Education as an Encounter: A Philosophy of Teaching
Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of
recognition but of a fundamental encounter. What is encountered may be Socrates, a
temple or a demon. It may be grasped in a range of affective tones: wonder, love,
hatred, suffering. In whichever tone, its primary characteristic is that it can only be
sensed. In this sense it is opposed to recognition…(Deleuzei, pp. 139–140, emphasis
original)
~
Teaching has always been and will remain for me the primary source for encountering
thought and knowledge in its most immediate, invigorating, and hopeful form; a form
that foregrounds learning as a relational and therefore negotiated act of responsibility,
risk, and trust. Bodies are the grounding for my conceptualization and enactment of this
relational teacher-learner encounter. Creativity is the path. Allow me to explain.
As a person and an educator, I thrive on going behind the scenes of language and
symbols of the self, of cultures, of communities and their aesthetic expressions, of
scientific explanations, professional practices, socio-political structures, and so on to
examine not only what they mean but how they come to mean what they do and how
their recognition as something we know could be otherwise. I believe it is important to
help students see and contemplate the incongruities, complexities, or paradoxes between,
for example, the commonly understood intentions of law makers, religious leaders, film
producers, education professionals, theorists and others, and the unintended consequences
or actualities of lives lived outside of or in spite of these intentions. A teaching
philosophy based on the perceived importance of disrupting or dislodging students’
common sense, their recognizable truths, or habitually relied-upon systems of meaning
making is not for the faint of heart—as a teacher or as a learner. This brings me to my
opening quote and paragraph, where I implicate the encounter, with reference to
relationships, bodies, and creativity as central to what I have come to value and purport in
my teaching.
Relationships. Trust, risk-taking, and the act of taking responsibility for becoming
and being educated are not inherently part of the teacher-learner arrangement. I can
teach without these elements circulating in any given classroom and yet I believe that
little new, nothing extraordinary or of lasting importance will result. Causing
misrecognition, a judicious stumbling into what we did not already know or believe to
be the case is thinking anew and that sort of teaching and learning takes risk, care, and
a desire for deep affiliations among those involved. I place primary importance on
building healthy, productive relationships with and among students in my courses. I do
this through vigilant attention to the personal, emotional, physical, and practical
climate of the classroom as well as through careful scaffolding and sequencing of
course content. Taking into serious consideration how, for example, to introduce social
constructs of racism, takes getting to know who is in your classroom (and who is not)
and working together to understand what level of risk this critical conversation and
critique is likely to pose. It also takes exploring implicitly and explicitly why certain
readings or media pieces might be more or less effective in opening perspectives and
committing to consistent, open, and reciprocal dialogue about when and how to step
back, push forward, or venture into new, progressively more rigorous or risky
intellectual territory. Being learner-centered is an obvious framework for this sort of
teaching and learning arrangement and yet, it is an ethic of care and dedication to
respectful, affectionate affiliations with students that I believe helps me reach beyond
keeping learners’ needs central, engendering conditions that permit detailed critique,
innovative analysis, and transformative learning. The relational dimension of my
teaching philosophy leans deeply into the deceivingly simple question posed by
feminist philosopher and developmental biologist Donna Harawayii; “So who is
surprised: when were love and knowledge not co-constitutive?” (p. 163)
Embodiment. So what about the bodies? How does corporeality or inter-corporeality
intersect with and enlarge my beliefs about and approach to this relational philosophy of
teaching? Gilles Deleuze, whose thoughts about thought serve as an opening to this
document is my go-to philosopher for conceptualizing the physicality of thinking,
learning, and by extension, teaching. In the Deleuzian oeuvre, any linkages of thought to
meaning-making deeply implicate and indeed graduate the sensorial, the corporeal; our
bodies as necessary ground and force. As a philosopher, he devoted himself to helping us
think differently about and move on from our Cartesian-contusion that so convincingly
sorted and split our abilities to think-with-mind and to feel-with-body. Deleuze and other
