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My History as a Teacher: From Practice to Theory and Back Again

This is a secret that most of my closest friends and mentors do not know: Education never appeared among the major choices on my application form for universities and colleges. When I graduated from high school, my biggest dream was to become a tour guide traveling around the world. When applying to universities, I chose foreign language majors such as French, German, Spanish, and Japanese. (Un)fortunately, my scores on the university entrance examination were high enough to have me selected by the East China Normal University (ECNU) and then assigned to the Department of Education.Footnote 1 Although I was deeply frustrated when I received the admission offer, I still accepted it; after all, this was the best normal university in the south of China. Three years later, a critical incident changed my life.

In my senior year at ECNU, I began my first real teaching experience: I was assigned to intern as a teacher of English in a fourth-grade classroom in one of the most renowned public elementary schools in Shanghai. At first, I was very excited by this opportunity, and at the same time I felt quite confident, for I thought I had been well-equipped with a great variety of pedagogical knowledge and skills through educational courses in curriculum theory, instructional strategies, educational psychology, philosophy, and schooling. Once I entered that fourth-grade classroom, however, I found that the real world I encountered was not the one I had imagined via my studies. At this time in my life, if someone asked me “What does it mean to teach?” I would have replied:

Teaching means to methodically address every behavioral objective in your lesson plan before class and then try to accomplish all of these objectives in each class, one after another. Teaching means to discipline and to push students to be good listeners to attend to every word from the mouth of their teacher and to grasp all “essentials” required by curriculum developers. Furthermore, teaching well includes orienting students to perform daily routines to the satisfaction of both school board members and officials in local and general Education Commissions.

From my current perspective, this answer characterizes teaching as a sophisticated set of soulless technologies pertaining to so-called basics that seek to “program” students’ minds in the quickest and most efficient way, i.e., high-stakes testing. In addition, teaching as described here is so highly competitive that one’s career can be arbitrarily ended if the “good” academic performance of students—demonstrated by their high testing scores—cannot be guaranteed.

At the end of the internship, I recognized that I clearly did not possess the qualities that make a good teacher, or in this sense, a good jail guard. I could not look into my students’ eyes when announcing that all of today’s recesses were canceled due to unsatisfactory midterm examination scores. I could not bring myself to request that the PE or art teachers relinquish their classes so that I could prepare the class for an upcoming English contest. I could not repeat hundreds of times in class: “Listen! I need your absolute attention and silence as I go over this issue which will quite possibly appear on the tests.” I could not yell at students who gossiped in class or send them to stand by the garbage can in the corner of the classroom. I could not force students to stay in class after school to write and rewrite the English words they misspelled in their homework or on pop quizzes. Most of all, I could not escape the fear that if I did these things for long enough, one day I would do them without a second thought and without feeling any guilt.

I began to feel pessimistic and even desperate about my future teaching career: Could I survive in this school culture, which every day felt more like a black hole, absorbing the life from me and my students? The difference between schooling and education seemed to be as huge as that between marriage and love: The former is about bottom lines, the latter spiritual transcendence into the realm of unlimited possibilities. Rather than become a school teacher upon my graduation, I chose to continue my studies at the graduate level in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction. When the graduate advisor asked me which area I would choose for my focus, I replied firmly, “Not ‘instruction.’ Curriculum theory sounds fine to me.” After my internship experience, I wanted nothing to do with teaching.

This negative experience with “direct teaching” brought me to the field of “curriculum theory,” a change in course that would impact my life in more ways than I could have imagined and would ironically bring me back to the classroom. Graduate study in curriculum theory was a happy experience for me. I was very satisfied with my life in the ivory tower: reading, writing, and conversing with mentors and other graduate students, removed from the “real” school setting I had experienced during my undergraduate internship. Before graduation, I was poised to accept a position as editor with a famous educational publisher in Shanghai, but life intervened with an invitation to continue my graduate study in curriculum theory in the USA. At the time, I deemed faculty research more important than teaching, and I assumed any teaching I might be asked to do at the university level would be quite different from teaching in K-12 schools. I happily accepted the offer and began my adventure in the Ph.D. program in Curriculum Studies at Louisiana State University.

The ensuing learning experience was a fresh and exciting one for me. At the end of my second year of study, however, I was assigned to teach an undergraduate course, “EDCI 2030: Teaching, School & Society.” My old fears of teaching, now magnified by new anxieties about teaching as a “foreigner,” kept me up at night, but I had no choice if I wanted to keep my assistantship and stay at LSU. On the morning of my first class, my major professor came to my office with some words of comfort: “Jie, I’ll tell you a tip that my professor told me before my first conference presentation. Imagine everyone in the audience is a watermelon.” After the class, he came to ask how it went. “Dr. Doll,” I said, “you forgot to tell me that all of those watermelons have eyes.”

