with you if it serves the purpose of learning.

The way of the Healer asks us to pay attention to what has heart and meaning.  By this is meant listening carefully and watching thoughtfully.  It means to find out what is important to these fellow beings with you in that classroom.  What has heart and meaning for our students will also have energy and we are asked to tune in to and pay attention to that.

The way of the Visionary reminds us to tell the truth without blame or judgment. This includes giving honest feedback to your students, your fellow teachers and to administrators.  Say what you see and what you observe going on.  Share your thoughts and ideas and reactions so that change might result.  At the same time we are asked to avoid sitting in judgment of these other people for what they can or cannot do.  This is hard to do.

The way of the Teacher is to be open to outcomes and not attached to outcomes. Teach bringing out your best, give what you can but don’t assume that your students are going to learn what you teach or will do with their learning what you think they might.  We need to remain open to the possibility, indeed the probability, that our students will take their learning and go with it far beyond our own imaginations and knowledge.  This is as it should be.

The Way of Council is a communication and teaching pedagogy.  It was borne out of Native-American and other traditions as a way of communicating in a group and the process, again, involves a circle.  Every voice has its time. No agenda is forced.  The process is egalitarian and supportive of all learners.  In a Council people often find that there is much more to be experienced and heard than the words that people say.  By employing a practice of speaking from the heart and deep listening new understandings emerge.  Participants find that they can feel connected to others through this process and that there is great power in this.

Similarly, I want to add that for teachers and students alike, collective practices, group practices of all sorts, practices that collect and coalesce energy are rich and important.  We cannot underestimate the power of individual and group intention and the insight and wisdom offered through coming together in a circle or via individual or group meditation.  We can also harness these processes to help create coherence in our classrooms so that what we say and what we do as teachers connect and resonate with our students.  The energy, motivation and intentions of the teacher matter.  The intentional use of practices and of monitoring our own energy makes a difference in the teaching and learning process.

Maria Montessori’s approach, usually thought of as a pre-school educational process, has important implications for our work as well.  A careful exploration of Montessori’s ideas suggests that there are other, critical, factors to consider in planning for quality education.  Some of them have been incorporated in to certain mainstream classrooms.  Sometimes, however, it feels like lip service rather than a real commitment to the transformation of education.

Montessori said that learning had to be meaningful and relevant to the learner.   There are specific guidelines for teachers at every phase of the educational process which invite teachers in to the process of thinking carefully about all aspects of their classrooms including how activities are described, who is in charge of the completion of them and how that happens and the use of tactile elements in teaching.  Montessori’s banner call was to follow the learner.  Don’t lead, but follow.  See what the learner is interested in and how each one is engaging with the material.  Make your decisions as a teacher based upon that information.  More on what this will look like in a classroom to follow.

Waldorf  Education developed and promoted by Rudolph Steiner advocated for the inclusion of the arts and an attention to the periphery of things; beauty in the classroom, according to Steiner, is not considered a luxury.  From a progressive school’s literature, I found the following  “. . . at this juncture I would put forth the question, might not beauty, and the love of the beautiful, perhaps bring peace and harmony?  Could it not carry us forward to new concepts of life’s meaning?  Would it not establish a fresh concept of culture?  Would it not be a dove of peace between the various cultures of humankind?”  (The Unknown Craftsman, Soetsu Yanagi).  These ideas provide another question we must consider, how do we include the love of what is beautiful in our work?

To Wonder at Beauty…
By Rudolph Steiner

Paulo Friere, the Brazilian educator and activist has forced so many to look at what is chosen to teach versus what students need to learn in order to gain power and status to really make differences in their communities.  Freire talked about the banking method of education and its pitfalls.  This refers to the idea that teachers know what students need and it is, therefore, the students’ “job” to swallow and absorb what has been directed their way.  Freire was one early proponent of radically transforming education so that it would reflect the true nature of the relationship between education and those power and status dynamics.  His work with poor illiterate Brazilians shook things up.

Still much of education seem to continue to rely on a banking approach, even though it is at times disguised as something other than that.  Curricula often relies on it and standardized testing usually does.  In 2008 we saw the house of cards that is the United States and international financial system we educators really don’t want to be in to banking, do we?  We want to invest, rather, in the souls and spirits of our students.  We want to give them access to all of the power and mystery that is available to them.  As educators we should be concerned about shaking things up in our classrooms and communities.

