A different Drama Tuesday

Why I am a teacher. Why am I teacher?

During my first year in teacher education I found myself sitting across from a troubled young student. Anxiety was written in his sweaty body language, the tightly drawn breaths and the lacing of his fingertips as he dodged around the reason for his visit: he was struggling to write the first assignment in EDN101 Intro to Teaching. The task was a gentle recount of something from his own schooling that had left an indelible mark on his own decision to become a teacher. This topic was something that I could relate to as it was a question I had asked myself often.

“I can’t think of anything to write…” he muttered before trailing off into indefinite silence. 

I wanted to help so I offered some suggestions but his answers were desultory and noncommittal.

Tell me about where you went to school. In the country

What were your teachers like? They were OK, I guess.

Were you a good student? Guess so, about average. I always did what i was told. My mum made sure of that.

Why do you want to become a teacher? Mum thought it would be a good idea. Dad told me that it was a good job, steady. Lots of holidays. Good pay.

So you want to be a teacher? Nup. 

Impasse. I searched in my backpack of conversation topics to see if we could move on.

Tell me a bit more about school. Was there something you were good at in school? Sport. 

OK, tell me about that. I thought that being a PE teacher would be good. Always out on the oval, moving about. Couldn’t sit long in a desk. Hated doing head stuff and reading. But I could see myself doing that. I was pretty good at running and OK at footy and the health stuff was OK, bit sexy scary but it was interesting…

Something seemed to have switched on for him. Words flowed.

There was this one time, we had a lightning carnival. Our little District High went to the Senior High in the next big town and I was in the relay team. It was a blustery down south sort of day but OK and we won the relay which was right at the end of the competition. In fact, it was the very last event and the PE teacher made us get on the bus as soon as the race was finished and the cup was handed over. I was so happy. But it had been a busy day and after lunch i was too nervous to go to the toilet and had run the race with a full bladder, thinking I could go before I got on the bus. But that didn’t happen, did it (he added with a discomforting shiver of his spine).

She made us get on the bus, quick. Grab your things and get on there. I was still holding the trophy, a big silver cup and plonked it down on the seat beside me. The back of the bus had the usual gaggle of girls laughing and making jokes. The rest of the boys were sat at the fort of the bus because the teacher wanted to keep an eye on them because they caused trouble. So I was sitting halfway down the bus. It was OK at first, as we chugged out of the town and onto the highway. It was even OK when the other PE teacher driving the bus, ground through the gears and bunny hopped into cruising speed. But i knew I was in trouble.

I was desperate to pee. It really hurt. I asked the teacher and she said, Tie a knot in it, buddy! I pretended to look out the window at the green but couldn’t think of a helpless sense of agony. I tried looking out the window at the flicking by of the Tuarts and trying to ignore the rowdy shouting and the noisy joking in the bus that was starting to fog up the windows. I squirmed one way, then another. I crossed my legs. I tried thinking of other things – winning the race – but that only made it feel worse.

I scrabbled around in my bag in case there was an empty drink container. It would be desperate I know but I simply had to go. I looked at the plastic bag that mum had sent my lunch in, but it was too flimsy. I thought about opening the window of the bus, but those girls behind me would see. There was only one thing for it. The silver trophy was on the seat beside me. Trying to look casual, I slid it towards me and quietly, checking to see no one was looking … 

The relief was immediate.

I would have gotten away with it, but at that moment the bus slid into a turn and there was a clanking of silver cup against the back of the next seat. The PE teacher who was standing near the boys at the front of the bus, looked up quickly and was catapulted a couple of steps down the busy towards me. Her face said it all. She noticed the slopping yellow liquid, and my startled face looking up at her wide eyes. You dirty little bugger! And then everyone else on the bus was looking with questioning eyes. That’s disgusting, you little animal!, she said. Can’t you control your animal instincts! Her eyes had that look of disgust.

His narrative stopped now. He looked away and down, ashamed. Then he whispered mostly to himself. Bitch. She didn’t need to have called me that. I hate her. She can stuff her PE teaching.

I let the moment settle, waiting.

Why don’t you write about that? Mum would kill me, if I did that. 

