What is it about the word teacher that has so many wanting to undermine its true meaning?
Taking an historical perspective, there have been in recent years several attempts to replace the word with a range of synonyms that frankly do neither the word, nor its activity, any justice. The titles of learning managers, learning facilitators, learning coordinators, educators, presenters, cohort leaders have all been trotted out and presented as viable alternatives to the single word teacher. Interestingly, none of these alternatives has lasted and they have usually had the sense of wearing an ill-fitting garment that belonged to someone else, a jacket that was stylistically unsuited or simply ‘not right.’
Why would there be such a movement to remove the word teacher from our everyday lexicon? Is there a power and simplicity in the word that substitutions cannot come close to matching and does this simplicity naturally expose the less than transparent cleverness of the rogue terms?
Moreover, what is the activity that accompanies the word teacher? Does this activity also have levels of power that the replacement terms cannot match?
This Is My Teacher!
Many of we teachers have experienced the enthusiastically expressed claims of children that This is my teacher! This passionate and open confirmation leaves one in no doubt about the strength and value of the bond that children have with their teachers, a bond that lasts for many, many years and often well into adulthood. I am yet to hear any child passionately exclaim This is my learning facilitator! Have you?
The Activity of the Word Teacher
Offering Connection
The relationship between a child and their teacher built over a Primary school year is based, at its truest, on the connection the teacher builds with the child. S/he sees the child for who they are, reflecting back both their strengths and weaknesses, and accepting them as they are, regardless of both. Teachers see and appreciate the child as a person with a unique set of talents to bring to the world, and support them to grow these talents without any investment in how this growth needs to look. This is an unusual type of care and nurturing to offer to anyone as it has a quality of caring detachment without any projected outcome.
By contrast, the majority of relationships in our Society are based on reciprocal investment – I do for you so that you do for me. This investment often comes laced with many hues of emotionality and, at times, control. Emotionality and detachment are mutually exclusive: they cannot coexist. Yet it is detachment that allows true care to unfold, a fact observed for centuries, including in the teachings of the Buddha and of Jesus.
There is a saying in the profession that a teacher’s love is tough love. Often this refers to the fact of the teacher’s lack of engaging with, or pandering to, emotionality; in fact, it usually falls to the teacher to apply consequences for emotional outbursts, such as those based on anger, extreme frustration or resistance to cooperating with others. As well as providing the opportunity for the teacher to express detachment from emotionality, these situations may also allow children to develop a sense of how to express and communicate with true respect in ways that support everyone, including themselves, and to gain mastery of their reactive emotions when they are part of a group. To use the vernacular, children begin to develop a clear sense of loving boundaries in social situations, a development that serves them throughout their lives.
Experiences like these confirm the bond between a child and their teacher. They deepen the sense of trust that many young children have in their teacher as a true authority figure in their lives, not solely as someone who has the power to enforce consequences, but also someone who supports the child to slough off the behavioural dross so their true gold can shine more consistently and more brightly. Confirming this true gold is an integral part of the teacher’s relationship with the child and a clear indicator of the deepest meaning of the word teacher.
Inspiring a love of learning
There are teachers who are deeply passionate about what they teach and this passion inspires children to connect with the wonder of nature, the beauty of language and the precision of Maths. This aspect of the word teacher is readily felt in the body, as such teachers veritably pour out their wisdom and enthusiasm for their subject matter freely to all, expressing their love and appreciation for their topic. Most of us will have experienced this quality of teacher at some stage in our lives and hence can confirm how infectious their expression is.
Confirming a Child’s Humanity
As well as drawing out the talents and capabilities of a child, there is equally the opportunity for teachers to confirm their qualities, whether it is in the way they lovingly support others, their ability to inspire and lead a group, their steadying presence, the joy they bring or the quality of their expression. With the ever-increasing focus on outcomes, results and data sets, this aspect of teaching is often seriously under-expressed. Is this not an indictment of our collective values, for, if there is no quality in what we do, do we not become merely the automatons of functionality, highly efficient but disconnected from our humanity and from the qualities of our true essence?
What Manner of Role Model?
There is no doubt that teachers are role models for the children in their care. The question is What manner of role model? The teacher can be an inspirational role model, reflecting to their students the talents and the qualities the teacher brings in service to the world. Conversely, the teacher can reflect back an array of negative attributes from control and martyrdom (1) through to lack of true expression and a mindset of going through the motions for the sake of exclusively personal security (comfort). This paints the picture of being no more than a cog in an unforgiving and relentless machine.
We teachers have a daily choice to honour the truth of who we are, appreciating what we offer to the world and allowing the warm and confident expression of this to be the foundation of all that we do and say. Or we may choose a dimmed version of ourselves, a compliant, comfortable, don’t rock the boat persona and then reflect that manner of being to the children in our care.
In each instance, our every movement, our every word and gesture reflect a way to be in the world and, in a real and tangible manner, we role model this way to our students.
So, the word teacher is powerful in all that it conveys in regards to its wide-ranging activity.
Is it possible that the attempts to introduce substitutions like learning manager, learning facilitator and others occur when those of us in the teaching profession have neither valued nor lived – for whatever reasons - the absolute integrity and deep levels of care and inspiration inherent in this word teacher and its true activity?
This is certainly worth pondering each day as we each put on the name badge, we all wear with the single, simple epithet, teacher – the one whose job is to grow people! We all have the opportunity each day to allow our essence to shine like the sun - unapologetically, a teacher.
(1)Dabell, J., 2020. Guilt-Edged Guilt. [online] TeacherToolkit. Available at: <https://www.teachertoolkit.co.uk/2017/02/23/pedagogue-expressing-guilt-syndrome/> [Accessed 7 July 2020].