Designed Distance
My reflection on this positionality coincided with my belated introduction to bell hooks. Of course I had heard of bell hooks, but I had never read any of her work. After her death I started reading Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (Side note: if you've never read bell hooks, start now! She keeps a balance between academic rigour and heartfelt intimacy that makes the writing flow beautifully).
hooks describes her own experiences as an undergrad, and how her emotionally distant professors refused to have anything other than a completely objective student-teacher relationship; "they experienced as a threat any efforts students made to emotionally connect with them". This dehumanized both them and the students, leading to a cold and inhibitive classroom environment. hooks took this clinical distance and turned it on its head in her own practice, arguing that "[t]he loving classroom is one in which students are taught, both by the presence and practice of the teacher, that critical exchange can take place without diminishing anyone’s spirit, that conflict can be resolved constructively." Robin Pendoley, writing in Age of Awareness, also notes the dehumanizing effect of authority on teachers. It causes us to "step into a hierarchy that unnaturally separates [us from our] students"
I try my best to strike a balance in this hierarchy. I'm not an inscrutable obelisk, too purposefully frigid to establish connections; nor am I a sieve, spilling out my every uncensored feeling and laying my soul bare. Conflict will happen - sometimes with me - and we can work together to resolve it constructively. You could argue that this is a form of love; not bulldozering away any potential form of trouble, but equipping students with the skills they need to overcome obstacles in a healthy way.
Yet isn't this what parents do? Aren't we, as teachers, acting in loco parentis and thus surrogate maternal and parental figures? And what is the role of a parent, if not to love their children?
I'm A Parent, But Not Your Parent
As of this writing, my daughter is 18 months old. The emotions I have swirling around her are so strong that they're difficult to describe. There is no way I can feel that way about my students. Now that I'm parent, I cannot fathom being a "parent" to my students, because I cannot love them in the terrifying, all-encompassing way I love my child. Nor should they be subject to that.
hooks touches on this when she addresses complaints her colleagues make about being conscripted into armchair therapy with their youthful charges. She, obviously, agrees that teachers are not therapists, but that "there are times when conscious teaching [...] brings us the insight that we will not be able to have a meaningful experience in the classroom without reading the emotional climate of our students and attending to it."
hooks argues for conscious teaching, not instinctive teaching. To me that hews to the role of professional mentor. I am supportive and empathetic, but I model successful adult living (to the extent that anyone can be considered a "successful" adult), and one part of that model is consciously setting boundaries. Teaching young people to work on that skill is incredibly helpful, but not one that a parent can easily do. Adopting a parenting mind frame would limit my ability to model healthy adult interaction.
The counter-argument here is that the student-teacher dynamic has an inherent power imbalance that mimics that of the parent-child dynamic. The adult has to care for the youth, and not expect any care back. Nel Noddings, pioneer of "care ethics", argues that normally, when two people care for each other, the label of "carer" and "cared-for" switch based on who needs to be cared for - but, says Noddings, not with teachers and students. I'm a big fan of Noddings' work, but I disagree with this point. If we're modelling care, should we not expect students to show that back to us, to some degree? Do we simply expect that because we're teachers we must suffer to save students from themselves?
Jesus Saves; I Teach
If you follow education news, you probably saw the stomach-turning "Dash for Cash" event in Sioux Falls in December of 2021: during intermission at a local hockey game, teachers scrambled on their hands and knees to collect dollar bills in front of a cheering audience. The Washington Post had a fantastic rejoinder imagining the same scenario in other professions.
Why do we treat teachers this way? I think it's because we equate "teacher" with "parent", and from there it's a short walk to "self-sacrifice". Like the mythic cowboy conquering the land with nothing but his trusty steed and iron will, so too must the noble teacher make due with naught but a Staples coupon and pluck; all the more glorious our "salvation" of the students!
Never mind that this assumes students need "saving", which is incredibly problematic. Never mind that it haphazardly covers up the real issue: decades of underfunding and mismanagement, led by neoconservative governments, that have plagued most North American public school systems. My issue is that many teachers think this is how we're supposed to be. Of course we sacrifice, scrimp and save, put our student's successes and lives above our own. That's what a parent would do; society thinks we're parents; thus, we behave accordingly. So much online edu-babble trucks in these hackneyed tropes yet we never stop to do what we teach - critically analyze the message.
Teachers feel put upon, so we work hard to make our students unassailable paragons of success. This justifies all our sacrifices, doesn't it? Leave it to bell hooks to disagree - "if we are only committed to an improvement [...] that we feel leads directly to our individual exploitation or oppression, we not only remain attached to the status quo but act in complicity with it."
Professional Care
In her seminal work Philosophy of Education, Noddings summarizes care ethics as such: "[W]hat I as a carer do for one person may not satisfy another. I take my cues not from a stable principle but from the living other whom I encounter." To me, this means not unequivocally loving all my students - that would be the "stable principle" that Noddings rejects. I treat each student as an individual, with their own specific needs and abilities, and adjust my pedagogy as such. That's not love; that's professionalism.
So to return to Bradshaw's original tweet - can you be a good teacher if you don't love your students? Yes. Absolutely. But perhaps it's worth examining whether our profession's focus on love is of value anymore, or if it's time for a different ethic to underpin our practice.
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Works Cited
Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by W.D. Ross, Baotche Books, Kitchener (1998).
Noddings, Nel. Philosophy of Education. 4th ed. New York: Routledge, 2016