Charles Curran who followed in the footsteps of Carl Rogers, the humanistic psychologist, founded Counseling Learning also known as Community Language Learning.  This learning process advocates for and requires deep listening.  This includes listening by the teacher to the students but also and equally importantly by the students to each other.  It highlights how important it is for learners to say what is true and meaningful for themselves; to look at and share with each other their own worlds.  When students share true and important experiences and ideas, magic happens in the classroom.

Mary Rose O’Reilley also talks about this,  “When people sit around in a group and share experiences, the universe of possibility begins to change”.  I personally know this to be true from time spent with students in many places of the world, as O’Reilley continues, “when people sit and tell each other what the world is like for them, the air becomes electric with both danger and hope”. (p. 41).

Deep listening and sharing is also a core idea of the group communication and learning process known as Council.  The Council process advocates for learners and their guide or teacher to be seated in a circle where every individual can clearly see every other individual.  It provides space for each person to have a voice and to be heard.  Taking the time to listen deeply yields amazing results which cannot to prescribed or predicted.

The power of deep listening is something that we educators must not ignore.

In this ongoing conversation it is important that we also revisit some of the pioneers of alternative ways of viewing teaching and learning.  I will refer to some of the pioneers who contributed to the genre of language teaching pedagogy, as this is an area I have worked in for many years.  I find that these ideas have profound relevance for other content areas which is why I include them.  This is only a beginning and much of my writing from here on out will come back to and deepen my own understanding of these important ideas.

The first set of ideas I will explore briefly for now  is that of Caleb Gattegno who developed The Silent Way.  Silent Way was originally a mathematics pedagogy that was later applied by Gattegno to language teaching.  One important idea is to examine what it means to subordinate teaching to learning, to make your students’ learning more important than your teaching.  Another of Gattegno’s core ideas was to not do for the learner what they can do for themselves.  After twenty years of working with these ideas, they are still provocative and meaningful for me.  Gattegno was deeply inspired by the philosophy of J. Krishnamurti so these philosophies and ideas run deep with deep roots that are extremely well grounded.

I also continue to explore Gattegno’s invitation to look at our use of praise and whether or not it is necessary or even helpful.  O’Reilley concurs with this question saying, “. . . many of us still define our success as teachers by our skill at ‘marking’. . . such an approach to teaching inhibits students’ ability to find their own strength” (p. 49).  This is in contrast with developing what Gattegno called students’ Inner Criteria, meaning developing their ability to know for themselves if they are correct, not correct, or where they are on the continuum.

O’Reilley continues with her exploration on the question of praise by saying, “Even our positive responses often merely addict students to repeating their most successful tricks.  Both praise and blame set students looking for other people for definitions of the self.  Both discourage create problem solving because you can’t solve problems in new ways when you have an eye on what ‘they’ might think.”  When students are wondering “What is the answer I’m supposed to come up with?” their creativity and full potential is diminished.

A final thought from Gattegno who also said, “Only awareness is educable”.  We can only help to train our students’ awareness of what they know or don’t about the subject, of themselves as learners, of themselves within a learning community.  This idea has profound implications for what we will do or not with our students.

Shakti Gattegno, Gattegno’s wife, built in meaningful and sustaining ways on his work.  One of her core ideas which stays with me is that we must be good to our students rather than be nice.  By this she means when we make the road too easy for our students, we do them no service.  Rather we must do that which will develop their full potential for human goodness.  This means challenging them in appropriate ways, holding their feet to the fire, making them work hard, not for some external standard but to develop their own internal criteria and a knowledge and skill set that allows them to achieve great, human goals.

More on these ideas soon.

Teachers teaching within any teaching system, systems which are nearly always fraught with issues about money, curricula, mission and goals, might feel as if they cannot make a difference.  They absolutely can, however, help to bring about progressive social change – through the transformation of one student, one person at a time.  I am intrigued, however, by this not-quite-intuitive description that Greene uses – this is the “seeing big” and seeing small” imagery.  When she talks about “seeing big” that means being up close and personal with the student in front of us, close enough to smell their perfume or the scent of coffee on their breath as they articulate the ideas important to them.  We can see the color of their cell phones and maybe even know what earrings they are wearing or what color ink they prefer for writing.  When we see our students big, we cannot diminish them.  It has often been said that by reducing people to statistics, numbers a quantity – we diminish their humanness.  In that instance yes, we are seeing them small, as just a point on the bell curve.

Seeing big requires courage as seeing our students for who they are can make us more vulnerable.  Greene again, (p. 109)  talks about teaching for openings.

We teachers have to be willing to “break ourselves open and begin again”.  We have to be that vulnerable and awake to our students and their learning.  Knowing ourselves and our own prejudices is part of this.  Staying awake and aware of the same in our students is another part.

