Reflection Why Do I Teach? Bruce Saulnier
At the 2002 Lilly Conference on College Teaching I was fortunate to meet Peter Beidler, the Lucy G. Moses Distinguished Professor of English at Lehigh University and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching 1983 U.S. Professor of the Year. As a result of that award, the editors of Alumni Magazine invited him to write a short essay, which they published as “Why Do I Teach?” In Beidler’s essay, he writes about lifelong learning through teaching, innovative teaching methods, and how teaching is rewarded continuously as former students go on to do good and useful things. Yes, teaching does indeed provide us with, as Beidler says, “… many nectars to taste, many books to read, and many ivory and real-world towers to discover. Teaching gives (me) pace and variety and challenge and the opportunity to keep on learning.” Like Peter Beidler, I teach for all of those reasons – but those are not the most important reasons why I teach! A few years ago I met a fellow teacher on-line and we became good cyber-friends. I invited him to attend and make a presentation at the annual meeting of the International Society for Exploring Teaching and Learning (ISETL). Upon meeting him in person, our initial exchange of pleasantries took the usual academic spin. In short order I asked him, “What do you teach?” His answer – “Students!” As one of his musings so eloquently puts it, “If you want to be a teacher, you have to fall in love each day. If you want to be a teacher, you have to put aside your formal theories, intellectual constructs, axioms, statistics, and charts when you reach out to touch that miracle, called the individual human being.” Parker Palmer, in his classic The Courage to Teach (1998), postulates, "If we want to improve the quality of college teaching, a million workshops on methodology will not be enough. Good teaching does not come from technique. It comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher." Indeed, most teachers, most of us, choose our vocation for reasons of the heart. We care deeply about our students and our subjects. But the demands of the professoriate cause too many of us to lose heart. So for Palmer the essential question is how to continue to do what good teachers always do – give heart to their students. In his more recent work, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (2000), Palmer builds on his theme of personal integrity. He urges each of us to find our life's true calling by listen to our inner voice, our inner teacher if you will, and follow its teachings to a sense of meaning and purpose. He posits that "every journey, honestly undertaken, stands a chance of taking us toward the place where our deep gladness meets the world's deep need." Palmer feels that cultivating that truth is the authentic vocation of every human being. So for me the real question is how to be authentic in the classroom and simultaneously reconcile the need to be a scholarly and productive member of the professoriate with my very basic need to connect with my students and my subject. The scholarship of teaching provides me with such a venue, for it allows me to use my chosen vocation as a basis for my scholarship. And the process of studying the scholarship of teaching provides me with the exposure to innovative teaching methods employed by others as well as exposes my own methods to the thoughts and constructive criticism of others. In the process I become a better teacher and in doing so model for my students what it means to engage in and value lifelong learning. Students are the real reasons I teach, students who grow and change in front of my eyes. As Pete Beidler puts it, “Being a teacher is being present at creation, when the clay begins to breathe. Nothing is more exciting than being nearby when the breathing starts.” Good teaching offers love. Not only the love of learning and of books and of ideas, but also “… the love that a teacher feels for that real student who walks into a teacher’s life, begins to breathe, and then walks out.” As Beidler says, “I teach because, being around people who are beginning to breathe, I occasionally find myself, quite magically, catching my breath with them.” |