Most of us, sometime in childhood, were offered this solemn advice from a peace-loving teacher or parent: “If you want to have a friend, be a friend.” The adage has wider application, I’ve found, than we might have suspected when we stood by the swings and considered our social options. One is this: if you want collegiality, be collegial. Share equipment and information and investment in department life. Another is this: if you want to keep learning, keep teaching.
While I don’t fully espouse the pious egalitarianism of those who claim, “I learn more from my students than they learn from me” (because what exactly are we doing at the front of the classroom if that’s the case?), I do think it’s an educator’s responsibility to keep learning. We do, of course, learn from our students. If we invite odd questions and authentic curiosity and news from electronic neighborhoods we don’t tend to visit, we’ll learn things. We also learn from people in picket lines and waiting rooms and airplanes (those not already wearing their headphones), if we’re willing to watch and ask and listen to their stories. And we learn around the dinner table if we let those we think we know surprise us.
As my life gets longer, the notion of “lifelong learning” becomes richer and more meaningful and, these days, more urgent. We have a lot to learn for our students’ sake, for the children, including our own, who are inheriting a range of problems with unprecedented complexity. We even have a lot to learn about the fields in which we have some expertise; we can always fine-tune, expand, deepen, and rearrange our knowledge as new information comes in and new contexts require revision and rereading. It takes humility and courage to keep learning. We need to do so if only to stay aware of what we’re asking of students when we lure them out to their learning edge—that they reconsider what they thought they were sure of, that they challenge authorities they have been taught to respect, that they can afford to risk mistakes, that real learning is not a competition but an invitation to exhilarating conversation.
Still Learning about Learning
At its best, what educational institutions call “professional development” is an honest effort to foster the kind of learning I just described, and to foster the climate of reciprocity and mutual appreciation in which it flourishes. Professional development is a recognized criterion of evaluation for promotion at most institutions: we are expected to attend the occasional in-house workshop on learning styles or working with students with disabilities or diversity training or how to make the best use of electronic classrooms. We occasionally hear invited experts in the field report on new research. We sign up for webinars and, when we can, attend national conferences. Though some of these can seem pro forma, redundant, or a waste of time we might prefer to spend actually reading or doing our own research, few of us question the need for ongoing learning as part of professional life.
In my experience, much ongoing learning comes in preparing and presenting talks. I’ve had the exhilarating experience of hearing Mary Oliver and Billy Collins read from their own works; I’ve also taken great pleasure in speaking about those works to audiences who don’t normally read poetry. The former experiences were delightful and memorable; the latter allowed me to discover new ways of reading familiar material, new approaches to interdisciplinary conversation, and new answers to a question that arises frequently and deserves a rich and full answer: Why read a poem at a time like this?
In my efforts to answer questions like that, usually posed by people who live and move in other disciplinary territories, I have frequently recalled Peter’s challenge to believers to always be ready to give an account of the hope they live by. It is a valuable challenge for teachers as we consider the missional dimension of our vocation. The “why” question is not an idle one. It tends to arise more frequently for those who teach material with less obvious application than, say, computer skills for techno-teens or biology for budding scientists. Why should we read Milton or Melville or Eliot, or why should we concern ourselves with the particulars of wars fought and treaties forged centuries ago are questions that arise honestly, if sometimes impatiently, and it is our job to keep widening students’ and one another’s shared understanding of the value of what we’re doing. We always need to be ready with examples of “the best that has been thought and said” that lead us back to the core questions: Why are we here? How do things happen? How do they change? Who gets to decide? interpret? control information? How is power acquired and transferred? What does love have to do with it all?
Learning moments are epiphanic. They come as shocks of recognition: suddenly I see what was there all along. Once the frame has shifted, what seemed to be unrelated facts fall into place in a larger pattern. I see how adjusting one assumption changes everything. We need to keep having those moments and sharing them. When I have the privilege of standing in front of an audience of peers and sharing how a few lines from “Little Gidding” have changed my understanding of time and faith and intention, how they have taught me to live differently, how the image of the “husk of meaning” has helped me imagine the learning process with more nuance and compassion, I reaffirm for myself what matters and bind myself more intimately to those who share my sense that teaching and learning are sacred tasks.
A Checklist for Presenters
Preparing to present a paper or lead a professional discussion is a process of clarifying values. I don’t want to waste my colleagues’ time or my own. If they’re all investing effort and expense (not to mention uncomfortable evenings in airport lounges) in gathering to hear what I have to say, it had better be worthwhile. Hoping to ensure that it is, I have developed a few basic criteria I hope to meet when I present.
