Authority and Teaching

Colleagues,

Way last fall I wrote a response to Laird’s question during our discussion with Wolterstorff. I never sent it because faculty got so busy discussing other things. But since it may be relevant to this afternoon’s discussion, I attach it now.

And if you don’t remember Laird’s question, it had to do with shalom and authority.

Carl

Carl Vandermeulen

Professor of English and Communications

Northwestern College

Laird (and colleagues),

Your question at the faculty workshop was so provocative that nobody could quite figure out where to begin to answer it. But it has lurked in the theatre long enough, rattling around during RUSH, trodden with the Grapes of Wrath, recoiling from Terror Texts. Time for response. As I recall, you put the question like this: “What are the implications of shalom for our authority as teachers?” I’ll hazard a partial response, and since you probably asked it because you’ve been thinking about it too, I hope to hear your thoughts and those of others. If you wish, you may take a few months to think about it.

It seems to me that as teachers, we have at least two quite different kinds of authority. I’m guessing you were thinking of our formal authority—our power to give assignments, articulate expectations, regulate behavior, give grades, etc. In that case, I would say that starting with shalom does not reduce our authority but instead invites us to restate your question this way: “How can I use the power I have to bring about flourishing for the greatest number of students, keeping in mind that when they leave the course, they should be better equipped and more disposed to bring about shalom in their own lives and in the lives of others?” To ask the first part of that question is to observe, as Joonna did, that we need to find ways to do a better job with the students who for one reason or another have not done well in most classes. A start might be thinking of at least some of them not as “poor students” but as “the downtrodden”: Who has stepped on them? Are we unknowingly encouraging some students to rise by climbing over those students (for instance, by “grading on the curve”)? Here’s a more specific question I’ve asked myself: “Why have I not done as well as I’d like in getting good work out of apparently talented American minority students?” (The frequency of their names on probation and suspension lists suggests it’s not just me.)

I’d offer this beginning of what could become a long list of ways to use our formal authority to help bring about shalom:

1. As Wolterstorff suggested, insist that students respect each other and the work that calls us together.
2. Do more than defend the grade in our responses to student work. Acknowledge unusual gifts and include a reminder that gifts imply responsibility in order for the group and the society—not just the gifted individual—to flourish.
3. Plan assignments and conduct classes in a way that allows different people with different capabilities to make a contribution so that students view themselves and each other across multiple dimensions, not through that narrow binary, smart / not-smart.
4. Accept Wolterstorff’s invitation to contextualize—in our case, to locate our teaching within the context of our students’ lives and callings, measuring our courses against the question, “Am I engaging the capabilities and potential that students bring to the course and equipping them to go on to do the good work that they are called to do after the course?” We have to fight the tendency to allow our courses to become little games, played by rules convenient to us within the course but not taking students very far beyond the course. As a specific application, I question point-system grading (so many possible points for this assignment or test, so many for that, with final grade based on total points accumulated) even though many students love it (teachers, too, apparently). It seems to me that evaluation ought to help students know their strengths and weaknesses so that they make good decisions about subsequent actions, including course choices and career choices. However the number of points a student scores on an assignment doesn’t easily translate into useful information about strengths and weaknesses. Sometimes we need to use our authority to urge students to quit thinking about how many points they’re scoring and even what grade they’re getting, and to think instead about the capabilities they are developing.

Your question is at least as provocative for examining the other, quite different kind of authority, the kind that our students, especially the best ones, look for in what we know, in what we have done and can do, and even in who we are as we perform and model the life of a scholar or artist. Most of us would probably be better teachers if we could make ourselves more knowledgeable and capable and impressive—at least up to a point. When we ask what helps students to flourish, both in our courses and later on, we can also recognize risks: at least in the arts, a too-impressive and too ego-involved teacher can dominate the most impressionable students, turning them into clones. Or we might develop a false consciousness in students--get them to parrot their teacher’s ideas and attitudes but not really own them. As we influence students, we probably also need to build in ways for them to learn to resist our influence in order to find their own way, their own flourishing. How do we do that?

Another risk of having real influence in teaching is that a few students try too hard, putting themselves under so much pressure that their work collapses under the effort. And when we merely grade the work without understanding why it is weak, they are likely to feel confused, self-accusatory, or angry. Those are not qualities associated with flourishing.

Authority isn’t easy to think about because we’re so close to it. We probably need to talk about it so that we can move it off a little to see what it is.

Carl Vandermeulen, English and communications