|
|
Journal of Cognitive Affective
Learning, 1 (Spring 2005), 8-12. Copyright Ó 2005,
Oxford College of Emory University. 1549-6953/05 https://www.jcal.emory.edu//viewarticle.php?id=34&layout=html Bridging the Heart and Mind: Community as a Device
For Linking Cognitive and Affective Learning Maureen
P. Hall, Assistant Professor of Education University of Massachusetts at
Dartmouth. Email: mhall@umassd.edu Though affective learning or
attention to the emotional part of learning has been undervalued in educational
systems, it represents a part of learning that is becoming increasingly
recognized as vital. How can we bridge the cognitive and affective parts of
learning? This article explores Parker Palmer’s workable framework for the
creation of community in learning environments, accompanied by classroom
examples from the author’s teaching practices. Community is a place where
teachers and students can test ideas and make connections between what they are
teaching and learning in their heads and feeling in their hearts. Introduction
In the best learning environments, there is a space characterized by
mutual inquiry, a place where teachers are learners and learners are teachers.
The teacher and students can co-create a community for learning where everyone
feels valued. Feeling valued represents one piece of affective learning.
Researchers have characterized affective learning and its important connection
to cognitive learning (Astin, 1985; Goleman, 1998). Bloom’s taxonomy included
affective learning objectives, which he argued were as central to learning as
the cognitive objectives. These objectives begin with receiving (paying
attention), and proceed through responding and valuing to organizing
(conceptualizing values), culminating in characterizing (generalizing values to
behavior). Though affective learning or attention to the emotional part of
learning has been undervalued in educational systems, it represents a part of
learning that is becoming increasingly recognized as vital. How can we bridge the cognitive and affective parts of learning? In my
current work with teachers in graduate-level education, preservice education
courses, and in my own teaching experiences with K-12 students, I have
identified a need for community. This assertion grows out of my work, and there
is a need for further study to validate this hypothesis. I believe that the
behaviors involved in creating a learning community with others stand as the
affective part of learning. Without attention to the affective components of
learning, the most conducive community for learning cannot be sustained. We
need to make connections between cognitive and affective learning in order to
create the best teaching and learning environment for our students and for
ourselves as educators and lifelong learners. How can we make these connections
transparent in the classroom? Examining good teaching provides an opportunity
to investigate these connections. Affective
Elements in Teaching
Enter
the work of Parker J. Palmer, a writer, teacher, lecturer, and activist. This
article will explore Palmer’s workable framework for the creation of community
in learning environments, accompanied by classroom examples from my teaching
practices. Parker Palmer’s seminal work The Courage To Teach (1998) shed
light on the art of community-making when he suggested that a teacher must
first be in community with his or her self before he or she can create community
with others. A teacher’s self-knowledge is a starting point for creating
community with one’s teaching self. However, there are issues in education that
can prevent one form gaining self-knowledge. These include vulnerability,
disconnection, and fear. Having taught for over thirty years, Palmer (1998)
described his feeling as he started with each new class that he taught, no
matter the arsenal of teaching methods he possessed. Instead, he saw his
ability to connect with students as paramount. He wrote: In
every class I teach, my ability to connect with my students, and to connect
them with the subject, depends less on the methods I use than on the degree to
which I know and trust my selfhood—and am willing to make it available and
vulnerable in the service of learning. (p. 10) Palmer pointed out that good teachers not only have
the capacity for connectedness, but that they also actively participate in
self-discovery and find interesting and valid ways of joining their inward self
with the subject that they are teaching. Vulnerability
Good teachers create a welcoming space for learning.
