I just read Tompkins’s essay “Pedagogy of the Distressed,” which, as I read, I realized I have seen quoted and heard teachers cite quite a few times. Tompkins notes that we don’t enact what we preach (106), that really, instead of viewing the current model as the banking model, which is “obsolete,” we should understand the current model as the “performance model,” where the professor is most concerned about three things while teaching: a) how smart she looks, b) how knowledgeable she looks, and c) how well-prepared she looks (106). This teaching as performance is driven by fear (107), and Tompkins notes that, like sex, we hardly talk about teaching (this was originall published in 1990), and the only thing said about pedagogy is “teaching as a vehicle for social change” (108).
From page 108: “I have come to think more and more that what really matters as far as our own beliefs and projects for change are concerned is not so much what we talk about in class as what we do. I have come to think that teaching and learning are not a preparation for anything but are the thing itself.”
For Tompkins, the “classroom is a microcosm for the world,” and “The kind of classroom situation one creates is the acid tests of what it is one really stands for” (109). This reminded me of Sánchez’s article that I wrote about a few days ago. She writes, citing Zizek, “ideology works at the level of doing rather than knowing“ (Sánchez 155), and I think that Tompkins is right that our actions in the classroom really show what we really believe, and not what we say we believe.
I really like that Tompkins writes, “Education is not a preparation for war; the university is not a bootcamp,” when it comes to how much work to assign and how heavy the workload should be (110). I would take that metaphor and say education is where the war is and should be, where we should be fighting against hegemony as much as possible.
Sheridan Blau notes that students aren’t actually learning when teachers teach most often; in fact, students are witnessing the teacher’s learning process. I like how, in this essay, Tompkins shows how her students have taught the classes, and done so well. This is important to show that people learn best when they teach.
One last note on this essay, which I enjoyed a lot. Tompkins strongly suggests that teachers “Talk to the class about the class” (112), and this so reminds me of counseling philosophy and of what I try to do when I teach – talk to students about the process. Be open and up front and transparent. This is vital for the building of trust. A good teacher talks about his, her, or hir pedagogy with students and is open and honest.
Tompkins, Jane. “Pedagogy of the Distressed.” Dialogue on Writing: Rethinking ESL, Basic Writing, and First-Year Composition. Eds. Geraldine DeLuca, Len Fox, Mark-Ameen Johnson, and Myra Kogen. Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002.
How does Tompkins’ performance model relate to the “sage on the stage” vs. “guide on the side” models of instruction? Isn’t anything that we do in public an argument, an example of rhetoric, hence a performance? In Kevin Michael DeLuca’s article “Unruly Arguments: The Body Rhetoric of Earth First!, ACT UP, and Queer Nation,” the notion of the body as an argument is asserted, but oddly De Luca does not mention Ghandi or MLK or the Tiannamen Square image of the pedestrian in front of a tank.
Certainly “actions speak louder than words” – i.e. enacting (or not) what we profess.
Thinking further on this – I am sure there is a connection between performance and persona. In an article I read recently (but it’s at school so I don’t have the citation), a student teacher discussed the persona or mask she created to enable her to perform in the classroom. For this woman, teaching was a challenge because she hated school, so to enable herself to perform, she created a persona which was comfortable in the classroom, a bit dissociative. Although the article didn’t say so, I inferred that the student teacher left the profession because of this disconnect.