The lecture
a story first published in my book 'Imagined Worlds and Classroom Realities' Sense Publishers (2015)
1.
"Don't work too hard.'
'I won't.'
He is sitting at his desk at home on a Saturday, his wife on her way out to coffee with a friend. He can shut the world out and work undisturbed for a few hours on his next Masters of Education lecture, though one of the dogs is bound to fling himself at the fence outside the window whenever the neighbour's cat slinks past.
'It's a beautiful autumn morning. Go for a walk when you can?’ she calls.
'If I can.'
He hears the front door close and then the car start up.
Above his desk are his wall-mounted bookshelves. He likes to think and write in the presence of these books, some of which he hasn't opened in fifty years but which once helped him see wider horizons.
This lecture, he already knows, is not going to be an easy one to write. There are scribbled-on papers spread about on the floor, but as yet he has found no clear sense of direction, no central idea to hold together the disparate thoughts he’s had over the past week.
The topic is listed on the lecture program as 'Surviving the first years as a teacher', and he's lectured on this theme many times before. It's obviously an important issue, given that only about half of those who graduate from teacher education courses are still in the profession after five years.
Just yesterday he received this email from a former student.
I've had a hard term of learning and, the other day, I had a breakdown at work.
A doctor has given me some time off work and has recommended counselling.
He wrote on the medical certificate that I'm suffering from 'adjustment disorder with features of stress'. My classes have been such fun but the eternal meetings and school obligations have worn my little teacher soul to the roots. I hope you don't mind me sharing this with you, I find there are not many people I want to discuss this sense of loss with. I feel a deep sense of disappointment in my own inability to find balance and teach.
This is such a common story, especially among some of those ex-students who most put their hearts into the work. They have dark times of feeling discouraged, demoralised, and overwhelmed. Some pull through. Some don't.
‘I feel a deep sense of disappointment in my own ability' This sense of inadequacy, of personal weakness, is another common theme. A number of his ex-students have talked about feeling ashamed or embarrassed, reluctant to ask for help for fear that their struggles are seen as weakness or pathology: 'adjustment disorder with features of stress'.
It is time to lecture differently about survival.
In the past, he has veered between being pragmatic (Ten tips to help you make use what you've learned at university), evangelical (Hold fast to, and work towards, the vision that inspired you to become a teacher!) and analytical (Understand the societal and institutional reasons why schools are driven to operate in impersonal ways). None of these approaches was wrong; each, he was confident, had something to offer the beginning teacher.
But these stories about little teacher souls worn down to the roots have had a cumulative affect. This time he wants to do go deeper. This time he wants to offer something that might make richer soil.
He opens his calendar. There are two weeks before the lecture, but the days between now and then are already looking crowded: another 40 essays to mark by the end of next week, a growing pile of unread journal articles all directly related to an article he is currently writing, tutorials to teach, appointments with students, various meetings. He suppresses the thought that there won't be time for fresh thinking about this lecture. There is time this morning, at least for a beginning.
He wants to go beyond the pragmatic, the evangelical and the analytical; but what's beyond those?
Again he glances up at his bookshelves. Holt's How Children Fail. Postman and Weingartner's Teaching as a Subversive Activity. Dennison's The Lives of the Children. Neill's Summerhill. R. F. Mackenzie's Escape from the Classroom. Books from the 70s, when he was a young teacher. What was it about these that helped his little teacher soul survive those early years? None offered tips. None simply preached. None saw its only task as unmasking the system, though they did that as well.
These were writers who were interested in human nature. Holt saw children as innately curious. Postman and Weingartner described learners in terms of the human desire to ask questions. Dennison wrote about the purposeful in play. Neill saw students as beings who thrived when allowed to shape their own experience. Mackenzie spoke of the soul's deep desire to know its connection to the natural world. All had a philosophy out of which their practice grew.
