Effective teaching functions as a performative catalyst, not a spectacle

Evidence

From which we derive the third principle, relating to a NECESSITY FOR INVENTION: the classroom only offers an ecosystem supportive of joint attention if it is the place of a process of collective invention in action. It is not only at the level of the university that we should speak of ‘teacher-researchers’. Even if the contents of a course in elementary geometry has, apparently, been fixed since Euclid, what is done in the classroom has a lot less to do with ‘transmission’ (modelled on the baton passed from hand to hand by relay runners) than with continual reinterpretation: even if the formulation of the theorems has hardly changed, in every group each learner comes to it with singular knowledge, imagination, sensitivity and attitude. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 267 (#expands, via linked claim)

When you leave the podium and walk around, suddenly the way you smell, the way you move become very apparent to your students. Also, you bring with you a certain kind of potential, though not guaranteed, for a certain kind of face-to-face relationship and respect for “what I say” and “what you say.” Student and professor are looking at each other. And as we come physically close, suddenly what I have to say is not coming from behind this invisible line, this wall of demarcation that implies anything that from this side of the desk is gold, is truth, or that everything said out there is merely for my consideration, that the only possible way I can respond is by saying “good,” “right,” and so on. As people move around it becomes more evident that we work in the classroom. For some teachers, and especially older faculty, there is a desire to enjoy the privilege of appearing not to work in the classroom. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 259 (#instantiates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Physical classroom movement dismantles the desk’s implied hierarchy of truth — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 259; An engaged teaching voice must shift with its audience and context — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 33; Teaching is continual reinterpretation rather than transmission of fixed content — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 267

Related

• Teaching is continual reinterpretation rather than transmission of fixed content (similarity 0.83)
• The collective attentional ecosystem, not the teacher, is the classroom’s agent. (similarity 0.80)
• Physical classroom movement dismantles the desk’s implied hierarchy of truth (similarity 0.80)
• The capitulation-versus-rigor teaching debate can be reframed by attention ecology (similarity 0.80)
• Generating classroom excitement requires abandoning fixed agendas and fixed authority (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Teaching is continual reinterpretation rather than transmission of fixed content #expands (0.78) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 267