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Two Kinds of Teaching
When I think back over the memorable teachers I had or have known, the fact that stands out most is the diversity of their styles. Bill Levi at Roosevelt College would sit cross-legged on the desk, moving nothing during the entire class hour save his lips and his mind. Meanwhile, at nearby University of Chicago, David Greene was a pacer. Fresh from his farm at eight on wintry mornings, manure still clinging to his boots as Greek poured from his mouth, he strode with a vigor that made the advancing wall seem adversary. We felt sure that sooner or later he would slam his face into it, but he never did; invariably in the nick of time he would swirl and bounce off the wall not his head but his behind, thereby gaining momentum for the return journey. Gustav Bergmann, logical positivist at the State University of Iowa, was so authoritarian that when a student dared to question something he had said he thundered, “Let's get one thing straight: from 10:00 to 11:00 A.M. on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, there is but one God, and his name is Bergmann!” His opposite was a teacher so nondirective on principle that students used to say he not only didn't believe anything, he didn't even suspect anything. I had teachers who wrestled with me socratically as evangelists wrestled with the village drunkard, and teachers who simply dished it out—very well indeed!
The surprising thing is that learning occurred in all these contexts. I conclude that there is no one way to teach; in writing here of two ways I write only of ways that have taken shape in me. Who knows who learns and under what conditions? The act remains essentially mysterious, like love, or sex, or life itself; more strange than familiar, less science than art, a word to which I shall return.
METHOD I
During its first 20 years, my teaching followed a single pattern. Questions and discussion were encouraged and were fun, but lectures were the focus.
Today, lecturers are on the defensive. Almost everything we would like students to know we can place in their hands via paperback. They can read faster than they can listen to us, and print is durable; they can go back if they miss something or forget.
All this is true, but the points don't add up to the conclusion that lectures are passé. One of my most memorable learning experiences was a course Thornton Wilder offered, once only, at the University of Chicago. The classroom was in fact an auditorium, and it was invariably packed. If there was a single question or comment from the floor I don't remember it, yet the exhilaration of those hours I shall never forget. I would leave the auditorium walking on air. In those early afternoons of autumn even Chicago was beautiful.
Plays, too, can be read faster than we can sit through an evening at the theater, but reading doesn't take the place of the performance. Moreover, lectures provide the opportunity for trying out ideas while they are in process of formation and are thus part of the teacher's laboratory. The advantage to the listener is that he or she is not presented with a finished treatise but is watching a living mind at work and being given an insight into its strategies.
Just as there is no one way to teach, so, too, there is no one way to lecture. John Dewey's lectures are said to have been rambling and dull—until the student awoke to the fact that he was witness to a powerful mind's direct involvement in the act of thinking. Minds have their own dispositions: some, like Wittgenstein's, are splitters; mine happens to be a lumper. This fact, so apparent that I suspect that it is grounded in my brain structure, makes metaphysical reticence impossible for me. And, as it affects my approach to lecturing in other ways as well, before saying more about lecturing proper I propose to indicate why a wholistic approach to my field is, in my case, the only approach possible.
Gestalt psychology has made its mark, and gestalt therapy is bidding to do so. In this age of analysis, this heyday of analytic philosophy, is there a place for wholistic, gestalt philosophy as well?
If this discipline takes its cues from the sciences, the answer seems clearly “yes.” Gestalt psychology I have already mentioned; psychology abandoned atomism with its discovery that there is no area of experience, perceptual or otherwise, that is free from what positivists used to call noncognitive factors. In biology, the attempts of molecular genetics “to reach the beautiful simplicity of biological principles through concepts derived from experimental systems in which the ordered structure that is the source of this simplicity has been destroyed [are proving to be] increasingly futile,” and physics, in its complete experience, “does not support the precept that all complex systems are explicable in terms of properties observable in their isolated parts [Commoner 1969].”
Turning to philosophy itself, epistemology has found element analysis ineffectual. Whether we approach knowing analytically or phenomenologically, reports agree: there is no datum unpatterned, no figure without ground, no fact without theory. Instead of a one-way process whereby through perceptual archeology irrefrangible primitive elements—Hume's impressions, Russell and Moore's sense data—are first spotted and then built into wholes, knowing (we now see) is polar. Part and whole are in dialogue from the start. No man looks at the world with pristine eyes; he sees it edited, and editorial policy is always forged in the widest field of vision available.
The same holds true for ethics, for doing is vectored by overview as much as knowing is. “Deeper and more fundamental than sexuality, deeper than the craving for social power, deeper even than the desire for possessions, there is a still more generalized and more universal craving in the human make-up. It is the craving for knowledge of the right direction—for orientation [Shelton 1936].”
