Quite serendipitously, just after I returned from a wonderful fellowship at the Teachers College at Columbia University, I fleetingly met Alok Mathur at the Valley School. I vividly remembered an insightful session with him that inspired me to cultivate a teaching portfolio and keep a journal. So I took a deep breath, overcame my reticence, and ran over to share what I had recently experienced with him. Still bursting with ‘aha’ moments, I must have been rather inarticulate in those few minutes but he kindly invited me to write a reflective piece on my current journey in teaching and learning at the Valley, which has been enriched through interactions with educators elsewhere. Here it is:
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” ― Mary Oliver
Where does the story begin? I first arrived at the Valley School, in 1995, as a shy eight-year-old with a burgeoning social conscience. I didn’t understand then why my parents, inspired by a slim paperback called Freedom from the Known, had sought out this school for me. As I grew familiar with the myriad paths around this unusual forest, I began to find my voice.
About a decade later, I followed a poem, Sylvia Plath’s “Tulips”, all the way from the Valley, where I grew up, to Smith College, where Plath had felt as if the world was splitting open at her feet like “a ripe, juicy watermelon”. Indeed, on those very green lawns, amidst archival research and literary theory, with Plath scholars and poets, I felt almost the same way myself.
As an intern at the Poetry Center, as I heard visiting poets not only read their finished poems aloud but also share notes on their craft, snatches of their lives, I could resonate with how Plath felt when she met W. H. Auden when he visited Smith: “Oh, god, if this is life, half-heard, glimpsed, [with] the god-eyed tall-minded ones, let me never go blind or get cut off from the agony of learning…”
Hungry for more, I went on to the School of the Arts at Columbia University. I was delighted to find myself living in a graduate student apartment on W 112th Street, only a couple of buildings away from where John Dewey had once lived. I had discovered Dewey when I took a course with Rosetta Marantz Cohen, The Philosophy of Education, in the spring of my senior year at Smith.
At graduate school, I took a part-pedagogy, part-practicum seminar with Alan Ziegler, Writer as Teacher, and joined Columbia Artists/Teachers, which gave me the opportunity to teach. On the morning of my first class, as I walked around yellow crime scene tape, and into a challenging classroom in Harlem, I noticed immediately the power of a teacher’s rapport with her students. How, because of the bond they shared with her, they were willing to open their hearts to me too.
That’s when I discovered the joy of being a bridge between a child and an idea. I found teaching to be the most intellectually stimulating, creatively satisfying and emotionally rewarding work.
Eventually, I was keen to return to the singular wonderland of my own childhood to teach there. With a newfound sense of appreciation for the handful of schools set up by the philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, I returned to the Valley School to teach. Here, we attempt to let children flourish in an atmosphere that is free from competition, comparison, and fear in all its forms.
I would hope that this means each of my students feels free to grow and bloom in their own way, at their own pace, making all the mistakes that they need to, to learn. My wish for them is to be unfettered by expectations–mine, their own, the world’s. To be free. It feels like a good reason for me to be engaged in a process of continuous self-discovery myself.
As time has gone by, I have become more curious about education. I have been keen to find opportunities to reflect on my own philosophy, pedagogy and practice as an educator. Thus, it was sheer good fortune to join an extraordinary cohort of fellow educators from around the world at a Summer Institute hosted by the Teachers College at Columbia University to do just this.
Below, I have tried to pull together my notes and thoughts on all three interwoven strands–philosophy, pedagogy, and practice–to share what I found most meaningful:
PHILOSOPHY
Here are a couple of big ideas, incisive questions, and other marginalia–from a meaningful session on the Philosophy of Education anchored by Erika Drezner and Varghese Alexander:
Big Idea #1: There is an important difference between the taught curriculum and the learned curriculum.
What I say I am teaching… …may not be what my students are learning.
A personal teaching philosophy is not only what, how or why I teach… …but also what are my students learning?
