It is easy enough to say, as I have, that discussion classes should aim at helping participants develop their ability to judge well. Such a claim, however, only raises more questions -- perhaps especially for those of us that teach classes that we view as being about texts. Whatever we say that we want to do, we tend also to want to give our students, or to help them reach, an understanding of the reading we assign. While it might be is easy to criticize this view theoretically -- we can accuse ourselves of having the wrong view of knowledge or of having a exaggerated sense of our role as authorities -- it is much harder to find a way past this perspective that's compelling enough that it can take root.
Our relationship, and our class's relationship, to the text -- to whatever subject it has been assigned -- is complicated, and it should feel complicated. Perhaps this is clearest in instances where the relationship seems to be working badly or not at all. I learned of one such instance in late June, in a place called Bizoton.
I was participating in a conference in Bizoton, a neighborhood in Kafou, the hot and overcrowded suburb along the road that leads from Pòtoprens to southern Ayiti. The conference gathered teachers and activists committed to working with groups in ways that encourage people to become free. A fair number of the participants practice Wonn Refleksyon, the program that I have been involved with in Ayiti for the past seven years. Some of these had asked that a small group of us come together to discuss problems they were confronting as they tried to use the second volume of short texts that our project had produced.
The volume frustrated the teachers in two ways. First, whereas a group of experienced Haitian and American discussion leaders had produced a guidebook for use with the first volume, there was no such tool for the second one. Without a guidebook outlining a wide variety of approaches to the various texts in the volume, the teachers felt they were stuck in a rut, limited to a kind of standard procedure they had deduced from the guidebook and from their separate and shared experiences. Second, they were finding the more difficult texts of the second volume very difficult indeed. They were not always sure what they and their students were supposed to be getting out of them, nor even what questions they were supposed to be asking.
The conversation impressed me for a couple of reasons. On the one hand, the teachers had come to feel comfortable running their Wonn Refleksyon classes in a certain way. By working through a guidebook that introduced them to a range of classroom procedures, they had settled into one that generally permitted them to lead discussions they were happy with. This was true even if they had reached a point at which they felt that their technique was failing them.
Leadership of conversations that employs good procedures can go a long way towards helping those conversations work. At the same time, even to the limited if real extent to which leadership of discussions can usefully depend on well-thought-out procedures, those procedures must remain creative responses to, and not impositions on, the discussion group. The teachers in the Bizoton discussion saw themselves as technicians, but not yet as creative ones. They were confident in their ability to follow established procedures, but uncomfortable when faced with the need to develop procedures themselves. Until they can decide to trust their relative wealth of experience, they will remain limited.
On the other hand, the second problem they were having brings out the limitation inherent in discussion leaders' viewing themselves as mere technicians, no matter how creative. Faced with texts that they did not think they understood well, the teachers froze up. Their technique depended, at least in their view, on their having the right questions to ask. The guidebook they had been using with the first volume of texts included possible questions about many of the texts. They wanted to have such exemplary questions, formulas or keys that would allow the conversation to move forward on a more-or-less predetermined path towards broad engagement of the students they work with.
The problem is that it is not a procedure that engages students, but the matter under discussion. This is not to say that procedures make no difference, but only that conversations need to be about something if they are to engage anyone at all. The teachers wanted a formula that they could use to get a conversation moving, but there can be no such formula.
This claim will be clearer if we step back to reconsider what discussion classes are for in the first place. It will help if we remember that discussions are not about texts themselves but about our individual judgments about texts. Thinking we can use a standardized or formulaic approach to a text presupposes that there is a predetermined knowledge or issue that we can aim at. But if we understand that our goal is determined only partly by the text that we have in common, but also by the individual curiosities and convictions that we each bring to our reading, we should also admit that our approach to a text needs to be tailored to the group, to the particular situation, that we are in.
And there is one surefire indication of what an appropriate approach for us to take might be, and this indication was alive in the experience of the teachers I was speaking with in Bizoton. The feeling of uncertainty that they found paralyzing is probably essential both to leading and to participating in the conversations they were hoping to be a part of. To start a class by pointing to that uncertainty guarantees that they will point towards the realm in which at least one participant is genuinely engaged with the text. That participant is themselves. To take their own sense of uncertainty, their feeling that they did not know what steps they were supposed to take, as a reason to fail to move forward is to forbid themselves the best tool at their disposal.
We share with our colleagues in Haiti an enormous challenge. They need help recognizing their own, hard-won competence and putting it to work creatively in their classrooms. They need help learning to permit themselves to be at a loss, to ask about what they do not understand. They have more than enough experience as discussion leaders to recognize their students' needs and to strategize well as to how to meet those needs, but their competence means nothing unless they believe in it enough to trust themselves.
Even so I would be sorry if the only focus of their development was the technique of running discussions. In order to confidently face the uncertainty that arises when they find the texts they are reading hard, they must learn to think of themselves not as technicians but as co-students with their students. They must learn to let the confusion that they feel serve them as a place to start, not as a barrier.
Helping them learn to think of themselves as students will be a different and, perhaps, more difficult job than helping them trust the experience they have at the technique of leading discussions. Trusting themselves as technicians still leaves them in the for-a-teacher comfortable role as the one in charge. Letting their curiosity, their uncertainty, take over means giving up a measure of control. When what we don't know takes center stage in our conversations, there is no longer any way to know just where those conversations will lead.