What has happened to educational philosophy, he wonders. Dewey, Vygotsky and Piaget still crop up in education courses, but they're usually associated with pedagogical method ('pitch your teaching within the zone of proximal development’) rather than with a more penetrating exploration of human nature and the soupy milieu in which all learning takes place. There is now such a strong move towards the narrowly pragmatic: classroom management techniques, creating lesson plans, aligning assessments to outcomes, classroom seating plans, and the like.
Clearly, there's no immediate prospect of the re-introduction of history and philosophy, given the current utilitarian climate.
But perhaps he could slip in a single lecture.
2.
A memory floats to the surface, and he relives for a while an event from his second year of teaching over forty years ago.
It was a hot February Friday afternoon in his Year 6 classroom at a boys' school. Some of his students were staring of into the distance, a couple squabbling half-heartedly, half a dozen had their heads on the desks, and even the most conscientious were struggling to keep their minds on the rather mundane exercise he'd set for them.
They'd shut the windows to keep the hot February wind out of the classroom, but this only made it worse; after a lunch hour tearing around outside, twenty-five sveaty boys meant that they brought the heat in on their bodies. All day - no, if he was honest, all week - he'd struggled unsuccessfully to engage them, and he was beginning to think it was time to abandon the attempt. Maybe it was best to ride out the afternoon and try again after the weekend's break.
Then Andrew, something of a class clown, climbed up on a desk, apparently intending to open one of the high windows in the stuffy classroom. He could have pulled on the long rope; this would have levered the window open. But Andrew wasn't a boy who was attracted to the obvious.
'Andrew, get down from the desk.'
A slow smile spread across Andrew's freckled face. He looked down from his vantage point and saw that he had everyone's attention. He grabbed hold of the dangling rope and put it loosely around his neck.
'Is this a hanging offence?' Andrew asked.
Everyone laughed.
Where a moment before the boys had been listless and unconnected, suddenly they were alert, focussed, engaged.
This, it suddenly seemed, was a moment with potential. Recently he'd been reading Virginia Axline's Dibs, in Search of Self, and he had been impressed by this story of the purposefulness of play, the centrality of an imaginative engagement in stirring an otherwise directionless or confused body. Andrew was playing and the class had woken up. He decided to join in.
"You are on trial, Andrew English,' he intoned in a voice that he hoped sounded like some ninetenth-century judge, 'for the wilful act of attempting to hang yourself by the neck until dead. Take your place in the dock …’, he said as he quickly moved a few desks to form a rude replica of a courtroom. 'and subject yourself to the full might of blind British justice.'
Andrew's smile broadened. Then he made a half-hearted attempt to look awed, bowed his head, solemnly got off the desk and sat himself down in the ‘dock’.
A lawyer was hastily appointed for the prosecution, another for the defence. Other students became character witnesses or observers, court reporters and the like. The ndiculous nature of the alleged crime - attempting suicide was never questioned; disbelief had been suspended.
For the next hour or so, the classroom was transformed, the heat forgotten. He watched as group of lethargic 11-year-olds morphed into a galvanise team attempting to creatively cope with the excitingly unexpected. They put on new voices, adopted new body language, created (in the half hour left before the end of school) a new space shaped by their imaginations and love of the spontaneous.
3.
Perhaps, he thinks, he can tell that story in the lecture. He likes telling stories; they touch the listeners’ unconscious desires and fears.
But, this time, he wants to go beyond just telling a story. There is an important idea lodged somewhere in this particular memory, and he wants to be able to unearth it so that he can discuss it in his lecture.
He's been reading Deleuze and Guattari; philosophy, according to these two, is the art of creating concepts to solve problems. Could he extract from this story of the mock trial, and from his own accumulated experiences and readings, a concept that might help address this problem of teacher morale? What has a concept wrought from an event in a long-gone primary classroom got to say to a cohort of preservice teachers about to enter choppy waters?
