| Living a Teacher’s Life |
| In this essay, Sumara draws an important distinction between complicated and complex endeavors. He rightly states that teaching is complex rather than merely complicated. While there are important skills that teachers need in order to be successful, there is no “manual” that will guide them through any teaching situation. As pointed out in the essay, schools are the meeting places of the diversity of culture. This is why “the patterns of interactions [in schools] can never be predicted” (p. 2). Sumara states that, because curricular relations are so complex, teachers can only interpret curriculum. There are so many interacting components in a classroom that it is futile to attempt to control or understand the resultant “complex fabric of relations” (2). Sumara goes on to suggest that teachers act as “interpreters” of curriculum rather than as transmitters of already-interpreted messages. What this act of interpretation would entail in terms of practice is not specified. It seems that the task would be an enormously difficult one, judging by its full description: to “work within cultural locations that collect the diversity of culture and, within those locations, work with various overlapping, intersecting, and often competing communities to continually interpret the complex fabric of cultural relations that comprise our lived situations” (2). We may need a manual to grasp what that really means. One clue is what comes later in the same paragraph: “learning means coming to better understand the ever-evolving condition of our “thrown-ness” in the world” (2). Sumara argues that because the world we seek to understand already existed when we were thrown into it, we cannot actually know or understand anything about it; we can only interpret the world. The gap between us and the “complex fabric of cultural relations” cannot be breached, only better understood. Socrates said that the more one understands, the more one realizes one does not understand. Now, understanding is not possible. Sumara does not allow for the possibility that some subjects in school are more readily interpreted than others. Does a chemistry teacher do well to interpret the cultural fabric in the midst of a titration experiment? Should a math teacher remind himself of his “thrown-ness” before introducing his class to linear algebra? I am sure not. Courses such as history or social studies, however, definitely require that the teacher involve more than a few trusted sources of information. A teacher in such a classroom must make it clear how such disciplines are necessarily open to interpretation and even questioning. Sumara does well to draw an analogy between the teacher and the artist. It is true that the teacher, like the artist, must be able to see “what is not readily apparent or present to others” (3). One of the basic acts of the teacher is to bring out what is difficult to see. Another excellent point is that “new knowledge is generated during events of learning” (3). Although Sumara does not explain why or how this happens, in my experience it does. Each time something is learned for the first time, there is a potential for an entirely new construction consisting of that knowledge. The claim that “all forms of schooling and teaching must be understood as forms of cultural study” goes too far (3). Can the learning of mathematical logic and the scientific method be merely cultural study? If so, that sort of learning is not worthwhile: the only value logic and science have to us is the gaining of knowledge. If they are only cultural artifacts they are of little use to the student. A very good point is made later on: that during the interpretive activities occurring in school, “teachers and students will locate things that may be unpopular” (3). Teachers and students must anticipate that not all the knowledge that has been handed down to them will be true and that they do have the ability to find hidden truth. |