The local
coffee shop is covered in abstract art depicting nude, Caucasian female bodies
in suggestive positions. Full-grown adults order their lattes and vegan scones
and, while waiting for their goodies, stare at the paintings and giggle like
schoolchildren. I sit in a booth beneath one of the fleshy paint globs and
grade papers and think about the nature of writing. A wiry, salt and
pepper-haired woman in designer glasses approaches the art display and takes in
each piece with a look of awe and puzzlement. She finds the work a flowing
homage to human reproduction (probably), and enjoys the way the artist has
rendered her subjects both hyper-flexible and ambidextrous. She stares at the
peach swirls of entering and takes deep, audible breaths. She is a picture
herself, of artistic appreciation and hard-thinking. I sip my breakfast tea and remember how happy
and confused she looked when I raised my hand in her small, stuffy classroom
one seemingly long-ago autumn.
The woman,
of course, was my Teaching Elementary School Art instructor from a failed
undergraduate education degree life I don’t really like to talk about these
days (for fear that the anger I hold towards the current American public
education system might boil up from my belly and burn my tongue.) Her course
was fantastic: twice a week a handful of potential grade school teachers met in
the basement of the university art building and learned how to bring the joys
of the visual and plastic arts to kindergarten through sixth grade students. We
finger-painted, we sculpted zoo animals out of papier-mâché, we burnt clay pots
in the university’s outdated kiln. Our instructor was a neo-Midwestern-hippie
who hadn’t succeeded in her attempt to write the next great American novel and
had instead decided to try her hand at educating future educators. She was kind
and energetic and loved to help us discover the creative selves that hid beneath
the surface of our wannabe “professional teacher” veneers. In short, she was the
delight of the education department and one of the only reasons I didn’t have a
nervous breakdown in the fall of 2007.
After
dropping out of the education program and switching to English (because a
teacher had praised my limericks in fourth grade), I loathed seeing my old
education professors. For the most part, they were by-the-book, stalwart
pedagogues from the American educational old-school. They looked down on
innovative teaching techniques and told drawn-out stories in class about the
“good ol’ days,” when they could spank mischievous pupils with thick wooden
paddles and not worry about jeopardizing their tenure. I struggled in these
professor’s courses because they refused to listen to any of my progressive
ideas about education (almost all of which were most likely a combination of idealistic,
naïve, or impossible-to-execute silly-babble), and I refused to believe that
their archaic classroom knowledge (some hadn’t had classroom experience in nearly
twenty years) had anything to do with contemporary education. My struggles led
to below satisfactory grades until I eventually had to leave the program, not
truly knowing if I was a “bad” teacher (do bad grades in poorly facilitated
courses actually equal a double negative of academic promise?) For a time I
thought my leaving the education department meant the backwards instructors had
won, and when seeing them on campus, they often gave me smug, almost pitiful,
smiles that I took to mean, “you just couldn’t handle the way things are always
going to be when it comes to teaching.”
Several semesters
into the English program, I saw my art teacher walking across the quad,
stopping ever twenty or thirty paces to look at a tree or a squirrel eating
acorns on top of a university garbage can. She noticed me as I walked by and
smiled and stopped to chat. I asked her how she was doing and she gave a misty
answer about trying to find meaning in the small things of life or something of
that nature. She asked me how I was doing and I had to admit that I had dropped
out of the education program and was pursuing a degree in writing instead.
Surprisingly, her face lit up when she heard I was no longer working towards a
life as a grade school teacher. Her hands when to her rosy wrinkled cheeks and
she said, “Oh thank goodness, you would’ve made a terrible teacher! While we
[the education faculty] were trying to teach young people about how to best
convey material to their students, all you cared about was politics. I remember
when you were in my class, I would be talking about how to teach students to
paint and all you would talk about was, ‘What does the painting process
actually mean?’ and ‘Why should we encourage children to paint?’ and ‘Why
should we teach in the first place?’ You were only interested in the politics
of it all!”
I was shocked by her comments (I didn’t know I
was so outwardly vocal as an undergraduate), but also felt strangely comforted
by her observation. As she so keenly perceived, the reason I struggled in the
education program wasn’t, as I had previously and erroneously thought, because
I was a bad or inept student. It wasn’t even really because the instructors I
had were bad teachers (although, to this day, I still find some of their ideas
about education to be misguided and potentially damaging to student
development.) I was a poor future-teacher candidate because what I care(d)
about when it comes to education is at odds with what many education students
and faculty in America care about when it comes to education.
But, upon
seeing my old art instructor at the coffee shop (inquisitive eyes and bright
smile still intact), I am reminded of her comment about how I wasn’t a
successful education student because I was “only interested in the politics” of
teaching and learning. What I took as an attempt to encourage me when it was
originally said (“it’s not that you or education are flawed individually, it’s
that you don’t make a good match for each other because you have different, and
opposing, values”), I now, after having taught college-level writing for the
past three semesters, find troubling. What does it mean to “be interested in
the politics” of education, and why, in the case of my undergraduate education
instructors, is this interest necessarily considered a bad thing? Why is it
frowned upon to ask the big questions of “Why does learning matter?” and “How
should what we teach students affect them as human beings?”
Now, after
five more years of pedagogy instruction and practice, I find myself at a
different place in my understanding of education than when I took my
instructor’s Elementary Art Education course back in 2007. Where in the past I
might have answered the question, “Why are you so interested in the politics of
education?” with a confused smile and nod, I would now respond to the question
with the question, “On what level are teaching and learning not overtly
political acts?” Furthermore, I would note that it seems troubling not to consider the political
ramifications of the educational process, for, at each phase of said process,
value, meaning, and power claims are being asserted and exchanged. To ignore
these assertions and their consequences is not only academically and
politically irresponsible, but potentially harmful to the way we think about
education and its value in our globalized human community.
While I
would like to approach my old instructor and inform her of my intellectual and
pedagogical growth, she looks too happy observing the nude female bodies in all
their twisted eroticism. And why would I want to bother her with something as
disconcerting as personal empowerment in her moment of private aesthetic
pleasure? I already know how troubling it can be to some teachers to combine the
discourses of art, education, and politics.
