Critical Perspective on and about Practice-Oriented Education
by Prof. Stephen Brookfield, Distinguished Professor, University of St. Thomas, Minnesota

(Excerpted from address given at POE conference, Northeastern University, April 2001.)

One of the things I always did the first day of class was start off my course with a speech that went as follows: "Hi my name is Steven, please call me by my first name, don't call me Dr. Brookfield or Professor, 'cause I like us to be on a first name terms here. I'd like us as much as possible to be coequals, we're moral coequals with maybe a temporary imbalance in amount of expertise, but we're moral coequals I want to acknowledge that right at the beginning. So please call me by my first name, I'm will call you by your first name."

     "So it's just great to be a teacher, I'm astonished I get paid for this and it's really such a privilege to come here today and learn from all the rich experiences and lives that you bring to this class. You may feel that you really don't have much experience and knowledge in this area because it seems like a new subject, but trust me, you know all about this, you can do a lot in this area it's just that you don't know that you that you know it and my job is to help your realize how much you already know and how much you can already do."

     "Just a couple of things about how I'm going to run this course. Firstly, when you were in high school, probably the thing you were most concerned about was not making a mistake. In my classes I encourage the making of mistakes because mistakes are the things that we really learn the most from. (They are) the richest moments to learn, so when they happen we shouldn't hide them or be ashamed of them, keep them private, we should being them out into the public domain, tell everybody about them, celebrate them as the instructional friends that they really are. That's what you learn from mistakes, you don't learn as much from successes, but a good analysis of a mistake is the most potent something in your something of learning."

     "Just to underscore what I'm talking about, you know I'm a teacher but I make mistakes. In fact in the last three months I've made three basic errors in this area that really help me understand the system of logic and dynamics better and it helps make me a better teacher."

     Then I end by saying "One final thought. It doesn't matter how carefully I plan this course. Sooner or later, something unexpected and unlooked for is going to happen that will throw everything off caliber and when that unexpected event happens, I don't want you all to look to me, to respond to it on my own, because, we as a group of people can bring experience and knowledge to this room are going to draw on our combined experience and knowledge to deal with the problem, so we're going to solve it together."

     So that would be my opening speech so I thank God if everything's good and pathos respectable democratic teacher Carl Rodgers is channeling through me. I was doing work for a book called The Schooling Teacher which came out a while ago. And the premise of the book is that skillfulness is not a set of predetermined consequential behaviors, but skillfulness is an ability to get inside a situation find its internal dynamic and rhythms and then respond to it in an informed way, so the skillful teacher constantly researches their own classrooms. So I decided to do this, I decided to ask as many of my own students as I could what were the best and worst experiences they'd had with me in the last 10 or seven years.

     So I got to my students and I started hearing this very troubling response that "One of the worst things that happens was when we showed up for the first day of class you made a speech to us which made us feel very, very nervous and made us feel psychologically inadequate, but being that, we left knowing you had a history of making mistakes and you're not actually competent. So that first day when I heard you introduce the class and introduce yourself, I was on the verge of getting out of the class, going down to the registrars office, seeing if I could change to another section where I would learn something useful from someone who had something to teach me."

     Well, then I have to reason with several of my offshoots about the role of a self-deprecatory initial stance by an educator as a way to deconstruct power relationships ...and I guess the assumption I was working under was that if I emphasized the experiences of the students and tried to place them on the moral level as me, this would raise their confidence and decrease their anxiety. In fact the opposite was happening, they were being shattered by my obvious lack of basic credibility, and their anxiety had been raised.

     Since that time, when I start a new course, I don't make that speech anymore instead. I try to put myself in the position that my learners are in and see the situation from their point of view and I play the diplomatic game with myself, first day of every new course, which is that as I'm walking to teach the class, I'm not the professor, I'm really the student and the course I'm going to take is not a course in whatever it is I'm teaching, but it's a course on white water rafting, because to me that would be the learning experience that is most threatening...(I'm not a physical person, but my wife has an annoyingly outdoor streak within her personality and is always trying to get me to door outdoor types of things and a couple of times I've been on the verge of joining a class on white water rafting, but as my hand has gone down to the sign-up sheet, which allows a legal phrase abdicating responsibility... there's an invisible barrier above the sheet, so I never have done this. But if I did, what would I want to happen...)