philosophers and theorists concerned with how we learn to learn and why any
conceptualization of teaching must consider the affective and material dimension of our
humanity have helped me conceptualize and construct a pedagogical set of beliefs and
practices that hold sensorial learning and knowing central. With Deleuze, and especially
his contemporaries in the field of material feminism as guides, I have become fascinated
by and committed to better understanding the physiology of thought and the physicality of
education more broadly. I keep a quote at the top of my teaching websiteiii by
physiologist and biophysicist, Candace Pertiv that reads: “We learn best when we are
anticipating pleasure.” It is through absorbing work like Pert’s, which considers how our
conscious manipulation of emotional states can direct and redirect the brain’s capacity for
permitting and processing information, in light of philosophical conceptualizations about
the materiality of knowledge that I have come to value and practice enfolding an acute
attentiveness and responsiveness to the embodiment of learning in my teaching. I work to
foster what I have come to refer to among close colleagues as ‘serious play’ in my
classroom and believe that students can and do absorb and transmit new ideas, raise
better questions, and so on because their bodily presence is not merely a condition of
happenstance, but rather is conceptualized and sensed as an inextricable and productive
part of the learning mix. While not always setting out to create “pleasurable” or pleasing
conditions, a pedagogy that aims toward centering corporeality and inter-corporeality
helps me and students sense when the force of the learning encounter has or is about to
have us in its grip, forcing us to think. How creativity serves as conduit for these teaching
tenets is where I turn next.
Creativity. One of my greatest joys as a teacher is expanding students’ curiosities and
perspectives through creatively bringing personal beliefs, commonly held perspectives,
and widely circulated and relied-upon explanations into meaningful relation with
unexpected texts, surprising symbolism, and intriguing artifacts. With the pedagogical
values noted above as a lens, my teaching methods across courses and disciplinary
domains emphasize integration of professional knowledge, intellectual agility, and
practical abilities, with aims toward cultivating critical, relational, and experientiallybased thinking and knowing. I work hard at artfully bringing common-sense
understandings and recognizable discourses from students lives into relation with the
unexpected, believing this to be one of the most powerful strategies for opening borders
of thought and inciting creative practice. By way of example, I have, with undergraduates
and graduate students alike, conjured the legendary and ceaselessly intriguing figure of
the zombie derived from Haitian cultural and folkloric traditions. In certain courses, this
figure has roamed as a powerful assistant, guiding students’ understandings of 1) the
logic and power of binary oppositions, 2) the fear surrounding the dissolution of these
oppositions, and 3) their conceptual role (in contemporary cinematic form) in producing
and maintaining pernicious stereotypes related to gender, race, ability and so on.
Working with images, movie clips, and even children’s literature featuring monstrous
characters, students and I have been able to get busy examining and beginning to
disarticulate the symbol of the zombie, as the not-quite-dead/not-quite-alive figure that
has overtime and with Hollywood’s help become sinister and suspect. Then, leaning into
this powerful boundary-blurring figure, we have approached anew various theoretical,
political, and historical discussions that debate, for example, the natural and/or socially
constructed experience of homosexuality or other difficult differences as markers of
identity.
Whether inviting students to produce zines as an act of social inquiry and aesthetic
expression, or to read and map what is meant by the biology of leadership, or to
collectively draw a squash still-life to grapple with debates about the objective versus
subjective nature of scientific truths, I believe that creative methods that promote
progressively more rigorous analytic work across boundaries provoke desire within and
among students to develop different, more potentially valuable questions and to do so
with diverse communities of thought.
i
Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and repetition (P. Patton, Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press.
Haraway, D. J. (2008). Otherworldly conversations, terran topics, local terms. In S. Alaimo & S. Hekman
(Eds.), Material feminisms (pp. 157–187). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
iii Follow link: http://faculty.rcoe.appstate.edu/clarkkeefeka/kellyswebpage/teaching.html
iv Pert, C. B. (1997). Molecules of emotion: Why you feel the way you feel. New York: Simon and
Schuster.
ii