He feels utterly ill-equipped to create a concept. He's been a teacher for most of his adult life, not an academic, and there is so much still to read and know, such a vast distance between his current scholarship and any notion that he might be able to offer some useful contribution.
What he's been reading from Deleuze and Guattari, though, seems elusively relevant. He senses they have something to say about this business of survival in difficult times. Theirs is strange writing, impossibly complex in parts; and yet it has been working on him, getting into him, shifting his thinking in ways he's not yet able to articulate. He wants time to try to negotiate their labyrinthian prose, to get his head around some of their odd concepts.
The Body without Organs, for example.
For weeks, now, he has been trying to understand this weird concept. He's read about it in Anti-Oedipus, and more recently in A Thousand Plateaus. He's read commentaries, and even tried to write about it on his blog. For a while, it was a concept that kept slipping out of his grasp: one moment he'd think he got it, the next he'd read something that made it obvious that he was still a long way off.
And then - and wasn't it like this with much of learning generally? - this accumulated tangle of confused and jumbled thoughts about what the term could possibly mean suddenly resolved itself, almost overnight, through no disciplined synthesis constructed by his conscious mind. One morning he woke up, picked up a commentary on the concept of the Body without Organs, a commentary that he’d already read and highlighted several times; and this time it all made sense. Even more satisfying was the realisation that it was saying something about that hot Friday afternoon in his second year of teaching. Perhaps it might say something useful for beginning teachers.
All bodies seek to persevere in their own being (the phrase is Spinoza's). Each body, to use Deleuze and Guattari's way of saying this, is a desiring-machine seeking to join with other desiring-machines in order to increase flows of intensity. At a certain point, however, bodies find themselves organised into relationships and couplings which constrict libidinal flows, and there's an instinctive and often unconscious move to create and occupy what Deleuze and Guattari call the Body without Organs (the BwO), but which might perhaps more accurately (but clumsily) be described as 'A-milieu-less-constrained-by-organisation'.
In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari speak poetically rather than logically about this BwO.
... you have one (or several)... you make one, you can't desire without making one ... It is not at all a notion or a concept but a practice, a set of practices. You never reach the Body without Organs, you can't reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit. ... on it we penetrate and are penetrated..... The BwO: it is already under way the moment the body has had enough of organs and wants to slough them off, or loses them ... the BwO is also full of gaiety, ecstasy, and dance ... Where psychoanalysis says "Stop, find your self again," we should say instead, "Let's go further still, we haven't found our BwO yet, we haven't sufficiently dismantled our self'.
It's what first Andrew, and then the rest of the class, was discovering and then occupying on that Friday afternoon. They, and their teacher, both found and created a space where behaviours were not organised from without, where there was license to experiment, create and play. It was a move towards a de-stratification in order to allow for more flow, greater intensities, a more animating experience for a body.
... It is where everything is played out.... A BwO is made in such a way that it can be occupied, populated only by intensities. Only intensities pass and circulate. ... The BwO causes intensities to pass; it produces and distributes them in a spatium that is itself intensive, lacking extension. It is not space, nor is it in space; it is matter that occupies space to a given degree - to the degree corresponding to the intensities produced. It is nonstratisfied, unformed, intense matter, the matrix of intensity ... That is why we treat the BwO as the full egg before the extension of the organism and the organisation of the organs, before the formation of the strata... the organs appear and function here only as intensities.
Such a strange, subversive concept.
He and the class, in those minutes following Andrew's question, were making their own BwO. They were freeing themselves from a previous way of being organised (by a teacher, a classroom, a curriculum, a task), and were creating the right conditions for energies (potential intensities) to be released and to flow.
Could it be that there’s some link between survival as a beginning teacher and an ability to make your own BwO? Could this be the kernel of the lecture?
4.
Immediately another story comes to mind. He heard it just last week, told to him by Lauren, one of his former students.
Over coffee, he had asked her how her first year as a secondary Art teacher had gone. He knew she was about to apply for permanency and that, in order to pass the probationary year and be given a permanent position, she would have to provide evidence that she'd met the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers at a level that is called 'proficient'.