In playing the game of life-orientation, the first rule is to capture everything in sight, for the elusive might prove to be crucial; if it is and it escapes your net, you may get rich, but you won't win. The second rule is to set what has been captured in order, to array it in pattern or design. Thus the twin principles of gestalt philosophy are: (a) attention to the whole, taking care to see that nothing of importance has been omitted; and (b) attention to the pattern of the whole's parts. Complementing clarity and consistency which are the virtues of analytic philosophy, the virtues of gestalt philosophy are scope and design.
Now back to lecturing. As a gestalt philosopher both these principles of scope and design figure in the way I approach my task. Scope enters to position the topic to be discussed within the panoply of human interests generally. Why among the myriad of things we could talk about during this hour or this semester are we giving time to this? The answer needn't take much time; indeed, no time at all if it is self-evident and acceptable. But it must be evident and acceptable to students, not just to me; that's crucial. Answers which, however evident, are not acceptable to students are: “because the professor happens to be working on a paper of the subject,” “because this is what the instructor was taught in graduate school, so knows most about—read, is most invulnerable with respect to,” “because having avoided math the student needs a course in philosophy to graduate,” or “because it will help those who intend to continue in philosophy to get into graduate school.”
Once the topic has been positioned in the sense of linked to an acknowledged human interest or need, the elements bearing on the topic must be positioned. Enter pattern or design.
Paintings begin with a discovery, a new and exhilarating perception. Immediately the painter faces enormous difficulties; he must force shapes and static colors to embody what he has felt and seen. The lecturer's task is analogous. He, too, must fix, articulate, and objectify what on first discovery was nebulous, fluid, and private. How, within the artifice of a class hour, can he make a subtle aspect of life or being evident? Every sentence calls for knowledge of his materials and their limitations and an unswerving eye on the effect intended. It is an old problem: how anything of the real can pass the gap between intuition and expression. The passage can be effected only by translation, not from one language into another, but from one mode of being into another, from reception into creation. Everything at the instructor's disposal—facts, concepts, anecdotes, analogies, arguments, humor—must work to enforce the intended impression to the end that at the hour's close the student feels, “that's true and important, or at least interesting.” It's no good if he stops with “that's true.” As Whitehead noted, “It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. The importance of truth is that it adds to interest.” As irrelevancies deaden the effect, omission is of the essence.
What constitutes a masterpiece here, or (to drop hyperbole) at least an authentic work of art? When a person for whom the topic in question is vital, who as a consequence has lived with it and pondered it, summons everything he or she has discerned on the problem, distills it, compresses it, pounds it into a form that makes sense! Thoughts emerge, not in mere succession, but architecturally, in meaningful pattern—possibly, in addition, they emerge as incarnated in a life that is being lived, his or her own. That's what sent me walking out of Mandel Hall on air those Chicago afternoons. And that, now that I think of it, is the way subliminally I have sensed myself as a lecturer: traveller, pilgrim, archeologist of space and time, trying with the help of a parcel here and a fragment there to piece together the largest possible meaning for life and the world. Such meaning, though it is intelligible, exceeds the merely rational. Or if one prefers, is the highest category of the rational.
In characterizing lecturing as art, my model has been the painter rather than the actor. Not that lectures can't be dramatic performances too; they can be, as the adage that every good teacher is part ham attests. But the comparison means little to me—again, the variety in teaching styles. Writing is as different from speaking as reading is from listening, but the feelings that infuse me while writing and lecturing are much the same. Attention is fixed on content; issues of delivery and audience contact work themselves out unconsciously.
METHOD II
It will be apparent from what I have said that I haven't lost faith in the mix of lecture and discussion that is higher education's abiding rubric. I continue to teach one course each term by this format; it involves me and, given the averages, students show symptoms of satisfaction. But there has been a change. For the last eight years I have also taught a course by almost opposite canons.
This second course roots back to the summer of 1965, when I was invited to Bethel, Maine, to observe for two weeks the work of the National Training Laboratories with small groups: T- (for Training) groups, encounter groups, or human interaction laboratories as they have come to be called. By pleasant coincidence, I was to bring back from Bethel what Bethel had originally drawn from my own home base, for it was from Kurt Lewin's pioneering work at M.I.T. that the National Training Laboratories evolved. Something happened to me at Bethel, but it is also the case that I was ready for it to happen. It wasn't that I had grown disillusioned with higher education, but the question of whether it might not be better had become insistent. For however one assessed its virtues, university learning struck me—and still strikes me—as:
1. Insufficiently experimental. It scans less than does industry for improved ways of doing things.
2. Too authoritarian. Persons aged 17 to 25 years would at other times have been launched in the world. Here they continue to be subjected overwhelmingly to directives that flow down to them instead of rising from their own volitions.