Though the word vulnerability has some negative connotations, its meaning needs
to be qualified for the space of teaching and learning. Palmer (1998) referred
to teaching as a constant act of hospitality. This good-natured hospitality is
a form of recurring vulnerability; it is an empathy and openness for one’s
students and their varying needs. Empathy informs the connection between
cognitive and affective learning; empathy builds on our own self-awareness and
allows us entry into the feelings of others. Goleman (1995) asserted, “The more
open we are to our own emotions, the more skilled we will be in reading
feelings” (p. 96). Likewise, Palmer’s view on good teaching stands as a
conscious and repetitive act of openness and vulnerability, which is partly
informed by our empathetic capacity. When teachers center themselves in their
identity and personal truths, take risks, and allow themselves to be
vulnerable, good teaching can happen. If teachers do not make themselves open
in these ways, the connectedness is gone and good teaching cannot happen. When I conduct midterm evaluations with my students,
I am allowing my teaching and my teaching self to be vulnerable. These midterm
evaluations are not required at my institution. The first time I conducted a
midterm evaluation was in the fall of 2003. It was both the hardest and the
best thing I did. After collecting the evaluations, I read through them once.
Overwhelmed with the feedback, I decided to set them aside for a day or two.
The information was not all negative, although the negative comments became
“larger” than the others. Good teachers tend to focus and worry about the
negative rather than the positive. This is human nature. As caring teachers, we
seek to please every student all of the time. We tend to get frustrated when
this does not occur. I made some changes in my teaching in response to the
information from the midterm evaluation. If I do not open up my teaching
practices through these evaluations, I will avoid this vulnerability. However,
if I can listen to the voices of my students and be responsive to their
educational needs, my vulnerability can be the medium through which I improve
the teaching and learning spaces in my classroom. Disconnection
With regard to both
secondary and postsecondary levels, Palmer (1998) emphasized superficial issues
that disconnect teachers from their students and colleagues, and summarized the
illusions about what it will be like to be a part of that educational culture.
Teachers think that by joining academia they will be a part of a community of
scholars, but instead find themselves involved in competitive and distant
relations with each other. According to Palmer (1998), four issues promote this
disconnection: (a) the grading system that separates teachers and students, (b)
departments that fragment fields of knowledge, (c) competition that makes
students and teachers wary of their peers, and (d) the bureaucracy that puts faculty
and administration at odds. The cumulative effect of these issues creates
anything but a community of scholars. So as a possible solution to address these potential
disconnections, I decided to investigate my teaching with the help of another
educator. In the fall of 2003, I asked my department chair if he would
participate in the peer review of my teaching. This was voluntary. I believed
it was important to gather some data on my teaching practices in order to
improve my pedagogy. Interested in this activity, the chair scheduled times to
meet with me. This peer review was conducted in a similar fashion to the method
we use to supervise student teachers in the field. We had a series of
pre-observation conferences, observations, and post-observation conferences. I
asked him to act as a student and give me information on the clarity of my
instruction. The data gathered for this peer review gave me another opportunity
to gain information about my teaching. In addition, peer review helped me to
build community with my department chair. Peer review has become a valued interaction in higher
education because it provides rich opportunities to improve one’s pedagogical
practices. If I am to open my teaching and learning space to others, I must
trust them. In a productive peer review situation, I become another pair of
eyes in a colleague’s classroom in the name of improving teaching and learning.
Rising above the atmosphere of palpable competition, I partner with a colleague
to investigate pedagogy. Supporting each other with information and suggestions
builds a bridge towards community in higher education, which is a place that
can be otherwise isolating. My background as a K-12 teacher, my experiences supervising
student teachers, and my current peer review work with two colleagues supported
by the “Teaching Partners” initiative through UMass Dartmouth’s Center for
Teaching Excellence, all provide a lens for looking at teaching. I focus on
reflective practice and the creation of community, and both of these elements
feed the best models for peer review. “I’m glad about the ‘inflict no pain’ motto,” said
one of my partners in peer review after I observed one of her classes. She said
this during one of our post-observation conferences, and it made me laugh out
loud. She was confusing the first law of medicine “Do no harm,” which I had
learned as the first “law” of supervising student teachers as a doctoral
student at the University of Virginia. She had translated “Do no harm” into
“Inflict no pain.” I laughed for two reasons: because it was funny and because
it reaffirmed to me how vulnerable we all feel when someone else enters our
teaching and learning space. This post-observation conversation occurred in a
trusted space of community that we have been working to build with each other
centering on improving our teaching and our students’ learning. This
conversation about teaching echoed Palmer’s (1998) notions of what kinds of
issues cause teachers at all levels to connect and/or disconnect. Palmer
characterized both the negative and positive manifestations of vulnerablity in
one’s teaching. My colleague allowed herself to be vulnerable enough for me to
come in and observe one of her classes so that I could give her information
about her teaching; she was working to improve her practice and that was
positive. This openness or vulnerablity allowed me to help her reach her goals
in teaching and thereby improve her students’ learning. Fear
Though Palmer regarded vulnerability, disconnection,
and other issues in academe as equally important, he suggested that fear is the
overarching reason for all of them. Though many different kinds of fears are
involved, not all fears are necessarily negative. For instance, if a teacher is
worried about the quality of his or her teaching, this signifies that he or she
really cares about the craft of teaching and strives to improve. When teachers
complain that students are unreachable, the teachers abdicate responsibility
for their students’ learning. This creates a separation between teacher and
student and frees the teacher from any responsibility for student problems. In
addressing this issue of fear, Palmer identified respect as a way to re-connect
to others. He believed that academic life could be transformed by practicing
simple respect. I
don’t think there are many places where people feel less respect than they do
on university campuses. The university is a place where we grant respect only
to a few things—to the text, to the expert, to those who win in competition.