‘It's been something of a surprising journey,' she explained. 'I hated what I went through last year, trying to get a job and producing all this documentation for job applications and interview panels. It felt rushed, impersonal and degrading, a kind of flat presentation of data about my previous university performance that had nothing of the richness and ongoing development that I think is true about what I leamed from the various pracs and some of the teacher education units. I sat down in front of the panel with my folders of so-called 'evidence', and I could see one of the panel members ticking off items on a checklist. I had this sense that I was presenting this lifeless snapshot of my professional preparation. It didn't feel like me, and I could sense the confidence and conviction seeping out of me the longer the panel meeting went on.'
'But you still got the job' he'd said.
'I got the job, but I dreaded the thought that I'd have to do it all again in a year, that I'd have to produce this portfolio of evidence to get permanency. I'd decided that the system sucked and I should just shut my classroom door, if I could, and get on with enjoying the teaching, which I know I'm good at and which gives me a charge. But it didn't feel good. I could feel a kind of poison, a bitterness, entering my system, and I didn't like that.'
'That's not you.'
"That’s not how I want to be. I hate the idea of being flattened by the system. I wanted to find some way of wriggling free of this pessimistic weight that was pressing down on me, this growing anger that was turning to a kind of cynicism about an impersonal and uncaring system.'
'And you have found a way?'
'Surprisingly’, she said, "I think I might have. Who knows, the system might still find a way to fuck up what is feeling like a promising solution, but something different seems to be happening.'
'So tell me,' he said.
‘Well,’ Lauren said, ‘a group of four of us beginning teachers have been getting together for a drink after work on a Friday, and for a while we just spent the time bitching about the system and the school executives and what a lonely and soul-destroying business this applying for the ‘Proficient’ status had been. It had felt like such a pointless paper-producing process. Why coldn’t they just come into our classrooms, see how well we taught, talk to kids and their parents, look at our results? Instead each of us would have to be up late at nights for weeks, trying to fill in their forms, document evidence against a bazillion standards, and in the end produce what would feel to each of us to be a lifeless, flat and incomplete snapshot of our teaching lives.
Then, at one of these get-togethers, we began to talk about how neat it would be if we could work together in some kind of a way. But we all belonged to different departments and different schools, and taught different kids, so how could we do that? Jason then suggested that we work together on this business of getting a 'Proficient’ rating. It immediately caught our imagination, and we were soon planning and creating e-portfolios, which we each began to populate with stories and statistics and work samples and the like. We'd then meet and share our progress, reminding each other of forgotten triumphs and achievements. The more we talked and created, the greater the sense that we weren't working alone on this thing anymore, that we were actually doing something that seemed both fun and useful.'
"You'd created folders of evidence before?'
‘Yes, we'd done that. But not together.'
"So it was the collaborative side of it that made the difference?'
'That was part of it. A big part. But there were other things. Like the quality of the product. Or not just the quality, but its nature. The folders of evidence and the paper application weren't dynamic, they weren't something that kept changing and growing; it was a moment in time, it was a photograph rather than a movie. Our e-portfolios turned out to be more like movies. As we worked together, and as this e-portfolio grew and changed and became more focussed, I could see in front of me all the things I've done.'
"Being visible was important.'
‘It made a difference. And it mattered that the process and the product were dynamic. The documents we were creating were somehow alive, changing, evolving.'
She looked up suddenly, and smiled. Her fingers which, until then, had been resting on the table next to her empty coffee cup, began to drum on the cafe table, as if filled by little currents generated by her increasing animation.
"It's brought a group of people together, it has been a vehicle for much larger and very, very important conversations and movement in all of our careers. The fact that it is organic makes it stronger; it’s keeps shifting and growing in response to things we’re discovering as we talk together.'
'It's made a difference to how you see yourself, how you feel about your work.'
