Recalling Being a Teacher
There’s so much that I recall about teaching and here are two fundamental realizations: (1) Teaching is a complex activity, and the mystery of what really happens in a classroom, why and how it happens, can be perplexing; and, (2) teaching is a uniquely personal and intuitive activity.
I felt challenged when I started to think about my thesis and to draw on twenty years of my teaching history. In the context of all my teaching and learning memories and virtually hundreds of stories about teaching, I felt overwhelmed about where on my teaching continuum to begin. I revisited the exercise of writing a life chronicle. I began to think about my twenty-year teaching career as exemplified by stories of my first year, middle, and a more recent year. As my life chronicle unfolded on the paper, two stories stood out: an encounter with a former student that inspired memories of my earlier teaching practice, and a more recent story of teaching a group work course to college students preparing for employment in a helping profession. Both stories are on a continuum of my teaching lifetime in adult education teaching practice in the context of the community college system. The stories raise questions about a teacher’s identity and her adoption of adult education and group work theoretical literature that alleges to inform classroom practice and curriculum development. The stories of experience that I include are embedded in a shifting community college landscape that embraces the unities, rhythm and temporal qualities that have shaped an evolving teacher identity.
The telling of this educational journey begins with my graduating from university with a four-year degree in sociology and declining acceptance into Teacher’s College in spite of my dream of always wanting to be a teacher. My decision not to accept was largely grounded in my compliance with my then husband’s belief that there would be no teaching jobs. The media forecasted too many teachers for the future because of the vast number of university graduate baby boomers flocking to Teacher’s College. While I was disappointed not to follow my dream of being a schoolteacher, I found solace in my new status and role of wife at age twenty-one. I sought employment in the social services field and encountered the Ontario Career Action program. OCAP afforded me a full-time opportunity to work alongside my supervisors, Brenda and Catharine, two women who were to become my mentors in community college teaching.
Beginning in Community Based Education
When someone asks, how did you get into teaching at community college? I respond that I fell into community college teaching and recaptured a dream that I had let go of earlier in my life. I didn’t anticipate becoming a teacher in the community college system teaching and learning with students who were adults. My dreams about teaching included images of me working with people who were smaller and younger. In my dreams I saw myself as a kindergarten teacher, though unlike my own, and as close to my memories of my own favoured teachers in grades one, two, five, six and twelve. Each of these individuals shaped my notion of what it means to be a teacher. Including my kindergarten teacher from who I experienced exclusion when she frequently instructed me to be ‘head down’ on my desk for my having returned too slowly from recess and chatting in the school lineup.
My beginning teaching situation in 1979 was the initial and pivotal step in what was later to become the touchstone for my journey in education. My teaching journey began with my experience as an OCAP trainee, which was a four-month contract in a community based vocational and life skills program for adult students. The purpose of the OCAP program was to provide new graduates like me, who were twenty-one years of age and younger, with training and supervision in a vocational area of their choice. The students, also considered trainees, were funded by what is now known as Human Resources Development Canada (HRDC). The community based program was administered by the community college, and situated in a church basement in a large urban center serving a relatively high-risk referral group. The referral base demanded a strong emphasis on life skills, focusing mostly on issues related to low self-esteem and problematic relationships within the workplace, leisure and home environments. I have since come to embrace this experience as my apprenticeship to teaching and learning with students who are adults.
The Students and Their Teachers
In reflecting on this initial group of students, I recognize the challenge of working within a group socioeconomically different from my middle-class experience. The students were working-class and a culturally diverse group. Most of the students in this particular intake were, or had been, in trouble with the law, drugs and/or alcohol. Drawing on my experience with the first group I worked with as an OCAP trainee, I call attention to the dilemmas, challenges and issues the students carried with them into the program.
I vividly recall one student who I’ll call Jim. He carried the medicinal odour of Antabuse. I recall Jim’s protests and resistance to a hepatitis injection from the visiting school nurse. Jim claimed he trusted only himself to administer an injection with a needle. I felt hurt when Larry, a student I was particularly fond of, defiantly blew cigarette smoke directly into my face. (I later learned that he was stoned on Percodan.) I felt abandoned by the students who left me to fend for myself the day John, an angry student who had gone off his medication, put his hands around my neck and tried to choke me when I confronted him about his behaviour on the volleyball court. (My Teacher Training Journal, February 1979).
