[557] in magellan
[Fwd: TP. Msg. #279 TEACHING'S COMMUNITIES AND THE USES OF "ALONETIME"]
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Anderson)
Fri Dec 15 08:35:04 2000
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Date: Fri, 15 Dec 2000 08:36:15 -0500
From: Greg Anderson <ganderso@MIT.EDU>
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Good morning,
I thought this was an interesting piece advocating balance between
collaboration/interaction and the time each of us needs for ourselves. Although
geared to faculty, I think these comments have a lot of relevance for us as
project leaders.
How can we balance our responsibilities for leadership, outreach,
communication, and collaboration - the attributes of our successful work, with
the equally valuable need for 'alonetime' where we can achieve some distance
from work, renew ourselves, and contemplate and gain the perspective that
enables us to continue to improve?
Consideration of this dynamic - 'communities of truth' - see below and
'alonetime' leads me to think that we should each consider our needs for
solitude and be better advocates for that time. Finally, it seems to me that an
important aspect of professional development is achieved through this alonetime
- either through time invested in learning or professional development -
courses/conferences, etc.
Thanks,
Greg
Greg
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: TP. Msg. #279 TEACHING'S COMMUNITIES AND THE USES OF "ALONETIME"
Date: Thu, 14 Dec 2000 08:56:26 -0800
From: reis@stanford.edu
To: tomorrows-professor@lists.Stanford.EDU
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SPECIAL NOTE: AS IS OUR REGULAR PRACTICE, THIS WILL BE THE LAST
POSTING FOR THE CURRENT YEAR. THE NEXT POSTING WILL APPEAR ON
TUESDAY, JANUARY 2, 2001. HAVE A VERY ENJOYABLE HOLIDAY SEASON.
Folks:
Particularly as we approach the holiday season, the article below on
the importance of "alonetime" in both teaching and learning, should
be of considerable interest. It is the seventh posting in a series of
selected articles from the National Teaching and Learning Forum
newsletter reproduced here as part of our "Shared Mission
Partnership" announced in March of this year.
NT&LF has a wealth of information on all aspects of teaching and
learning. If you are not already a subscriber, you can check it out
at [http://www.ntlf.com/] The on-line edition of the Forum--like the
printed version - offers subscribers insight from colleagues eager to
share new ways of helping students reach the highest levels of
learning.
Regards,
Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: Time, Faculty and The Academy
Tomorrow's Academic Careers
--------------------- 1,517 words -------------------
TEACHING'S COMMUNITIES AND THE USES OF "ALONETIME"
Steven Weiland
Professor of Higher Education
Director, Jewish Studies Program
Michigan State University
There is no feature of teaching in higher education more vigorously
prescribed today than collaboration. It is a byword of "progressive
pedagogy" that work in groups--for students at any level of
education, in fact--is indispensable to learning (Bruffee 1999;
Palmer 1998). Parker Palmer, a deservedly admired critic of
educational conventions, proposes a particularly intense form of such
activity. He names the class, or any group of learners, as a
"community of truth" in which relations with classmates are essential
in gaining authentic knowledge of a subject.
In a "communal circle," as Palmer names this arrangement, each
"knower" is obligated to the others in an appealingly symmetrical
distribution of responses also to the subject being studied. "As we
try to understand in the community of truth," Palmer says, "we enter
into complex patterns of communication . . .. The community of truth,
far from being linear and static and hierarchical, is circular,
interactive, and dynamic."
To my mind, there can be as much "authority" at work in this form of
teaching as there is in the much maligned classroom lecture, but in
this case it is the leader or teacher who is demanding a relational
rather than a mainly cognitive experience. My purpose here is to
identify a role for educational solitude as an alternative or
complement to collaboration and to the classroom or the "learning
community," again, to my mind now an overworked metaphor in education.
