“If I became a great teacher, who would ever know?”
“You, your students, and God. Not a bad audience.”
–A Man for All Seasons
Who is the authentically engaged teacher? How do such educators understand their work? What do they look like? Why do they act they way they do? These are the sorts of questions we will address in the first part of this project as we examine the teacher’s “niche” in the classroom. We will look first at how a teacher’s authentic engagement informs his or her sense of identity as a co-learner (Chapter 1). Then we will look at how this engagement informs the structure of the relationships he or she has with students (Chapter 2) and, finally, we will look at how an authentically engaged teacher understands education’s purpose (Chapter 3).
Author’s Note: my early reviewers who have been helping me with this project have suggested to me that the material in Chapter 3 may need some extra “digesting” to process its full argument; they want to encourage any readers to take more than one pass at it after the first read through.
What’s Wrong with this Picture?
For those who might find the content of “Caro’s Biology Freakout” difficult to “swallow,” my class of former students have all graciously given me permission to share the video referenced in this section. Special thanks to Lauren for the original filming and editing, and of course, an extra special thanks to Caroline for giving her blessing to post it.
Light a Candle 
In Chapter one you make an observation which is as valid for college professors and those teaching in graduate school which is that the student is the center of teaching, not the subject matter. All too often at the college and graduate school levels of education we find people who don’t want to be teachers, just do research, or who are only there to because they love a particular subject matter. The enabling of students to discover their own authenticity in relationship to a body of knowledge is totally overlooked.
LikeLike
You state that “The essence of the teaching act, then, is a process of creating ways of relating a subject that fundamentally alters a person’s experience of reality.” I agree because it is my belief that we create the meaning of our lives as we become aware of and develop our unique “self” in relationship to the world [i.e. reality] in which we live, a process that is life long. Teaching, as you describe it, is an enabling force for this creation. And so, as you make clear, that is needs to be an ongoing process for the teacher as well as the student.
LikeLike