They Learn You: How My Father Taught Me to Teach Without Knowing

• In Event: Engaging Praxis: Curriculum Studies in Classrooms and Communities

Abstract

The purpose of my essay is to explore through a personal teacher narrative the counter-cultural notion of the teacher as someone who doesn't know: who is questioning, full of doubt, questioning who they are alongside the students questioning who they are, as well as regardless of what plans have been laid what will transpire? What might possibly happen? What discoveries might be made in this state of not knowing? My essay will use two of Maxine Greene's earliest books, Teacher as Stranger (1973) and Existential Encounters for Teachers (1967), as both a jumping off point and a theoretical framework for discussing existential philosophy and phenomenological thinking. Rather than discussing these ideas objectively or considering them solely rationally in a piece that explores why such frameworks are important in teaching and learning, I explore more intimately and through personal narrative how these ideas downloaded to me through my father, a retired existentialist and phenomenologist himself, have impacted the way I
teach.

My essay will draw on methodologies advanced by Edmund Husserl (one of the philosophers' who studied by Greene) and Clifford Geertz and his notion of thick description to elucidate and embody what an existential and phenomenological stance looks like for the teacher in the classroom. The impact on young people will be explored
through the combination of personal narrative and theorizing which are hallmarks of curriculum studies and its reconceptualization.

Part of my essay consists of interviews I conduct with my father about existentialism and phenomenology as well as the inter-subjectivity that results in our unique relationship as father-son, professor-teacher, and in one case during graduate school, when I took an independent study with my father on Edmund Husserl’s work, professor-student. Thissource material constitutes the frame from which to understand some of the thickly described narrative that’s included in the essay.

The result of my inquiry mirrors the neglected work of Maxine Greene and her insistence that the act of teaching must be concerned primarily with the act of being, what it means to be and become, amongst other beings also being and becoming, that in such an age of personal and planetary peril, existential and phenomenological philosophy provides ways for teachers to teach, think, and act in more direct and expansive ways, to, in the words of Albert Camus, “be cured” not by trying to make right the upheaval but instead to “take into consideration the awareness of our exile which have suddenly acquired.” Like Maxine Greene’s description of the prisoner in Plato’s The Myth of Cave, while at first the light is blinding, eventually the light brings new truths, insights, and ways of inquiry.

I hope my essay will reinvigorate latent engagement with Maxine Greene’s still revolutionary ideas in her out-of-print first two books, and the important ideas they hold not just for teacher and teaching, but for schools and schooling that are often places bereft of meaning with their almost complete focus on capitalistic and consumerists paradigms, as laid out by the education historian, David Labaree.

Author

• Avi Desai Lessing, Oak Park and River Forest High School
  Presenting Author