I am not proposing that any of this is easy.  It is, in fact, among the most challenging things that we could ask of ourselves and our colleagues.   Robert Kegan, formerly of MIT and now with the Harvard School of Education wrote a fascinating book in the 90s, In Over Our Heads:  The Mental demands of modern life (1994).  In it he explores in a very accessible manner, how difficult it has become to function effectively in our modern world.  Kegan discusses different levels, what he calls orders, of consciousness.  His system includes six orders, each allowing in more information about our surroundings, people around us, and indeed ourselves.  The main thrust, however, is whether or not the individual has any perspective on themselves, their situations and their relationships with others.  Being able to reflect, to step back from and out of one’s immediate circumstances to varying degrees is how one moves from one order of consciousness to another.  In this model an infant and young child who only wants to nurse at the breast or to have the cookie is seeing the world from the first order of consciousness.  Adolescents thinking about how to pass the test with the least amount of effort or how to get to know some special boy or girl are probably at the third order.  Kegan points out that most adults only make it to about stage three or four.  Modern life, however, and solving the world’s problems requires more and more people to operate at at least a 5^th Order of Consciousness which involves the ability to hold multiple perspectives and to weigh them against each other.  This requires the skill of and willingness to reflect not only on one’s own circumstances but how those circumstances affect others around you.  This is a far from straightforward demand.

Critical thinking is a skill that can be developed in ourselves and in our students.  I see the need for this with increasing frequency when I visit classrooms or training centers.  Many educators around the world are highlighting how important it is that students (and, of course their teachers) develop the ability to think critically, to examine situations from many perspectives, not jump to the first conclusion, to challenge easy answers and look for complexities and nuances. The so-called higher order thinking skills are becoming something of importance to all students worldwide.

And so I’ll continue exploring this in my next post.

I have found it useful to revisit the ideas which helped launch us on to the humanistic route.  We remember Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, a paradigm still completely relevant today.  We can only achieve higher needs such as the need for self actualization if we have met some of our “lower needs”, having enough food to eat, clean air to breathe, being able to sleep at night without fear, to feel part of something, cared for somewhere by someone, to hold a sense of self-confidence and of feeling valued and finding one’s place in the world.

And so in additional to understanding how the human psyche is structured we also have to embrace ways of understanding, describing, engaging with and then resolving the challenges we face as teachers working with fellow humans.  Teachers need to be concerned with both their own personal work with students AND how the systems of education operate.

Maxine Greene, professor at Teacher’s College, Columbia university, has talked about a way of looking at educational systems/schooling and the individual teachers, administrators and students within these systems.  She talks about seeing small as from a distance; and seeing big – close up, personal, detailed.  Greene is interested in how teachers engage with both systems of education and individual students.  She says,

“How can teachers intervene and say how THEY believe things ought to be?. . .Interested in shifting perspectives and different modes of seeing,” Green continues, “I find myself turning to Confessions of Felix Krull, Confident Man (1955), a novel by Thomas Mann. . .at the start young Felix asks himself whether it is better to see the world small or to see it big.  On the one hand, he says, great men, leaders and generals, have to see things small and from a distance, or they would never be able to deal as they do with the lives and deaths of so many living beings.”  Yes, in this reference Felix is talking about generals and leaders but I see this as relevant also to curriculum planners, text developers, administrators and others who deal with lots of people and ideas.  In the next section Green says, “To see things big, on the other hand, is to ‘regard the world and mankind as something great, glorious, and significant, justifying every effort to attain some modicum of esteem and fame’.

To see things or people small, one chooses to see from a detached point of view, to watch behaviors from the perspective of a system, to be concerned with trends and tendencies rather than the intentionality and concreteness of everyday life.  To see things or people big, one must resist viewing other human beings as mere objects or chess pieces and view them in their integrity and particularity instead.  One must see from the point of view of view of the participant. .

When applied to schooling, the vision that sees things big brings us in close contact with details and with particularities that cannot be reduced to statistics or even to the measurable. . .  The vision of seeing things small looks at schooling through the lens of a system – a vantage point of power or existing ideologies -  – - most frequently these days, it uses the lenses of benevolent policy making with the underlying conviction that changes in schools can bring about progressive social change.”  (Greene, p.9-11).

So we’re supposed to trust those who “see things small”, those who design system-mandated curricula and standardized testing to bring about social change?  Maxine Greene doesn’t believe this and neither do I.  I’ll explore this more in the next post.