To teach: The journey of a teacher by William Ayers

Beginning: The challenge of teaching
Ayers (2001) argues that teaching is “instructing, advising, counseling, organizing, assessing, guiding, goading, showing, managing, modeling, coaching, disciplining, prodding, preaching, persuading, proselytizing, listening, interacting, nursing, and inspiring” (p. 4). He emphasizes that “teaching as the direct delivery of some preplanned curriculum, teaching as the orderly and scripted conveyance of information, teaching as clerking, is simply a myth” (p. 5).
He claims that teaching is not for everyone (p. 5).
Reasons not to teach:
Bad pay; Low status; Work in difficult situations; Complex.

He claims that“ people are called to teaching because they love children and youth, or because they love being with them, watching them open up and grow and become more able, more competent, more powerful in the world. They may love what happens to themselves when they are with children, the ways in which they become better, more human, more generous. Or they become teachers because they love the world, or some piece of the world enough that they want to show that love to others. In either case, people teach as an act of construction and reconstruction, and as a gift of oneself to others…[they teach] in the hope of making the world a better place” (p. 8).

Obstacles that are scattered along the pathway of teaching include:
Pressure not to teach; Submitting to the structure of schooling (the ‘real world’); Cynicism; Teaching as being Technical (easily learned, simply assessed, and quickly remediated).

He states that “becoming an outstanding teacher is an heroic quest…teaching is not for the weak or the faint-hearted; courage and imagination are needed to move from myth to reality” (p. 10).

Myths about teaching include:
1. Good classroom management is an essential first step toward becoming a good teacher
2. Teachers learn to teach in Colleges of Education
3. Good teachers are always fun
4. Good teachers always know the materials
5. Good teachers begin with the curriculum they are given and find clever ways to enhance it
6. Good teachers are good performers
7. Good teachers treat all students alike
8. Students today are different from ever before
9. Good teaching can be measured by how well students do on tests
10. A good teacher knows what’s going on in the classroom
11. All children are above average
12. Kids today are worse than ever before

Ayers maintains that “teaching is relational and interactive. It requires dialogue, give and take, back and forth. It is multi-directional. This explains in part why every teaching encounter is particular, each unique in its detail” (p. 17).

He argues that we as teachers “too often implement the initiatives of others; we pass on someone else’s ideas of what is valuable to know or experience, and we cultivate a sense of ‘objectivity’ as the greatest good. We become passionless, non-thinking, uninvolved, and we hand over important considerations to ‘the experts,’ evading our deepest responsibility and marooning ourselves with the merely technical. As we separate means from ends, we begin to see our students as objects for manipulation. Moral considerations become irrelevant; in the banal language of our time, we are each merely discharging our duties, following others, simply doing our jobs” (p. 20).
He emphasis that “teaching is more than transmitting skills; it is a living act, and involves preferences and value, obligation and choice, trust and care, commitment and justification” (p. 20).
He agrees with Maxine Greene’s rational that teachers should “do philosophy” in order to make sure they are successfully educating students for the future. He explains that “doing philosophy means being self-aware and highly conscious of the world around us. And it means attending again and again to a fundamental teaching question: ‘Give what I now know (about the world, about this class, about this student before me), what should I do?’” (pp. 22, 23).
Ayers states that “the challenge of teaching is to decide who you want to be as a teacher, what you care about and what you value, and how you will conduct yourself in classrooms with students. It is to name yourself as a teacher, knowing that institutional realities will only enable that goal in part (if at all) and that the rest is up to you. It is to choose that rocky road of change. It is to move beyond the world as we find it with its conventional patterns and its received wisdom in pursuit of a world and a reality that could be, but is not yet. It is…to choose to do something that enables the choices of others, that supports the human impulse to grow…It is to choose teaching as a project or a vocation, something one is called to do” (p. 24).
He concludes by claiming that “teaching is the vocation of vocations, because to choose teaching is to choose to enable the choices of others” (p. 24).


Liberating the curriculum
According to Ayres, “Curriculum is more than pieces of information, more than subject matter, more even than the disciplines. Curriculum is an ongoing engagement with the problem of determining what knowledge and experiences are the most worthwhile. With each person and with each situation, the problem takes on different shadings and meanings” (p. 85).
He states that teachers should “develop a curriculum that engag[es] kids, challeng[es] them, encourag[es] them, activat[es] them, and invit[es] them to think seriously and deeply over a sustained period of time” (p. 86). He emphasizes that the curriculum should open all children to “a life worth doing” (p. 86). In fact, he relates that “critically examining the curriculum, in a sense, [should be] our curriculum” (p. 87).
Ayres agrees with John Holt (1990) when he states that the basic model of curriculum and teaching is “‘not just mistaken and impossible, but bad in the sense of morally wrong,’ because it is based on the idea ‘that some people have or ought to have the right to determine what a lot of other people know and think’” (p. 87).
He claims that “since knowledge is infinite, and knowing intersubjective and multidimensional, anyone who tries to bracket thinking in any definition sense is, in essence, killing learning. Teachers can expose, offer, encourage, and stimulate – they should not dictate” (p. 87).
He explains that curriculum is “everything that goes on in a school, for example, not simply the material collected and delivered for the better package of goods, but all the unintended as well as planned consequences; all the hidden as well as overt messages; all the experienced as well as stated aspects of school life” (p.87). Furthermore, he states “curriculum can be thought of as everything that goes on beyond as well as within the school walls” (pp. 87, 88).
Ayers argues that today’s teachers have the responsibility to “create a dynamic and flexible classroom, and to build challenge and exposure into each school day” (p. 89). Moreover, he emphasizes that “youngsters need opportunities to choose, to name, and to pursue their own passions and projects, to develop some part of the class as their own” (p. 89). He believes that it is in the “interaction of teacher and student, of immediate interest and larger purpose, that a living curriculum can be forged” (p. 89).
Questions that help construct a framework for thinking about the curriculum:
· Are there opportunities for discovery and surprise?
· Are students actively engaged with primary sources and hands-on materials?
· Is productive work going on?
· Is the work linked to student questions or interest?
· Are problems within the classroom, the school, and the larger community part of student consciousness?
· Is work in my classroom pursued to its far limits?
In Ayers view “children are the great untapped resource in most schools. Instead of unlocking the energy of hundreds of people gathered together each day, most schools spend additional resources containing and controlling kids. A school that engages youngsters in creating a better school and a better community taps a vast reservoir of talent, energy, and labor…projects [can] become, as well, powerful vehicles for learning social responsibility and practicing life in a democratic community” (p. 97).
Teachers’ challenge in today’s school system is “to teach well in spite of the mandates, to refuse the implied constrains and confinements and to do a good job with students anyway” (p. 99). Ayers claims that in order for teachers to accomplish this they need to set aside any mandate or guideline until they have sketched out their “large purposes and goals, and filled those in with specific plans and concrete action steps” (p. 99).
He emphasizes that “any single objective can be simply an obvious part of something larger and fuller, or it can be sought out and brought onto center stage and taught didactically as if it held power in and of itself”; it really is up to the teacher (p. 101).
References:
Ayers, W. (2001). Beginning: The challenge of teaching & Liberating the curriculum. In To teach: The Journey of a teacher (pp. 1-24 & 85-108). New York: Teachers College Press.