Teaching Other People’s Ideas to Other People’s Children: Integrating Messages from Education, Psychology, and Critical Pedagogy

Early in the 1990s – a period at times called the decade of canon debates (Banks, 1996) and culture wars (Hunter, 1991) – some classrooms within the United States, including those in university-based teacher education and educational administration programs, became engaged in a battle for children’s minds.  As this new millennium begins, questions of what we teach, how we teach, and why we teach continue to be asked with answers often taking the form of opposing dogmas.  Although efforts at ensuring diversity and multicultural education have been made, these efforts have often remained focused on cultural awareness, sensitivity, and skill-building (Sleeter, 1999).  At times, the critical questions of “Whose knowledge are we teaching?” and “Who gets to authorize what we teach?”  are submerged under layers of cultural celebration and limited insight into the lack of universality of any one knowledge base. (Scheurish & Young, 1997) 

Drawing from the perspectives of education, psychology, and critical pedagogy, the position we present begins with the point that, in many important ways, our work as educators is unchanging. Our educational task has always been one of teaching other people’s ideas to other people’s children.¹   However, we don’t always act as if we know this.

For many preparing to teach (and for some who are teaching teachers), the role of teacher is that of expert.  We posit that the role of teacher must shift from one of expert to one of collaborator.  Cummins (1996) asserts that when educators work collaboratively with families and the community-at-large, more can be done to empower students and provide instruction that promotes equity and fairness.  Corson (1998) explains that in order for child-centered collaboration to work, schools must initiate conversations with parents and communities.  In some cases, it may appear that parents are unable or unwilling to participate in decisions affecting their children’s schooling; however, it is important that they become part of policy-making decisions.  The temptation of schools to rely solely on the “expert” opinions of professional administrators and those in authority maintains a system that is hierarchical and oppressive.  Corson (1998) concluded that the commitment to changing education to meet the needs of individual students from diverse backgrounds requires a clear understanding of purpose that not only adheres to the expressed needs of those in positions of political, economic, or cultural power, but also encourages input from those from culturally different backgrounds. 

In addition, increased awareness is required of the diverse forms of knowledge that are available – and necessary – for enriching our educational endeavors as we confront the tasks of educating children for success in the global community (Banks, 1997).  Foucault (1984) identified two critical functions of teaching: recognition of the embeddedness of students in society and the capacity of education to provide them choices to move beyond their embeddedness.  He stated: “One of the main functions of teaching was that the training of the individual should be accompanied by his being situated in society.  We should now see teaching in such a way that it allows the individual to change at will, which is possible only on condition that teaching is a possibility that is always offered” (Foucault, 1984, p. 329).

Recent work in critical pedagogy as well as revised perspectives in traditional disciplines such as developmental psychology can be used to assist educators in our on-going efforts to improve the education of all children.  One way to focus our efforts is to re-consider our dual tasks of (1) teaching other people’s children and (2) teaching other people’s ideas.

Teaching Other People’s Children

Teaching, in contrast to parenting, is typically identified with an adult who is charged with the task of teaching a group-sanctioned curriculum over a relatively short period of time to children or adults.  With the increasing emphasis and acceptance of diversity within our pluralistic society (particularly within urban settings), it has become clear to many of us that when we teach, in contrast to when we parent, the socialization process in which we participate is one which may not – and probably does not – follow from our own familiarity, expectations, or dreams for the individuals in our charge.  Rather our teaching is committed to achieving general goals related to the well being of our society.  How these goals are perceived and respected may differ among both teachers and students.  Educators may argue about how best to meet these goals or even what the exact goals are, but usually we acknowledge that our task is a societal one, not a familial one.  Many teachers, in fact, endeavor to clearly separate their role from that of the family and voice concern when their school districts or their communities act as if they are supposed to take on responsibilities of the family.

Within this context, it should be expected that at times teachers and families will have different goals for the education of individual children.  It should also be expected that neither teachers nor families may know much about the others’ way of life.  Advocates for multicultural awareness and sensitivity (e.g., Delpit, 1991; Lee, 1992; Lightfoot, 1989) remind teachers that we must acknowledge and learn about the gifts and strengths that children bring to classrooms from their families.  Some (e.g., Corson, 1998; Delpit, 1995) have advocated for partnerships of teachers and families in the schooling of children, particularly for children who come from homes that are culturally different from those of the teachers.  Delpit (1994) concludes that parents can be good “cultural translators” for teachers and schools.  When we recognize ourselves as “teachers of other people’s children,” it makes sense to start our teaching process by finding out about the family setting—particularly about the expectations and dreams that the family has for their child.

