Adventurous Teaching

"Adventurous instruction makes distinctive demands on teachers...It increases the difficulty of academic work for students, partly because the work becomes riskier...Teachers who take this path must work harder, concentrate more, and embrace larger pedagogical responsibilities than if they only assigned text chapters and seat work. They also must have unusual knowledge and skills. They require, for instance, a deep understanding of the material and modes of discourse about it. They must be able to comprehend students; thinking, their interpretations of problems their mistakes, and their puzzles." (David K. Cohen, 1988,"Teaching Practice: Plus Que Ca Change," p. 73-75) Thoughtful responses to reading cannot occur, Cohen says, with worksheets, and subjects should be taught as "fields of inquiry" to be adventurous.

Cohen says other interesting things about adventurous teachers, including how math teachers need to be comfortable with uncertainty in allowing students to have multiple representations. http://ncrtl.msu.edu/http/ipapers/html/pdf/ip883.pdf I would like to share observations of two adventurous high school teachers I have seen recently.

But first, a comment about my previous post. Yesterday I went to the grand opening of a new museum: http://www.mynorth.com/My-North/May-2009/Eyaawing-Museum-amp-Cultural-Center-Opening-Peshawbestown/ We are lucky in Mt. Pleasant to have an award-winning museum: http://www.sagchip.org/ziibiwing/ We often take humanities students, and it gives them a different perspective, a critical perspective about our local tribe, and sometimes it shifts their perspective significantly. In the bookstore, I looked at Louise Erdrich's new book. I have been a fan of Erdrich since the 80's, but I had forgotten that she, like Debra Marquart, was from North Dakota. It struck me that Marquette's story never mentioned American Indians. I am not sure whether it is because she had no contact with them, had not learned anything of significance about them, or something else. Perhaps, they didn't "count" for her, as Jane Tompkins' problematizes about historical sources in her article "'Indians': Textualism, Morality, and the Problem of History." Perhaps, that is overly critical, since Marquart focuses on her German-Russian heritage.

The two adventurous teachers are so different that it strikes me as so interesting. One teacher, I'll call her Beth, has created a curriculum for her students which is based on classic texts. Within one school year, her seniors understand the historical context of literature and how themes connect from the beginnings of literature to the present. Her students read a lot! It is risky; the students are not used to it; there are no computers involved. The other teacher, I'll call her Terri, developed a wiki with her students, after one wiki demonstration in our local Dinner & Dialogue with high school, college, and university English teachers. She admitted that she just jumped into it even with uncertainty. The wiki had hundreds of posts by students; students began voluntarily writing in rhetorically sensitive ways.

How amazing that in this practice of "human improvement" (Cohen, p. 55), where we are dependent on students for our success, teachers can still be so adventurous, and in different ways.

Do you have a story about adventurous teaching?