The Essential Role of Love in Learning and Teaching
Love is not often listed as a crucial building block of rigorous academic environments. Yet, it’s an essential part of meaningful learning.
There’s nothing in learning and teaching like “ah ha” moments. They are instances of profound discovery when our learning coalesces into new understanding of the world and ourselves. My favorite teachers created these moments for me. They posed challenging questions, introduced insightful texts, and supported the exploration of ideas and emotions. Both directly and indirectly, they asked me who I wanted to be and how I wanted to contribute to the world. They exhibited a faith that if they challenged and supported me, my learning would have value well beyond content mastery and elite college admission.
As I reflect on the learning process we engaged in together, I also see how it was a collaborative pursuit. Years later, I can still remember their excitement during the process and the signs they were learning right along with me. These were more than professional partnerships. Their pedagogy was rooted in love — that “agape” love defined by a commitment to celebrating the humanity of others.
Principle of Learning and Teaching #2:
The teaching/learning relationship is triangular, where teachers serve as guides, helping to illuminate the subjects we explore together as learners.
In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire described pedagogy as the power dynamics among the student, teacher, and subject of study. He posited that how this power is wielded in the classroom determines the degree to which education oppresses or liberates. He assumed all humans hold the capacities to learn about our endlessly complex world and to teach about their unique experiences in it. He also saw the collaborative process of leveraging those abilities as fundamental to protecting these capacities. Freire equated such learning relationships to love.
Love is not often listed as a crucial building block of rigorous academic environments. Yet, its importance resonates with both students and teachers. Ask anyone about the most important learning experiences of their lives, and they will tell a story about a relationship with a teacher. They’ll tell of that person’s efforts to expose them to new perspectives, spur their reflection, and support them through the difficult moments. And, if you listen carefully, you’ll hear evidence of the teacher’s joy and fulfillment in their role. Such teachers take their place among the friends and family who shape our sense of self and how we engage with the world — the people we love.
Research supports the notion that the relationship among students, teachers, and the subject of study are crucial to learning outcomes. Carol Dweck’s book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success posits that our belief in our capacity to learn is a major factor in determining the degree to which we engage as learners. In Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, Angela Duckworth highlights the critical importance of identifying purpose for one’s learning both in one’s passions and in their value to the world. Both researchers point to the essential role of teachers in nurturing students’ innate capacity to learn. Because the learning process is neither immediate nor linear, there are inevitable moments of frustration and hurdles to overcome that can lead students to crippling self-doubt. Add to this a social, political, and cultural context that constantly sends false messages about who isn’t intelligent based on race, nationality, gender, and a wide range of other factors, and it’s easy to see why support and empathy from teachers is critical.
While there is no single way to live out this principle, it begins when educators are intentional and reflective in their practice. An important starting point is to recognize the inherent power teachers hold. In most schools and classrooms, teachers are afforded positional authority rooted in the ability to control the curriculum, define the only relevant “truth,” and assess student learning. This positional authority can also be reinforced by society and culture. Factors including gender, age, race, nationality, and even physique can affect the way power is attributed to the teacher. The better we understand positional authority and how it shapes teachers and their students, the easier it is to envision how it should and should not shape the learning space.
As teachers work to understand this power, they also have to grapple with how they should wield it. Ignoring it doesn’t make it go away. Power enters the classroom in the lived experience of the teacher and students. It must be intentionally wielded, with the approach clearly articulated, for students to understand their role. For example, teachers and students can examine curricular standards together to identify opportunities for meaningful explorations and inquiry. They can collaborate to design assessments and determine grades. Teachers can choose to say very little and require students to drive the discovery of insights, perspectives, and analysis. By directly articulating their pedagogical approach and asking students for feedback, teachers allow students to further shape the learning process. Teachers can wield their positional authority in ways that require students to take up their own power and responsibility as learners.
Unfortunately, poorly wielded power can have detrimental and even debilitating impacts on students. It can be oppressive. Explicit and implicit bias can shape who is given opportunities to learn, encouragement in the rough moments, and a sense of whether they have an innate capacity for learning. Often, our biases and resulting actions happen without our awareness. Students receive these messages and learn from them.
Responsible and loving pedagogy is an art that takes time to hone. Just like their students, teachers need an intentional learning process that includes the challenge and support of others:
When I was first learning to be a teacher… I was terrified of not knowing the answer to my students’ questions. I found it embarrassing, but sometimes I had to tell them that I didn’t know, and I’d find out for them and let them know the next day. Every time this happened, and they didn’t walk out, it became easier to do. Once I got past my own ego, I could ask the class if any of them knew the answer. Next, I embraced the “less is more” mentality and allowed the students to do most of the talking and working things out…This led to a student telling me after we discussed my formal training, “oh, I thought you didn’t know anything.” That hurt my feelings a bit, but I realized how her perception was a result of my methodology. Now, I have more confidence and more trust in the process, and I try to bring as much honesty and open-mindedness as possible. When everyone is owning the learning, and we’re exploring something important and relevant, it’s really a lot of fun.
— Nora Falvey, Educator
Experimenting with new ways of wielding power can feel risky. Great teachers feel deep responsibility for the learning of their students. And, teacher success is often measured as the degree to which students demonstrate content mastery. This approach to teacher assessment is rooted in the false assumption that learning is something teachers do to students. If we believe that only the learner can do the learning, the most effective thing educators can do is help students leverage their innate abilities as humans to learn.
Teaching from positional authority is dehumanizing to teachers, too. Teachers are not Omniscient, Omnipresent, Omnibenevolent gods. When they teach from positional authority, they step into a hierarchy that unnaturally separates teachers from their students, as though they have supernatural power to justify their position. Teachers that want humanizing relationships with their students must get to know them as learners and as people. They must also authentically share of themselves.
As a classroom community, our capacity to generate excitement is deeply affected by our interest in one another, in hearing one another’s voices, in recognizing one another’s presence.
― bell hooks, Teaching To Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom
Cliche as it may sound, for teachers to have loving relationships with their students, they must first love themselves. This requires acknowledging who we are through critical self-reflection. We each have insecurities, communication styles, and implicit biases that shape how we engage with others. When we lean into our strengths, own our imperfections, and strive to live in a manner aligned with our values, we embrace our own humanity.
This personal work is often difficult, and it’s only effective as an ongoing pursuit. But, it allows us to enter the classroom with a new form of authority — expertise. It is expertise about how to learn in ways that are humanizing to ourselves and others. It demonstrates to students that learning as an individual and as part of a community is valuable because it is fundamental to our humanity, not because it helps us win a meritocratic race. When we do the work to become the learners we want to be and to love ourselves for who we truly are, we are preparing to serve as guides for our students to do the same.
Further Inquiry:
While I believe in the Principles for Learning and Teaching, I don’t have definitive answers as to how to actualize them in our learning spaces. Here are some of the questions guiding my inquiry. Please share yours in the comments section below.
- How can curricular standards and assessments be designed to productively leverage student learning capacities?
- In what ways can school communities intentionally shape counter-narratives to the dominant culture of meritocracy?
- Can school communities respectfully and openly engage in pedagogical reflection related to issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion?
This post is part of a series supporting educators in reflecting on their pedagogy and practice. Read the intro to this series If We Don’t Work on Pedagogy, Nothing Else Matters or explore the most recent posts below.
The Pedagogy of Purpose ← P R E V I O U S
N E X T → Let Learners Learn