But we do not grant respect to students, to stumbling and failing. (1998, p.
18) Respect, an attribute far too often overlooked, is an
essential component to all relations in the academic culture. This extends from
teacher to student, teacher to teacher, teacher to administrator, and all other
possible relations in an educational setting. Respect between and among these
stakeholders shows that care is extended and that people’s possible successes
in learning are considered. Community as an
Antidote to Fear and Disconnection
Another example of community as a bridge between
cognitive and affective learning comes from a master’s level developmental
reading class designed for teachers in the spring of 2004. Creating community
was one of my affective learning goals for the course. After grades had been
posted and the semester was over, I received an unsolicited e-mail from a
student in this class. She commented on how community had evolved in this class
and described it in part by explaining, “When students feel like valued
professionals they are more inclined to have a vested interest in sharing and
learning from one another” (Anonymous, personal communication, May 20,
2004). Because students felt invited to share ideas in the class, she felt
comfortable about being open and interactive. Teaching can be characterized as
an act of hospitality encouraging a kind of respectful listening and openness,
which fosters a rich community for learning. The learning environment in this
course was enhanced by the creation of community, thereby connecting the
cognitive with the affective. Models of Community
Palmer (1998) evaluates three models of community:
therapeutic, marketing, and civic. The therapeutic model demands intimacy
between all members of a community and he emphasizes such a demand is
unrealistic. He noted that individuals only attain true intimacy with a few
people in our entire lives; expecting a teacher to develop this sort of
community with thirty students in nine months is clearly an unattainable goal.
Teachers are not trained to be social workers or therapists. Palmer stressed
that if community is synonymous with intimacy, then many possibilities will be
lost for quality interaction with others who are different from us. The marketing model of community considers parents
and students the customers. Schools
must improve their product (education) by strengthening their relations with
students and by becoming accountable to them. According to Palmer, “Bill-paying
students and parents must be treated as the consumers that they are and given
ample opportunity to criticize their purchases” (1998, p. 93). He discounted
the workability of the marketing model in today’s schools because in our
current educational environment, parents and students are not equipped, or in
many cases allowed, to be the main evaluators of classroom practices. Instructor evaluation at the University of
Massachusetts at Dartmouth presents an example of the marketing model of
community. Student evaluations of instructors stand as one measure of teaching
effectiveness. I strongly believe that student evaluations provide vital
information. Students’ voices need to be heard because though they may lack
some pedagogical knowledge, students are consumers of their educational
experience. And as consumers, they can provide important information about the
quality of instruction. Student evaluations should not provide the only
measure. Palmer discussed the ways in which the civic model incorporates
elements for the best kind of classroom community. The civic model hinges on a
mutual agreement to work together towards a common goal. When communities are
built on the civic model, a much wider range of relations can exist among
people. The
community envisioned by the civic model is one of public mutuality rather than
personal vulnerability—a community where people who do not and cannot
experience intimacy with each other nonetheless learn to share a common
territory and common resources, to resolve mutual conflicts and mutual
problems. (1998, p. 92) The civic model contains threads for addressing
divisions in our society due to differences in race, gender, and ethnicity.
