15 November 2005The Teacher as Model Learner[NB: This is the first version of any essay I wrote recently in application for an academic position. I mean to post a revised and, I hope, somewhat more enticing, version of it here soon. -- MFL] The teachers I remember most fondly from my years as an undergraduate had various admirable qualities. All of them were enthusiastic devotees to their special discipline, and so they were vigorously demonstrative in their lectures. Some of them were unafraid to express their well considered and firmly held principles, and they could be voluble in their opinions. Others gave emphasis, with a perfect dose of force, to the skills of the academic craft; they encouraged clear and persuasive argumentation, and they themselves were paragons of these skills. It is perhaps significant that none of the group of teachers so salient in my memory taught in the particular field in which I eventually settled, archaeology--though many fine archaeology professors instructed me. This handful of impressive teachers consisted of professors of Arabic, existentialism and phenomenology, biological anthropology, mysticism and religion, and Marxist theory. They were not simply specialists from whose partial store of knowledge I could launch a professional career. Rather, they were persons who both reflected and amplified my diverse interests. They also readily exhibited how they had come to the knowledge they possessed. They could articulate what they knew such that it was broadly intelligible, without being either obvious or overly abstract, and simultaneously elicit a similar response from their students. In short, they were good communicators. When I was an undergraduate student, my teachers' demonstrativeness and clear enthusiasm alone probably overawed me. As I pursued higher education further, I came to admire subtler qualities in the academics charged with overseeing my progress, qualities that I took longer to admire and that made them less lecturers and more mentors. The most lasting lesson I drew from my experience in graduate school was the importance of humility. Of course, making this claim is difficult without seeming arrogant rather than humble. Suffice it to say that it is obvious that not all graduate students learn this lesson (and by extension not all academics). I am not implying that my teachers in undergraduate school were braggarts and blowhards, but rather that a derivative lesson is that humbleness and other, quieter qualities may be just as significant in early stages of one's adult education as in later stages. They may seem more important in graduate school, because the relationship of student to tutor is more constant, lasting, and intellectually reciprocal than in the preliminary stages of higher education. However, these observations are just as applicable to other educational settings, especially those in which the ratio of students to teachers is low and where seminars, rather than lectures, are both desired and feasible. An aspect of personal humility is the ability to step outside oneself in consciousness, to find a time and a place for others. It entails listening. The professors I still admire were model communicators, because they could listen as much as they could speak. If foregoing statement sounds commonplace, I would assert it nevertheless contains an oft-overlooked truth, one that may not be as patent as it first appears. Listening is not a passive engagement. It is not merely hearing and response. Good listeners make meaning of what they perceive, not just by hearing, but with all the senses. They interpret the diverse materials presented to them, teasing them apart to find their points of articulation. In this sense, they analyze these things. Good listeners try to reassemble some or all of the parts in order to construct something that works for them. Lest this seem an essentially destructive process, I should emphasize the second part--making something work--since this is a way of translating from one idiom to another. I was fortunate to have an academic adviser for both my master's and doctoral research who had a talent for translating, in this sense, what I said and wrote. Our relationship is especially remarkable because although some common scholarly basis for communication between us existed, as one should expect, each of us was steeped in a different kind of theoretical literature. Conversations with him were always challenging: listening to his seemingly effortless translation of my faltering attempts to articulate my thought forced me to interpret my own work in his terms, to communicate my arguments more carefully, and to ask myself frequently, "Is that what I really mean?" He was good at teaching me how he himself learned, and like all the best communicators, he never resorted to accusing me of being a poor one. It follows that the best teachers, such as I have discussed, regard their interaction with students as an opportunity to learn more themselves, as opposed to treating students as instruments for the further advancement of their own opinion. Professors--in the etymological sense of the word, those who profitentur "avow something before someone"--have to tread an ethical razor's edge between responsibility to their discipline and regard for their students as ends in themselves--persons who may benefit in their own way from the tuition they receive. Professors must cultivate abilities already in the students that permit the students to realize their particular ends. It also means that teachers must allow their opinions to be open to interpretation and admit that they could be mistaken. If this sounds like a child's lesson in morality, then one should observe how many academics, among others in various largely individualistic professions, treat their understudies as shoots onto which to graft the limbs of their intellectual offspring. The metaphor of translating is especially apposite to my broad intellectual interests and to my own line of research. One requirement of my archaeological profession--as well as something I much enjoy--is acquiring new languages. Sometimes I must do this to engage with the living in their own habits and habitats; other times I must breath life into the relict words of the long-dead inhabitants of ancient places. In a narrow sense, I have to be able to speak with persons of diverse backgrounds, interests, and occupations in places whose language is foreign, particularly in Greece. I have to be conversant in a wide range of subjects and quickly make sense of terms that are used in various circumstances and are sometimes quite specialized--flax retting, hackling, driving sheep in joint herds, trenching for vines and fruit trees, and so forth. In a broad sense, I have to attune myself to different ways of structuring the inhabited world symbolically: to cycles of seasons, festivals, comings of age, and passings away; and not just to what travels in a circle, but also to what lies on a straight line, what is near and far, and events that break the still surface of routine consciousness like fire and water erupting from the landscape. Only thus can I accurately interpret the material traces people have left behind them since time immemorial. The issue is closely related to those of communication and teaching. As much as I am an adherent to the theory of the innately human ability to acquire spoken language, amply evident in most children's rapid mastery of their first spoken idiom, I also recognize how too often adults, especially in the Anglophone world, use some popularized version of this theory to excuse their incompetence in a second language. ("If you don't learn another language by the time you're ten, you'll always speak with an accent, at least.") Active, perceptive listening is indispensable to the acquisition