From Jim I began to learn about the strength and the power of the addiction to drugs and alcohol. Jim’s life had been fully impacted by drug and alcohol abuse. While in the program Jim’s partner, who also abused drugs, gave birth to a child who had to be treated for cocaine addiction. I felt challenged, and still do, in the way I perceived Jim falling through the cracks of our social system. I felt frustrated by his personal choice to seek and abuse Antabuse as a resolution to his problems.
Another student named Alex introduced me to a value base and culture that was unfamiliar (and from my perspective consisted of coarse and senseless violence.) His world lacked the sense of safety and/or security that I felt within my own community and support network. Alex’s narrative brought to light how people vary in the degree (and type) of safety and security they need. As Alex grieved a personal loss in his life due to violence, he did not seek the services of the police as a source of resolution to the incident. His choices evolved from a culture and value base that was certainly foreign to me, and one that did not have the same notion of resolution that I might have sought. In his own way Alex sought support from the Life Skills Group that, up until this recent loss, he had seemed to resist. Some of the group members were familiar with his lifestyle, and many of the students grieved with him. Alex’s personal life event shaped the relationships among the students and deepened the nature of the life skills group’s dialogue.
The experience of John putting his hands around my neck provided me the opportunity to gain insight into the value of a teacher’s support system and the application of teamwork. I remembered how supported I felt by my supervisor, Catharine, when she listened to my description of the incident. Catharine’s immediate response to this incident and her direct support and follow through felt like a full acknowledgment about my place on the team, in spite of my position as trainee. She immediately called the student’s psychiatrist and learned that John had gone off his medication. John was withdrawn from the program and returned to the hospital for treatment.
From Larry I learned about boundaries and the perception of potential. I recognize that my perception of Larry was different from how he saw himself. Larry always seemed to know what to say and he appeared confident and sure of himself, especially in contrast to some of the other students in the class, who on some days appeared lost and unsure. I recall one of my supervisors, who was also touched by Larry’s charm, trying to fix him and make things better for him. As I understand this situation now, I accept the smoke he blew into my face as a signal cautioning me not to overstep the boundary in the student-teacher relationship. I speculate that my supervisor, Brenda, was experiencing difficulty in accepting Larry’s choices. She seemed to be working harder to change Larry, than Larry was working to change himself. Perhaps Brenda was unknowingly working through a personal or unresolved issue of her own. I suspect that I came to know this because I recognized myself in Brenda. I also wanted the students to like and accept me. While it may seem contradictory, this woman, who was also a significant mentor to me, taught me about teacher self-care and personal balance. To this day I use my memories of her as a beacon, and as a warning for professional burnout.
The stories of each one of these students taught me something about human beings, behaviours in groups and cultural and lifestyle differences. Each one of them touched my life. They taught me about acceptance, empathy and nonjudgment. From them I also moved beyond my sociology textbook understanding of the socio-economic challenges in our world, to the real problems and issues some of our learners carry with them into their classroom and work environments. I can only imagine myself as wide-eyed and naïve‘ about my students in this early teaching situation. I had not given any consideration to the impact of the complexity of students’ life to their learning. Perhaps this stems from my youth and my early adult years, where I had become accustomed to clearly keeping life experience outside the learning situation separate from inside the classroom.
Curriculum as Life Experience in a Community Based Program
When I think about Brenda, I picture a tall slender woman entering a classroom space that is set up in a circle of lounge and sofa chairs. As Brenda walks across the room to take the seat that has been left empty for her beside the flip chart, she gregariously engages the students into the lesson plan. There is an energy and air of assurance about her. The rapport between Brenda and her students intrigued me. I recall how she shared anecdotes from her own life and the happenings of her morning. In the context of the life skills and job readiness program’s curriculum, Brenda invited life experience, in Dewey’s (1938) sense into the classroom situation.
Brenda’s curriculum, a term not generally used in the adult education literature or by my colleagues working with adults in the informal sense, embraced the students’ past, present and future life experiences (Connelly and Clandinin, 1988). Her classroom session unfolded as class time began resembling Clandinin and Connelly’s (2000) explanation, “Dewey’s (1938) notion of situation and experience makes it possible to imagine the teacher not so much as a maker of curriculum but as part of it and to imagine a place for context, culture … and temporality…” [Italics added] (p.28).
For many years after, still following Brenda’s example, I thought of curriculum as something I built, worked and moved with as I came to know my students. I moved through most of my teaching career with the notion that the curriculum was tied closely to my teacher identity. However, as discussed subsequent to my formal review of the adult education literature, and discovering the absence of curriculum discourse, I felt as though the very core of my teaching identity had been shaken.
