Humanising Language Teaching
Year 2; Issue 5; September 2000

(this piece continues the train of thought started in the article of the same title in HLT July 2000)

Myths talk straight to our emotional system and elicit instant answers

Joseph Campbell

Like many other teachers, I have spent years looking for ways to motivate my students and make them learn. That search has had lots of positive effects, as it helped me to develop my teaching skills, but after 16 years as a teacher, although I have become quite good at making lessons interesting for those who want to learn or are in a neutral position towards English, I still fail routinely to motivate those students who refuse to learn or hate English. My failure to motivate the 'desperados' has often caused me grief and feelings of guilt because I felt that I was a bad teacher. And I was not alone, all around me I could see teachers feeling guilt, confusion and depression because they were unable to motivate their students and failing to make them learn.

That so many teachers, most of them committed professionals and very, very good at teaching, shared my feelings and my experience made me realise that maybe something more than our individual skills (or my lack of skills) was at work. The question is, even if we were perfect teachers, with all the skills in the world, even if we all had available all the resources in the world, would we be able to motivate all of our students? Would we be able to make all of them learn English? A yes for an answer would imply that learning depends on the teacher and only on the teacher, with the students playing a passive role, but is this logical thinking? If the answer is no, then just improving our skills is not enough and going from seminar to workshop and from recipe to new approach will never give us anything more than partial answers. If the answer is no, we may be replicating those Middle Age alchemists who spent years searching for a non-existent philosopher's stone. We now know that the alchemists could never have succeeded in their endeavours, not for lack of skills at mixing, melting and combining elements, but because their outcomes, and the thinking that underlay these outcomes, was wrong. And I wonder if we too have not, as the alchemists before us, programmed ourselves for perpetual failure and disappointment.

When so many teachers are suffering, and I use this word literally, maybe it is time to, instead of going on looking for ways to motivate our students, pause, breathe deeply and take stock of the collective assumptions, mental models and ways of thinking that guide our actions. Then we can decide whether we want to hold on to our thinking or whether we need to change it.

Questioning our way of thinking implies looking at the hidden assumptions that shape our reactions. The metaphors we use to refer to our profession can give us information about our collective mental model and its underlying assumptions, which very often are out of our conscious awareness. In "Teacher in Search of a Metaphor" ( published in HLT July 2000 )I used one of the most pervading myths in our culture, the hero myth, to explore some of those hidden assumptions. According to the hero myth heroes (and heroines) are the ones that cause change. Heroes are, therefore, active, energetic, strong, powerful. The athlete who wins the race against incredible odds, the self-made tycoon, the newspaper seller who becomes a Bank president, they are all the embodiment of the hero myth.

In "Teacher in Search of a Metaphor" I wondered whether we teachers were acting under the influence of the hero myth. Because being a hero doesn't seem a good option for a teacher. Heroes control the situation whereas it is impossible for teachers to be in control. Also, and much more important, accepting the hero myth as a guiding representation means accepting that teachers have the sole responsibility for the learning process, that teachers are the ones who make learning happen, regardless of incredible odds/despite their students.

If learning doesn't depend only on what I, the teacher, do, if learning is a process where students have the last word and the teacher's role is to help their process then the hero myth cannot be an adequate guide, it will elicit inadequate answers and will direct our behaviour in the wrong direction, creating unnecessary guilt and suffering in the process.

But then the question is what other metaphor can we use? How can we re-create myths so that they elicit more adequate responses and help us to do better?

I was recently reading "Kitchen Table Wisdom", a book about stories in everyday lives, written by Naomi Remen when I found the following text "No gardener ever made a rose. When its needs are met a rosebush will make roses. Gardeners collaborate and provide conditions which favour this outcome. And as anyone who has ever pruned a rosebush knows, life flows through every rosebush in a slightly different way."

For some reason I immediately thought of teachers. Teachers as gardeners? Well, it certainly lacks the dashing appeal of the hero teacher, and even if I could imagine myself as gardener (on a good day) I find it difficult to identify my boisterous teenagers with delicate rosebushes. But I could accept them as assorted plants, some cacti included.

At the same time there is something in that metaphor that speaks to me. The first thing that attracts my attention is the fact that, while heroes have qualities, gardeners as teachers, develop their skills. Heroes are, gardeners become. And the qualities the hero has are very different from the skills the gardener needs to develop. And those skills are implicit in the metaphor and the similarities, some of them pretty obvious, between gardeners and teachers.

Gardeners don't make the rosebush, or any other plant, bloom; the rosebush blooms on its own. Teachers don't make students learn, students learn on their own.

