Thursday, June 21, 2007 8:37 PM
by
jtspencer
the upside of studying "isms"
It is not uncommon to meet a psych student who has lost touch with human relationships, viewing each conversation, not as a chance to be with a person, but as a time to study and analyze and apply theory. Similarly, I have met people who go off to seminary and lose touch with what it means to love God and people. Instead, they fill themselves up with Ariminianism and Calvanism and they expound upon the details of Lordship theology or Liberation theology or the hypostatic union of the theanthropic person of Christ.
For teachers, this can happen as well. I watch it every year (okay, I've only finished three years) as rookies sit in the staff lounge and talk about constructivism or rubrics or the latest educational fad. After a few months, they almost all say, "Everything I learned in college was a waste of time," or something nearly as cynical. It makes me wonder, at first, whether or not we need all the isms. It turns into a sort of educational fundamentalism with silly in-fighting that is about as useful as the middle-age arguments of how many angels fit on the head of a needle. It seems that behaviorism and constructivism become ideologies for grad students to use in research papers while the vast majority of quality teachers find what works and almost intuitively feel their way through the profession. I begin to think that the answer is for a person to articulate a philosophy of education stripped of the jargon and the isms.
Yet, I think there is a benefit to the academic study of theory. We need to know why people learn, how they learn best, what it means to be human and what pedagogical practices fit best within our philosophical framework. True, it's a jungle and someone can get dangerously lost. However, there is a sense in which all of that theory has a mysterious effect on what we believe. I can't always articulate it, but I know that I benefited from my childhood development classes. The academic atmosphere was a process where I synthesized so many theories, analyzed what I believed and challenged my own presuppositions that I ended up with a few core convictions about teaching and learning.
It would have been easier to skip the theory and find some useful practical advice. I probably would have a few strong convictions and I might have done well as a teacher. Yet, there is something to be said about going through that jungle and arriving at the mystery of education rather than accepting the mystery in a naive shallowness.