Over the course of the semester, I spent countless hours preparing for each class meeting. I wrote lesson plans that were so detailed I accounted for every word I would say, including the jokes. I recited my lessons over and over again as if preparing for the greatest performance of my life, only to find that each class meeting felt more and more like a disaster. Often, when I thought I had prepared enough content to teach the class for more than two hours, I finished in thirty minutes and then did not know what to do to get through the next sixty. The more I pursued a perfect teaching performance, the more mistakes I made. In their evaluations, the students criticized not only my accent, but also my teaching. Six years of graduate study melted away and suddenly I was back in that teaching internship in China. This time, though, I refused to surrender so easily. Now, I realized, this “failure” was to be the beginning of my teaching career.

Critical Reflections on “Failures”

Following this disaster of a semester, I dug to the very bottom of my files, pulling out archives, journals, reports, log sheets, and other field artifacts—a collection six years in the making—searching for answers. Through reflections on these two unsuccessful teaching experiences, I found many things I had not recognized or noticed before (Yu, 2014).

To prepare for my internship in China, I took the teaching methods courses required for all Education majors in which the texts of Johann F. Herbart and Ralph W. Tyler dominated. Their “Ten Commandments,” paired with the pre-packaged plans of my school cooperating teacher, served as the framework for everything I did in the classroom. I studied her lesson plans and I imitated her teaching style, all in the hope that I would earn a high grade on my internship.

Similarly, in planning my course at LSU, I copied the whole syllabus from the previous instructor. Because I wasn’t familiar with the texts she used, I studied them carefully and then summarized them for my students. In both teaching experiences, I wrote down in great detail the objectives my students were expected to grasp by the end of each class. For example:

“Know the meanings of the first six English words in Lesson 2 and spell them correctly.”

“Grasp the use of WHAT questions.”

“Be aware of the major arguments of the Big Five educational philosophies.”

“Understand the concepts of ‘formal curriculum,’ ‘null curriculum,’ and ‘hidden curriculum.’”

In both cases, I was focused on delivering a pre-laid running track. I wanted students to reach the finish line rather than reflect on and respond to the journey to take stock of the “ currere ,”Footnote 2 their lived experience running on that track, i.e., the students’ actual learning. In other words, I put too much emphasis on the direct teaching of so-called knowledge or truth from formal curriculum while assuming that all students came with “empty” minds.

Nel Noddings (2007) argues that such direct teaching in our current schooling system is concerned with the question “Has Johnny learned X?” rather than with another far more interesting question, “What has Johnny learned?” (p. 5)—“When we say that ‘students will do X’ as a result of our instruction, we often forget to add, ‘if they want to’” (p. 55). Maxine Greene (1995) claims that this “‘top-down’ teaching and supervision has to be questioned” (p. 89). William Doll thinks that this teaching just focuses upon “what is taught” rather than “who is taught.”Footnote 3 I think this traditional direct teaching of knowledge does violence not only to students but also to teachers, for it ignores not only “who is taught” but also “who is teaching.” Teachers, to some extent, become mere mediums through which the basics or essentials are transferred from textbooks to students. These factors may contribute to what bell hooks calls (1994) “a serious crisis in education: students do not want to learn and teachers do not want to teach” (p. 12). In this context, both teaching and learning turn into boring, unhappy, and even traumatic experiences for teachers and students. Teaching is thus reduced to numerous checklists of “benchmarks,” rather than rich spiritual abundance. This is echoed by the critique of John Dewey (1963) that students would “associate the learning process with ennui and boredom” (p. 27).

Furthermore, John and Evelyn Dewey (1915) state in “Schools of To-Morrow” that as students resist this teaching-as-telling ,Footnote 4 many teachers “even go so far as to assume that the mind is naturally averse to learning – which is like assuming that the digestive organs are averse to food and have either to be coaxed or bullied into having anything to do with it” (p. 4). In other words, as many educators implicitly or explicitly believe, our students need to be taught to learn, they forget that learning should be as natural a thing for children as food is to a human’s digestive organs. The food metaphor reminds me of the spinach story told by Gregory Bateson (1972). When Bateson taught an informal course for psychiatric residents in the Veterans Administration Hospital at Palo Alto, one of the questions he gave to the class for discussion was:

A certain mother habitually rewards her small son with ice cream after he eats his spinach. What additional information would you need to be able to predict whether the child will: a. Come to love or hate spinach; b. Love or hate ice cream, or c. Love or hate Mother? (p. xvii)

When I read this question raised by Bateson, I paused for a long time at that page. In our schools, who is that mother? What is the ice cream? And spinach? What would be the result? Can it be questioned why the boy needs to eat spinach? If not, what else can he eat? How can one promote a healthy eating habit without the stimulus of ice cream?

