There is a fine thin line between teaching as science and as an art. Yet, this thin line like a river can present itself as gorge that divides educators in their bifurcating worldviews of teaching. I embrace both the science and art of teaching that experience taught me.
I graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Mass Communication and consequently earned Master of Arts in Communication Management. Contrastingly, I have set my foot on the field of education - mentoring, inspiring, transforming, enlightening, motivating, coaching, helping and teaching learners. Experience gave me a degree in both pedagogy and andragogy as I taught children, young adults, and mature adults while I worked as a teacher and trainer-consultant.
I lacked the scientific knowledge that formal schooling provides for teachers, so I turned to creativity, imagination and reflective thinking to master the competencies of a teacher. Because of this personal limitation, I engaged my self into developing a model for teaching that applies the art and science of communication. I merely modeled my personal approaches to teaching from the best teachers that mentored me, and through pinning my head on literature about education. This model is my personal contribution to the body of knowledge about teaching and learning. It is an imaginative work based on empirical works, and it has applications not only in teaching communication arts, but also in teaching the sciences.
The question as to whether teaching is an art or science, is not a common discourse among college faculty that I worked with. My colleagues never speak of the results of empirical efforts that examine education with scientific lenses. It seems to me that they have their own art and science of teaching. That teaching is rather msytical if not a result of trial and error.
The lack of scientific knowledge and philosophical foundations are merely compensated by a teacher's overboard confidence that she or he can teach. Teaching could be easy, when it is viewed as a mere transmission of knowledge, but when teaching is measured as to the students' learning, it is another story.
I no longer think of teaching, or what to teach and how to teach. Rather, I think of why the students need to learn what and how and they will be able to learn them in the given time allowed. Simply, because I am called to teach for students to learn.
If I assume that teaching is a vocation, then I have to consider it as a mission and ministry. As a mission, I am responsible to help learners achieve learning goals. As a ministry, I am to serve the academe and these younger generation with respect to a higher principled and philosophical goal. A vocation is noble calling that requires the demonstration of high morals and professional standard. A vocation is not a profession, for it finds gratification not in the remuneration, but in the reward of being able to share one's life for another's transformation.
Pedagogy, scientifically, is all about changing behavior permanently. But this should not imply that teachers utilize behaviorist approaches. Rather, it must continuously aspire to find the right means for the betterment of a learner and the learning process. The process that science offers is not fool-proof, and socially, it is unethical to use students as guinea pigs to try out techniques, tools and other things.
Scientifically as well, psychologists have determined that individuals are able learners, who learn by him/her self, in groups and in their social interactions with others, that learners are constructive and they will learn best if schools can provide the needed scaffolds for them to move to a competent state. In this case, the teacher is not central in the process - but also a scaffold.
The latter is an interpretivism, my personal imaginative thought. The art of teaching is not magic, and not pure teacher-performance. The art of teaching, for me is engaging the learners to recognize the value of education and willful commitment to its process for their personal transformation.
Teaching is performance that should enable the students to learn, it does not end as a mere spectacle that learners watch. Teaching is beyond oratory and rhetorics to fascinate learners, but a dialogue in which discourse and authentic knowing would take place. That is the art of instructional communication. As an art, there is no exact or deterministic method, because it is dynamic and evolving.
Since there is fine thin line between the art and science of teaching, there is no pride in claiming that teaching should be approached in one way against the other. Teaching is for learning, and learning is achieved scientifically and artistically.
2 comments:
Wahaha! My dichotomy lies in teaching from experience and from research. I noticed there's a huge difference between a teacher with a master's degree and one who relies solely on experience. There's also a huge difference between one who studied two different fields, as opposed to only one. What I like about our PHD is that it allows us to take electives outside of our college so that we can enrich our field of study. But, as my professor in Comparative Lit once said, we must not treat other fields as if they were handmaidens to our own. They must be treated with the same amount of respect as we do our field.
I guess that's when I discovered that I like our PHD. I learned to appreciate other fields because of how we inquire into and about them.
Thank you for being you.
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