Some teachers try to convince their students that the information they are giving them is important for their future. And some teachers help their students to imagine those important things in the context of the world the students know.
The difference between an unsuccessful and a successful teacher is the degree to which the teacher is able to focus on the creation of an experience for the student, rather than on simply delivering information to be absorbed. Consider why people tell stories: to recreate an experience for the listeners, to put them in the scene. Being in the scene is what most people enjoy about stories – and it is also where most learning happens.
The Power of the Imagination
In the classroom, when the experience of something cannot take place, the next best thing is a recreation of that experience. And what’s the best mode for recreating experience? The story. A story holds the truth that everyday life often does not. In James Wood’s How Fiction Works he quotes Brigid Lowe, who describes how fiction does not ask people to "believe things" but to "imagine them."
Fiction, or story is "sensual," like a story, which is told - not to teach a leasson - but to produce an imaginative experience. This imaginative experience, which is the work of the classroom, helps to "restore the Greek rhetorical term ‘hypotyposis,’ which means to put something before our eyes, to bring it alive for us.”
When teachers try to compel students to believe something, they are failing at their job – even if all outward appearances and traditional conceptions indicate the contrary. A quiet, attentive classroom does not mean an educated one – it may simply mean that the indoctrination has been successful. Propaganda is effective. It does convince people that they are right in their shared beliefs. But propaganda that wins one over by abstraction (using only lecture or discussion to teach) and circular reasoning (You should know this because it’s important and therefore you should know it) should not be mistaken for education.
Creating Experiences
The typical, traditional classroom is not reality. Thus, teachers have to attempt to educate by creating the illusion of reality. Hypotyposis does this through descriptive language that brings something to life. Preachers who are most successful are those that are good storytellers – and not only because they are more entertaining – but also because they are using hypotyposis, bringing alive an experience in service to a message they hope to instill in the listener.
A teacher’s pride in his or her knowledge of the subject is worthless to students. They don’t care about teaching degrees, books the teacher has read, the experiences the teacher has had. They don’t care about grammar rules and the six qualities of effective writing or why Hawthorne used so much symbolism and how a poem is structured. They want to have their own experiences and find their own truths, and frankly, that is the only way that education can happen.
Therefore, teachers who want to be successful must reframe their objectives: Their goal is not to assure that students absorb information. Their goal is to become experts at creating experiences for students.
Reference:
Wood, James. How Fiction Works. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2008.
Shaun Perkins - Shaun Perkins, teacher, poet, storyteller, porch-sitter, beekeeper, gardener, writer, has been a high school and university teacher for ...
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