3. Too passive in the role in which it places students. On this point clear proof is at hand. Take a word count in almost any class: who talks most, even in discussion classes and seminars? As learning requires doing, the arrangement is ideal for teachers, but one hears that it's the students who pay tuition.
4. Too detached from students’ on-going lives, their hopes and involvements, the points where their psychic energy is most invested. It is as if the curriculum's cerebral thrust connects with the top 6 inches of the student's frame while leaving the other 60 inches idling. “It is by living, by dying, by being damned that one becomes a theologian,” Luther advises us, “not by understanding, reading, and speculating.” Or perhaps by both? What is clear is that academic reading, speculating, and understanding is joined very little to students’ living, dying, and damnation. The most substantial recent study of American education, Charles Silberman's (1970) Crisis in the Classroom, concludes that reformers and innovators have an obligation to lobby for more emphasis on the education of feelings and the imagination and for a slow-down in cognitive rat-racing.
5. Too impersonal. Colleges used to be communities. Universities have in our time become almost the opposite: huge anticommunities like virtually every other institution in our mass, mobile, agglomerate society where rules and regulations take precedence over persons and seasoned relationships.
What encounter groups showed me first and above all else was a way to generate involvement. I hadn't been at Bethel 48 hours before my entire life seemed to sink or swim in terms of my group—my 15 strangers, none of whom I had laid eyes on two days before nor was I likely to see again 10 days thereafter. Swiftly, almost instantly, the criss-cross of human interactions—words, feelings, glances, gestures—had enmeshed me. Thought was emphatically involved, for apart from the therapeutic hour each afternoon when I deliberately turned my mind off and flung myself into the blissfully uncritical arms of impersonal nature (a lake), every waking moment was given to trying to make sense of what was happening. But not thought only; perception, too, as I tried to see what was transpiring in nuances of gesture, tone, and silence, and to feel what was happening in me at subliminal levels. My will, too, was engaged as I wrestled with whether to speak, risk, act.
New possibilities demanded consideration. How, precisely, encounter groups might ameliorate education's weaknesses, I had no idea; but it was inconceivable to me that, operating powerfully in precisely the areas of those weaknesses, they would have nothing to offer. For encounter groups are:
1. Experimental. This remains the case even though they have been with us in various forms since World War II. The extent to which they have caught on suggests that they tend to be useful, but they are no panacea. Their utility is neither unvarying nor established by objective criteria.
2. Nonauthoritarian. It is part of their definition that leaders leave them largely unstructured, let them develop in their own ways, and use whatever transpires for leaving vehicles. Part of the fascination of such groups derives from seeing what does develop when 8 to 16 lives are closeted for appreciable time while deprived of task, agenda, and assigned hierarchy.
3. Activating. Where nothing happens save by the group's initiative, boredom, or anxiety, the will to power and the will to play see to it that initiative is taken.
4. Involving.
5. Personal. Attention is focused on the here and now, and in encounter groups, this means people. Again, remove tasks, to which lives tend to get subordinated, and lives change from means to ends.
I shall not try here to say what encounter groups are. Let me say only that since 1965, half of my pedagogical interest has been devoted to trying to discern the potential for higher education latent in what Rogers himself considers this “most rapidly spreading social invention of the century, and probably the most potent.” To the end of augmenting my understanding of group processes, and effectiveness in facilitating them, I have participated in training programs conducted by the National Training Laboratory, Tavistock Institute, and the Washington School of Psychiatry; and have led seminars and workshops each summer at Esalen Institute and other growth centers. To explore their relevance for formal education, I have in each of the past 12 semesters taught courses ranging in subject matter from “Introduction to Philosophy” to “Philosophical Anthropology” which combine encounter techniques with cognitive learning. Students are apprised of the intended mix during preregistration screening interviews; registration is closed at 16 students; and a balance of men and women is desirable. The course opens with an encounter weekend, which means that we spend 13 hours together before we open a book. My object is to get the Waring Blender of human interaction churning, then feed into it eye-dropper drips of cognitive content. After the opening weekend the class meets for a three-hour stretch each week. Typically, the first hour goes to student-directed discussion of the week's reading assignment; the second hour is mine to either lecture or continue the first hour's discussion under my direction; and the third hour continues the weekend encounter group. In mid-semester, we have a second weekend encounter, if possible off-campus and out of the city. When I can secure budget or prevail upon the good offices of my wife who works professionally with groups, I have an outside trainer conduct the weekends. This helps to reduce student-teacher distance and to get authority issues more openly onto the floor.