of another idiom. One must take an attitude that is child-like in acceptance of error without loss of face and that requires an almost synesthetic capacity for taking in the whole context of communication. This involves risk. Mature concepts of self and the development of analytical and critical skills indispensable to an adult render this attitude less than natural as one grows older. Nonetheless, it is the skill of teachers as communicators to encourage the most positive tendencies in this attitude, while providing students with the intellectual equipment to avoid dishonest or misleading communication. Thus teachers may help students steer clear of both self-delusion and exploitation by others. How does this apply to my archaeological research into the past? I devote myself to the archaeology of the last centuries of the late Bronze Age in Greece, the so called "Mycenaean Era." This includes the study of the archives in the Linear B script from major sites of the period, particularly "sandy" Pylos of Homeric fame. The underlying premise of my doctoral dissertation was that we archaeologists by and large think we understand writing better than we really do. There is a certain arrogance that often accompanies our own erudition that causes us to perceive a written record, once it is identified as such (by whatever method) among other artifacts uncovered, as essentially transparent in meaning, though fragmentary. Whatever is written is taken implicitly to have more to do with our scholarly priorities and conceits than with those of persons living in the Bronze Age. To be sure, this presumptuousness is not so often the attitude of the philologists and paleographers who spend their professional careers poring over such documents as the clay tab-lets inscribed in Linear B; however, through no fault of their own, these specialists often do not see the broader implications of their subtle understanding of dialects and scribal idiolects, techniques and scribal idiosyncrasies. Writing and reading are practices, materially and corporeally intricate, as well as historically situated. Writing cannot be reduced to speaking, any more than reading can be reduced to listening. Nor is any of these practices the poor relation or dim reflection of another. However, writing does share certain points of articulation with embodied speech. For writing always takes place in a concrete speech situation, whether an individual imagination or a particular space comprising several persons. This is among the historical circumstances that any scholar with a commitment to event must take into account. The trouble is that modern practices of writing and reading are so deeply ingrained in the habits of so many of us that, in a certain sense, we no longer listen to the voices of the past and can no longer envision the hands that scored the clay or folded the paper and parchment. We no longer see, as in a medieval abbey, scriptores, dictatores, literati, and illuminatores, but instead see ourselves reading and writing silently, if not simply abstract historical processes that a metahistorical intention seems sometimes to drive. Let me give an example from the study of the Linear B archives. Since the discovery of inscribed clay tablets on Crete in 1900 and on mainland Greece in 1939--those of the Linear B class being deciphered some years later, in 1952--archaeologists have tended to treat this evidence of writing as pointing to some element of their own discourse. Thus it is variously and often simultaneously regarded as an index of a certain stage of social development (chiefdom, kingdom, hierarchic bureaucracy), its concentration as a measure of a site's political importance within a presumed hierarchical framework (palace, workshop, subordinate archives), and its arrangement as a unique source of social power (literacy versus illiteracy, panoptical monitoring versus dispersed interpersonal encounters). I cannot unpack the arguments and critiques of them completely here. Briefly, though, the first, evolutionary count falls down with the "disappearance" of writing at the end of the Bronze Age and its reappearance 500 years later; either the development of writing, to so many archaeologists' way of thinking, marks a stage in historical progress toward the present, or writing in the Bronze Age was something considerably different from what we understand today for it to be an abortive experiment, as they themselves would have it. Likewise, the second two counts, when not broadly circular in argumentation, take little or no consideration of different sources of social power and the increasing historical and ethnographic evidence that writing, as we know it, emerges in different places and times for very different reasons. At worst, archaeologists who persist in arguing otherwise are obsessed with the supposed prerogatives of some elite. This is not to propose on the contrary that there was no social inequality or that there were no self-styled or recognized elites in the Bronze Age. However, social inequality can be measured on several axes, and social identities are constructed of diverse and often disparate elements. By paying careful attention to the evidence of the intertwined operations entailed in producing a Linear B text, of how the scribes mingled with each other and yet others not of their kind, of how they lined up for specific tasks, and of who spoke at certain times and who was then silent, we can, in the sense I have been explaining, once again listen to some of the voices of antiquity. As I believe my research has already shown, the results are sometimes surprising, other times nuanced. We can tell whom they knew by name and with whom they affiliated themselves. We can compare their sense of time and space, and their place therein, with that of persons engaged in other practices, such as cultivation and tending animals, activities with which the scribes were more concerned at some moments than at others. We can see how they conceived of themselves in their official capacities and for whom (not us) they thought they were writing. By listening to the scribes in this way, we are also asking ourselves constantly, as conscientious students, "Do we really know what we mean by 'writing,' 'kingdom,' 'scribe,' 'power'?" We are communicating with the past. Beyond my research is teaching. This I do with the same passion with which I learn. I want to do so in order to honor the past. I do not mean this statement to appeal to a conservative notion that there was once a golden age, nor to suggest naively that all past persons are honorable. (Without speaking ill of the dead, we can admit it is painfully clear that some are not.) Rather, I wish to imbue people with an understanding of the responsibility they have for making the world what it is, that what they do now is some part of what there will be--elements of a future's past. At the same time, listening to the scribes of Bronze Age Pylos or Knossos, we humble ourselves before the complexity of historical processes, acknowledging that their world is not ours, and ours, upon reflection, is not quite what we thought it was. I submit that this is what the old maxim about "learning from history" should mean--not that history is an eternally returning morality play, nor that it is the progress in accumulating good things--but rather that in actively engaging with and interpreting the past we contribute to history and partake in it. And we learn that we can lead different lives. At least as much as this narrowly didactic goal, I also wish to honor the learners who taught me. What better way than to teach to learn? Feedback should be sent to me, Michael Lane, at mflane@acephale.org | ARCHIVESMarch 2006November 2005July 2005May 2005February 2005October 2004September 2004August 2004July 2004June 2004May 2004 |