TEACHER’S DAY IN FOCUS
World Teachers’ Day is a time to salute educators and differentiate between Teacher and teacher
AS WE celebrate World Teachers’ Day tomorrow, we acknowledge the amazing, dedicated, selfless, lovable and brilliant educators who have touched our lives.
We are especially aware of teachers working under conditions of untold violence and insecurity, and have adopted roles and persona which have far exceeded any normative notion of a teacher.
Some may remember a Teacher whose genuine interest in our well-being changed the way we saw ourselves, and redirected our paths into wonderful accomplishments. Others might recall the particular enjoyment of a subject, only because of the teacher. We deliberately distinguish between a Teacher with a capital T and that with a small t. While the Teacher is what we require and respect, the teacher is not.
Good teaching, learners will tell you, has to do with how a Teacher makes you feel – the sense of hope, the confidence to believe that anything is possible.
In turn, we acknowledge that some of us might equally recall those teachers who made us feel small and unseen, whose words and actions made us cringe in fear and humiliation, as we prayed each day for it to stop. It seems, therefore, that we need to separate the teacher from a Teacher – the two are not the same.
A Teacher wants to teach, loves those they teach and loves, as Algerian-born French philosopher Jacques Derrida reminds, without expecting anything in return.
It is not that a Teacher does not expect his or her learners to behave well or to pass their exams. However, expecting nothing in return implies some sort of unexpected or surprising act without which a Teacher might not have been aware of before.
That is, he or she recognises the potential of learners to do the unpredictable and to come up with new ways of thinking and seeing the world.
Unlike the teacher, a Teacher starts each day with a knowledge and recognition of what teaching requires of them. They recognise the enormous responsibility they have chosen to carry – of not only imparting particular sets of knowledge and skills but of being the very best person their learners will encounter. And perhaps this is what a Teacher does: establishing possibilities for learners to be co-learners with in their encounters.
Such encounters would for once immerse a Teacher and learners in communicative encounters where they learn with one another.
A Teacher knows their place – their position of authority is subsumed by their position of responsibility; they knows that beneath the bravado of youth is only the vulnerability of the young. So, they tread carefully and gently while traversing the minds, spirits and hearts of those entrusted to them, ever aware that learners and learning hold inconclusive and renewed possibilities.
A Teacher knows all too well teaching is not for now; it is for what is to come, what is yet to be known.
A Teacher knows that although their teaching is confined to the parameters of a school, what they teach will be taken into the world. It is this realisation, which brings us to the heart and concern of this topic – how well we prepare our children for the world in which we live and, for the latter to happen, we conceive the role of a Teacher to cultivating encounters in which caring with learners becomes a priority on the basis that there is always more to encounter.
If the ever-increasing number of media reports related to the harmful and despicable conduct of teachers are anything to go by, then South Africa’s teaching and teacher crises are by no means limited to the issues of resources, teacher knowledge and preparedness.
In fact, to address poor resources, provide teacher training or re-training, and then to hold principals and teachers then accountable, is surely more easily attainable than to remedy the bigger problem of teachers, who should not be allowed to teach in the first place.
For the sake of clarity, our contestation and anger is as much with teachers who humiliate, who abuse and sexually assault learners, as it is with teachers who make children believe that they are less equal, less capable, and less worthy. We find these teachers everywhere.
They come in many guises – sometimes clad in arrogance, some with “misunderstood” good intentions, and others with proclamations of sheer ignorance. They come from world views, which dare not be questioned or contested; they justify racist, humiliating, or exclusionary language as mere mistakes or misinterpretations; and they hide behind veils of ignorance, even when the truth is right in front of them.
The harm is not only to the unsuspecting child, it is to teaching and teachers, as much as it is to us, as a society.
Teaching is about the dignity, compassion and care, which Teachers can establish with learners.
As such, perhaps the purpose of a World Teachers’ Day is best served by taking stock not only of who we are as teachers, but what kind of teachers, and by implication, what kind of schools, and what kind of societies we are. This is not to say the kinds of people produced through society is the exclusive domain of teachers. Rather, that as a collective we ought to hold teachers to a particular standard of just action, which we consider as most conducive to a society, shaped by dignity, compassion and care.
Teachers, by virtue of the label they bestow on themselves, enter into a covenant of trust with learners, their parents or guardians, and hence, society. It is fair to expect of them standards to which reasonable citizens ought to hold themselves – to act with dignity, compassion, care, and if not in agreement with all forms of difference, then have the grace and civility to respect, regardless.
On this day, we need to remind ourselves of our collective responsibility to ensure our teachers teach and act by taking account of all learners and their learning, whether in the classroom, on the sport field or on the drama stage.
We need to ask our teachers to think about who they are; to reflect upon their histories and values, which have given shape to how they think, and how they see the world. This is a collective responsibility, because all our children should matter to all of us. The well-being and dignity of any society is measured by how it treats its children. Teachers have the honour and responsibility of being critical to this measurement. Professors Nuraan Davids and Yusef Waghid are academics in the Department of Education, policy studies at Stellenbosch University.