Learning to Listen to Students

To ask “What is the best way to teach?” is to ask “What is the best way to learn?” Because learning goes on all the time, in class and out, the question is not if students are learning, but what they are learning and how they are learning. At the end of the semester in each of my classes, I ask students to write an essay reflecting on the learning they have experienced in our class. They frequently “frame” their learning in the context of their lives, sometimes going back many years to retrieve memories of early schooling. Their responses never fail to impress me with profound images of pain, struggle, and determination that attend authentic learning. The following excerpts from student essays are particularly memorable. (Students, given pseudonyms, granted me permission to use their writing.)

My junior high and high school years were terrible, because no one ever took the time to work with me intellectually. I wasn’t taken seriously by anyone, and it was frustrating and depressing. . . . But no one knew me at George Mason, and I had a fresh start. I now feel this self-reformation in myself. I have never felt so alive as I do at this point in my life, and I feel a large reason is due to my newfound passion in learning. I feel that education and knowledge of books has uplifted a new power in me. After the struggles I’ve been through, I wanted a direction in my life, a lead, and I see college as an opportunity to begin again. Finally, at college I have found a haven for learning. (“Sophia”)

Early on, I wanted to understand the complexities of life. I wanted to be one of the few to obtain the secret to a happy life. In college, I felt that studying philosophy would create a common bond or a sense of unified relatedness between myself and others. . . . I will never forget when I first told my father about my decision to become a philosophy major. His words will echo in my brain forever: “And what the hell are you going to do with that degree?” my father screamed. . . . But in retrospect, my life seems like a blur with the exception of one thing: My quest for learning remains constant. (“Chris”)

When I got a “C-” on a paper in Anthropology (my major), I felt humiliated and almost gave up on school and my ability to be a coherent, clear person. . . . But after taking this course I’ve realized I have a second chance. And even more importantly, I have a third and a fourth and a fifth, etc. chances. . . . After two years at George Mason, I have learned to look at my college career in a whole new light, all from the angle of a writer doing revisions. Even though I was grabbed by the ghoul of bad writing last semester, I had the ability to banish him. I’ve come to realize that coherent, clear writing requires a coherent, clear way of thinking. I also realize that I can revise myself as a student just as I can revise my papers, and to come to this idea is pure bliss. (“Jonathan”)

These students are not casually responding to an assignment: Learning in school is a central drama of their lives, a way of being in the world. I’m continually amazed at how students appraise their learning in relation to their lives, how they see school as inextricably bound up with their identities, and how they transform themselves in the processes of learning and reflecting. Their eloquence moves me. Sophia speaks of the “self-reformation” that college has engendered and how, having rediscovered books, she “has never felt so alive.” For Chris, life is a mere “blur” without the “quest for learning.” “I can revise myself as a student,” Jonathan says, “. . . and to come to this idea is pure bliss.” Their very self-concepts are intimately connected with their memories of school, testimonial to the transformative power of learning. College for many students is the chance to “begin again”; it provides the critical opportunity to create a new and vital self, to establish crucial life-affirming relations. Clearly more than a preparation for a career or one more hurdle on the way to an imagined better life, higher education has value for anyone trying to come to self-understanding. These students remind me that the ancient edict “Know Thyself” is still relevant.

Nevertheless, I find in student writing and in talking with them that they often feel the educational system does not focus on their inner lives or help them to acquire the self-understanding that is the basis for a satisfactory life. Nor, by and large, does it provide the safe and nurturing environment that people need in order to grow. I dwell on these student voices because they seem to symbolize something that is missing from education: the reality of private and inner lives. Students tell me about and frequently write about parts of themselves that school has sidelined or suppressed: emotion, imagination, spirituality, personal struggle, respect for the body’s needs. School, by its very existence, seems to militate against the very thing that education is for--the development of the individual.

Making Connections With Students

E.M. Forster begins his novel Howard’s End with the phrase, “Only connect.” I’d like to appropriate it as a motto for my professional life. What I am looking for, what I think all educators are looking for, is a common experience; belonging; good feelings in the workplace; a community of hope; an integrated life. It seems apparent that these things do not exist as they should in the university. Why? People are isolated from each other and from themselves: by their individual interests, professional and personal; by their departments; by their crowded time schedules; by the physical distance between them; by the psychological distances between them; by the absence of a culture of conversation.