>From Solitude to "Alonetime"
The British psychoanalyst and critic of the arts Anthony Storr (1988)
named "a return to the self" as one of the gifts of solitude. He is
interested primarily in the activities of writers and artists who
find solitude to be an essential resource for creative work. He
believes that all "human beings are directed by nature toward the
impersonal as well as toward the personal." Like Storr, Arnold Modell
(1993) finds in human "interests" (work and the arts, for example)
sufficiently satisfying "objects" for human relations. They help to
maintain a coherent and loving self which needs its privacy
"affirmed" even as it depends on human relationships.
In an effort to resist trends in education and other domains, Ester
Schaler Buchholz (1997) has taken up the origins and uses of solitude
from the perspective of everyday pursuits. She launches her effort
with a useful lexical distinction. "As 'hot' is opposite to 'cold,'
neither being inherently positive or negative, 'attached' and 'alone'
portray two equal states, each valuable and pertinent."
Because our culture's emphasis on attachment has "undermined"
solitude, Buchholz proposes the term "alonetime" for a "vital need
and state of being." It is defined as "the need to retreat
psychologically (and at times, physically) in order to modify
stimulation and to constitute or reconstitute how one functions--by
oneself." For Buchholz, we now have to search for "alonetime," but
since it is "equivalent to all absolute needs and motivations" it is
necessary that we do so to restore balance to living, and recover the
conditions of many forms of creative and educative activity (see also
Dowrick 1991).
Versions of "Alonetime" in Teaching Careers
Solitude and "alonetime" are allies of individualism, which
progressive educators often denigrate on behalf of collaborative or
social ideals. Paradoxically, autobiography is flourishing in the
publishing marketplace and in academic and intellectual life. Indeed,
there has been enough academic autobiography to prompt complaints
that there is too much writing of this kind (Simpson 1995). As a
genre, autobiography supports a form of discursive individualism at
the very least, and often of solitude as well.
For scholars and educators, an autobiography is inevitably an account
of learning and teaching. In Virgin Time (1992), Patricia Hampl
searches with others but most successfully by herself for the meaning
of "contemplation," or a deep experience of thinking and feeling that
can illuminate her vocation. Carolyn Heilbrun (1997) explains her
longtime relations with people she admires but has never actually
encountered as "Unmet Friends," an image that conveys the wish for a
form of privacy even within the experience of intensely shared
interests and projects. In English Papers (1996), William Pritchard
demonstrates how, in an earlier period of higher education,
collaboration in teaching could be effective without a totalizing
ideology of educational "community."
The Scholar in Her Study
The ideal teaching temperament has room for the pleasures of
"alonetime" and for working with others, as a choice among
pedagogical methods reflecting how any professor estimates the
demands of his or her subject and the needs of students. Thus, the
pedagogically focused autobiography by literary scholar Jane Tompkins
(1996) comes to its defense of solitude only in the context of a
complementary case for more sociability in the education professions.
The story is told from a familiar perspective in education. There is
too much authority and competition, too little active learning and
collaboration. Tompkins agrees with writers like Palmer and David
Damrosch (1995; like Tompkins, another English professor turned
critic of higher education) who address, respectively, the
undergraduate and graduate scenes of learning.
Walking down the halls of her department one day in search of a
colleague with whom to reflect on pressing professional matters,
Tompkins finds no one. "A momentary disappointment, but the roots
went deep," she says, in recognition of how the habits of autonomy
characterizing academic work had begun to trouble her. By now this is
a familiar sentiment in education--witness the popularity of Palmer's
efforts to formulate new structures of connection between students
and teachers, and between teachers and their colleagues (e.g.,
chapters in The Courage to Teach on knowing, teaching, and learning
"in community").
But there is a counterpressure in Tompkins' experience and reflection
on it that ultimately takes her story in a different direction. "I
don't think most of us ever try to imagine our ideal world as
educators. We're not encouraged to, certainly. I have taught in
colleges and universities for thirty years, but no one has ever said
to me: 'Tompkins, have your vision of an ideal university on my desk
by tomorrow morning.' When did anybody ever say that?" She employs an
unlikely image for such an ideal institution, the cloister, but not
because it is unworldly.