Make it new. This was Ezra Pound’s advice to young poets. Help your readers hear the language in a new way. Give them an experience of a sentence or poetic line that will disturb their peace or spring them out of the grooves of habit long enough to reconsider how meaning happens, or what lies just outside familiar frames of reference. I want the medical professionals I address to leave with new appreciation for the importance of word choices—especially metaphor—in the clinical encounter. I want fellow fans of Henry James (a dwindling, but happy, few) to discover enough new satisfactions in his twelve-line sentences to make them want to crack open The Ambassadors again. I want aspiring writers to leave with a renewed appreciation of the humble disciplines of apprenticeship and imitation, and a healthy skepticism about too-simple notions of what is “creative” or “original.” Making it new can mean redefining or offering a new interpretation or approach, or simply a new way of “putting it.”
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say. This advice might sound a little New-Agey until we recall that it is Kent’s final line in King Lear—a hard-won word of wisdom about the importance of candor in political life. Academic life runs some of the same risks: pretentiousness and petty competitiveness or timid compliance, for example. One of my own memorable professors, a translator of national notoriety and a powerful teacher, left me with an enduring understanding of what it means to speak from the heart into the academy. I remember with gratitude not just what he had to say about Greek drama but also with what luminous affection he read out passages from the Oresteia. If we lose a sense of vocation, of mission, of the sacredness of our task, of the generosity required of real learners and teachers, our teaching will be like “a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal” (1 Cor. 13:1).
Honor the complexities. Arguments that simplify to make a point are dangerous—as we have all too much occasion to see these days. I have often gratefully remembered the emphatic reminder from Ellen Goodman, longtime Boston Globe columnist: “The bottom line is always, ‘It’s not that simple. ’” Especially when addressing our fellow educators, it seems important to show not only that the matter at hand is more complicated than it might seem but also that there might be occasion to question accepted categories of analysis, routine assumptions, conventional approaches, and current practices. We may not necessarily dispute their value, but our questioning allows us to consider their limitations, to consider the merits of new research, and to initiate one another into the deeper mysteries of, say, political science without polemic, chemistry in cultural context, or religious studies that invite critical inquiry while sustaining faith. We dwell in paradox all the time. Our job is to help students and one another dwell there more willingly, finding balance points as they come to terms with ambiguity and mystery. We need to take one another out to the scary edges to which our best questions lead us—those edges where we need to walk in faith while we seek understanding.
Integrate faith and learning. This was a criterion of evaluation at Westmont College when I worked there. Student evaluation forms included the question, “How well does this course integrate faith and learning?” The question served, every semester, as a strong reminder of our core calling. The verb integrate is invigorating, challenging us to hold the center when tensions between secular assumptions and faith assumptions become acute. Much of the work of integration takes place at the level of language. Professional jargon can become a litmus test for those who seek membership in our ranks; it needs to be anchored in simple, substantive claims. “All you need to say is simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’” is good advice for us all (Matt. 5:37). And in our efforts to meet that high standard of simplicity—sometimes “costing not less than everything”—we need, every time we prepare for public conversation, to pray (Eliot). As Wendell Berry put it, we need “to be quiet in heart, and in eye, clear.” We need at those times to remember that our colleagues are also called by love into a profession that requires great love. When we close the laptop and turn off the light on the night before our session meets, we do well to pray that our teaching and learning, our speaking and writing, the questions we frame and the theories we explore, will be guided by the same Spirit promised to the disciples when, as Jesus sent them out (doubtless apprehensive) to face hostile hearers, “Do not worry about what to say or how to say it. At that time you will be given what to say” (Matt. 10:19).
I encourage my fellow laborers in the field to receive what is given to you to say. Go joyfully where your deepest interests lead you with a spirit of spontaneity rooted in trust and a boldness rooted in sure and certain hope. And may your preparation time, like your prayer time, be a deepening practice of the presence of God.
Works Cited
Berry, Wendell. “The Wild Geese,” in Selected Poems of Wendell Berry. Counterpoint, 1998.
Eliot, T. S. “Little Gidding.” http://www .columbia.edu/itc/history/winter /w3206/edit/tseliotlittlegidding.html.
Marilyn McEntyre’s teaching career has included Westmont College, Mills College, The College of New Jersey, and UC Berkeley. Her books include Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, Word by Word, and Make a List: How a Simple Practice Can Change Our Lives and Open Our Hearts.