The Heart of the Matter: 'Fessin' Up

Lou Spaventa, US

Lou Spaventa teaches and trains in California, the USA. He is a regular contributor to HLT. E-mail:spaventa@cox.net

"A true believer is infinitely interested in what is real"
Soren Kierkegaard
Provocations 66

Over the last decade and a half, an old friend and teacher, Earl Stevick, has made it manifest that his Christianity is the belief system that motivated him and informed his concern for others, perhaps that led him to teach and study languages. Prior to this, Earl was mainly quiet on the subject of his faith. Consequently, he had been associated with a "humanistic" approach to teaching languages, one in which, critics might say, the affective domain trumped the cognitive, and what a person felt and thought became more important than what a person actually learned in a language classroom. The irony here is that Earl was not a humanist in the classic sense of that term, a person devoted to a rationalistic outlook on life that put human affairs over the divine. All the while he was being labeled as part of the humanistic school of thought, he was actually a devout Christian. Now, Earl makes a distinction between his faith and his understanding of how language learning works for human beings. He says that research shows long term memory to have a strong affective component. "In brief, I see the relationship between affect and memory as very intimate and very complex" (p.10, "Yokum's Error," cetesol.org/stevick). However, while "humanistic" methodology makes sense to Earl because of what he has learned about teaching and learning, the ultimate goal in human interaction is not human progress or perfection, as I understand Earl's position, but rather a union with God. Furthermore, in some sense, Earl would like to share this truth he has found with others.

What to say to all this? How are we prepared as teachers to deal with first causes and professions of faith? The answer is that we are not. We bring whatever belief traditions we have with us when we become teachers; however, they are moot in the training classroom. We have studied within a tradition that relies on science for what truth it can muster. When experiments are replicable and results come out the same (though in language research they rarely do), we are quite satisfied that we have done our best to find what seems to be objective truth. However, there is a whole layer of discussion that is glossed over - Is there one truth for all human beings? What is the nature of human existence? Does life have a purpose? Are we all human beings together or do the differences among us separate us irreducibly? Is human life evolving toward an Omega point as Teilhard De Chardin claimed or are we on the road to self-destruction? Are some societies further along that evolutionary path than others? One response to these questions is to put them aside as unanswerable or only answerable by each person within his conscientiousness. They are importantly beside the point when we study to become teachers.

Nevertheless, these questions are abiding, and we spend a lot of our lives thinking about them. Yet, we have learned to suppress them when it comes to matters of teaching practice. After all, as teachers of English to speakers of other languages, we are the most likely pedagogues to come into contact with the many different cultural and spiritual traditions of humanity. It would not be fair to treat each person as though he or she was a putative member of our own culture, nor would it be fair to assume a spiritual kinship. However, if there is even a little bit of truth in the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis that the language we speak colors our world view, then we must admit that we are exposing our students to a potentially different way of apprehending the world, a different set of first principles, a different set of arguments about human life. So, how do we become Ciceronian guides to our language and culture without being indoctrinators? First off, we must agree that to whatever extent we are ourselves true believers we cannot be objective in the western, scientific sense of the word. We must then keep this in mind as we instruct our students. "How much of what I am going to teach today is colored by my view of the world?" "How do I offer a setting in which alternate views can be expressed without derision?" "What implicit conclusions are students likely to reach about the content of our lesson today?" I don't believe we can ever rid ourselves of our own consciousness as we enter the classroom, but as Caleb Gattegno used to say "The only thing educable is awareness." We can prepare ourselves by being aware of how the "I" that is doing the teaching thinks.

There is one other aspect to this question of awareness of others and their belief systems. That is the aspect of voluntary versus nonvoluntary study on the part of the student. At a certain point in life, say by the time we are young adults, we tend to make decisions about what we will learn, and so for example, may decide to go to Italy to experience the culture and study the language of that country. Under those circumstances, it seems to me that the student has put himself in the position of willing exposure to the way of thinking of the target culture. To give a concrete example, in an Italian conversation class I joined in Florence, the instructor expressed over and over again his rightist views on the world, and often offered affirmation when students expressed similar views. As an adult who has opted to join this class, but was not compelled to do so, I am responsible for my understanding and my reaction to the teacher's point of view. Furthermore, in one sense I would not have him maintain a more "neutral" demeanor in the classroom because he is offering me a picture of how he sees the world, and I consider myself intelligent enough to accept it for what it is without requiring that he neuter himself politically. I don't either think that his point of view is going to overwhelm my nascent understanding of his country and culture because I myself have a viewpoint. Herein is part of the contradiction of our lives as teachers: we are teaching best when we teach from our convictions, but we must also realize that we have convictions, and that these will intrude into our pedagogy no matter how hard we try to adopt an objective stance. The idea of objectivity is in itself, as I expressed earlier, a western scientific construct.

In the United States' academic and public culture, we are currently in a period of watchfulness in terms of politically correct (read culturally correct) behavior. Certain words, expressions, actions, are not accepted because they are considered damaging to the sensibilities and to the persons of others. I understand the intention of such thinking. However, I reject it totally because I believe that political correctness forces the thoughts of the individual underground, to be shared only by liked-minded individuals. In a democratic polity, this is the worst that can happen. Mao once wrote "Let a thousand flowers bloom." and I support that sentiment though I am quite sure that Mao wouldn't like my application of his metaphor. For me it means free speech is free or it is not. The only condition I would put on it for classroom teachers, to paraphrase Buddha, is that teachers must be aware of their own positions before they instruct others.

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