Sports Values and the Challenge of Seeing Teaching as Beautiful

• In Event: 43.063 - Crossing the Chalk Line: Perspectives on Sports Culture and K–12 Education

Abstract

First thing about it, and this seems so obvious that maybe we overlook it, baseball is a beautiful thing. —Bob Costas (Ward & Burns, 1994)

Sports media personalities have little trouble waxing eloquently about the beauty in the games they love. Numerous online content features pundits highlighting the beauty of athletic performances, whether it is a golfer’s swing (Shamburger, 2015), a running back’s elusiveness (Dubin, 2015), or a footballer’s fulfillment of Pelé’s “Beautiful Game” on the pitch (Averbuch, 2015). Many educators also enjoy chatting about the beauty of a local team’s performance. But what comes natural in sports talk is arguably harder with teaching. Hundreds of hours of video of preservice teachers and their instructors talking shop yielded a single excerpt of a preservice teacher exclaiming:

And [my mentor teacher’s engagement of students is] very intentional without being, “Your eyes on me!” You know? And it’s just this beautiful thing, because when she goes through it it's like, like as I was watching I was like, Damn! That is what I want to be!

Indeed, it is more common to overhear teaching discussed in technical rather than aesthetic terms. Why is this? What does it say about teaching as a performance of skilled practice?

Sports are big business, and sports media thrives by ensnaring fans in debates over what counts as beautiful performance. By comparison, much of what teachers do is less publicly visible. That does not mean, however, that teaching lacks beauty or defies aesthetic evaluation. Scholars including Crispin Sartwell (2004) and Jim Garrison (1997) define beauty as inherently cultural, linked with desire, and reflective of deeply held values. Furthermore, Sartwell suggests that aesthetic inquiry is an expansive “exercise in awareness, a way to keep finding what we’ve lost” (p. 152). Garrison speaks to this sense of loss in teaching by reminding us that it is “a lovely art whose beauty is often concealed beneath bureaucratic forms, teacher-proof curricula, and tests” (p. 84). Denying the artfulness of teaching, he adds, sustains this concealment, trapping it within the languages of science and policymaking. In this paper, I argue that educators and those who support them can (re)discover much about their work by expanding into its beauty.

To do this, I undertake an axiological examination of media portrayals of “beautiful” sports performances, teasing out values that serve as the basis for aesthetic judgement within sports culture, including excellence, merit, glory, and honor. I then argue that, while those values inform teaching to some degree, there are others less extolled in public discourse—e.g., equity, cooperation, care, etc.—that shape teachers’ work (cf., Nieto, 2015) and arguably make it more beautiful than is often acknowledged. I conclude with a call to keep discussing our instructional values and to reimagine K-12 teaching as the artistic production of goodness—a beautiful practice deserving of the same fawning attention given sports practice.

Author

• Ian Parker Renga, University of Southern Maine