Teaching About vs. Teaching As & More
— Immersive Teaching —
I am sure that almost all teaching from grade 1 through graduate school is teaching “about” something. We are taught about some events in history, about science facts and, hopefully concepts, about music, about art, about arithmetic algorithms, about literature, and so forth. The most common exceptions are teaching how to play music, how to express oneself through art, how to express yourself through writing, how to play certain sports, how to swim, and how to drive a car. But, schools are cutting out most of these teaching hows. Even writing is taught as formal, non-fiction writing. Art and music courses are being eliminated. I learned how to swim in high school. In fact, you couldn’t graduate from high school without passing swim class, unless you had a disability that prevented you from swimming. In five days a week of physical education, besides learning to swim, we also learned how to play and participate in a lot of different sports, including basketball, baseball, football, soccer, wrestling, gymnastics, track and field, golf, and volleyball. We even had a driver’s education class in high school. In the regular drivers ed. class time, we watched films to scare us into driving safely and learned the rules of the road. When we had class in a car, three students at time would go with the teacher into the driver’s ed. car, which had an extra brake pedal for the teacher. If you screwed up, the teacher, who also was the physical education teacher, would give you a side arm against the chest. I think the girls missed that wonderful teaching technique. The teacher also would jam on his break just to see how you handled skids, which was much more exciting in the snow. We, also were required to take a typing class in grade 8. We grew up in a tracking system throughout our K — 12 schooling. Typing was required, whether you were destined to be a laborer, a secretary, business person, lawyer, doctor, or scientist. We all took typing. At this moment, I’m using those skills in writing this article, while not looking at the keyboard. Today, we would call this type of course keyboarding and basic computer literacy. In schools of today, keyboarding, in particular, is not viewed as particularly important for most students and certainly is not a requirement. In present day schooling, there are no driving classes. Physical education has been cut way back. I’m sure very few schools have swimming pools, let alone swim classes. Arts and music have been cut way back or eliminated.
However, “teaching about” has survived and continues to thrive at all levels. In fact, teaching about has been the mandate that appears across curricular subjects and has been refined into the ultimate of the deprofessionalization of teachers, where entire classes, day after day, are scripted. Supervisors visit classes with stop watches to make sure all teachers are teaching the same thing at the same time. And, in order to maintain the mandated time-line, teachers forced into teaching about. Teaching about maintains a huge distance between the subject matter content and the children’s minds. What is to be learned is disconnected bits of information that is decontextualized and objectified. A teacher cannot teach deep, contextualized, cohesive, and connected concepts in the amount of time given to cover whatever material is supposed to be taught. Such deep, contextualized, cohesive, and connected concepts have to be taught over varying amounts of time. In fact, the development of deep understandings could take years. But, schools are not concerned with deep learning. Schools are just concerned about the mechanical processes of covering content as quickly as possible. And, the powers that reign over schooling have taught their teachers that covering the material is what is important, and that they can feel good about completing their coverage of the curriculum. Even though, teachers probably know or, at least suspect, that their students really don’t understand much of what was covered.
Teaching about tends to be sterile and objectified. Students do not get a feel for how that knowledge was created or produced. Teaching writing does not teach students what it feels like to be a writer. Teaching about science does not teach what it feels like to follow your curiosity, to know what it feels like to be a scientist, to know what it feels like to design and do inquiry. Much of science teaching also teaches about inquiry, so that students never experience what it is like to actually inquire into something. Teaching about art does not allow students to know what it feels like to express oneself through art. The list of disconnected “learning” extends through all subject matter areas.
So, let’s go back through some of the features of teaching about and how these features manifest differently in other approaches to teaching. Knowledge is presented in ways that are distant from the learner. In this case, such distance is keeping certain knowledge away from us in ways that keep us from closely examining such knowledge, especially examining the knowledge in terms of its connection to our own experiences. “Disconnected” teaching presents a great deal of information without connecting ideas in a richer and more elaborate “story” of the material. The concepts presented in this approach tend to be fragmented and not well structured. This particular combination of disconnection and fragmentation contributes to another problematic feature: decontextualization. Gregory Bateson made the point that “without context, there is no meaning.”[1] For instance, if I said, “ball,” you might have some image of a ball, but you really have no idea of what kind of ball or in what situation that ball is in. Maybe it’s a golf ball hit by Tiger Woods during the U.S. Open tournament at Torrey Pines, where he played in the play-off round with a broken leg. Or, maybe it’s a very old baseball signed by Willie Mays. Or, maybe it’s a basketball signed by Magic Johnson. Or, maybe it’s a handball or tennis ball. Or, maybe it’s a ball of fire. Or, maybe it’s referring to Cannonball Adderley, a dog’s ball, or a formal dance, or “having a ball.” The more context that is developed around a concept the deeper and richer the meaning. Knowledge that is “objectified” is related to the previous notion of “distance.” Knowledge like this has little, if anything, connection to our personal experiences or to our emotions, values, aesthetics, or any other feature of the way we put together meaningful understandings.