     So I picture the scene; I'm on a plank in Northern Minnesota waiting for our instructor to show up, looking nervously at the raft which is near my, thinking, am I really going to get into this thing bobbing up and down, shouldn't it be static at least here? Then out of the pines, strides our instructor, Sven or Sventlana, and she says, "...Call me Svety. I'd really like us to be on first name terms here, I love teaching white water rafting, I look forward to it so much, it's a real privilege, and you know why it's a privilege? Because as a teacher I learn so much from you. You bring such a rich experience to this classroom, that it's a privilege to get paid for me to be able to access and grow on your experience and knowledge. I know you don't think you can do this, but trust me, you can do white water rafting, you already know all about it. You don't know that you know about it, and my job is to make you realize how much you already know."

     And then she says, "A couple of things before we get into the boat about how I run this class. First of all, mistakes are something we don't hide. When you make a mistake in the raft, bring it to the attention everyone, we'll all learn from it, celebrate along with you, and just to underscore the importance of making mistakes, I've made three standard mistakes in the past month which really helped me to understand being a white water rafting instructor. And then she says one final thing, "you know as a teacher, it doesn't matter how carefully you plan everything, sooner or later, something is going to happen that will throw everything off caliber, when that unexpected event happens, we don't know what it is yet, I don't want you all to look to me, we're all going to pool our experiences, so for example, when we round the bend into the rapids awaiting us there, I want us to form into triads in the raft, here's some waterproof paper, some waterproof markers, and brain storm for thirty seconds on dealing with crisis in out lives and then we'll come back together as a group and determine the best way to get through the rapids together."

     So this is how I prepare for my first day of teaching, I try and play this scenario in my mind and one the most helpful things for my practice of doing this, is that I realize if I did ever find myself in that situation, if Svety told me, "trust me, you can do this, it's good for you, it's within your capabilities", I wouldn't believe her. But I would believe a group of former learners, so if Svety had said, at that first class meeting, listen you can do this, I know you can do it, but I know that at some level you don't think you can, so let me introduce you to someone who I think might convince you that you can do this. And out come three, pathetic, physically inadequate, skinny (people). Out they come and she says, "Here's the three successful graduates of the last three classes I've taught, and I'd just like them to tell you how they felt the first evening and to pass on the best advice that they can to you in terms of the shoes that you now occupy." Those three people told me when they came here that there was no way they could do this, but Svety was a good teacher, "she told us what to do, when to do it and once we got some basic skills, we were encouraged to experiment with different ways of doing this practice, and look at me, I made it." I would believe that, in a way that I wouldn't believe Svety, so, one of the things I do in my classes , particulary if they're required courses where there's a lot of hostility and resentment on the part of the students, is start off with a panel of former resistants, who come in and talk. Each of them have about five minutes to pass on the best piece of advice they can to the new students about how to survive in this course. And while this happens I leave the room, so the first night of class, I actually walk out on the students.

     What I'm interested in is how do we apply that particular perspective on criticality to our on practices as people who work experientially who on practice as much as theory because I think its easier for us to critique practices out there; authoritarian, didactic, one way transmission of information, but it's much harder to look within and adopt to critical practice on our own common familiar practices.

     There are about five or six things which I've seen people in practice based education circles they do often when they are working with students. First of all they like to work in cooperative rather than separated rows. Second, they encourage any kind of discussion on how practices are working out, the greatest diversity, the viewpoints, and alternatives. Thirdly, as students are going through practice, one of the ways that we get to know how their learning practice is by getting them to keep learning journals. So learning journals are a sort of portfolio assessment which are very common. Fourth, we see our role as supportive facilitators and resource persons not all-knowing dispensers of knowledge, but people who are really working to support our students. Fifth we strive for high student evaluations, we believe students should be in control of evaluative data and that students' opinions and judgments should be trusted. We don't view students as individuals who know nothing about teaching. Finally, we strive to be responsive. We try and research the context that we are in and respond to the rhythms that we encounter there.

     It seems to me that these are core practices that we all engage in. But if we look at them critically, and these are all practices that I engage in, so what I am doing is looking at myself. When we look at them critically, we realize that there are many different readings that can be given of them particularly if you take the perspective of criticality as blame and looking for impression, inequity and injustice.

     Let me give an example. One of the things that I did 30 years ago when I started teaching was to come into the classroom and rearrange the chairs. It seemed to me that this was more democratic, respected and participatory. It gave the signal to participants that all views were welcomed and that no one was to be excluded from the circle. My chair was in the circle which I thought in brought forth a message that my authority had no greater integrity or ability than anyone else's in the room. And for many years, I continued this practice of coming in early and rearranging the chairs. It was one of those things that I was really proud of. However, when I showed up to a faculty meeting, seminar, conference, or classroom and saw the chairs arranged in a circle, my heart would fall. Now I'd have to share. I came here to learn, not to share. Then at my next class I would rearrange the chairs in a circle and take pride in my democratic orientation. Then I was able to compartmentalize my experience autobiographically over hear.

