Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository
Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository
Willingness to work for ends by means of acts not naturally attractive is best attained by securing such an appreciation of the value of the end that a sense of its value is transferred to its means of accomplishment. Not interesting in themselves, they borrow interest from the result with which they are associated. (218) This “value” is “conjoint free mental play and thoughtfulness” (219) - the marriage of “pure interest in truth” and the “love of the free play of thought” - which is so natural to children but is often lost upon maturity because of the pressure of “social conditions.” For Dewey, it is the work of the teacher to stimulate his or her students to pursue such “value” in those “materials and occupations” put before them. To do this, to stimulate the “enrichment of the present for its own sake [which] is the just heritage of childhood and the best insurer of future growth” (219), is to stimulate wonder, that thing I sought out in my own writing when I too was a child and then, years later, when I began working to become a teacher of writing. And now that I have explored those portraits of the dialectical opposition of Uncertainty and Certainty as offered, whether explicitly or implicitly, through the educational philosophy of John Dewey and the research study of William Perry, I would now turn to me: my very own attempts to realize this theoretical purpose and the “potential” and “promise” therein in the writing classes I have taught over the years. I 172
would say a few things about my pedagogy before explaining, with as much detail as I can offer, how I have tried to translate that dialectic into practice. Towards the end of Embracing Contraries, Peter Elbow had this to say about the raison d’etre of his “cooking”: Searching for contradiction and affirming both sides can allow you to find both the limitations of the system in which you are working and a way to break out of it. If you find contradictions and try too quickly to get rid of them, you are only neatening up, even straightening, the system you are in. To actually get beyond that system you need to find the deepest contradictions and, instead of trying to reconcile them, heighten them by affirming both sides. And if you can nurture the contradictions cleverly enough, you can be led to a new system with a wider frame of reference, one that includes the two new elements which were felt as contradictory in the old frame of reference. (241, emphasis mine) If my philosophy of teaching were to have some defining epigraph, some words that distilled the primordial essence of what I thought about the “How?” and the “Why?” of teaching, it would be these. Elbow does indeed summarize my teaching philosophy very well, very well better than I could do myself. For me, thinking and learning – and writing – rises from out of the wreckage of the disturbing head-on collision of those “deepest contradictions.” And teaching is provoking and inciting – catalyzing – those collisions. “Nurtur[ing]” those collisions, within the student but also within yourself, as a teacher. Between freedom and constraint. Between exploration and scrutiny. Between the “personal” and the “social.” Between hope and skepticism. Between inspiration and criticism. 173
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would say a few things about my pedagogy before explaining, with<br />
as much detail as I can offer, how I have tried to translate<br />
that dialectic into practice. Towards the end of Embracing<br />
Contraries, Peter Elbow had this to say about the raison d’etre<br />
of his “cooking”:<br />
Searching for contradiction and affirming both sides<br />
can allow you to find both the limitations of the<br />
system in which you are working and a way to break<br />
out of it. If you find contradictions and try too<br />
quickly to get rid of them, you are only neatening<br />
up, even straightening, the system you are in. To<br />
actually get beyond that system you need to find the<br />
deepest contradictions and, instead of trying to<br />
reconcile them, heighten them by affirming both<br />
sides. And if you can nurture the contradictions<br />
cleverly enough, you can be led to a new system with<br />
a wider frame of reference, one that includes the two<br />
new elements which were felt as contradictory in the<br />
old frame of reference. (241, emphasis mine)<br />
If my philosophy of teaching were to have some defining<br />
epigraph, some words that distilled the primordial essence of<br />
what I thought about the “How?” and the “Why?” of teaching, it<br />
would be these. Elbow does indeed summarize my teaching<br />
philosophy very well, very well better than I could do myself.<br />
For me, thinking and learning – and writing – rises from out of<br />
the wreckage of the disturbing head-on collision of those<br />
“deepest contradictions.” And teaching is provoking and<br />
inciting – catalyzing – those collisions. “Nurtur[ing]” those<br />
collisions, within the student but also within yourself, as a<br />
teacher. Between freedom and constraint. Between exploration<br />
and scrutiny. Between the “personal” and the “social.” Between<br />
hope and skepticism. Between inspiration and criticism.<br />
173
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