What we want, or need, but don’t always realise

The idea of providing students with meaningful work is a common theme in the educational press these days – and often goes under the term agency. One of the basic ideas here is that we allow students to make decisions and to get used to thinking and acting for themselves, rather than just doing what they are told. That is, of course, one of the central goals of a progressive education, and I am 100% behind it (not withstanding the paradox of a rule of not blindly obeying rules.)

The pedagogy that supports agency can be deceptively simple – asking students lots of open questions; giving them time to discuss; asking them to explain ideas in their own words using their own examples; taking a genuine interest in those ideas; presenting those ideas to the class for peer feedback; choosing their own areas of interest to explore and so on. It can also be taken further, and it’s interesting to see how far we can take this last strategy – which is often called co-constructing the curriculum with students. 

We all know that learning is easier when we are really interested in the material we are learning, so adapting the curriculum to suit student interests is appealing – and where they have flexibility, teachers will to some extent do that naturally; for example by spending longer in areas that engage students to learn more deeply. Taken to its extreme, co-construction can mean collaboratively deciding with classes or individuals the entirety of what they learn, and this is a position that finds a lot of advocacy on social media.

So I was interested to read a well-known champion of liberal education, Professor Gert Biesta, arguing against this position. His starting point is that agency is, in itself, a values-neutral quality. Students – and adults, as we can see reading world news – can exercise agency to good or bad ends, and our goal has to be broader than just agency for its own sake. 

Biesta’s main point is that as professionals we have a broader responsibility than to offer students what they want and what they are interested in (of course, as parents we know this). Biesta talks about the first gift of teaching – being given what you didn’t ask for and argues that education should give students what they did not ask for – first and foremost because they didn’t even know that they could ask for it. This seems to me to be such common sense, and so aligned with the graduating students who over the years consistently tell us I didn’t see the point of this at first, but by the end I learnt just how relevant and important it is or the long-graduated who write, years later, I didn’t know at the time how valuable all those things I learnt at school would be. There’s also the point that students will never ask to study a lot of things simply because they do not know what they do not know. So the extreme of co-construction would impoverish the scope and breadth of their learning; and a lot of passions would remain dormant because children never came into contact with, say, theatre, service, hiking, cross-country, capacitors, or calculus.

But the key idea here is more than merely encountering new ideas, important though that is. The broader point is that we learn about ourselves, and grow into ourselves as we encounter and challenge our desires – not just follow them. It is a deep human truth that we may not need what we desire, and may not desire what we need – and that’s as true for us as adults as it is for students. Furthermore, the journey of understanding the difference between our needs and desires unfolds over a lifetime. It’s worth quoting Biesta at length:

So the slow work of the educator… is to accompany children on this journey, encouraging them to go on the journey, and helping them to gain insight in their desires, to gain a perspective on their desires, to come into relationship with their desires, so as to find out which desires are going to help them with living one’s life well in the world and which other desires are going to hinder in this task.

One could and should argue that the work of education professionals is not just [to give] students what they ask for, but it is about engaging with them in the process of figuring out what it is that they might need (just as in the medical profession the work of doctors is not just to get patients what they want but to figure out what it is that they need). That makes school, perhaps, a place of revelation.

This last sentence resonated strongly for me last night, as I read it. Last April we held an inspirational two day celebration of 50 years of UWCSEA – our 50th Forum – and some of it felt like a revelation indeed. After a difficult few pandemic years, thousands in our community came together to honour our Mission, and commit to the future. It was just what I needed, though in the intense preparation and run-up it might not have been what I entirely wanted! 

So for adults too, we too may need to be invited or guided to things we might not be able to express ourselves. I know that’s how I feel when in conversation someone leads me to an insight that I was perhaps dimly aware of but couldn’t quite put my finger on. This is a common theme in the leadership literature; John Gardner argues that the most gifted leaders understand that the needs of people cannot be fully plumbed by asking them what they want or why they want it. One of the deepest of truths about the cry of the human heart is that it is so often muted, so often a cry that is never uttered. 

At our Forum, we heard the Executive Director of UWC Movement, Faith Abiodun, speak about the possibility and promise inherent in the future of the UWC Movement. He was unquestionably inspirational, but what was most uplifting about the conference for me was the idea that he awoke precisely those things suppressed over the pandemic years, and we all knew it as we heard him speak. Gardner hits the nail on the head:…beneath the surface ….are dormant volcanoes of emotion and motivation. Oddly, when leaders tap those geothermal sources and evoke intense responses, we attribute the intensity not to the subterranean fires but to charisma in the leader.

The best leaders, and the best teachers sense what we need, even though we can’t articulate it for ourselves. There is much to learn here.

With thanks to Gemma Dawson and Ellie Alchin for conversation and insights here.