"This was a use for the cloister: to screen out the world and enable
the gaze to turn inward in contemplation. For the growth of human
beings an environment set apart and protected from the world is
essential. But the cloister needs to be used for the purposes for
which it was really intended: quiet reflection, self-observation,
meditative awareness."
If the cloister represents the educational institution as a whole
then it is the monk's "cell"--in the form of the scholar's
study--that stands for the way in which teachers can best fortify
their contributions to it.
Tompkins' book ends with a tribute to team teaching qualified by an
image of the study and its solitary scholar, presented with great
care for the details of a
----------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------
"Being in a room by herself will provide for her intellectual
projects and then relations in public."
----------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------
teacher's workplace. There is, in her newly furnished private space,
an old teacher's desk ("the kind [they] used to stand or sit behind
in class"), an antique wooden chair, and an old lamp. All have been
chosen with great care to reflect her taste for what being in such a
room by herself will provide first for her intellectual projects and
then relations in public. After surveying the room's objects,
Tompkins' final comment is the laconic, "That should do." No more
resources are needed for a teacher seeking renewal, she implies, than
those that are identified with solitary pursuits. Even so, she has
not withdrawn her earlier commitments: the final image is one of
solitude contemplating community.
Conclusion: After Coffee
Tompkins did not give up on the values of company. In a suitable
institutional gesture she dedicates herself to the effort to bring
more places for coffee and conversation to the Duke campus.
"Sometimes I think that bringing up the subject of coffee in the
right time and at the right place is the best thing I ever did in my
career as a professor." Even so, she remains dedicated to asserting
the roles of emotion, imagination, dreams, and spiritual experience
in and out of the classroom. Perhaps her students can learn from the
example of her private study.
In Tompkins' course on autobiography the aim of an early assignment
is to "help students find a time and place for silence and
receptivity in their lives, for listening and restful waiting." While
such qualities can be gained in a group or a learning community (and
perhaps at a campus coffee house), "alonetime" is at least as likely
a condition for doing so.
"I am filled," Tompkins says, "with an inchoate yearning for
integration." The solitary habits deriving from her transformation
are a sign that making the self "whole" will begin at home and alone.
Is solitude unfairly stigmatized in human development and education,
and does Tompkins' ambivalent stance anticipate a renewal of interest
in its role in academic work and teaching careers?
I think it does.
References
* Bruffee, Kenneth. 1999. Collaborative Learning: Higher Education,
Interdependence, and the Authority of Knowledge. Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
* Buchholz, Ester Schaler. 1997. The Call of Solitude: Alonetime in a
World of Attachment. New York: Simon and Schuster.
* Damrosch, David. 1995. We Scholars: Changing the Culture of the
University. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
* Dowrick, Stephanie. 1991. Intimacy and Solitude: Balancing
Closeness and Independence. New York: Norton.
* Hampl, Patricia. 1992. Virgin Time: In Search of the Contemplative
Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
* Heilbrun, Carolyn. 1997. The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty.
New York: Dial Press.
* Modell, Arnold. 1993. The Private Self. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
* Palmer, Parker. 1998. The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner
Landscape of a Teacher's Life. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
* Pritchard, William. 1996. English Papers: A Teaching Life. St.
Paul, MN: Graywolf.
* Simpson, David. 1995. The Academic Postmodern and the Rule of
Literature: A Report on Half-Knowledge. Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press.
* Storr, Anthony. 1988. Solitude: A Return to the Self. New York: The
Free Press.
* Tompkins, Jane. 1996. A Life in School: What the Teacher Learned.
Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Contact:
Chad M. Hanson, Ph.D.
Faculty, Social Science Department
Northcentral Tech
1000 W. Campus Drive
Wausau, WI 54401
Telephone: (715) 675-3331 #4802
E-mail: hanson@northcentral.tec.wi.us
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