‘I’m becoming more aware of what is unique about me, the unique skills that I have, the unique contribution I make to a group. I also have a clearer picture of who I am as an teacher.'
'I'm wondering if it's changed the way you work at all?'
‘I think so. I've noticed a difference. I’m an active person normally, happiest when I’m doing stuff, not very good at sitting quietly and thinking about something. But creating this electronic portfolio, knowing that I’ll be showing it to my friends, helps me to stop and reflect.’
'The whole process has affected you.'
‘I think the representation ... this richer representation of who I am as a teacher has been created and now, in some ways, can't be uncreated because it’s become me. That was unintended. I thought it was an entirely external experience and I didn't think at all that it was an internal, transformational experience at all. Initialy l thought I was doing this to represent myself better for the panel, but this has tumed out to be so much less important than all the internal outcomes, and the collaborative and collective ones. They're very emotionally based, they're much stronger.'
5.
He sits with his recording of their conversation.
It was the energy that had been most apparent. He thought of the contrasting picture that Lauren had painted of herself, at first depressed with a sense of being unseen and unappreciated by the system, then alive and animated as the group began their collaborative project. A heavy sadness replaced by an energetic jouissance. "Sadness,' said Deleuze in an interview, 'occurs when you're separated from a potency or force that, rightly or wrongly, you thought you were capable of fulfilling. You feel joy when you realise a potency, when you make a force real.'
He opens up his copy of Anti-Oedipus. The opening pages seem to describe a world very much like the world that Lauren's group were discovering.
(Desiring-production) is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts ... Everywhere ... machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into an energy-source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts ... For every organ-machine, an energy-machine, all the time, flows and interruptions.
What he likes about this passage, about the whole of what he's been reading in Deleuze and Guattari, is this sense of the ceaseless, restless, unquenchable desire to produce, of the flow and movement which were so present in Lauren's descriptions of her experience, and of the contrast she drew between the frozen-in-time snapshot and the dynamic ever-changing movie. The affects (sadness, joy) are consequences of the blockages and flows.
Boys’ bodies confined and sluggish in a hot February classroom. Lauren's body weighed down by an impersonal process. Beginning teachers struggling to remember why they ever wanted to become teachers in the first place. All looking, consciously or unconsciously, to find and make a Body without Organs, a field in which blocked energies might begin to flow again.
He wants to hear more about Lauren and her friends' experience. Could he perhaps invite the four of them to record a conversation with him? Would this give him a way of grounding some of these concepts, or at least of exploring them more systematically?
He returns to his computer to write an email to Lauren.
6.
Everyone else is in bed and he is alone at his desk. There are books open on the floor - Anti-Oedipus, A Thousand Plateaus, a Deleuze commentary. There's a wind blowing in the trees outside his curtained window. A possum scurries across the roof. One of the dogs barks. But, for the most part, he's inside himself, just him and the thoughts which drift in like little welcome waves on a beach. He's not often up this late; he usually works best in the mornings. But tonight he's enjoying the quiet and the thinking.
The meeting with the four is set for tomorrow. The lecture is still a week away.
He's found a title for the talk. Becoming-teacher. It's satisfyingly ambiguous.
The students, seeing the title, won't know whether it's about procedures (In order to become a teacher, you need to satisfy the following criteria and have taken the following steps ...), transitions (In order to move from being a university student to a practising teacher, you need to know ...) or survival (This is what we've found contributes to people surviving the probationary year and becoming permanent teachers ...). Each of these interpretations will strike chords in different students, and they'll arrive in the lecture hall in different affective states, especially given that he'll have prompted responses to the title in the preceding tutorial. He knows that beginning with affect effects engagement.
The lecture, though, will begin with the hyphenated noun Becoming-teacher, and with the story of Lauren. Connecting the theoretical with the practical, the conceptual with the actual.
He reads again - out loud, because …. well, just because - a passage from A Thousand Plateaus that has intrigued him. A passage that feels like a summing up of much of what he’s been thinking and feeling.
