When I was in seminary, I had planned my master’s thesis around the title “Psyche and Spirit in the Classroom.” I see now that this was a skew frame, at an awkward angle, that made it unnecessarily difficult to apply the tools for thinking and seeing that I had gathered in my training. From the perspective of complexity: I was observing the wrong scale. From the perspective of engineering: I had drawn an incomplete system. From the perspective of education and progressive pedagogy, I misunderstood the proper field of reflection on my work as a teacher.
From the perspective of theology, I made a category mistake — what I needed to explore was, “Psyche and Spirit of the Classroom.” To the point: the classroom has a soul, that nexus between the embodied, unconscious constituent elements (psyche) and the animating, holistic awareness (spirit); that heart of being, where will and ideal meet and open the way for action, for reflection, for growth, for compassion, for something new in the world.
The classroom has a soul. Psychodynamically, it has a internal culture, a character, a potential space that holds in tension the inner experience and the outside world, that is made stronger by trust or made weaker (that is, fractured, schizoid) by imposition of the “real world” on it. In Buddhist terms, it is a unity composed of vast diversity, that becomes a harmonious, cacophonous community that realizes the Way (Suzuki Roshi said: “things as it is”). Again from the perspective of complexity, the classroom’s inner experience of of itself is an emergent property of its constituent elements (students and teacher) acting according to a fixed set of simple, local rules. From the perspective of progressive pedagogy: the classroom is a community first, composed of interrelated and interdependent free persons, that engage in democratic process to be accountable to one another and grow their collective wealth.
For all my years as an educator, I have wondered about what a classroom is, what it is for, how it creates change; why students do what they do, and what the teacher can contribute; and finally, what the classroom can create in students to respond to our contemporary crises, adapt as a community, and make progress together. As a math teacher I’ve often started with the distinction between narrow mathematical skills (the “what”) and broader habits of mind (the “how”) but its a natural move to generalize this tension to other subjects, and then of course to a classroom’s or school’s purpose in the context of our culture, society, economy, politics, etc. What are we trying to do here? What will happen no matter what given our structure and the incentives students understand, and what can we actually change in them, and in the world?
Helpfully, to ground this, I have returned repeatedly to thinking about the math classroom, over cycles of reflection, over years and years of practice. To articulate the basic tension, I’ve long relied on Magdalene Lampert’s work (particularly in Teaching Problems and the Problems of Teaching or the essay “When the Problem is Not the Question and the Solution is Not the Answer”) to articulate two goals of my math classroom.
- Learn the math.
- Learn how to be the kind of people who learn math.
When I say, “the math” in the first goal, I refer to School Math, a set of procedures and objects that are narrowly defined and even overdetermined in what our society expects of schooling. I say overdetermined, because there are so many factors that narrow what might be called “Mathematics” and its practice to a sequence of “algebra-geometry-calculus-or-statistics” that most people see it as natural; so while educators in literature and history and the languages and arts and sometimes even science can create classrooms with radically different forms and content, while still addressing the heart of their respective content area, math somehow still has to be “the math that I learned when I was in school”. This is the same math whose symbols are used whenever anyone wants to represent the experience of schooling itself: a right triangle with the trigonometric ratios indicated, or an algebraic equation with the omnipresent “x”. Both of these are as natural to some cultural ideal of “schooling” as other symbols that most would recognize as outmoded or traditional, like a diagrammed sentence to teach grammar, or perhaps a book report on George Washington read aloud, more hagiography than history. These images are easy to build upon: red apple on the teacher’s desk; American flag on the wall, next to the clock and the bell; wooden desks in rows, 30 or 35 children directing all eyes at the bespectacled matron at the chalkboard, or frantically scribbling away at an exam, which each will receive back with a circle grade in red pen. (While this collective imagine is familiar even if your schooling didn’t look like it, you will recognize the common experience of all these associating school with being BORING.)
All very evocative; but if I’m thinking of the salient features for my guiding questions here (What is a classroom? Why do students do what they do? What can a classroom do?), I zoom in on a few important details. There’s the top-down instruction, a pedagogy and theory of knowledge that makes students passive receivers of knowledge and the teacher the active possessor of that knowledge, and also the sense that each student is fundamentally making an individual effort (my desk, my test) for an individual outcome (my grade).
The second goal that I have relied upon addresses this while maintaining the individual frame: it asks, what kind of person is a person that learns mathematics? Well, this could be about the qualities of the individual (paying attention, taking notes, completing homework, studying — or even the more progressive-sounding “reflecting” or “taking risks”) but I have always favored an interpretation that bring mathematics forward as an activity practiced in community — we do math when we do math together. So: listening to peers, asking them questions, discussing your own approach, solving problems together, reflecting and sharing in the hopes of moving the work of the class forward. These are communal efforts that, it is assumed, will be reflected in each students’ pursuit of the first goal. In fact, this is often how I’ve framed it for my students when explaining to them the value I find in my discussion-based style of classroom: you will learn the math better here. And on the way, as a nice side result, we’ll do something that looks like how real math is done in community, and will even tie in certain democratic tendencies at the heart of progressive pedagogy.