Too often our teachers teach in school as that mother behaves, arbitrarily assuming what is the best for their children to learn or eat without considering or asking the children’s own opinions. Even if teachers recognize children’s disinterest in what is taught, the spinach, usually they would offer the attractive reward of ice cream for eating spinach—“to cover it [subject material] with sugar-coating; to conceal its barrenness by intermediate and unrelated material; and finally, as it were, to get the child to swallow and digest the unpalatable morsel while he is enjoy tasting something quite different” (Dewey , 1990, p. 208).

In my two teaching experiences, I had been familiar with the use of these tricky methods of sugar-coating to persuade students to eat spinach with the attraction of ice cream—to allure or force them to learn what is taught to them under the reward or punishment of grades. In fact, these are in some sense very efficient teaching methods , especially when a teacher is under high pressure to cover a certain amount of material in time for standardized testing. The questions Bateson raises at the end of the spinach story, however, push me to ponder upon what I had never thought of before, the results of such teaching. Will students come to love or hate what they are persuaded or even forced to learn? What will they think of the sugar-coating method, or ice cream, the reward for boring learning? How will they think of their teachers using the tricks? The following arguments from Dewey (1963) might answer these questions:

Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only the particular thing he is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes, of likes and dislikes, may be and often is much more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history that is learned. For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future. The most important attitude that can be formed is that of desire to go on learning. (p. 48, emphasis added)

When a good-intentioned mother forces her little boy to eat the spinach even with a reward of ice cream, she forgets the boy might thus hardly feel happy during those meals and never eat spinach or other vegetables when he can freely choose what to eat. This can also apply to teaching and learning, as Dewey quotes from an American humorist “It makes no difference what you teach a boy so long as he doesn’t like it” (1966, p. 134). Dewey is absolutely right that the “collateral learning” of “enduring attitudes of likes and dislikes” is much more significant than the actual content of learning. Unfortunately, few of us as teachers have genuinely realized this.

This external top-down control in traditional direct teaching is also evident in the unquestioning acceptance of curriculum, the reduction of curriculum to a detailed list of behavioral objectives listed in the teachers’ lesson plans. As written behavioral objectives specify exactly “what students will do, to what level of proficiency, and under what sort of assessment,” Noddings (2007) critiques that the lesson plans are “no longer supposed to emphasize what the teacher would do, but, rather, what students were expected to do as a result of instruction” (p. 53). One of the greatest dangers of this, according to Dewey (1910), is that students’ chief concern becomes to accommodate themselves to teachers’ expectations rather than to passionately engage with what to learn: “‘Is this right?’ comes to mean ‘Will this answer or process satisfy the teacher?’” (p. 50). Therefore all students’ learning is directed to induce correct responses on high stakes testing. This meticulous mechanical system ignores that whom to teach is more important than what to teach for to teach is to be with human beings. In other words, the boy eats the spinach just to get the ice cream or please his mother, not for its healthy ingredients.

Much worse is that under the heavy pressure of teaching-as-telling for testing, often teachers forget to double check whether the spinach they are required to feed their students is fresh enough to eat. I really wonder and worry that, even if teachers find that the spinach is rotten in “inert” knowledge or facts (borrowing Whitehead’s phrase, 1967, p. 1), they would still feel obliged to feed students the moldy spinach. In this sense, the system is good at monitoring and pushing both teachers and students to reach the predetermined objectives rather than critically reflect upon them. Then, where is the remedy for the mother and boy in that metaphoric story? How can mothers help their children build habits of healthy and balanced diets, and teachers help their students learn with passion in a non-behavioristic way? How can teaching be not just all about telling and passive listening?

At the end of his book “Mind and Nature” (2002), Bateson questions, “As teachers, are we wise?” (p. 210, emphasis added). This is a question deserving deep pondering on the part of all educators. While we question the authoritative teaching role of teachers, are there any alternatives to, and challenges of, what we typically think of as teaching, specifically traditional direct teaching , in classroom settings? This led me to another journey, that of a Taoist Pedagogy of Pathmarks .

