As I wrote in my first blog post, the purpose of this blog is to read, review, and synthesize contemporary works of teaching and learning. What follows is a review that both objectively distills and subjectively responds to the work in a direct and minimalist manner. In sacrificing a need to be thorough, I hope that this post--and others to come--reach for, uncover, and popularize certain useful principles and concepts in the field.
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In his just-published Becoming a Soulful Educator, Aryeh Ben David forges the thought of Parker Palmer and Rav Kook to realize certain principles of what he calls "soulful teaching."
I initiate this blog with a review of Ben David's work, because I think that it's best to start with the very reason, the basic choice that we all make when choosing to teach. That is, before we start interrogating the classroom, the curriculum, and the place of the student, we have to start with ourselves, the educators. Why did we choose this path? What do we hope to gain--and what do we intend to give?
Ben David's book is, at its very foundation, is a response and reminder to these questions--and a proposal and intentional structure for realizing this response in our classrooms.
Ben David's read of education resonates: soulful teachers must take a position in the classroom that is entirely essential and not at all about themselves. While associated with particular practices, soulful education is not solely about story-telling or singing songs, because those practices are not fundamentally evocative (13), in that they are performances by an individual teacher that may be more or less impressive or inspiring. A soulful teacher, for Ben David, plucks his or her own soul strings, and the students respond in kind by plucking their own soul strings, too. In so doing, the "harmonic vibrations" (13) between both sets of soul strings--much as facing guitars--are matched.
Mostly based on Rav Kook's teachings, Ben David offers sets of lists for cultivating soulful personalities and soulful teaching, with practices for both. First, Soulful Personalities are
- aware that they have souls always communicating to themselves
- listen to the voice of their souls to create harmony in a broken world
- capable of honoring their own uniqueness without placing themselves at the center of the world.
- personal honesty about the subject
- positioning herself as a work-in-progress
- sharing future goals and challenges related to the subject
For Ben David, modeling such soulfulness of honesty and humility for one's students through teaching and classroom practices is both essential--and essentially challening. He sees four categories of challenges in this regard: "not talking in the first person, talking too generally, fear of admitting weakness, and feeling like a fraud."
While these challenges are certainly intutive for any educator, Ben David does a great service in affirming the challenges, demonstrating the need for overcoming these challenges, and suggesting that the root of these challenges lies in a certain ego voice--a voice driven by fear, in which the educational process is about the teacher's failures and not the student's successes.
This, for me, was the first great take-away of the book. While I had always intuited the need to feel comfortable and even vulnerable and honest in the classroom, Ben David underscores why this need is so central to educating the souls of the students--if the teacher can't be honest, vulnerable, and a student of the wisdom of the discipline, then how can students learn how to do so?
The remaining two chapters to Part 1 of the book are concerned with two pre-requisites, if not fundaments, for soulful education: intentionally creating a safe soulful space for students to be vulnerable and honest, and loving each and every student. Again, this is wisdom that most teachers feel, but Ben David makes a compelling case for centering this wisdom at the core of our pedagogy. This second point hit home, personally, when Ben David opened the chapter unequivocally: "The most important quality of a teacher is to love his or her students--all of them." (34)
Soulful education requires that we love our students through the following paradigm shifts:
- Relating to students as souls--and loving their souls.
- Loving our students unconditionally--despite bad behavior.
- Loving all of our students.
- Especially loving the student on the margins (e.g. the quiet student).
The second half of the book is dedicated to setting up a lesson plan, unit, and ultimately a year-long experience that is soulful in design. While Ben David talks about the 6 steps to soulful education on the micro- level, I think that these steps are true on the macro, year-long level as well. They are
- Transitioning into class
- Introducing the learning
- Mindful engagement
- Heartful engagement
- Summarizing the learning
- Transitioning out of the class.
1. Transitions, Ben David suggests, maximize focus by minimizing the now-natural multi-tasking. The soul, in his words, can't multi-task. I've always thought about warm-ups or "write-nows" in the English classroom, but I've only intuited the transition for teachers--setting up a ritual of sorts to enter the space of the classroom. He suggests a mantra (his own is "Please, God, give me the will and wisdom to best serve my students.").
2. Introducing the learning is about answering the question: "where are you in this subject?" Here, the teacher plucks her own soul string, modeling her own personal engagement.
3. Mindful engagement is about relating wisdom to one's own experience and making that learning central. I'm not exactly sure how mindful engagement is different than heartful engagement (the following step), but I do take away that mindful engagement is about learning slowly, deliberately.
4. Heartful engagement is about processing the learning. He breaks this down into 4 steps of inquiry:
- Where are you regarding the subject studied?
- How do you think these ideas can affect your life?
- What do you think are the obstacles for you to reach this future reality?
- Based on what you learned, what's one small practical piece of advice that you could give yourself?
5. Summarizing the learning is all about articulating what happened and what was learned today--before the class's end.
6. Transitioning out is about setting up rituals or routines that will allow the seed of learning to flourish beyond the classroom. This is less about something that happens in the classroom and more about acknowledging that "the goal of the class is what happens after the class is over." (81)
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Conclusions
I found Ben David's book to be a quick and easy read. Much of what he writes is intuitive, but his argument and method is refreshing and certainly not at the center of conversations around education. Indeed, while school communities expect that developing the soul of a student is at the core of our work, pedagogical conversations assume that this happens through good pedagogy. Creating a language, a set of principles, and even a certain discourse and trajectory is Ben David's useful contribution.
Personally, I take the following teachings to heart, and as a call to renew certain basic intuitions or felt assumptions that I've known or developed as teacher:
- to love my students-as-souls, and to do so unconditionally;
- to personalize soulful learning by first and foremost being a vulnerable teacher;
- and to set up certain rituals before, during, and after class that foreground the soulful nature of my classroom.