How has it gone? Roughly 85% of the 160 students who have been in these courses report on anonymous, postcourse checksheets that they were glad we used this approach and would recommend that it be continued. They report that compared with other humanities courses they enjoyed it more, were more interested in it, and learned more from it. I have no illusion that these statistics are clean, particularly the last one. If one esteems not only “learning that” but also “learning how” (i.e., learning how effectively to occupy a place in life as contrasted with merely knowing about life), Kierkegaard's truth as subjective transformation of oneself, and education as “the curriculum one had to run through in order to catch up with oneself,” even the last statistic could be valid. I doubt, however, that students have acquired as much cerebral knowledge of subject matter in these courses as they do in others. Encounter aspects of the courses seem to fill such a vacuum in students’ lives and become thereby so seductive that I find I must constantly throw the weight of my office on the side of cognitive learning to keep the course from developing into encounter group only. Being unsettled in my mind as to how cognitive learning does fare in such courses, I do not recommend casting all education in their mold. I should think it might be ideal for each university undergraduate to carry one encounter course each term, but not more. As a side benefit, a college that instituted the policy of having them do so might, I suspect, find itself reducing its psychiatric and counselling staff appreciably.
With regard to the specifics of ways in which I have tried to link group process to cognitive learning, I would happily say nothing, for I am far from satisfied with my formulae and keep devising new ones constantly. But this is the nub of the matter, so lest my statement on T-group teaching, or peer-group learning as it might better be called, end up looking like a Taoist composition around the void, I list some samples of things I have tried.
1. Have students pair with partners they know least, look into one another's eyes for two minutes without speaking, then express nonverbally how they feel toward each other. For their next reading assign Martin Buber's (1970) I and Thou. Did the pairing exercise illumine experimentally what Buber means by an I-Thou relation?
2. Ask students to take 10 minutes to recall and write down their earliest childhood memory. Place the statements in the middle of the circle. Ask a student to select and read one of the statements at random. Can the group guess who wrote it? Does the discussion corroborate ontogenetic emphasis on the formative influence of early experiences as argued, say, in Erik Erikson's (1964) Childhood and Society?
3. Read Konrad Lorenz's (1966) On Aggression. Do its theses shed light on the competition and hostility that have come to light within the group's own experience?
4. Read Nietzsche's (1968) Will to Power. How much of the group's life—most obviously the struggles for leadership within it, but not these only—supports its central thesis?
5. The greatest anxiety I, personally, have felt in a group setting was in the initial meeting of 65 persons who were closeted for two and one-half hours with no agenda whatever. Watching every attempt to structure that chaos come to naught was an unnerving experience, but it was insightful too, for it showed me directly the way formlessness without produces formlessness within. Not knowing my place in the group, I didn't know where I stood in any context: who I was, how I should act, anything. Compare Heidegger's (1962) notion of angst in Being and Time as symptom of the collapse of “the worldhood of the world”; also Harry Stack-Sullivan's (1950) famous essay on “The Illusion of Personal Individuality.”
6. Read the first essay in Leonard Nelson's (1949) Socratic Method and Critical Philosophy, and ask if the goal of encounter education is to complete Nelson's approach to philosophy with two emendations: the Socratic method becomes the group Socratic method with the total group replacing a single individual as midwife, and feelings as well as thoughts are intentionally brought into the picture.
7. A “low” tends to settle in on groups the last few sessions before they terminate. The impending death of the group seems to awaken presentiments of individual, personal death. The experience provides concrete, shareable data relating to Heidegger's notion of being-unto-death as a criterion of authentic living.
I stress that I have not listed these projects in order to recommend them to others. I cite them only as instances of the kinds of bridges that can be thrown from group experience to cognitive learning. It appears to be of the essence of encounter teaching that no canned rubric will work for long. I wish I could report that I feel like a veteran architect of bridges of the kind described, but the fact is the opposite. I have come to suspect that how and where to throw such bridges will be my pedagogical koan (Zen meditational problem resolvable in life only, not in words or formulae) till I retire.
If I have neither solved the problem of relating group process to cognitive learning nor believe that it admits of standardized solutions, why do I make of it more than a marginal issue? Others who have ventured into these waters and stayed long enough to ask questions will probably answer as I do. A new panorama has opened before me. With it has come every variety of self-doubt, fear, and suspicion: Am I simply giving students what they like, afraid to demand of them hard work and drudgery; am I playing group therapist; am I merely hungry for intimacy? But in the end I have been forced to listen to a new claim. Let me articulate that claim. We need wisdom. To this end we need knowledge, but knowledge that is established in life—that connects with feelings, illumines choices, and is in touch with wills. Such knowledge today's academy is not structured to elicit.