“[M]ake conscious, thoughtful decisions of what kind of teacher you want to be, and … remain reflective about the kind of teacher you are always in the process of becoming …” ― Fenstermacher and Soltis
This reminded me of a time when I juxtaposed a poem of Sylvia Plath’s with some poems of Ted Hughes’ that we had in our 12th grade literature course, in my instinctively feminist effort to bring more women’s voices into the canon. However, a boy came up to me at the end of the class and said, “Until now, somehow I always thought that Hughes was the villain of the piece but now I see that they were both simply flawed and passionate human beings, like us all, who did the best they could at that moment in time…”
Big Idea #2: A teaching philosophy should be an exercise in continual self-reflection.
How can I be a reflective practitioner of what I value?
An enduring philosophy… …should be one on which I constantly reflect.
“Your philosophy must keep you uneasy. How does it keep you in a perpetual state of becoming?” ― Maxine Greene
What makes me reflect on what I hold to be true is how I am constantly challenged to think again… I vividly remember an assembly we had at school when I was a student. Two teachers, both of whom I loved and admired, engaged in a passionate debate. One said, “If you have said you will be somewhere at a particular time, you must be there–no matter what–out of respect for the time of others.” The other asked, “What if you saw the sun was setting? Or a beautiful insect perched on a flower? Would you not stop to admire it?” Even today, I often reconcile these two urges in my own heart, knowing there is no one right answer. It’s the knots of these sorts of contradictions that keep us curious.
Big Idea #3: Great teaching assumes many forms.
How does my philosophy actually look in practice? How can I modify my teaching to make it more closely reflect my philosophy? How can my philosophy be adjusted to more closely reflect my teaching?
What are the values I want to impart to my students? Where are those values in my philosophy? What is one way my philosophy prepares students to find meaning or joy in their lives?
We teach values by HOW we teach. ― John Dewey
Once, in the 8th grade, our class wickedly locked a teacher out of our classroom and could not hear her knocking on the door through our chatter. Undeterred, she climbed in through the window to begin her class on time. Only a little ruffled, after a quick admonishment, she dove passionately into her subject. These days, as I often find myself jumping through windows both literal and figurative, to reach my students through the din keeping us apart. I do so with as little grumpiness and as much grace as I can muster. Drawing inspiration from all those who have done this so beautifully before me… It is not about what we, as teachers, specifically do or don’t do but about how we are being.
PEDAGOGY
The other thing that had a big impact on me was Dr Nicole Furlonge’s invitation to ask ourselves:
Who am I from? Who do I carry with me?
Both my grandmothers were teachers.
Dadima, a refugee, came from Lahore to Bombay after Partition and taught all her life, through marriage and motherhood, through raising three children. At first she simply alternated her only two sarees, always neatly ironed and draped. As the years went by, her collection grew and she enjoyed her starched cottons and the occasional silk, before retiring as a beloved headmistress.
Ammama, born and raised in Bombay, grew up reading in the corridors of her father’s premier academic bookstore. She earned her B.Ed. a couple of decades after her M.A. in Sociology, having raised four children in the years that intervened, and savoured those precious few years of teaching—leaving only when I was born, her first grandchild, to lavish her love upon me.
Often, I feel them both sitting inside my heart. Two women so different from one another who both found meaning and joy in the classroom. I carry each with me into my classroom too.
“The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy.” ― bell hooks
Each morning, as the years go by, they remind me to be resilient, and stay open to wonder.
Interwoven with the ideas of all the wonderful thinkers and philosophers who inspire me are the lives of my grandmothers. Often, it is in those most visceral strands that I find my answers.
PRACTICE
“…teaching tugs at the heart, opens the heart, even breaks the heart—and the more one loves teaching, the more heartbreaking it can be. The courage to teach is the courage to keep one’s heart open in those very moments when the heart is asked to hold more than it is able so that teacher and students and subject can be woven into the fabric of community that learning, and living, require.” ― Parker Palmer
Perhaps, what was most magical for me at the Summer Institute was the feeling of camaraderie with my fellow teachers, from which I will continue to draw the courage to keep my heart open.
