Know Thy Student!

Cesar Elizi, Brazil

Cesar Elizi is a teacher of English in Sao Paulo, Brazil. He has an MA in Applied Linguistics from UNICAMP and is particularly interested in metacognition. E-mail: celizi@terra.com.br

Even as a novice teacher my gut feeling was that I needed to know my students. I did not know why, but I could somehow feel it. The reader will certainly agree with the fact that knowing our students well will help us to: 1. manage the curriculum; 2. understand the students’ behaviour; 3. fight stereotypes; and 4. better adapt tasks and activities, etc. In a nutshell, knowing students well is by far the most valuable way to improve students’ learning (Jones).

Having agreed on the need to know students well, we are now faced with the challenge of how to do it. But the hard-working colleague should not fret! You can devise different ways of getting relevant information about students: questionnaires, interviews, biographies, learning accounts of past courses, etc. Not only can you obtain personal data ( family/ job/ school or university, etc) but also immediately useful insight into their professional and academic needs! Not everything is writing, of course. You can conduct discussions on certain topics to know their position, sensitivity to different issues, etc.

There are, nevertheless, a few limitations to this approach. As Educators, we will inevitably need not only to know but, more importantly, be aware of a number of other tiny details. How do they react to oral correction, different kinds of tasks, tone of voice, conflicts and other students’ opinions, to name just a few? Why are they missing classes? Not turning in homework? Not participating actively? Always agreeing? Often aggressive? Silent today? What do they think of this course? Of other students? Of themselves? Of me?

This is perhaps a good moment to challenge the assumption that we might know students well. Let us, for the sake of this article, define language simply as a symbolic system that connects our minds to the outside social and cultural world. The symbol, or sign, is not the thing itself but this is a necessary illusion. This symbol carries along with the illusion a trace of what the object is not! When I say I am Brazilian, the word Brazilian is not the same thing as being born in a part of the world known as Brazil and yet it carries traces of ‘not French’, ‘not British’, etc (Silva). Why is this, if at all, important? Because if we are serious about wanting to know our students, we must be aware of the fact that 1. our classification system works basically with binary oppositions such as man/woman, good/bad, etc ; 2. this classification is never neutral but pregnant with power relations. If we accept this, we will be better able to understand that identities arise precisely from differences. In Hegel’s words: “Self-consciousness exists in itself (…) by the fact that it exists for another self-consciousness; that is to say, it exists only by being acknowledged or recognized”. (Hegel)

How can we know our students then? Following Hegel’s advice, we could start by being there as a person, someone whole against whom students might position themselves in the micro cosmos of the classroom. That means that wanting to know students as if their identities existed independently from us is a naïve dream. They do exist, but only in relation to the other participants of the classroom. Acknowledging this fact will help us foster relationships that open space for students to feel invited to be who they are and share this with others.

Is it important to know students? Yes, it is vital. But not because we can better prepare our lessons or adapt an activity. Knowing students well is vital because it is the only way to fully understand who we are, what we are doing and to what end.

References

Judy Jones in www.teachersnetwork.org/ntol/ owto/develop/knowandcare.htm

Silva, Tomaz Tadeu (Org.) in Identidade e Diferença (2000) Editora Vozes – a must read!

Hegel, Georg F. W. in The Phenomenology of Mind # 178
www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/index.htm

Please check the From Teaching to Training course at Pilgrims website.