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  teaching for educational excellence
gary e. davis
February 7, 2019
 
 
Teaching is a Janus-faced practice of being hermeneutical (albeit unwittingly, relative to material [to be] tailored for curriculum) and enablative in student-centered “mutuality” (an asymmetrical fiction on the way to becoming truly partners in learning, even colleagues).

That is not basically instructional (though too many “teachers” haven’t—or can’t—realize that). The already self-directed learner may not be bored by instruction, but most learners want to see a good show of loving to learn by exemplification of the learning process with genuine enjoyment. Teaching mentors the learning process by example.

A student will not love new kinds of inquiry if the teacher does not. One will
not become a self-directed learner without seeing how self-directed learning enjoyably works. Teaching is a dramatic art. Any master teacher would agree.

Students want evincing, fostering, and sustaining of enthusiasm for a course,
the pathway, at each session. Learning is pathmaking, of course.

But the point isn’t masterful entertainment! It’s their potential for making a high quality of life that matters, for which a course is a passing element, yet for inspir-
ing futurity in light of “our” time together. Teaching loves the mystery of the other’s emerging talent, understanding, and efficacy, which a rigorous show of teaching effects.

Patience in interaction without loss of enjoyment is important to the scenic experience of the student—also for colleagues, constituents, clients (counseling, business), admirers, and children.

Invisible as the difference between self and interpersonal time is in improvisa-
tional acting, the difference—selfidentity/interpersonal relations—is, in principle, a way of the world, even normal (genuine, trustworthy), for protracted and effi-
cacious action. Even as “I’m truly with you,” truly with you, days are made
by authorship in the theaters of a life.

 

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  Be fair. © 2019, gary e. davis