A teacher…
…who traces paths in the student’s mind that they can follow towards learning. Some paths are provisory, some consists of a few roadsigns and warnings in a mostly untouched landscape, and some are deeply carved. A vision of the path and suggestions of possible destinations always precede the deeper exploration of each stop along the way.
…who points at what the student would benefit or simply should pay attention to as they develop their mastery.
…who approaches to troubleshoot if the situation seems desperate enough as the learner unsuccessfully attempts to understand or apply the knowledge or skills.
…who makes you fail just enough times, and systematically enough (ie. stumbling in a slightly different manner each time and for different reasons) so you learn the lesson and the specific troubleshooting or mending skill called for by each instance. Who pre-meditately places traps on the way to generate enough failures so that the apprentice experiences the full range and learns core principles for autonomy and self-sustaining exploration.
…who is embodied as a human that experienced and lived in the flesh that which is being learned, meaning that the teacher has experienced associations with other humans and all the unpredictable but endlessly rewarding messiness that derives from these. The teacher shares personal the sacrifices, the joys, the experiences, feelings, anecdotes and opinions about their living with the discipline or subject matter. They do not shirk from conveying the fallible yet skilled, and committed, practitioner that they are.
…who knows how to approach each student and that they all get a fair amount of attention, balancing this active approaching towards to the student to allowing them to take initiative in asking the necessary questions (but never leaving it entirely up to the student, as they might jeopardise the full learning process because they cannot overcome one specific difficulty, albeit an elemental skill)
…who makes it so that the students learn to ask the question that best addresses their difficulties.
…who knows how to balance these aspects to make the learning process as efficient (more results and more output with less time and less input), as accelerated and as incorporated as possible.
- To the point above, that to each individual student, what is learned is incorporated into an entire ecosystem of inner identity, with a lifetime of individual experiences, knowledge, skills, personality, affinities, potentialities and difficulties. Thus, what is learned enters into by entangling itself with this ecosystem, which will hold closer to its core certain aspects while rejecting others or making their introduction to it more challenging.
…who curates information and information sources of many kinds, both institutionally and non-institutionally sanctioned to prevent the student from drowning in the information out there, or thinking that what they find by themselves is the best that can be found. To show them that they haven’t even scratched the surface.
…who points towards the right sources to learn furthe,r or sources that work as examples to follow.
- To the point above, who introduces the student to the subculture (the gossip, the figures, the greats, the established ones, the controversial ones, the intriguing ones, the discussions, the places, the humour).
…who understands the mimetical function of education, and that aspirers need to know figures or archetypes to look up to and incorporate into their being. That they need to develop pride in the discipline by finding admirable figures to emulate and ultimately combine in their own individual way.
There are many ways to define what a teacher is supposed to do.
Even more so today with the incredibly rich but unwieldy proliferation of information technologies that is taking place, and the possibilities that this entails.
Let’s take the word ‘teacher’. Is it too full of connotations nowadays? Too institutionalised? When the word automatically invokes things that are not directly related to the process of education but instead to institutional or other secondary cultural or social concerns, its normalised circulation can begin to push us away from the main goal: to educate in the best way and in the greater general and individual benefit possible.
But then once we begin hunting for alternative terms that already exist, none of them seem to express every aspect of the role. For example, an alternative such as ‘mentor’ implies rather a one-on-one, long-term relation. Mentorship is just a specific type of education which is usually reserved for few people as they are too resource intensive. The situation is similar when considering the other type of mentorship which takes the shape of sporadical counselling from a mentor to a ‘mentoree’ who is already equipped with a high amount of autonomy and only requires course-correction when facing perplexing predicaments.
There is also the word ‘instructor’. Etymologically, it already suggests that the ‘instructor’ is introducing structure in the student’s mind. But within this sense that closely follows the root of the word, there is another interesting possible interpretation: the ‘instructor’ facilitates the generation of a structure relevant to the discipline within the student’s mind.
And subsequently, we could say that what follows from structure is consistency and reliability to mobilise the interlinked elements of that knowledge and incorporated skill structure for applications driven by specific purposes. Isn’t this a part of the instructor/teacher’s function? It would make sense if it did, but it indeed only partially covers what they could do.
The list of alternative words goes on: guide, trainer, tutor, counselor. But the essence always remains unchanged. This is a person that makes sure that their students become better in a specific field/craft/discipline, that they do not waste time in unnecessary obstacles 1, that they do not lose their way for too long, that they feel a part of something and can see its function and purpose, and that they
In fact, could the “teacher’s” [or insert a better word here] role be a negative one? Could the description consist of what they need to prevent the apprentice from doing while she is trying to learn something, so that the learning process is as rewarding and effective as possible?
Questions and angles to approach the topic of education never stop appearing, and they always originate from a balance between timeless aspects of the human condition and contextual concerns such as the technologies available today or in the near future.
Education is one of the most important fields in the world. It is a topic worth visiting, revisiting, formalising, breaking to pieces and reconstructing. And it is endlessly complex.
- Some obstacles are good for learning troubleshooting and autonomy, but they can become frequent enough that they can be seen as symptoms of a wrong learning path incompatible with the student’s identity and temperament. ↩︎
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