At times, educators may not think that a family has the requisite knowledge to know what is best for their child even when they do know what they want for their child.  This may be an indication that an adjustment is required in our process of schooling.  It may, in fact, be the case that educators lack knowledge that is critical to the educational endeavor.  For example, Corson (1998) proposes important ways that teachers can prepare themselves to teach in diverse classrooms. These ideas include the development of: (1) a flexible and self-directed teaching approach to diverse students rooted in the use of natural language; (2) a readiness to meet unusual classroom situations in imaginative and ingenious ways; (3) a person-oriented approach to conflict resolution, sensitive to the different values and norms of diverse students; (4) a curriculum that builds critical thinkers who are in control of their lives; (5) a curriculum that looks at society and social problems and asks who benefits from it, who suffers as a result of it, and how change can occur; (6) an evaluation system that builds, extends, and challenges students to higher levels of achievement; (7) a professional engagement with diversity that respects difference; (8) a willingness to look at the school itself, and not the student, as the source of educational failure; and (9) a view that sees education in the grip of social formations that can also be changed. (Corson, 1998, p. 215).

Perhaps the first thing for a teacher to do in preparation for teaching in diverse classrooms is to think about the children to be taught.  When we act as if we are teaching other people’s children, it becomes necessary to coordinate our educational goals for the child with those of her^[2] family.  Partnerships with families become vehicles for advocating for what we think is best for the child.  These partnerships also become vehicles for listening to what the family thinks is best for their child.  It may be that educators, following years of study and experience, know important things about what is best for children.  However, when we recognize that each child we’re teaching comes from a family that has its own knowledge and expectations, we also recognize that our work with families must include both advocating (based on our knowledge and experience) and listening. 

Most teachers have recognized the important role of the family in the educational process for a long time.  However, it is not only the active inclusion of the family in the educational process that is advocated here.   A change is proposed in the way we think about the child we teach.  The child we teach is not the “hypothetical” child that we have learned about from the traditional research and theory of educational and developmental psychology.  Instead, we are always teaching somebody’s unique and special child.  Although at first glance this may not appear to be a profound insight, it may require a profound change in the ways we teach, particularly given how we have been taught to think about “the child”.

The discipline of psychology, as a primary source of information for teacher education, has historically provided extensive evidence about the maturation, learning, and teaching of the “universal human child” (Kincheloe & Steinberg, 1993).  Standardized tests and typical school-based curricula have been designed around our knowledge of the “universal child”.  Teachers continue to be taught universal theories and norms that are employed to guide their teaching efforts and evaluate their effectiveness.  However, some psychologists have begun to recognize and teach that there is no universal child (Burman, 1994; Elkind, 1991).  Every child develops within a specific context of family and culture where someone cares for him and attempts to keep him healthy and growing toward maturity (Bronfenbrenner, 1977, 1993). When children come to school, they bring along these other people and their expectations.  Those who teach must begin to recognize the uniqueness of the child and her family setting.  In addition to teaching about universal developmental stages and normative behaviors, teacher educators must teach teachers that each child in the classroom is “somebody’s child” – a unique individual with her or his own cultural heritage.

It is clear that teachers cannot know each child as that child’s parents know her and they should not be expected to have that knowledge.  What teachers must know is that every child has a unique social context – a family and a culture in which the family is embedded.  Teachers must have that knowledge when they enter their profession and they must expect that part of their responsibility as a teacher will be to develop a partnership with each child’s family as they get to know the child.  We must educate schools and communities so that they can support teachers in this part of their profession, allowing time and opportunity for both teachers and parents to participate in sharing knowledge of each child.

We propose that our knowledge of human development requires the insight that when we teach, we always teach somebody’s child.  Just as we expect and make societal provisions (policies and mandates) to ensure that children are sent to school immunized and fed, we must come to expect that children are sent to school with a family connection that is respected by the school.  Certainly knowledge about that connection is important.  Multicultural studies, history of ethnicity and human migration, and disciplines such as sociology and psychology must provide continually developing knowledge bases for the teacher. 

Knowing that the human child is always embedded in a social context leads us to conclude that we must know more about that context.  Both teachers and teacher education programs must begin to develop strong knowledge bases about the human contexts that serve to raise our children.  Teachers must learn about culture, class, gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, and any other characteristics or phenomena that affect and/or reflect these human contexts.  However, that is only one part of the tasks facing teachers.

Teaching Other People’s Ideas

When teachers teach, by definition, they teach something.  We are not going to argue here for or against what they teach or how they teach it or even how they decide what or how to teach.  However, we do propose that, just as we must recognize that each child is somebody’s child, we must also recognize that each idea we teach is somebody’s idea, somebody’s interpretation, insight, or invention.  As critical scholars emphasize, it must be “understood that the knower is part of the known” (Goldberger et al., 1996, p. 5).  The teacher must know and be able to teach his students not only what is known but also where that knowledge came from and why it exists.  It must be clear to both teachers and students that what is known came from somebody’s ideas and interpretations and that a body of knowledge is some group of knowers’ “way of looking at things” (Erikson, 1963, p. 403).

