“The Poetics of Mentoring: Teachers Teaching Teachers”Word
File (59k) Ancient Wisdom, Computers and Imagination Once upon a time the telling of stories was the only real way of teaching and learning. Stories told by respected, experienced, wizened and wise members of the tribe or people were the bearers of the values, experience and vision that shaped the expectations and imaginations of the listeners who were in the ritualized process of learning how to best live. The stories were tacitly understood to be “true” in the sense that they expressed and explained the meaning of the story-tellers experience and understanding. The process of the story telling was more than informational teaching, it was the formation of the abilities of the people to fulfill their responsibilities well and a transformation of their hearts by disclosing to them that they were not alone in their lives and work, that they belonged to a whole and that they had a living role to play. As Muriel Rukeyser said, “the cosmos is composed not primarily of atoms, but of stories.” Who were those story-tellers, those teachers of experience and wisdom, those guides through the difficulties of knowing and fulfilling one’s role and work? Who were those tellers of visions who wanted to stimulate the growth of visions in their listeners because they knew “without a vision, the people perish”? They were and they are mentors. Mentors are those individuals who are willing to be open and available and to be a living challenge and encouragement to others mainly through their willingness to tell the stories of their experience and help others realize that they are creating their own stories. Applied to contemporary education, especially the education of teachers, it means that mentors know that “without a vision the teacher perishes” along with the students and the learning process. One origin for the word “mentor” comes from Homer’s Odyssey where
Mentor was the teacher of Odysseus’ son, Telemachus. At What
is a Mentor?
http://apollo.gse.uci.edu/MentorTeacher/Chapter1.html The Information and Cyber Age has been so rapid in its rise and so enormous in its influence, that it is affecting the very way we perceive, think and express ourselves. Teachers seem to have the task of teaching students more and more within the same ancient length of a day. Everyone is so busy there is no time for anything or any something. It is a high-pitched and high curved trajectory of duties and responsibilities for any teacher, new or old. But for the new teacher, it can push one’s conscious mind into overload and one’s unconscious into rebellion. T.S. Eliot wrote in the 1930s, “Where is the wisdom we have lost in
knowledge, / Where is the knowledge we have lost in information.” When
teachers are trained the way a technician or a statistician is trained,
all becomes information and technique and in the process there is no time,
energy or even awareness left for a deepening of understanding, let alone
a possible growth in wisdom, for either teachers or their students. And
without central value given to understanding and wisdom, what and why
do we teach? Why teach teachers to be teachers? Imagination. The 19th century English poet, William Wordsworth, said that imagination is the highest aspect of human reason. Imagination is the key to not only teaching and learning, but to enjoying teaching and learning for teachers and students. Imagination is the seed for curiosity, for developing or re-membering a love of learning and for realizing that in education, teaching and learning everyone is a beginner, only some are more beginners than others. The stories told by the guides and mentors enhance and enliven the imagination of the others and serve to deeper the mentor’s own imaginative ways of reinterpreting her or his own experience and work. The Learned, the Learners, Mentors & Mentees in a “Culture of Mentoring” The philosopher, Eric Hoffer said that In a time of drastic change it is the learners who survive; the “learned” find themselves fully equipped to live in a world that no longer exists. With so many “experts” today, including in education, one would think the quality of education would be on an ever-ascending curve, but many would say it is otherwise. Perhaps the problem with “experts” is that they come to think of themselves as “experts” and stop telling new teachers their stories and stop listening to the stories of the new teachers. When new teachers do not have the experience of being respected and trusted enough to be given the opportunity of having the unique relationship between mentor and mentee, those new teachers may have all the information about teaching needed, but not its spirit, not its living face. Thus, those new teachers may feel isolated and left to their own devices to see what theories and practices learned in school might actually benefit students and help them become learners. The mentorial relationship creates in the new teacher a sense of being taken seriously and valued for who she or he is at that very moment… the exact experience that a good teacher would hope to create for students. The National Center for Research on Teacher Learning (NCRTL)
in the United States advocates the mentoring of new teachers, not only
to avoid beginning teachers being and feeling “thrown” into the classroom
alone and isolated from the input of experienced teachers, but also as
“a way of promoting new approaches to teaching and learning and new forms
