Almost 30 years ago, Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner wrote a book called Teaching as a Subversive Activity. This book is about subversive teaching, the conscious act of teaching with the "inquiry method". It pull heavily from Marshall McCluhan’s work around the idea that the medium is the message, and that merely labeling ideas ("Oh, this is just the discovery method") diverts our attention from the complex processes that are at work.
They explain:
"The inquiry method is not designed to do better what older environments try to do. It works you over in entirely different ways. It activates different senses, attitudes, and perceptions; it generates a different, bolder, and more potent kind of intelligence. Thus, it will cause teachers and their tests, and their grading systems, and their curriculum to change. It will cause college admissions requirements to change. It will cause everything to change." (1969,p. 27)
In contrast to a "production" approach to teaching, the inquiry method focuses on the process, rather than the product. Thus, a good teacher is one who realizes the "answers" are not in the books, but within the learners themselves. Doing and experiencing are the key ingredients to real learning, and how and what we learn does not happen sequentially and especially does not happen for all learners in the same way at the same time.
A subversive teacher, then, is one who firmly realizes these "truths" about learning. Despite the system’s focus on product (predetermined curriculum and test scores), the subversive teacher actively attempts to redesign the structure of the classroom to focus instead on process. Some of the attitudinal characteristics of such "teachers in action" as listed by Postman & Weingartner include:
The teacher rarely tells students what he thinks. Generally, he does not accept a single statement as an answer to a question.
He encourages student-student interaction as opposed to student-teacher interaction, generally avoids acting as a mediator or judging the quality of ideas expressed.
He rarely summarizes the positions taken by students on the learnings that occur. He recognizes that the act of summary or "closure" tends to have the effect of ending further thought.Generally, each of his lessons pose a problem for students.
His lessons develop from the responses of students and not from a previously determined "logical" structure. (Postman & Weingartner, 1969, p. 33-36)
The relationship they describe between teaching and meaning seems to go at the depth of the work of every educator.
"As soon as students realize that their lessons are about their meanings, then the entire psychological context of schools is different. Learning is no longera contest between them and something outside of them, whether the problem be a poem, a historical conclusion, a scientific theory, or anything else. There is, then, no need for the kinds of "motivation" found in the conventional Trivia content. There are few occasions for feelings of inadequacy, few threats to their sense of dignity, less reason to resist changing perspectives. In short, the meaning-maker metaphor puts the student at the center of the learning
process. It makes both possible and acceptable a plurality of meanings, for the
environment does not exist only to impose standardized meanings but rather to
help students improve their unique meaning-making capabilities. And this is the
basis of the process of learning how to learn, how to deal with the otherwise
‘meaningless,’ how to cope with change that requires new meanings to be made."
(p. 97)
Mr. Postman, Mr Weingartner: thank you so much!