This does not mean we cannot teach about facts and truths.  Societies can be well served by their adherence to stable values and by their ability to transmit knowledge of those values.  However, risk lies in how we answer a question posed by Goldberger (1996): 

In a pluralistic world, can individuals and communities justly set criteria for what is right, what is true, and what is good without demonizing strangers? (p. 17)

One way to think about this question is to recognize that it involves at least two functions of knowing: (1) stability (values, truths, facts) and (2) flexibility (diversity, open-mindedness, respect).^[3]

The work of developmental theorist, Heinz Werner (1957), can be relevant here.  Whether we are looking at children playing, adults using problem-solving strategies, or the development of a language, Werner observed that development progresses from  “a global, undifferentiated state” to a functional tension between increasing differentiation (the capacity of individual components to function separately) and integration (the capacity of these same individual components to engage in one coordinated action or purpose).  Werner proposed that stability and flexibility are two opposing and at times contradictory functions that characterize developmental progress.  Each of these functions occurs along a continuum of developmental achievement, in one case from rigidity to flexibility, in the other case from instability to stability. As psychological processes mature and improve, increased stability and flexibility can be observed although there continues to be what Werner called a “dialectical tension” between stability (coherence, consistency, constancy) and flexibility (adaptability, openness to change, possibility). 

Given this notion of “dialectical tension,” it makes sense that the stability of a constant set of values or truths in a knowledge base must occur within a framework of an open-minded flexibility.  When that flexibility is undermined by a rigidly adhered to set of rules or, on the other hand, by an unstable lack of coherence, then the development of knowledge is threatened, regression occurs and, as Goldberger (1996) describes it, the stranger---and the strange or novel idea—become demonized.  The teacher who doesn’t recognize this about knowledge runs the risk of teaching as if the content of her lessons were set for all time and unchangeable.  On the other hand, the teacher who reflects his knowledge base as having no stability and no coherent set of values risks having nothing to teach^[4].  In contrast to both, the teacher who understands the stability of her knowledge and the flexibility of a critical open-mindedness can experience and instigate a transformation much as Sturgeon (1991) described:

As an educator, I, too, was becoming transformed.  I no longer carried the burden of feeling obliged to be an expert.... Rather, I was satisfied that I had encouraged the students to think and question and that I was learning and growing along with them (pp. 170-171).

Teaching our students that knowledge can be challenged and changed is one of education’s most important tasks.  Ideas as creations of someone’s mind by their very nature are changeable.  That ideas can be thought about from all angles is one aspect of the magic of the human mind.  Every idea has limitless possibilities linked to it that some human mind can imagine, argue with, or advocate.  We must teach children to consider these possibilities. Teaching techniques such as the Banks Value Inquiry Model (Banks & McGee Banks, 1999) are available as guides as we teach children to identify and justify their own and others’ values as they learn new things and imagine unknown possibilities.

Although educators will and must continue to debate the content covered in our classrooms, we propose that it is not the content we teach that will expand or limit our students’ thinking. Rather, we risk limiting their thinking – and our own – when we view whatever content we teach as absolute, static, or universal.  In contrast, when we approach all content, all knowledge as “somebody’s ideas,” then we approach our teaching as sharing in the creation and evaluation of ideas.  Our teaching becomes an invitation to our students to think about and evaluate the ideas we have chosen to share with them, to seek out other ideas, and to come up with their own ideas. Teachers and students together become part of an “idea heritage” that they participate in and are able to extend.  Teaching in this context is an invitation to know about a full range of past and present ideas (even those ideas that may have been ignored or suppressed) and to participate in developing future ideas.  Foucault (1984) talked about the plethora of thoughts to be known and imagined:

            There is an over-abundance of things to be known: fundamental, terrible, wonderful, funny, insignificant, and crucial at the same time.  And there is an enormous curiosity, a need, a desire to know….Curiosity is a vice that has been stigmatized in turn by Christianity, by philosophy, and even by a certain conception of science….I dream of a new age of curiosity.  We have the technical means; the desire is there; there is an infinity of things to know; the people capable of doing such work exist.  So what is our problem?  Too little: channels of communication that are too narrow, almost monopolistic, inadequate.  We mustn’t adopt a protectionist attitude, to stop “bad” information from invading and stifling the “good.”  We must rather increase the possibility for movement backwards and forwards.  This would not lead, as people often fear, to uniformity and leveling down, but, on the contrary, to the simultaneous existence and differentiation of these various networks,” (Foucault, 1984, p. 328).