ABOWAT — What?
Certainly, learning about some things is unavoidable, but also is necessary. We may need to learn about certain medications that we take in order to avoid side-effects, how often and much to take, how it interacts with other medications and food, and what kinds of effects we should expect. At the same time we are learning about a medication, we are also making it personally relevant, while creating richer contexts around the medication’s use and effects. It also is important to learn about certain historical facts and concepts, which can provide more meaningful and relevant understandings about current day contexts, conditions, and events. In such cases, we are learning about something while providing richer contexts, connections to personal experiences, and subjective meaning and relevance.
My teaching career started with a stint of teaching science in a New York City middle school, then expanding out to various subjects in grades 2 through 12 in different parts of the United States. And, then I moved into teacher education at the university level, which also expanded out into teaching courses outside of the college of education. Throughout this career, I became increasingly concerned with just teaching about, and how I could teach in ways that actually manifested the contexts of the subject matter. So, in teaching how to teach science, I tried to manifest inquiry both in the ways I “taught” — a term along with “teaching” I have come to not like at all — and in the ways students were expected to participate in the classroom, which was to “be” inquirers and knowledge producers.
In preparing for this article, I began looking into alternative prepositions to “about.” I came up with a core list, which doesn’t capture the entire depth and scope of moving beyond teaching about, but it does provide a bit of an alternative. The acronym for these alternative prepositions is ABOWAT. Teaching As. Teaching Beyond. Teaching Of. Teaching With. Teaching Across. Teaching Through.
“Teaching As” focuses on manifesting the particular subject matter context and the people who work within that context. A teacher teaching biology manifests as a biologist, while engaging the students to join her as biologists. When I was teaching a freshman class on an introduction to complex living systems, I tried to create a classroom context in which students engaged as “complexitivists” while making sense of living systems. Many years ago, I took an introduction to photography class at Pratt Institute of Art in one of my previous lifetimes, when I was teaching middle school science in New York City. Rather than treating the students as novices in this class, the professor treated everyone as photographers who joined in critiquing one another’s photos, and discussing the nature of the art form.
“Teaching Beyond” may go further than the self-imposed limits of the specific context or subject matter discipline. In these cases, the scope can open up and breathe in fresh ideas and perspectives. Teachers and students can ponder the implications that go beyond the particular discipline.
“Teaching Of” involves extending the qualities and features of a particular context or discipline. We might teach “of” ecology or teach “of” history as ways to manifest the dynamics and nature of particular subject matter areas. An ecology class may be presented in a way that manifest the dynamics of ecological systems.
“Teaching With” expands the way we teach and learn. “With” can be viewed as teaching with students, where students join in the teaching of particular concepts. Teaching “with” also can refer to the qualities and features that teachers and students manifest, such as teaching with passion, with heart, with beauty, with skepticism, with openness, with empathy, with wisdom, with vision, with vulnerability, and so forth. The teaching — learning processes and contexts can be imbued with the best qualities of our humanity. We can create teaching contexts that are “Warm,” as suggested by Nora Bateson.[2]
“Teaching Across” attempts to develop a way of examining subject matter from different perspectives and even from across different disciplines. Such an approach is transcontextual and abductive. Abduction is a different way — from induction and deduction — of developing understandings that cross and merge different contexts. Some “thing” in one context may reflect an aspect of a different “thing” in a different context. Or, it may be that one pattern of a particular process or object applies to processes and objects in different contexts. Such an approach extends the scope and depth of our understandings.
“Teaching Through” connects to the ways in which we examine and formulate our understandings. Teaching through inquiry, as discussed earlier; teaching through poetry; teaching through art; teaching through story; teaching through play; teaching through exploration; teaching through media; teaching through participation; and so forth, are all ways in which we can examine various aspects of our world as seen through different disciplines.
There are many other ways we can expand how we teach and learn, while moving away form just teaching about or just learning about. We can enliven our classes or our ways of learning by ourselves and, more importantly, the ways in which we learn with others. Teachers can adopt these ABOWATs as parts of classes and classrooms. If you are brave enough, you can transmute your classrooms away from “just teaching about” and enlivening the whole process. I suspect that teaching in this way will improve scores on the meaningless, but ever-present tests of achievement, even though you buck the system and include more ABOWATs.
As parents, we can provide learning opportunities that utilize the features of ABOWAT. We can be sociologists, anthropologists, biologists, political scientists, and so forth when watching TV programs, commercials, and news with our children. We can turn visits to the zoo, museum, or aquarium into inquiries by our families of scientists, artists, poets, and so forth. There are limitless possibilities.
Endnotes
[1] Page 16 in Bateson, G. (1979/2002). Mind and nature: A necessary unity. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.
[2] Bateson, N. (2017, May 18). Warm Data: Contextual research and new forms of information. Hacker Noon, 17.