of teacher collaboration” In such a “culture of mentoring,” whether in person, or possible even by telementoring, teaching and learning can be re-envisioned as a sui generis and spiritual, deeply human ritual of living. Mentoring can recall the experienced teacher’s own first years of teaching and what can be learned in an interpretive remembering of one’s own difficulties and how one learned to be a teacher. This kind of autobiographical recollection can be a foundation for relating to what new teachers are now experiencing and how best to help them. Teachers who willingly and enthusiastically and knowledgeably mentor new teachers can recapture, recapitulate and renew their own lives of learning, which is good, since only learners can actually help / mentor others learn. A “culture of mentoring” would remind older and newer teachers that learning and teaching are not purely individualistic, isolationist events, but collaborative processes that call for risk, responsibility, initiative, imagination a love of learning. A human being and the human mind and how humans learn have sometimes been reduced a some impersonal component by making them analogous to a computer, or an information processing system, or nothing more than a pattern of behavior. However, they are much more than that and mentoring has the potential to place in immediate relief that human teaching and learning are psychological and spiritual processes, not only a matter of quantity of information and techniques of delivery. As a way of reclaiming the intrinsic, not only instrumental, value of teaching and learning, in its 1996 report, What Matters Most: Teaching for America’s Future, the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future “recommended restructuring the first years of teaching to resemble a medical residency, where new teachers could be mentored by experienced practitioners” (a summary and the full report is available at http://www.tc.columbia.edu/~teachcomm/what.htm). This kind of mentors – mentees community would probably be a very different experience for the mentees than how most of the mentors experienced their own early years of teaching. A mentor does not have to have answers to all the mentee’s questions for as the Tao Te Ching says, “No one is as wrong as the person who has all the answers.” The mentor contributes to a culture or community of mentoring and to a teaching residency by both her or his knowledge and experience of teaching, but also by doing what is also found in the Tao Te Ching: “I have just three things to teach: simplicity, patience, compassion.” Let me use James Rowley’s The
Good Mentor http://www.ascd.org/readingroom/edlead/9905/rowley.html
Simply put, the good mentor is able to both guide the beginning teacher and be a model of learning for that teacher, conveying in very human and personal ways that everyone is in this process of teaching and learning together, that it is a continuously developmental process for all involved from teachers to students, that in the act and art of teaching we are all beginners, but that some are more beginners that others. Thus, mentors are as artists who don’t sign their work because they don’t own it and the work itself (the mentee’s becoming a good teacher) requires the mentor to allow the mentee the freedom to grow into being a mentor herself or himself someday. Ultimately, what mentoring can do is to enable the teacher to be a model of learning to the students so that they themselves can become “learners.” And when students are transformed and transform themselves into genuine learners, they can begin to mentor each other and the class can be enlivened by a “culture of peer mentoring.” Evaporating Ego, the Mentoring Spirit and Learning to Learn Mentoring new teachers gives a personal face, scars and all, to being a teacher and to being a teacher-for-students. Good mentors take the risk and wisdom to allow their limitations and unknowing about teaching to show. Experts do not make good mentors because “experts” are far too expert for a novice teacher to relate to and collaborate with in finding ways to grow into being a good teacher. The evaporation of the mentor’s ego (a process like learning itself) lets the mentor be free enough to not try to control the mentee or to conform the mentee into the mentor’s own image. It also allows the mentor to be as much a learner as the mentee and thereby model, for the mentee, that teaching and learning are professional activities, but are also deeply spiritual human activities for a lifetime. Such a mentor can give away her or his wisdom in a non-judgmental way and can give the mentee the trust and the responsibility to develop, perhaps in ways different from the mentor’s path. Mentoring new teachers touches upon learning as relational, collaborative, active, ethical, personal, a developmental process requiring guidance, encouragement and critique, and as an integration of the academic and the personal. Another model for a mentor can be taken from religious traditions around the world and throughout history: the role of the guide through the spiritual geographies. Those guides of the spiritual wisdom knew that much was at stake in seeking to pass on a living experience to a new generation. The vision was at stake in the stories the guides would tell, stories of the guides’ own experiences and visions. And that returns us to stories as central to mentoring new teachers. It has been said that “the universe is made up of stories, not of atoms” (Muriel Rukeyser) and the heart of mentoring is the mentor’s stories of her or his learning to become a teacher, failures and all. A good story demands it. The mentoring spirit focuses upon the present in the midst of incorporating wisdom learned from the past and imagining memories of the future. The spirit of the mentor can be a manifested epitome of a love of learning and of teaching for the mentee. It really is, along with all the educational theories and practices, a matter of love and spirit. Centuries ago Pascal said “Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we can not know it.” If one does not love learning and teaching, can one really learn or teach? Can one really be a mentor? But when the love and spirit are present, the mentor can speak her or his story to the mentee, a word of wizened wisdom and the mystery of life and learning. And perhaps that can make a world of difference for as a Russian proverb says, “One word of truth outweighs the whole world.” Mentors, mentees and students become a circle of learning to learn and learning to love to learn.
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