Another Unsettling Journey to a Taoist Pedagogy of Pathmarks

Since I began to look back and reflect critically on those two unsuccessful teaching experiences, I have been engaged in a difficult struggle with the question, “What makes a teacher, especially a ‘wise’ teacher?” In other words, what can I, as a teacher, teach to my students, and how can I teach it if I want to be a good teacher? This seemed to be a simple question for a person whose professional field of study is education. But it was definitely not simple for me. I tried a lot of things in my “School and Society” course at LSU (Yu, 2014). In the following semester, I had an almost completely new syllabus. I selected the texts that first brought forth my passion on curriculum and instruction. Both the midterm and final examinations were removed, for I thought—and still think—these tests trained students to mechanically memorize the “right” answers in pursuit of a good grade, not learning. I traded examinations for group projects, and rather than lecture at my students, I cultivated conversations with them. These changes were not a smooth shift and continue to represent a struggle for me. But at least then, I became much more comfortable with the mistakes I still occasionally made in teaching. While I experimented with teaching practice, I gradually built up my critical, reflexive thoughts on pedagogical theories by scholars in the field including John Dewey , William Doll, Paulo Freire, Maxine Greene, bell hooks, Nel Noddings, and Alfred North Whitehead. As I read these wonderful theorists’ various critiques of traditional direct teaching practices and expectations of how we could teach, I felt so deeply in my heart the need for a new conceptualization, a new vocabulary to express a different pedagogical model than teacher as “truth” giver.

The question of truth as it relates to the teacher’s role in the classroom raises not only issues of what and how we should teach, but challenges the very purpose of teaching. Since truth itself is a major question of phenomenology, Heidegger’s works, especially his phenomenological perspectives on truth and untruth , become a great help. By putting Heidegger in conversation with Lao Tzu and John Dewey I am able to further explore the rich dynamics of a Taoist Pedagogy of Pathmarks .

Complex Conversations Among Heidegger, Lao Tzu, and Dewey

Berhard Welte (1981) began his speech at Heidegger’s burial in 1976 with the statement, “Once a whole world listened to him” (p. 73). As one of the most influential contemporary philosophers, Heidegger (1889–1976) is the major founder of phenomenology after Edmund Husserl, and his critique of modernity, in some sense, opens the door of post-modern thought. His masterpiece, “Being and Time” in 1927 (Heidegger, 1927/1962), is one of the most original and influential works in the twentieth-century’s philosophy. Heidegger’s phenomenological work has also had great impact on contemporary philosophical movements such as existentialism, hermeneutics, deconstructionism, and post-structuralism. According to Welte, since Heidegger comes from the earth of Messkirch, “his thought has shaken the world and the century” (p. 73).

Thomas Sheehan (1981) has a pithy summary of Heidegger: His thought is “complex but simple,” while his life is “simple but complex” (p. v). It can be said that, in this complexity, the primary or even the only topic of Heidegger’s thinking, is “Being.” Footnote 5 Sheehan states that Aristotle, on whom Heidegger draws extensively, argues overall the defining question of First philosophy is “What is the being-ness of beings?” This “essence” or “X-ness” is not something objective, but “the meaningful relatedness, the intelligible presentness, of things to and for man” (p. x). It is this disclosive relation between man and beingness that Heidegger tries to retrieve from the ancient Greek philosophy and presses him to ask the phenomenological question, “What is the Being of beingness?” In asking this question, Heidegger wishes to move beyond the traditional philosophical question, “What is the essence of beings?” to ask, “What is the essence of essence?” In the very beginning of his “Being and Time,” Heidegger (1927/1962) tackles this “darkest” question of “Being” and says we have to face this question despite its indefinability. Since Being is not an entity, he says, “Looking at something, understanding and conceiving it, choosing, access to it – all these ways of behaving are constitutive for our inquiry, and therefore are modes of Being for those particular entities which we, the inquirers, are ourselves” (pp. 26–27). Here Being is neither something “out there” as traditional beingness of beings to be discovered nor creations of humans; rather, it is the presence or happening of the world opened by the inquirers as ourselves. In this sense, Heidegger argues Being is the unconcealment of truth in his phenomenological work.

As Heidegger (1925/1992) argues that the essence of phenomenological investigations is that “they cannot be reviewed summarily but must in each case be rehearsed and repeated anew” (p. 26, emphasis original), he spends his whole life in this “work of laying open and letting be seen” (p. 86, emphasis original). According to him, “Any further synopsis which merely summarizes the contents of this work would thus be, phenomenologically speaking, a misunderstanding” (p. 26). Furthermore, Heidegger explains the word of “investigation” which means not to “simply pull out results and integrate them into a system” but “to implicate the reader into pressing further and working through the matters under investigations” (p. 26). As a teacher and educational philosopher, I am struck by these beautiful, powerful accounts of phenomenology, which can provide productive alternatives to traditional didactic teaching. In contrast to others in my field who have previously critiqued teaching “as telling and being told,” I investigate this issue not to “pull out results and integrate them into a system” (Heidegger, p. 26) but to get anew this question through bridging western phenomenology and the eastern philosophy of Chinese Taoism.