Gardeners don't control the weather, the rain, the temperature, but the gardener can help to create the set of circumstances where the different plants in the garden thrive and bloom, whereas teachers don't control whether students attend their lessons, their students' background, the curriculum, or the school timetables but they can certainly help to create (or prevent) the circumstances that make learning possible.

Although rosebushes bloom on their own, and not because of the gardener's power, that doesn't mean that the gardener is not important. Gardeners are not powerful, but they have decisive influence. A garden without a gardener quickly goes wild and is overrun by weeds that prevent growing and the same could be said of a classroom without a good teacher.

A hero teacher has direct power, a gardener teacher has influence. This alone requires a shift in how we think about our job. A job done through power requires different behaviours and skills and thinking than a job done through influence.

Hero teachers place themselves on the centre of the stage and use their charisma to lead others. They establish their goal, focus on it and then rely on their strength, decisiveness and their capacity to pull their plan through. Heroes live in an 'I' world of cause and effect: When I act this way that other thing happens.

Gardener teachers move through the garden using their skills of observation to understand the needs both of the different plants in the garden and of the garden as a whole, and once those needs are understood they use their tools, technical skills and previous experience to nudge the plants in a given direction, knowing that at the end blooming will be the plants' work. Gardeners need to learn to pay attention, to be aware of the garden's needs. Gardeners' goals are 'we' goals, because their goal is to help others to achieve their goals.

Master gardeners learn to think of the garden as a whole much before the term "system thinking" was coined. A gardener knows that he has to add fertilizer, but also that the right amount today may be not the right amount tomorrow, because it depends not only on the individual plants' needs, but also on the sun, the humidity, the terrain, the growth rate of the plants nearby. It is not the plants in themselves that determine what amount of fertiliser has to be added, but the whole system and the relationships they create.

Gardeners move in a web of relationships where there is no direct cause and effect, but circular reactions, unexpected ripplings and movements. To understand what is going on in a classroom or in gardens you have to look at how the different elements affect each other. A student's problems at home will affect his behaviour the next day, and that affects the whole classroom.

When you think systemically guilt disappears. Gardeners plan but they know that plans have to be changed all the time and that they are not in control of the garden. A sudden spell of rain may change the garden's conditions overnight and there is no way the gardener can control the weather. So the gardener doesn't feel guilty when some rosebushes don't bloom. Sad, yes, worried, maybe, but not guilty.

Focusing on the whole system and the web of relationships at work not only makes guilt disappear. In "Leadership and the new science" Margaret Wheatley says, "none of us exists independent of our relationship with others. Different settings and people evoke some qualities from us and leave others dormant."

Teachers know that student's performance is affected by the group they are in,and that very often a student's behaviour changes in surprising ways when changed from one group to another. Margaret Wheatley implies that it is not simply that we change behaviours to adapt to the group, but that we develop and change, as human beings, in one direction or another according to how we relate to the people around us. Instead of thinking of our students as having fixed qualities, we need to learn to think of them as human beings always changing and developing new traits because of the relationships created in the classroom.

Students will not just learn (or not learn) our subject, because as students they become part of a web of relationships they will develop their whole personalities as they learn. Humanistic teaching is grounded in that perception.

Margaret Wheatley adds that when you move from the study of the properties of the elements themselves to the study of the relationships between the elements you change your whole way of understanding and realise that predictions and replications become impossible.

What worked with group A on Monday morning may not work with the same group in the afternoon. In any system, results depend on acting in the right place at the right time. Being able to choose the right place and time presupposes understanding the system you are in. It is not strength that matters; opportunity and results are not proportional to effort. A joke cracked in time may change the whole atmosphere in the group and help them focus and learn the content presented, while the activity you spent hours planning may fall flat and lead nowhere. In a system you work in the here-and-now all the time.

Therefore, flexibility to adapt to continuous changes becomes imperative. That flexibility has to be grounded on technical knowledge. You need to learn from other gardener/teachers as much as possible, but you also realise that their recipes will never really work for you.

Instead of the ability to analyse and predict we need awareness of the here-and-now, a large skill repertoire, lots of general knowledge, and, naturally, relational skills, like rapport and listening skills.

Last, but not least, a gardener needs patience. One of the basic rules of any system is that, because of the system complexity, time delays between action and reaction are inevitable. Gardeners cannot expect to see the results of their work immediately. A garden takes years to grow. In teaching very often the results of our work may, and usually will, appear far away both in time and space, from the original action.

But maybe the most important part of the metaphor is described in the last two lines "And as anyone who has ever pruned a rosebush knows, life flows through every rosebush in a slightly different way."