This week was a challenging one for me in many respects, I had a lot on my mind about future pursuits in higher education, but more relevantly I felt very detached from my students in the classroom. As the week started, I found my attitude was bitter and apathetic, I felt I was leading students through bland and tired lessons, that they were not invested in them (nor was I), and that I didn’t really care. Behavior “management” became quite an issue. By Wednesday I felt I hit the bottom, with the most “challenging” students challenging my poor teaching attitude the most. It was a bit of a call to wake up.
I think a number of factors played into these experiences, some of them were beyond my control, but certainly approaching the week with an over confident opinion about how I teach after six years fed into a detached teaching experience, which experience has shown me I should have seen coming. Then I read in McDermott’s Essay The Gamble For Experience, which summarizes Dewey’s educational philosophy, that the human organism is “Aggressively self-conscious” (p.415) He is referring to the way in which human beings transact with nature, being aware of space and the qualities of this transaction, and that is essentially what Maxine Green calls being “wide-awake.”
This made me think of Dewey’s view from Art as Experience that experiences, when we are awake to them, are aesthetic events. To live an aesthetic life, one full of qualities (quality) is to begin with being aggressively self conscious. The unaesthetic stems from detachment; which creeps up on educators (and students) from many angles. The trick is waking up from the detachment, and though it isn’t pleasant, it may come from bottoming out.
I think this is a really fine grasp of how things sometimes "happen" or how our experiences develop and move along. it is not always an upward slope or updraft. But sometimes the awareness comes from the opposite direction.
ReplyDeleteBut your point about "self-consciousness" is very much to the point. To be conscious about things that we might normally be? That's in part getting an aesthetic grasp of "the whole".