Do you think so? I know so. I can tell, even now. She had to go up to the school to get me after the bus got back. They rang her from the bus. 

I still think you should write about it for your assignment. Not gonna happen. 

He left my study with a shrugged shoulders at an offer to help him write it. Soon after, he left the teaching course. It might be something that happened a long time ago but I still remember it powerfully. 

Was it a good decision for him to leave teaching? Impossible to know. Could I have done more to help him at this moment in his teacher education journey? There are no second guesses in teaching. When you think about it, his telling of the story and his sense of outrage of his own teachers might have given him the necessary empathy to be a great teacher. Or, may be it was the right decision for him to leave his course.

I am happy to share with you that I came into teaching determined that I would make teaching better than my own schooling. The casual brutalism of the daily plying of power and status of my own teachers resonated with this student’s experiences. I know it was judgmental and naive of me to be so dismissive of the parade of tired middle aged men who taught me. Their sarcasm that passed for wit ran hand in hand with their occasionally physical violence. And it is easy to say that was then and now we do things differently. But do we? As teachers are we kinder than those teachers from my past? i hope so. I hope that we are, but when I hear stories like this one, I see the old soft shoe shuffle of power and status holds the spotlight. 

One thing I have come to recognise is that we all somehow live out the unfulfilled ambitions of our parents. My mother, who lived through the Great Depression and a World War, wanted to be a teacher but couldn’t do so.  Therefore it is not surprising that she gently pushed me in that direction. But there was something more than that wish fulfilment to my decision to go into teaching. I was angry about my own education: the narrowness and aridity; the power plays between teachers and amongst students; the dullness. There had to be something more. I trained my eye to observe and notice. To be aware of the undertow of people and relationships and how that shaped learning. I teach because it is about being human, being alive, being wide-awake to the world (thank you Maxine Greene). As that young man in my study taught me: every moment is a learning occasion. 

Learning lies at the heart of teaching.

A Socially Critical look at the state of Arts Education

I have been teaching students about Critical Theory and Critical Incidents. It occurred to me that arts educators might need to think about making a social justice case for the arts in schools. 

Critical Incident

In 2020, the implementation of arts education is under threat. Government decisions to strengthen STEM Education and the pressure to focus on Literacy, Numeracy and Science education through NAPLAN focus and teaching to the test, is diminishing the promise of arts education that documents like the Australian Curriculum: The Arts (ACARA 2014) dangle before us. Arts teacher education is being contracted. What is even more troublesome and galling is that the voices of arts educators are not cutting through the static. Our point of view is not being heard nor respected.

As Robyn Ewing (2020) observes, while 

…there is unequivocal research evidence that quality arts processes and experiences engender a distinctive and critical set of understandings and skills that all young people need to navigate twenty-first century living.… the potential for the Arts and arts education to transform the curriculum coupled with the ongoing paucity of Australia’s arts storylines threaten the actualisation o The Australian Curriculum: The Arts. (p 75)

It distresses me, as an arts educator, that the good work of many arts educators is going unnoticed. It angers me that my life’s work in arts education seems to be evaporating. I have been teaching my students to deepen their analysis of Critical Incidents as part of professional growth.and should try that approach.

Applying a socially critical lens to the current state of arts education as I perceive it, might help us better understand what is happening and why it is causing me distress.

Here is a useful outline of Critical Theory as proposed by David Tripp

Socially critical analysis in education is informed by principles of social justice, both in terms of its own ways of working and in terms of its outcomes in and orientation to the community. It involves strategic pedagogic action on the part of classroom teachers aimed at emancipation from overt and covert forms of domination. In practical terms, it is not simply a matter of challenging the existing practices of the system, but of seeking to understand what makes the system be the way it is and challenging that, whilst remaining conscious that one’s own sense of justice and equality is itself open to question. (modified from Tripp 1990b: 161) (Tripp 1993/2012 p 114)

Using this formulation for socially critical analysis I argue that arts education is being discriminated  against, marginalised and disadvantaged.