This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times. It is through a meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight, causing conjugated flows to pass and escape and bring forth continuous intensities for a BwO. Connect, conjugate, continue: a whole 'diagram,' as opposed to still signifying and subjective programs. We are in a social formation: first see how it is stratified for us and in us and at the place where we are; then descend from the strata to the deeper assemblage within which we are held; gently tip the assemblage, making it pass over to the side of the plane of consistency. It is only there that the BwO reveals itself for what it is: connection of desires, conjunction of flows, continuum of intensities. You have constructed your own little machine, ready when needed to be plugged into other collective machines.
Deleuze and Guattari have a way of writing that unravels previous thinking patterns or clusters, and then begins to create new ways of seeing and experiencing the world.
It’s time to sleep. Tomorrow, he hopes, he’ll hear more that will give flesh to the theme of the lecture.
7.
The recording device - his phone - sits on the cafe table, now switched off. The four have rushed off to their various homes, probably to have a quick bite to eat before tackling the marking and lesson preparation, their empty coffee cups still to be cleared off the table on which he now places a blank sheet of paper. He wants to get some of his impressions down before they fade. Then he'll listen again to the recording of the conversation.
The strongest impression is the contrast with an earlier meeting. A couple of weeks ago, he'd sat at this same table with three of his ex-students as they talked about their first years in the profession. It had not been a bubbly conversation. Each felt isolated and to an extent invisible. Each talked about a growing pessimism about doing good in impossible conditions. Two talked about a possible return to the relative calm of their previous employment in the public service. They, like the student who had written to him a couple of days before, were feeling their little teacher souls worn down to the roots.
This morning, on the other hand, the conversation was lively; they were clearly enjoying the opportunity to share their experiences with him.
He listens again to a portion of the conversation.
We've created something ... We've opened up a process... There's a buzz.. it's been fun and a releasing of tensions ... We've joined something that has got quite a lot of bigger energy at the moment ... We've been caught up in a wave which is a timely wave... We're getting into a more authentic space…We have been disruptive of the process ... It's led to lots of things opening up really ... a catalyst ... We're going to continue ... this thing continues to live … it's part of the development now... we're not in it alone ... this definite feeling of camaraderie ….. we're becoming more resilient to dealing with the storms we have to weather in this job ... we flipped it, we sort of took charge of it... we put the process in its place.
In their energetic exchanges, in their obvious enjoyment of each other, in the way they are constructing an account together, he hears echoes of that passage he’d read out loud last night. ‘Produce flow conjunctions … Have a small plot of new land … Try out continuums of intensities … Connect, conjugate, continue… We are in a social formation.’
It has felt good to hear all of this. He’ll weave it, somehow, into his lecture.
He walks to the counter to pay the bill.
Outside, he's suddenly aware, it is sunny and still. His wife was right. Autumn reds and golds are in the trees. Odd that he hadn’t noticed it before.
______THE END_______
A version of this story was first published in my book Imagined Worlds and Classroom Realities. There were questions attached in case the story was being used with preservice or experienced teachers. They were as follows. Perhaps you’d like to respond to one or more of them in the Comments below.
What wears your little teacher soul down to the roots? What nourishes it?
Which educational books, lectures and/or people have helped you see wider horizons?
“If this lecturer wants to address the problem of teacher burnout, he'd be better off equipping his students with the practical skills they'll need when they face their first class. There's too much wanky thinking - a Body without Organs, for crying out loud! - and not enough practical work done in teacher education.” Thoughts?
What have been your most stimulating and successful collaborations? Are you encouraged to collaborate (enough) in your teacher education or school?
In an interview called J for Joy, Deleuze said: “Sadness occurs when you're separated from a potency or force that, rightly or wrongly, you thought you were capable of fulfilling. You feel joy when you realise a potency, when you make a force real.” Does this ring true for you?