To be a born-again teacher in the 21st
Century, you must reinvent whatever kind of teacher you thought you
were, or that other people thought, in your first
teaching life. No matter if other people thought you were bad, or good, or
just so-so, you have to start over.
To start over, you need to look around at
what has changed in the past generation, or two (that is, of course, if
you're old enough to know). I know what I'm talking about, because
I'm old enough (61 this year, 2003) to know how things used to be about two generations
ago when I was starting my teaching career.
I'm grateful for some to the things I
learned even before I started my teaching job; that is to say, I learned
when I was a student some basics I'm still able to use. The most important
thing I learned is how to keep learning. Long, long after I graduated, I'm
still learning.
For example, I'm learning how to be a born
again teacher! This is something they definitely don't teach in school.
How does a teacher from the nineteen-sixties start over, or think like one
who's been "born again"? I think if I write and publish my
opinion on this on the Web then maybe I'll find there are others who, like me, would like to
leapfrog and get over themselves and morph into a more interesting
position with an outlook that's different than the one they now
face.
I can't speak for others about starting
over in teaching, of course. I have many friends and a few former students
who are deep into their present teaching career. The idea of starting
over is not as attractive as, perhaps, retiring and doing things they've
been waiting to do until after they are free of their teaching jobs.
On the other hand, for me the prospect of
teaching for my entire lifetime is and always was appealing; the thought
of retiring doesn't appeal to me. You might think I tried retirement in
1985, taking "retirement" early (43) as one way to get out of an
impossible, dead-end job at the UW art school (without giving up everything
I'd worked for and accomplished).
Now, after about seventeen years of
continued learning, doing some teaching, plus research and practice, I
feel ready to be "born again" as a teacher. To me this is not just a
cute expression or a pipe dream. I mean it--to seriously take the
"reinvented self" and apply this new self to a new school of
thinking and action.
I action--acting on my
principles (which haven't changed from the fundamentals of education I got
in my early years) but in a new world, a world that's been changed
dramatically by new technologies, economics and societal events.
One of the ways I'm learning to
"change myself" is to read a great deal about new technologies
and then to purchase the tools and software I need to try out what I've
read about. Sometimes I'm buying and applying almost simultaneously. Then
I apply these to my field--the arts.
This is a good technique because what can
happen with the combination of new tools and old, fundamental ideas (in,
for example, arts and education mixtures) is that they "loop
back" into themselves and create new or hybrid ideas. Take, for
example, the paragraph at the top of the column on the right, which I took
from an online magazine called salon.com.
When I encountered this paragraph (in a
book titled What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and
Literacy by James Paul Gee), I was deeply impressed with the way it
sounded like the way I taught when I was at the art school. I felt like I
was reading someone else' description of my teaching philosophy.
Furthermore, I felt like I could cut and paste a few
words--cut out words like "game companies" and paste in words
like "new schools"--and it would describe what I was doing when
I was a professor. The following paragraph is my result of doing this:
Many of the newest art schools now count on former
students to show them the way creatively. To ensure their own survival in
the savagely competitive higher education world, they make it easy for
their graduates to share their progress with former teachers and students
who are still in school. This stands in marked contrast to the old
schools' practices in the last century, which vindictively discouraged
students (and independent-minded faculty) from tinkering with art courses and
the canon of art. Old schools still cling to outdated interpretations of
creativity and careerism. By fostering the creativity of their
students--current and graduated--who some faculty consider as more agile
peers--the new-style educational enterprise will not only survive but
prosper.
There was a time, between 1970 and 1980, when I tried out
several of these basics.
First, I tinkered with the curriculum. I started
by changing time-honored premises of my specialty, which was printmaking. Instead of
treating the topic as an extension of painting and drawing, I treated it
as a base or root of communications technologies. Hand printmaking, in my
new definition, is merely the artifact or ancestral forms of, for example,
photography, cinema, TV and computer graphics.
I sidestepped the question of whether I was leaving the
fine arts and joining industrial design or communications, taking my lead
from art history. When artists in the past adopted new technologies, they
seldom became known in technology. Rather, the results of their
experiments and practices are in art museums today, not history and
industry museums.
Then I polled students for ideas as to what they thought
they should b doing; many of them thought they should be learning what are
often called "professional practices," which mean showing and
selling their art. They also wanted to know how to set up a studio practice and
manage a business. Each of these interests served to show me how to
modify the curriculum slightly from what it had been when I started
teaching.
I used the students' creativity, in other words, to help
me survive and maintain a sense of creativity when, all around me in my particular school, the trend was toward a conservative, safe and narrow
definition of printmaking. Indeed, my practice of cooperating with
students saved me a number of times
from fiscal shortcomings, support cutbacks, and outright burnout.
It didn't stop there.
Having taught 19 years (until I
resigned at 43) I was able to see former students from the
first decade succeed on their terms and sustain their practices. I was
even invited to join them in a kind of artist's cooperative
called Triangle Studios. My campus job and my off-campus practice actually
began to cross-fertilize - generating new ideas. Former students came back to campus and
visited with my new students,
and there were professional exchanges.
The comparison with video game companies, that I read in
the paragraph by James Gee, is clear. What's more interesting is the signpost this is in how a
teacher can, today, be born again if--having a generation of first-hand
experience like mine--he or she can think like a game company.
Maybe this
means creating a game that students--presently enrolled or from the
alumni, or both--can play and become "modders," too. |
"Many of the best game companies now count on modders to show
them the way creatively and to ensure their own survival in a savagely
competitive market. This stands in marked contrast to the music and film
industry, which vindictively discourages fans from tinkering with their
content and clings to an outdated interpretation of copyright. By
fostering the creativity of their fans, their more agile peers in the game
industry have not only survived but prospered." - April 2002,
salon.com on-line magazine, quoted by James Paul Gee in What Video
Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy.
About the Author: Bill H. Ritchie is an
Itinerate Professor based in Seattle. He taught college (UW) and after
promotion to full professor of printmaking and media arts, he resigned at
43. He then launched several teaching, research and practice companies. In
1992 he discovered Emeralda, a fantasy region accessible only by computer.
He invented the rules-of-play and created an operating system for online
interactivity for himself.
He writes for the benefit of discipline, using a PDA when he's
wandering around and a desktop PC to organize his essays. He has a
thousand or more saved, which you can see listed on the ten
"islands" on the Web. An example is www.seanet.com/~ritchie/spzine.html,
on the island of RIISMA in the Emeralda Region.
Contact Bill H Ritchie
via e-mail at ritchie@seanet.com.
His professional Web site is at www.seanet.com/~ritchie.
The company name is Emeralda Works, 500 Aloha, Seattle, WA 98109. Statistics: 1389 Words. 6699 Characters. 3 Pages. isp30730
A Born Again Teacher. ©2003 Bill H Ritchie |