     It was when I started reading post-modern influence analysis of how cower flows around a room, that I started to say to myself "O my God, this is what I'm doing to my students." This was a book I read written by Jennifer Gawson. In this book she says that most people in a circle don't experience it as a welcoming inclusive moment but a heightened sense of surveillance. So now I'm in a circle and whatever I say or do will be noticed by my peers and my teacher. If I could just go to Siberia, I would have that protection I need. She also says that the circle sends the message that now speech and participation are mandatory. So you've stripped students of the right to silence or the right to privacy. In classrooms where there is a great deal of hostility or mistrust, the right to silence or privacy is crucial for students to have to allow them the time to come to the point of saying that we really do trust this person and that it is going to be worthwhile to listen and take learning seriously because this person has something important to teach us. So by forcing the students into a circle, you strip them of the right to privacy, silence, and distance which the need in order to make an informed judgment about taking the educational process seriously.

     (Regarding) the diverse view points, I've always felt that what on earth can be wrong with encouraging the greatest diversity of alternative view points and perspectives. This is inherently democratic and respectful and doing it must be - by definition - good. If you read someone like Hubert Mercuser who talks about repressive tolerance... he says that allowing for tolerance of view points can end up repressing the alternative view points you think you're expressing because the view points become so dominated by the mainstream agendas that they're marginalized even when they are talked about in the classroom. So the view points become seen as exotic others, as something you'll flirt with but won't take seriously, however, we can convince ourselves we are doing good democratic inclusive work by allowing the articulation of the view points. We can leave saying "We've done the right thing" and "We're right on" because we have all these different viewpoints and perspectives, but what's happened is the tolerance that you have just exhibited has been repressive because all you've done has been in a strange way to marginalize one view point or another. It's very troubling thing for me to think about in my own practice. Mercuser says we need discriminate tolerance, what we actually need is a full immersion in the alternative perspective not a wide array perspective, only one perspective that students are coerced into - being immersed into - and he argues for pedagogy and justified coercion. Batiste, an adult educator at Penn State, calls it pedagogy disempowerment. He says that there are some perspectives about people that need to be disempowered and the classroom is the place in which this can happen. This is a very provocative thing to think about.

     I've always felt that learning journals were the ultimate way to respect student voices. I've used them for many, many years. But I've realized that in many ways this can be experienced by the students as another altered form of surveillance or oppression. What happens is that the student picks up the message somehow from me that a good learning journal is one that documents the truly transforming moment and a bad learning journal is one which just says "I didn't learn very much" or "It was a ho-hum experience." So a good learning journal when you come back from a practicum or an internship talks about how the scales fell from your eyes and how you went through an incredible transformation and learned so much, and you thank the teacher for setting up the internship. A bad learning journal in the students minds is one is which it says, "Well, I pretty much knew this anyway" or "I didn't really learn very much from it." The student will not write that, I would argue sometimes, that they will concoct spiritually transforming moments in their learning journals. Also, there is a mechanism of priestly absolution that happens in learning journals where students confess sometimes the error of their ways to you in practice and they say "Now having taken your course I realize exactly what I was doing wrong in my practice and I'm so glad that I was able to come you and confess my sins, and that you were able to lay your hands on me and... in this journal and now my sins have been absolved."

     What I would say is that I think when you start taking this critical perspective on practice-based education it does raise a lot of uncomfortable questions. It doesn't mean that you alter any of your practices but I think it means that you take them more critically and have more of a perspective on them. So for example, I use the circle still and I tell students that if they wish to remove their chair from the circle they are free to do that or if they already have by the time I come into the room I don't force them back in there. I make it a point that being in the circle does not mean that you have to speak and that, I won't equate silence with mental disengagement or negligence, that the people who are most frequently silent in any situation, including education, are the people with the least amount of power, so if you speak you could just be flaunting your power, so think before you speak, do you really want me to assume that you are just flaunting your power in front of me? And that really stops students in their tracks sometimes.

     If I'm asking learning journals to be kept, I always keep one myself as I said before. And one of the things that I don't do anymore is that after I set up a small practice-based task I don't go around and check out and offer assistance to the groups as their engaging in a task. After reading several student responses we've said that they see that as increased surveillance by me, exhibiting a basic lack of trust in their ability to carry out the task. They told me that the closer I got to them as I walked around the room, the more they engaged in performance theatre to look like task oriented students, good students, who were doing their assigned task and they dropped whatever they were really engaged in at the time. Which sometimes was a good thing but not always.