Using parts of this model may allow us to begin re-weaving the fabric of our
educational institutions that, like the relationships among diverse
individuals, have either become frayed or disconnected. But the commitments of society and the commitments of
the classroom are different. In civic society, people solve things through
bargaining, negotiation, and compromise. In a democratic society, whoever or
whatever receives the highest number of votes leads or is in charge. Palmer
explained the difference in goals between the civic society and the classroom,
thereby articulating important drawbacks of the civic model for the classroom:
“But what is noble in a quest for the common good may be ignoble in a quest for
truth: truth is not determined by democratic means” (1998, p. 92). In Palmer’s
classroom, a fundamental underlying premise of his model is that education must
be about uncovering truth. Community of Truth
Palmer (1998) has created an alternative model for
community, which he termed the “community of truth” (p. 90). He intended it to
address what he perceived as needed in a teaching and learning space. Though he
identified needed components from the therapeutic, marketing, and civic models
of community, he stressed that his alternative model is required: The
hallmark of the community of truth is not psychological intimacy or political
civility, or pragmatic accountability, though it does not exclude these
virtues. This model of community reaches deeper, into ontology and
epistemology—into assumptions about the nature of reality and how we know it—on
which all education is built. The hallmark of the community of truth is in its
claim that reality is a web of communal relationships, and we can know reality
only by being in community with it. (p. 95) He
offered no prescription for creating particular communities of truth because
different teachers must find their own ways to create it. Rather, he advocated
that this making of community must emerge from the identity and integrity of
the particular teacher. When the teacher can identify his or her strengths and
is in community with themselves, Palmer asserted that the right method will
emerge for him or her. Palmer described his community of truth as circular,
interactive, and dynamic; it is not hierarchical. It represents an atmosphere
that advances our knowledge through conflict, not through competition. Another Teacher’s Example
The
feminist pedagogue bell hooks provided an example of a community of truth in
her classroom practices. In Teaching to
Transgress (1994), hooks described both her view of community and how she engendered
community in her teaching and learning space: I
enter the classroom with the assumption that we must build “community” in order
to create a climate of openness and intellectual rigor….I think that a feeling
of community creates a sense that there is a shared commitment and a common
good that binds us. What we all ideally share is the desire to learn—to receive
actively knowledge that enhances our intellectual development and our capacity
to live more fully in the world. (p. 40) By creating her version of a community of truth,
hooks’ teaching and learning environment attends to the intellectual or
cognitive joined with the affective. In turn, living fully in the world and in
hooks’ classroom represents the dynamic manifestation of the cognitive meeting
the affective. To establish a connection between the affective and
the cognitive, teachers need to create a space in which students can integrate
what they are feeling and learning. Community is a place where students can test
ideas and make connections between what they are learning in their heads and
feeling in their hearts. This space allows for reflecting and exploring
alternative points of view. Communities for learning exemplify cooperation and
help students integrate cognitive and affective knowledge into a learning
"whole." Parker Palmer’s work represents rich territory for teachers
to explore, a place rich with ideas and practices for investigating teaching
practices, and improving learning for all students. u Maureen P.
Hall is an Assistant Professor of Education at the University of Massachusetts
at Dartmouth. Her research interests focus mainly on reflective practice
and the creation of community in teaching and learning spaces. References
Astin, A.
(1985). Achieving educational excellence. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Bloom,
B. S. (1956). Taxonomy
of educational objectives: The classification of educational goals. London: Longmans. Goleman,
D. (1995). Emotional intelligence. New York: Bantam Books. Goleman,
D. (1998). Working with emotional intelligence. New York: Bantam Books. hooks, b.
(1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. New York:
Routledge. Palmer, P.
J. (1998). The courage to teach: Exploring the inner landscape of a teacher’s
life. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. [OCEU1]…Since you have Level 2 Headings in subsequent paras, e.g., Vulnerability, Disconnection, Fear |
