Teaching as Listening: Strategies from Postman & Weingartner

     As I read Postman & Weingartner’s Teaching as a Subversive Activity, I was not reading as a believer. I kept arguing with the book as I read, and I really could not explain just why it was. As we had the lecture in the class from my peers, I did gain a better appreciation of the text as I saw it through the eyes of practitioners in the field. Chloe called the text complicated, outdated, but interesting. I had to set back and really think about the larger cultural context this book was written in. The expansion of public education at the tertiary level from the GI bill was petering out, it had been a decade since the Sputnik moment so that there was more investment in what we would call STEM classes now. It was also the late sixties and a visible part the boomer generation was questioning everything about the order of the system, Concurrently, we were seeing the rise of postmodernism and post-structuralism where the idea of any sole source of capital T “Truth” was in question.

That is the environment that was birthing the critical educational theorists with Freire and Postman & Weingartner that we have read for this course and I’m sure there are more whom I have not engaged with as I have not taken any pedagogy courses. Understanding the context better does not necessarily mean that I am in full support of the program.I still have several key critiques of the question-posing methodology. My main issue is that it torpedoes any sense of expertise. You as a professor have studied a topic and thought about it deeply and engaged with texts and the other experts in the field and have a baseline of knowledge in whatever subject it is that you are teaching. You might not know everything, in fact you know that you do not know everything and are aware of your limitations, but you know the process of coming to knowledge about the things that you do not know. I kept thinking about Socrates as a progenitor of this process as exemplified in the Platonic dialogs, in which we see the students in the agora coming to knowledge through an early version of the question posing form of teaching. In this, I am firmly in the camp with Aristotle in that we need some sort of empiricism as that baseline – what is it that we know and what is knowable, though that second part of epistemology does lend itself to the strategic process.

The other part that kept rubbing me the wrong way is that even though the goal of Postman & Weingartner is to allow student to become peers with their teachers in terms of taking ownership of their own education, the student is not centered in the text. We mostly see the authors focusing on the teachers and their role, but in a process like they are speaking about, it would seem to me that the students are the more important part. All the talk of teaching as a subversive activity should be overshadowed by the fact that learning is a subversive activity.

So how does one help make teaching a subversive activity? The authors share a list of eighteen suggestions in chapter eight, “New Teachers” that they state will seem “thoroughly impractical” (137). And this is where I think my frustration with the text came to a head. They start with a suggestion that we stop using textbooks for five years, then go on to having teachers teach outside of their areas of expertise, to dissolving all thoughts of a subject at all. They even have what feels like a Maoist suggestion to have teachers take a leave of absence every fourth year to do something else (139). Their list got increasingly absurd, and I did agree that it seemed impractical. I have to admit to being a bit conservative in making radical changes of this sort. Taking great risks can have great positive consequences, but I would rather make small incremental improvements than risk the huge downside risks that could come from failure.

However, the authors have a point in noting that change is needed (141), and that change is a key component of the world, but it does not feel as if it was fully embraced by educators (xiii). I think my own conservative nature regarding education is in part from the fact that the education process worked well for me. So, what I do is reflect on the classes I had and when I step into a classroom, I try to recreate the best of what I saw as a student but flip that to doing the same thing as a teacher. We see though, through years of evidence, that this does not work for all students. There are many who are disengaged for whatever reason, who resist the current paradigm, and thus “fail” in terms of how success in the system is measured.

To make this change from the lessons of Postman & Weingartner, I need a reframing of the process from how I was initially reading it. On my first reading of the text, I really read what they were doing as a denigration of all forms of expertise. As someone who has spent a lot of time in school, I value the level of expertise I have. I know things and that is important to my conception of self. What we need to do is not see the call for student-centered teaching as a denigration of expertise, but what it is a call for humility. This humility is important because to break down the hierarchy inherent in the current paradigm, it takes a mental shift from the professor. You are no longer the expert in the room, the sage on the stage, but you are a facilitator or coach as the other people in the room come to knowledge. You may be a bit further on the path of formal learning than your new peers, but they are acknowledged experts in their own lives and experiences.

Thinking through this reframing and humility allows you to work through the process with your students. You can meld the process of learning with the thing that you are learning. You cannot be learning any particular “subject,” but instead be focusing on one small node in the larger web of everything that is possible to be learned and to be creating new threads in that web. We can talk about what it is that we know and how we know it and how it has effects on our life outside of the classroom. We can learn not just things but the questions that we ask to learn those things (23). You as a teacher can use this question posing, open-ended process in a generative way, and that is reflected toward the end of the book in Chapter 12 as the authors are looking at applications of the process. It is here they are humbler themselves than what we saw in the earlier chapter, knowing that there are larger structural limitations in place. One suggestion is to “Listen to your students” (194). Here is a radical idea, emphasizing that you need to be really listening as a psychologist and not just being reactive. This humanizes your students and helps level the playing field, ensuring that you can see your students as humans with their own agency. It is in this chapter that we see the cumulation of the critiques and suggestions in the book and allows everyone to see education as an ongoing process and not some predetermined endpoint (205).

To make it more concrete, I will try to outline the process of  identifying strategies from Postman & Weingartner’s book would I use to implement changes from my experience as a writing instructor. We did not have control over the larger curriculum. The students were supposed to write and revise five papers, three of which were selected to be reviewed by my peers and professors to make sure we all were grading to similar standards. However, we were given a lot of leeway. In this new context, I would work through the process with my students. I would come on the day the unit started, and I would introduce the constraints within which we were working. We would talk about how we would want to respond. One of the interesting things is that it was a writing class so we had to write about something, so we would talk about what it was that was interesting to us at that point. We would then start asking what we think we know about the subject. We would examine why it is that we think we know it. We would ask what it is that we do not yet know, and we would come back and talk about what we learned as we tried to learn more about the topic. From here, we would start shaping our writing, and putting the paper we were assigned to write together. We would shape the arguments and make our claims and respond to objections – objections from our peers and anticipated ones from our assumed audience. By doing this process, we would all end up with a document that met the constraints imposed by the department on me as a teacher and the students in their institutional role. All of us would start out from a place of less knowledge and experience and grow to a place where we had more knowledge and experience. We would learn research without ever having a specific lesson on research and we would learn the rhetorical triangle without ever reading the Poetics. It would not be truly subversive, but taking as much ownership of our collective education is as subversive as possible within existing constraints.