Teaching to Learn/Learning to Teach: Meditations on the Classroom

Reviewed by Paul A. Lacey

The title of this book may lead some prospective readers to worry that it will be intellectually soft or religiously doctrinaire. It is neither. The product of Anne Dalke's twenty years at Bryn Mawr College, supplemented and "interrogated" by colleagues and former students, Teaching to Learn/Learning to Teach is a richly researched, carefully crafted, multivoiced, self-reflective study of the teaching and learning process. Its seven chapters contain a variety of forms: a ten-year journal charting the evolution of Dalke's approach to teaching; multiple stories, written "contrapuntally" by Dalke with herself, her students, and other teachers; and, running through it all, a narrative of Dalke's ongoing work to balance and integrate her roles as wife and mother, spiritual seeker, and, by deliberate career choice, a regular part-time faculty member who teaches English literature and feminist and gender studies in one of America's most intellectually rigorous colleges.

The book chronicles Dalke's teaching career, which she starts by standing in the front of the class, distilling the lectures she has heard in graduate school, and trying to get the students to respond to her readings of texts. The students sit against the far wall, diligently taking notes. Dalke's teaching supervisor in graduate school advises her to "never ask the class a question if you don't know the answer." (The same advice is given to prospective trial lawyers, perhaps for the same reason: in an adversarial power relation, one must always be in charge.)

Gradually, things change. Her reading lists become more inclusive; she designs a new course. In one class, she realizes that a group of articulate students are lesbians, that they are angry, "and that their anger fuels the very pointed questions they have to ask about these texts." Embarking on what she calls the "discipline of learning to listen," Dalke asks them for suggestions for her next reading list.

Dalke's teaching becomes more experimental and interdisciplinary. She enlarges the circle of voices represented in her courses, telling students, "I want us to learn about different cultures, and then I want us to think about constructing a community that acknowledges those differences." She runs into resistance-the students' resistance to thinking about themselves as women, to studying in a women's college, to understanding her pedagogical purposes, and to considering different points of view. Some of the resistance becomes angry, as students object to her choice of texts, or to her decision to give an exam. Some complain she is too rigorous or too harsh.

Dalke's students are articulate, and some know how to wound. She has taught them to be good readers, and they employ their skills to criticize her with surgical precision. "Inviting them to help decide about the conditions in which they learn opens me to challenges I'm not sure how to handle," she writes. A few students who are quoted in the book strike this reader as glib and smug in their sense of entitlement and their readiness to claim the protections of marginality. One, who glories in being angry, seems to do nothing but keep score of who is speaking too much in class. Dalke not only absorbs her criticism and the anger, but invites that student to collaborate with her in writing one chapter of the book. Dalke models openness, patience, and a determination to listen persistently, even to what is difficult to hear.

She believes that "we are beginning to construct a feminist pedagogy," and her choice of pronoun is important. The book documents Dalke's struggle with such things as how to negotiate power relations in the classroom, how the project of bringing out women's voices might undervalue the expressive powers of silence, how to interpret the complex meanings of silence and marginality, and who and what may be "privileged" in class discussion. In all those attempts, she engages in dialogue with postmodern and feminist works, such as those by Stanley Fish, Linda Kauffman, Mimi Orner, and Iris Marion Young, that are aimed at subverting the best of teacherly intentions. Dalke uses each of these writers as a test of her own practice, finding them sometimes helpful and sometimes confounding. For example, the practices that she has developed out of her deepest principles as a teacher are challenged by the words of Fish, who writes that if conflict is made into a structural principle, "its very nature is domesticated"; by Kauffman, who asserts that "the testimony of personal experience is a way of muzzling dissent"; and by Orner, who writes that our "attempt to empower students to find and articulate their voices" is a "controlling process." Similarly, Young's assertion that the ideal of community building "privileges unity over difference" challenges Dalke's teaching method. So many writers can tell us what we are doing wrong in our teaching.

Recognizing a profound religious dimension in women's studies, Dalke finds in Quaker religious practice a spirituality that fits with her feminism, helps her address issues of enacting authority in the classroom, and offers a pedagogy drawn from the process of group "discernment," or discovering together how the group and individuals are called to act, in Quaker meetings. Her Quaker practice helps her see herself as a learner with her students, "companions on a path that has spiritual as well as intellectual dimensions, with all of us moving toward growth and development." Following other Quaker writers, including education consultant Parker Palmer, who describes a religious version of the social construction of meaning as a "meeting for learning," and English professor Mary Rose O'Reilley, who calls it "the peaceable classroom," Dalke conceives of classes as "testings of what seem to be individual 'leadings' against both the texts and the leadings of others."

Discovering that a thesaurus listed teaching and learning as antonyms of each other, one of her students created a new word which fused them, "tearning." "Said out loud," the student writes, "it sounds like 'turning' . . . and evokes our efforts to turn, shift, and change the world."

This book is a work-in-progress toward a pedagogy of presence and attention, of deep listening, and of the use of silence as a milieu for transformation. It is vulnerable to many challenges, but a spirituality that helps us fuse teaching and learning into such a turning is worth considering.

Paul Lacey is emeritus professor of English at Earlham College. He writes on Quaker education and is the editor of Denise Levertov: Selected Poems. In 1998 he published Growing Into Goodness: Essays on Quaker Education.

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