I realize that many curriculum scholars do not wrestle with truth, certainly not in its purity, and do not see the teacher’s role as the authoritative transmitter of truth. So why do I go back to truth and untruth in Heidegger? First of all, although Heidegger has not produced major writings specifically in teaching and learning, his assertion that questioning functions as the piety of thought contributes to our understanding of teaching. In “A Letter to A Young Student” (1950/1971), he states, “I can provide no credentials for what I have said – which, indeed, you do not ask of me – that would permit a convenient check in each case whether what I say agrees with ‘reality’” (p. 186). Therefore, instead of trying to provide any big “convenient check” as established truth corresponding to the “reality,” Heidegger only offers small “changes” that can be inserted into the fixed system to turn or expose it inside out to critically examine what has been covered up before. Using these small changes to challenge big checks, Heidegger tries to compel us “to think, to question what we ‘normally’ do not question” by “his strange use of familiar words, his seemingly perverse etymologies, his deceptively simple gnomic sentences, his repetitions and staccato rhythms” in “dis-rupt[ing] and dis-turb[ing] ‘normal’ argumentative philosophic discourse” (Berstein, 1992, pp. 93–94).

Another reason that Heidegger interests me is that he establishes an essential unity between (un)truth and education. In his lecture, Plato’s Doctrine of Truth (1931/1998, p. 32),Footnote 6 Heidegger traces the significant change of the essence of truth in Plato’s cave allegory . This change affected the history of Western thinking, including its concept of education. For Heidegger, “the essence of ‘education’ is grounded in the essence of ‘truth’” (p. 170). The exploration of this original and profound sense of truth sheds light on that of education, especially teaching.

When I explored Heidegger’s phenomenological perspective on (un)truth for insights into taken-for-granted assumptions about education and the purposes of teaching and learning, I noticed a strong resonance between his notion of “clearing” and the essential spirit of Taoism, “the Tao of inaction .” Heidegger’s ideas about thinking and language, especially his work after “Being and Time” (1927) from the 1930s to the 1970s, can be aligned with Taoist philosophy in many ways. Heidegger is often regarded as “the only Western philosopher who not only thoroughly intellectually understands but has intuitively grasped Taoist thought” (Chang, 1974, p. 138), perhaps owing to his Japanese students at the University of Marburg and the University of Freiburg. The striking similarity between Heidegger’s works and Taoist thought has gained attention of Heideggerian scholars (Stambaugh, 1984; Parkes, 1987; Poggeler, 1987).Footnote 7

In the subsequent chapters of this book, Dewey is also included in the conversations with Heidegger and Lao Tzu , for Dewey’s two-year experience teaching in China, and his long-term relationships with Chinese educators in both America and China, qualify him to function in this capacity. Dewey’s provocative thoughts on growth , immaturity, and experience along with his powerful critique of education which “is not an affair of ‘telling and being told’” (1966, p. 38), not only creates more generative dynamics in these complex conversations, but also enriches my understanding of Heidegger and Lao Tzu from the pedagogical perspective.

My interconnected reading of Heidegger, Lao Tzu, and Dewey led me to a Taoist Pedagogy of Pathmarks to express my idea of how teachers can teach through paradoxically non-teaching without implying a binary opposition between the two. Specifically, I am looking for the not-yet possibilities of alternative ways and perspectives of teaching through the resonance among (1) Heidegger’s struggle between truth and untruth , (2) Lao Tzu’s conceptualization and practice of the Tao of inaction, and (3) Dewey’s critique of traditional direct teaching , as of these perspectives intertwine to create the Taoist Pedagogy of Pathmarks . In the following three chapters, I will insert boxes of conversationsFootnote 8 among Heidegger, Lao Tzu, and Dewey, as well as others, to illustrate the rich and dynamical interactions among them within the Taoist Pedagogy of Pathmarks . While trying to juxtapose the complex thoughts of the three great thinkers through conversations, I do not want to conflate them, especially the dissonance of the different cultural and philosophical traditions respectively from which they come. I suggest the simple comparisons among the three thinkers are impossible. Drawing on Heidegger’s critique of modern technology and his analysis of the nature of language, along with the Tao of inaction from Lao Tzu and Dewey’s critique of teaching-as-telling , I see a Taoist Pedagogy of Pathmarks as a “non-willing,”Footnote 9 a refusal of the will to control, with the hope to form a pedagogical bridging between Eastern and Western thoughts through a bridge “which is not a bridge” (Aoki, 2005, p. 228).