It’s the miniature crises like these that make me intensely grateful for the biweekly opportunity to work with Young Leaders of Philadelphia***, a program for college-bound Philadelphia School District graduates. Over the summer, students take several college-level classes and undertake individually-guided research projects. This provides an opportunity for pre-teachers and pre-college students to collaborate, the idea being that we can teach them something about college, and they can teach us something about high school (since we’re effectively switching school environments).
Anyway, the topic of today’s class was pedagogy, which, it turns out, is much easier to argue about when you’re in a room full of people who only vaguely recall their own experiences with different styles of teaching. And it’s not until the room is filled, instead, with people who have very real, very recent experiences with various teaching styles that you realize how patronizing it is to have considered these theoretical models without this point of reference.
Safe to say, these theoretical conversations became much less arcane when cast into the experiences of recent graduates. The first article we discussed, entitled “Learning in Education,” was an overview by Stanton Wortham of a few broad schools of pedagogical thought (and I don’t have the original article to cite, but the following summaries come from him, though any bias detected is likely my own). After reviewing each theory, students were invited to think of examples of each theory in practice. The two theories that generated the most interesting conversation among the recent grads were Behavioralist theory and Social Cognitivist theory.
Behavioralist theory was the most prominent pedagogical theory a half a century ago, and, in spite of falling out of critical favor, remains the basis for many “traditional” teaching methods. The theory essentially states that education molds well adjusted adults from erratic, id-monster children by strategically rewarding “good” behavior and “correct” responses, and punishing “bad” behavior and “incorrect” responses. I could outline the ways in which this is problematic, but the students’ responses tell the story much better than I could: in two sections of the class, responses centered around correctional, negative reinforcement. Students identified parents hitting children, and people being thrown in prison as examples of this educational theory. The most powerful example, though, was that of a student who described being stopped and harassed by police for walking in his neighborhood late at night, concluding, “that’s how you learn not to walk around late at night.” Without getting mired in everything terrible about that story, I’ll just ask you to bear in mind the role that authority plays in this educational model.
The second half of the conversation, concerning Social Cognitivist theory, was a much more positive conversation. This theory focuses on leveraging personal relationships to guide students in acquiring the knowledge and skills of more experienced instructors, without emphasizing the trial and error that Behavioralism hinges upon. Student examples of this theory generated a much different image of the “authority figure:” both classes suggested an older sibling, who maybe showed them the way to walk to school or how to prepare an after school snack. Suffice to say, when given the opportunity to be a part of a young person’s education, we should strive to be more like a benevolent older sibling, and less like a cop.
We can’t, however, realistically expect to step into a student’s life and assume the nuanced and powerful role that an older sibling might occupy. This, in part, is due to the power of culturally relevant pedagogy, as described by Gloria Ladson-Billings in another article the students read: “But That’s Just Good Teaching! The Case for Culturally Relevant Pedagogy.” An older sibling has the tremendous educational advantage of often sharing comparable lived experiences and nearly identical cultural identities with younger siblings. This means that content (whether academic, practical, or social-emotional) will likely be understood in similar ways between teacher and student, minimizing adaptation and losing a minimal amount in transfer. Additionally, the figure of the sibling-mentor is particularly powerful because they are not only more knowledgable, but presumably got to that point following a path not unlike your own. This makes the notion of successfully acquiring knowledge or expertise seem even more accessible to the student.
Unfortunately, a teacher cannot be this for most (read: virtually any) students. But personal relationships are an undercurrent of all great instruction and we can strive to cultivate an older sibling-inspired relationship: one that demonstrates a strong personal investment in the personal growth of the student. As he had a habit of doing, W.E.B. DuBois put it best:
"The proper education of any people includes sympathetic touch between teacher and pupil; knowledge on the part of the teacher, not simply of the individual taught, but of his surroundings and background, and the history of his class and group; such contact between pupils, and between teacher and pupil, on the basis of perfect social equality, as will increase this sympathy and knowledge." (Quoted in “Teaching to Change The World,” Oakes, Lipton, et. al., 336)
*** I've changed the name of the program to respect the privacy of the participants.