Within this invitation to enter “a new age of curiosity”, we propose that there must exist lessons about evaluation and evidence.  How do we convince each other when we think we have discovered a good idea?  How do we argue for agreement or voice our disagreement?  We have no answers for these questions – and, in fact, we sense some risk in providing easy answers.  However, because humans will continue to live together in social contexts, we will continue to need—and want—to share ideas.  It seems important to re-state Goldberger’s (1996) question:  “In a pluralistic world, can individuals and communities justly set criteria for what is right, what is true, and what is good without demonizing strangers?” (Goldberger et al., 1996, p. 17). 

We will probably continue to generate scientific methods, theological treatises, and philosophical arguments designed to convince others that certain ideas are good ideas and others are not – at least at this time, in this context, and for this purpose.  How we do that – how we evaluate and consider evidence – is something we must learn to do and to teach, not in rote ways relying on one method in contrast to another, but in active, interactive, and questioning ways.  Current methods – including the scientific method – must be evaluated and evidence of their worth (or lack thereof) debated.  We must neither cavalierly discard nor dogmatically accept any way of thinking or knowing, but instead we must learn and we must teach that all knowledge should be subject to critical inquiry.  Foucault’s ideas and the critiques they have generated provide a rich context in which to begin this critical inquiry. (Strathern, 2000; Racevskis, 1999; Ransom, 1997).  Our understanding of Foucault’s provocative body of work leads us to conclude that the first step in this process is to recognize that “knowledges are historically produced objects to be studied as other products of human culture are studied” (Racevskis, 1999, p. 82). 

As concluded in Goldberger et al., (1996), “Understanding what people think doesn’t mean you have to think the same thing.”  Knowing how to evaluate one’s own thinking as well as others has to become part of our on-going educational process if our children and their teachers are going to be able to judge “what to think.”

However, as Foucault (1984) cautions, we must use our judgment to generate ideas, not suppress them.  In his words:

It’s amazing how people like judging.  Judgment is being passed everywhere, all the time….I can’t help but dream about a kind of criticism that would not try to judge, but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea-foam in the breeze and scatter it.  It would multiply, not judgments, but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep.  Perhaps it would invent them sometimes – all the better.  All the better.  Criticism that hands down sentences sends me to sleep; I’d like a criticism of scintillating leaps of the imagination. (pp. 326).

Except for those who see any critical inquiry as a violation of known truths, these proposals are not intended to challenge any one way of knowing.  Diverse ways of thinking are proposed as the workplace of teachers and students.  The generation and shared evaluation of many and diverse ideas must shape the educational process, whatever the focus of the curriculum happens to be.

Conclusion

We think that if each of us entered our classrooms, as teachers or students, with the idea that other people’s ideas are being taught to other people’s children (by other people’s children!) then important characteristics of our educational system would begin to fall into place.  A simple idea, perhaps, but one that we think can begin to mature within the developmental tension of the contradictory forces of flexibility and stability in the teaching process^[5]. There are big questions that must be debated as we enter the new millennium with its inevitable globalization of economies, limits on natural resources, and migrating human populations toward large urban centers.  Learning to live with each other and to create ideas together when there are such apparent differences among us—in lifestyle, culture, language, religion, world views and ways of knowing—will challenge our classrooms and our teachers.  Perhaps by reminding ourselves of the simple concept that each of us is teaching somebody else’s ideas to somebody else’s child, we will engage positively with the complexities of diversity.    

References

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            Racevskis, K. (Ed.). (1999).  Critical essays on Michel Foucault.  NY: G.K. Hall & Co.

            Ransom, J.S. (1997). Foucault’s discipline: The politics of subjectivity.  Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Scheurish, J.J. & Young, M.D. (1997).   Coloring epistemologies: Are our research designs racially biased.  Educational Researcher, 26, 4, 4-13.

Sleeter, C.E. (1999).  Curriculum Controversies in Multicultural Education.  In M.J. Early & K.J. Rehage (Eds.). Issues in curriculum: A selection of chapters from past NSSE Yearbooks.  In the 98^th Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, Part II. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 218-249.

            Strathern, P. (2000).  Foucault in 90 minutes.  Chicago: Ivan R. Dee.

            Sturgeon, K.B. (1991).  The classroom as a model of the world:  Is there a place for ethics in an environmental science class?  Environmental Ethics. 13,165-173.

Werner, H. (1957).  The concept of development from a comparative and organismic point of view.  In D.B. Harris (Ed.) The Concept of Development.  Minneapolis:  University of Minneapolis Press.

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