Classroom excitement arises from collective recognition, not professorial charisma

Evidence

But excitement about ideas was not sufficient to create an exciting learning process. As a classroom community, our capacity to generate excitement is deeply affected by our interest in one another, in hearing one another’s voices, in recognizing one another’s presence. Since the vast majority of students learn through conservative, traditional educational practices and concern themselves only with the presence of the professor, any radical pedagogy must insist that everyone’s presence is acknowledged. That insistence can not be simply stated. It has to be demonstrated through pedagogical practices. To begin, the professor must genuinely value every one’s presence. There must be an ongoing recognition that everyone influences the classroom dynamic, that everyone contributes. These contributions are resources. Used constructively they enhance the capacity of any class to create an open learning community. Often before this process can begin there has to be some deconstruction of the traditional notion that only the professor is responsible for classroom dynamics. That responsibility is relative to status. Indeed, the professor will always be more responsible because the larger institutional structures will always ensure that accountability for what happens in the classroom rests with the teacher. It is rare that any professor, no matter how eloquent a lecturer, can generate through his or her actions enough excitement to create an exciting classroom. Excitement is generated through collective effort. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 25

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to hooks’s wider engaged-pedagogy argument and to Freirean anti-‘banking’ education critiques. — connects to: Academics equate seriousness with docile, disengaged students rather than lively reciprocity — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 273; Students remember one another when experience is linked to academics; Classroom success depends on collective community, not individual learning or teacher control — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 314 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• The collective attentional ecosystem, not the teacher, is the classroom’s agent. #corroborates (0.90) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 271
• Generating classroom excitement requires abandoning fixed agendas and fixed authority #expands (0.82) — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 24
• Effective teaching functions as a performative catalyst, not a spectacle #expands (0.80)
• Witnessing a teacher embody their theory inspires students more than written work can #complicates (0.78)
• Attention is alignment, the same faculty on individual and collective levels #expands (0.75)
• Accountability-driven evaluation forces teachers into fabricated performances that erode their sense of self #complicates (0.74) — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 675