How can these obstacles be overcome? By a commitment to finding a community of learners; by a willingness to subordinate personal advancement and scholarly achievement to teaching students; by constructing an alternative way to engage students in learning. Our educational system, my students’ writing suggests, focuses on the external at the expense of the internal: They want to be taken seriously. What I hope for is a disciplinary training for people that takes into account the fact that we are educators of whole human beings, a form of higher education that would take responsibility for the emergence of an integrated person. Such training would encourage students not only to write about and interpret texts, but also to learn how to be with other people, how to converse, how to take criticism, how to disagree graciously, how to find joy in learning. I want students to recognize that the courses I teach are not just my courses but truly their courses, the place where they can make connections that enhance their lives and lead them to discover driving questions that will in turn shape their lives.

As a teacher of writing and literature at all undergraduate levels, I find myself in nearly constant contact with the inner lives of students. (In my writing classes, for example, I meet with every student as many as four times a semester.) We talk about their writing, reading, and ideas concerning the course; typically we spend our time focusing on revision in the true sense of re-seeing. I realize that the most successful conferences occur when I mostly listen as students work out their thinking by talking with an attentive listener, a concerned responder. This kind of contact is the heart of my teaching philosophy, which may be summed up with the word dialogue. People make significant connections and realizations when they engage in authentic, focused dialogue, which involves questioning, interpreting, responding, and (re)thinking. Students work out their thinking not only in dialogue with me, but perhaps more importantly in the company of fellow students. My classes are therefore collaborative efforts that include: writing workshops; small writing and discussion groups; collaborative writing and class presentations; even collaborative examinations. Writing and examinations not only evaluate learning, but more essentially are employed as ways to promote learning. Writing--as I understand and practice it--constitutes a means of discovery, a way of knowing. “In our class,” I tell my students on the first day, “we are not only learning to write; we are writing to learn.” When students write and when they engage in collaborative activities they cannot be passive recipients of knowledge but must engage in long, intense absorption to become interactive participants in the learning process.

Making Connections With Colleagues

I learned to teach when I learned to listen--not only to students but also to colleagues. Much to my delight, I have had the enriching experience of collaborative teaching with superior teachers. My very first teaching assignment at GMU linked me up with Priscilla Regan and Debra Bergoffen in a first-year “linked” composition course. All our students took in common three separate courses: my first-year writing course; Pris’s course in American Government; Debra’s course in Social and Political Philosophy. This was perhaps the most demanding teaching I’ve ever done (and I did it three years straight!), because we worked together to compose our syllabuses; develop effective writing assignments and examinations; and orchestrate our class activities to gain unity and coherence in three quite distinct courses of study. Because almost every project required that they collaborate to write papers, present research projects, and even study for examinations, students in these classes seldom worked alone. I have written and presented papers (in collaboration with fellow GMU English teachers) at two national conferences about my remarkable experience teaching in the Linked Program.

Teaching collaboratively an Honors course called “Reading the Arts” was just as enlivening, but differently so. Diverse colleagues from Art History, French, History, Music and English helped each other achieve some degree of mastery to better introduce students to various art forms. We developed a collaborative assignment inviting students to visit the Smithsonian and write/report on their experience “reading”--that is, interpreting from a variety of perspectives--a particular museum. Students embraced this innovative assignment, revealing in their collaborative papers and presentations a penetrating sensitivity and depth of thought.

My experience teaching in both the Linked and Honors Programs deepened my understanding of students and teachers as we overcame some of the hidden barriers that often sabotage our best efforts. Talking, planning, reviewing, revising, and evaluating together helped me to see my teaching in a completely different light; no longer did I imagine myself working in isolation from other teachers and other disciplines. Sharing ideas and teaching strategies, sitting in courses of brilliant teachers, frequently conversing about the challenges of teaching first-year students--these activities changed me as a teacher and as a scholar. Having directly experienced the complexities of interdisciplinary ways of knowing and teaching, I can never again see the courses I teach as separate or isolated entities in the university setting.

What I’ve Learned in School

What I’ve learned from dedicated teachers and students is that, in the final analysis, students matter, not just as intellectuals following a career path but as individuals struggling to become who they are. My students sometimes complain, especially after registration, that they are being treated as “numbers” or “consumers”: They clearly resent it. They express a deep dissatisfaction with their lack of feeling for the institution at the human level. By breaking down the walls dividing disciplines, by helping students to make personal and social connections in their learning, by meeting regularly face-to-face with students--by doing all these things I’ve learned that I too need to enact the “self-reformation” of which my student Sophia speaks. I realize that I need to practice the special kind of awareness that validates student lives and gives them the confidence they need to succeed in college and beyond.

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