What is happening to arts education goes against fundamental principles of social justice, against a sense of what is fair and just. Prevailing attitudes to arts education in many schools are marginalising the value and significance of the arts in education; arts educators have legitimate concerns about choices which discriminate or minimalise their contribution and place in schools. There is hegemony in the status given to forms of knowledge and subject disciplines that play out in the curriculum offerings and the teaching of the arts.

There needs to be care in making this argument. In a time when there are many examples of marginalisation and discrimination, it might seem whinging to argue a case for arts education. Disadvantage, poverty, racism, gender bias and cancel culture are all legitimate causes for social justice concern. In the wider scheme of discrimination on social justice grounds, it might seem that the case for arts education is relatively trivial and unimportant because it speaks for a narrow group of people. Rather than weakening the case, the fact that we continue to see forms of discrimination gives legitimacy to the claim. The lack of arts education in schools is an indictment of discrimination which ultimately is one measure of social justice. It is discriminatory because the benefits of arts education are  withheld from the many whose lives would benefit from an arts education.

What arts education suffers from are forms of overt and covert domination. Decisions made by politicians,  school administrators and parents reflect unspoken misconceptions, assumptions and prejudices that place other forms of knowledge, other subject areas in the curriculum ahead of arts education. Arts education needs to be freed from these hegemonic decisions.

In stating this, I am not arguing that arts education is more important than other fields rather that arts education is as important. It is as important because a successfully comprehensive education addresses the breadth of human needs. Over time in schools, students need their cognitive, social, emotional and physical needs to be addressed. The Arts are part of a whole education. The arguments of a need for efficiency and prioritising of some sections of the curriculum over others, ignore the need for a broad and comprehensive approach that addresses the overall health, well-being and sense of identity in a democratic society. 

Steven Covey in (2004) offers the principle… seek first to understand, then to be understood. It is useful to consider how we understand what makes the system be the way it is. We need to spend time analysing why attitudes and values about arts education prevail. I speculate three points here: 1) the inertia of the ways things have always been (history and precedent); 2) fear of the unknown; and, 3) lack of opportunity.

History and precedent are no defence. In former times, prevailing social values gave legitimacy to slavery, racial and religious discrimination that we now question and challenge. Consider how attitudes and forms of habit about smoking have changed broad societal values and actions. What are the factors of those campaigns that provided the psychological and physical push towards change?

Fear of the unknown is a legitimate human response. To flee from the unknown rather than to confront it, is common. Without resorting to Rumsfeld’s known unknowns , the truism about teaching must be recognised: you can’t teach what you don’t know. In what ways can there be unthreatening and enjoyable experiences of arts education?

Ignorance and lack of opportunity. Poor or ineffective arts education negate decision makers who do not see the value and purpose of arts education. But the danger of Catch 22 lurks in the proposition that we bring long term improvement by incremental change. How do we implement opportunities in arts  education that are transformative of attitudes and values?

Shouting in the face of discrimination sounds hysterical and is too easily dismissed. Making logical arguments (like this one) are too easily ignored. Taking positions of influence and power are one way of addressing these issues – but slow, glacially slow. It is easy to get into a cycle of hope followed by disappointment. Making a cosy critical analysis of the arts education problem might help me understand better what is happening but does it change anything? What brings about actual change?. 

In a socially just view of the world, there is a fair sharing of resources, opportunities, status and responsibilities, There is a balance between the reciprocal needs of individuals and the institutions in society. A more socially just view of arts education means:

• overt and covert discrimination against the arts is addressed

• balance recognition of the place and value of arts education in schools is intrinsic to our society

• Arts Education is not just an entitlement but is fully realised.

The arts have often been vehicles for social justice and change. It is time for us to use our art forms to highlight the social injustice been meted out to arts education in schools. This is a call for action beyond analysis.

Bibliography

ACARA. (2014). "The Australian Curriculum: The Arts." from http://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/the-arts/introduction.

Covey, S. R. (2004). The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change. New York, NY, Free Press.

Ewing, R. (2020). "The Australian Curriculum: The Arts. A critical opportunity." Curriculum Perspectives 40: 75-81.

Tripp, D. (1993/2012). Critical Incidents in Teaching: Developing Professional Judgement. Abingdon, Oxon, Routledge.