Carl Rogers on education, part II

This is the second post on Carl Rogers' statement of the conditions for "significant learning."  Part I is here.

3. Acceptance and understanding

Another implication for the teacher is that significant learning may take place if the teacher can accept the student as he is, and can understand the feelings he possesses.  ...The teacher who can warmly accept, who can provide an unconditional positive regard, and who can empathize with the feelings of fear, anticipation, and discouragement which are involved in meeting new material, will have done a great deal toward setting the conditions for learning.  ...It will perhaps disturb some that when the teacher holds such attitudes, when he is willing to be acceptant of feelings, it is not only attitudes towards school work which are expressed, but feelings about parents, feelings of hatred for brother or sister, feelings of concern about self - the whole gamut of attitudes.  Do such feelings have a right to exist openly in a school setting?  It is my thesis that they do.  They are related to the person's becoming, to his effective learning and effective functioning, and to deal understandingly and acceptantly with such feelings has a definite relationship to the learning of long division or the geography of Pakistan.

I feel like I have not gotten to actively thinking about this issue yet in my observations.

4. Provision of resources

In therapy the resources for learning one's self lie within.  There is very little data which the therapist can supply which will be of help since the data to be dealt with exist within the person.  In education this is not true.  There are many resources of knowledge, of techniques, of theory which constitute raw material for use.  It seems to me that what I have said about therapy suggests that these materials, these resources, be made available to the students, not forced upon them.  Here a wide range of ingenuity and sensitivity is an asset.

I do not need to list the usual resources which come to mind - books, maps, workbooks, materials, recordings, work-space, tools, and the like.  Let me focus for a moment on the way the teacher uses himself and his knowledge and experience as a resource.  If the teacher holds the point of view I have been expressing then he would probably want to make himself available to his class in at least the following ways:

He would want to let them know of special experience and knowledge he has in the field, and to let them know they could call on this knowledge.  Yet he would not want them to feel that they must use him in this way.

He would want them to know that his own way of thinking about the field, and of organizing it, was available to them, even in lecture form, if they wished.  Yet again he would want this to be perceived as an offer, which could as readily be refused as accepted.

He would want to make himself known as a resource-finder.  Whatever might be seriously wanted by an individual or by the whole group to promote their learning, he would be very willing to consider the possibilities of obtaining such a resource.

He would want the quality of his relationship to the group to be such that his feelings could be freely available to them, without being imposed on them or becoming a restrictive influence on them.  He thus could share the excitements and enthusiasms of his own learning, without insisting that the students follow in his footsteps; the feelings of disinterest, satisfaction, bafflement, or pleasure which he feels toward individual or group activities, without this becoming either a carrot or a stick for the student.  His hope would be that he could say, simply for himself, “I don’t like that,” and the student with equal freedom could say, “But I do.”

One of the suggestions that stands out to me is the idea that the instructor ought to make all his expertise and knowledge and views of the subject available to the students, without imposing it on them.  It seems to me that the focus of many reform efforts has been to stop the instructor from imposing his views on the students.  As for making our expertise available to the students, though, I think we (at least I) tend to be rather withholding.  I think at some level, I believe that an instructor’s ideas will always be a “restrictive influence” on the students.

I’m experimenting with being a little less rigid on this point.  There is a teacher in the Teaching Seminar who demands, pretty much every time, that I “tell her the right answer” (my words, not hers) before we try to understand student ideas about some topic.  In the moment, I am very resistant to her request.  I feel like she’s not supposed to need to know that, or I’m not supposed to tell it to her, or both.  But she really demands it... so, I have tried to understand why she wants to know.  And darned if she doesn’t have actually pretty understandable reasons.  I don’t remember how she put it (hopefully it’s on video somewhere), but I remember feeling like I could see where she was coming from when I recalled that I appreciated Rogers a lot more after I was informed that before Rogers, psychology was pretty much all Freud.  When someone gave me a big picture of American psychology, I could appreciate Rogers’ originality a lot more.

Speaking of Freud, my image of an aloof and neutral PER instructor who doesn’t divulge her own expertise (but who silently diagnoses and interprets the students’ misconceptions) reminds me of an aloof and neutral therapist who listens to clients free-associate and diagnoses their neuroses.