Sitting in a room full of English teachers from schools around the world, I realised that we may teach in very different places but we are all working within the constraints of our own contexts–whether in the choice of the texts that we may teach or how our students are ultimately assessed on what they have learnt–and yet, we do the best we can to keep the subject alive. Never losing sight of their need to do well in their examinations, we do not allow prescribed textbooks or examination formats to limit how our students see the subject. To teach literature must mean to ask, “What does it mean to be a human being in the world?”
Indeed, I will never forget the joy of discovering the words to capture how we can always “bring a radical pedagogy to a traditional curriculum” in our practice, thanks to Shelby Stokes.
“My philosophical conviction in life is that we did not come to keep the world as it is, we came to the world in order to remake it.” ― Paulo Freire
Like Mrs Dalloway, I spend a lot of time preparing. Each class of mine begins long before I teach it, playing itself out in my mind many times over before it starts, as I wonder what I can bring to introduce my students to the text they will encounter. Sometimes I bring a moment from another time and place, sometimes a snippet of conversation I overheard, sometimes I bring a photograph, a memory, a line from a poem, a piece of my grandmother’s advice. Sometimes I bring things I would not share with anyone else, but for my students, to build that bridge, I will bring anything.
As students of literature, they will need to build their own bridges to the texts they encounter. Bridges that will be made up of their own selves, their own constellation of texts, their own worlds–and all the gifts I bring for them into my classes. Just as my own bridges would have been impossible to build without the riches that were shared with me by those from whom I learnt.
I feel fortunate to be teaching a subject like literature. Seeing ourselves as part of the continuum of human experience, and knowing, through the poems, novels, plays, and short stories we encounter together, that people have lived through great cataclysms and upheavals before, brings us solace. It assuages our collective anxiety in a time of so much uncertainty and reminds us that we are never alone, always a part of the larger constellation of human lives and experiences, across time and space. Perhaps it fosters a sense of common humanity in us… Indeed, what else is there!
As my students learn to inhabit the world of literature with one another, as they listen, speak, read, and write their way through conversations, with open hearts and open minds, with clarity and compassion, I watch them carefully. What keeps coming back to me is Dewey’s vision of education empowering children to think for themselves and to live with each other. If you teach children with respect and affection, and encourage them to question everything, then you empower them to become critical as well as creative thinkers, and compassionate human beings.
“You are the world. You are not a Russian or an American, you are not Hindu or Muslim. You are apart from these labels. You are the rest of mankind.” ― Jiddu Krishamurti
I am tempted to end on a slightly more personal note. As former students, my spouse and I are beneficiaries of the Valley School’s enlightened educational philosophy. We have a distinct, almost tactile memory of how it brings out children’s innate curiosity and intrinsic compassion. We know it empowers them to grow and bloom to their fullest potential.
As we filled up an admissions form for our daughter a few weeks ago, we found ourselves reminiscing and reflecting. We are deeply aligned with the school’s intent. We want our daughter to grow up in an oasis where she will be treated with respect and affection. We are keen that she explores herself and the world with sensitivity and authenticity.
We have enormous faith in the school’s approach. It will be wonderful to watch her study insects, recognise bird calls, discover whole worlds in singular trees, play games, shape clay, craft wood, mix paint, sing and dance. It will be fascinating to see her learn how to balance between freedom and responsibility, how to be both perceptive and articulate, both feisty and kind.
But as we sat down together with a blank paper to begin work on our note to school, we realised that, more than anything else, this new journey in our old familiar wonderland will be yet another worthwhile invitation for us, too, to reflect and introspect, to grow and bloom. For here, we are all–students, teachers, alumni, parents–engaged in reconciling philosophy, pedagogy and practice…
“A Kaleidoscope of Experiences : Philosophy, Pedagogy and Practice” first appeared in the Journal of Krishnamurti Schools.