But truth be told, this doesn’t break out of the persistent individualistic frame that our school’s are created around, and to demonstrate this central truth I don’t have to pull down collective images floating in the ether. On the contrary, I will point out something so obvious that it doesn’t seem to bear repeating: our schools are literally built around a personal effort/reward system. Kids know this in their bones. Any reference to some kind of Good outside of this incentive structure, whether it be a deeper knowledge of math or a comfort with intellectual struggle or some familiarity with democratic process, will always, always be filtered through the individual effort/reward sieve. This is a source of frustration for teachers who believe that learning is something more than an individual effort, and that knowledge worth knowing can be collapsed into the grade-reward — but why? It’s what we’re here to do. It’s a delusion (in the descriptive sense) to imagine schooling as directing its energy anywhere else. And it’s a delusion (in the moral sense) to direct our frustration at students about this! They are doing what we’ve told them. If they think their effort can make the cut, they pursue the reward. If they think their effort cannot make the cut, they reject the reward. This is very rational behavior.
This frustration among teachers makes sense though, because we recognize that this structure that centers individual effort/reward is not necessarily a feature of education, but a human-generated system that has chosen to identify certain priorities at the expense of others. So we can channel that frustration to push back, to say: individual effort/reward is not enough. It comes out of a capitalist and neoliberal system; it is reductive and infantilizing; it is not within the great tradition of human wisdom and its transmission from generation to generation. It reduces teachers to mid-level bureaucrats, petty tyrants of their little domain, demanding obedience and production in exchange for duly-rewarded credentials. Or worse, we become involuntary agents of the market, the point of transaction between “hours of attention begrudgingly paid” and “incremental units of learning”. We lock students in to a economic and political outlook that valorizes infinite growth, bootstrap individualism, constant hustle and all of those consequences we’ve been taught to live with: gross inequality, neverending competition, fossil-fuel dependence, climate change, socialism for the rich and prisons for the poor, the legacies of imperialism and colonialism, and all of the endemic social systems that protect the dominant paradigm
However, those priorities are baked in already! Do we award grades? Yes. Do those grade represent what individual students produced individually? Overwhelmingly, yes. These are the only salient facts here. Everything else is moralistic handwringing — or, when done institutionally, marketing. Our school offers what every other school offers, what any school can possibly offer in our system. Would you like your rugged-individualism-for-profit to be democratically flavored? Would you like the artsy variety? Or perhaps the rigorous variety, of an older vintage? It becomes a kind of consumer preference, and its just as empty.
Here I’d point out that the question, “how do we support individuals in pushing back against the unsustainable and cruel dominant paradigm” is one that most religious institutions exist to answer. It’s an important first step to recognize that when we talk about individual reward/effort incentives in schools, the call is coming from inside the house, and with good reason. I think in our current economic-political-social system, we will not get it outside of the house. It’s what built the house. But the practice of religious communities can help us think about how we might introduce students to something different, something ethical, something new.
I should not have been surprised when I came to that conclusion, that schools can learn something from religion, given my background. Nonetheless it surprised me when I came to it, because I came from a different direction entirely. Let me try to summarize that.
A complex system is one in which units interact according to a simple set of local rules to generate a structure at a higher scale, whose properties we could not necessarily predict based on the individual actors and the rules. The classic example of this is an ant colony, an entity whose famous complexity results, not from the direction of some kind of overmind directing the ant’s efforts, but the cumulative action of each individual ant’s response to those simple, local rules. This makes a colony adaptive to changes in its environment, in order to ensure the colony’s survival, even though no single ant in the colony can be said to be directing that adaptation or could even be said to be aware of the changes necessary to thrive. The colony’s features, its structure, its various functions of self-sustenance, are all emergent properties. And we feel it is accurate and appropriate to speak of the life of the colony on the scale of the collective, just as we can speak of the life of the ant on the scale of the individual unit.
We could go even further and describe a kind of complementarity between ant and colony — in that when we focus on one or the other, we necessarily lose sight of something essential about the subject of our focus. This references one of the roots of complexity theory in the development of quantum theory and indeterminacy. Focus on a light as a particle, and you lose sight of the ways in which it is a wave; focus on an electron’s position, and you lose sight of it’s momentum. This is not a feature of insufficiently accurate measurements, it is a practical limit to what we can perceive when moving between scales of investigation. This complementarity, translated to the example above, says: look at one ant and you don’t see it’s participation in the colony, which is essential to understand its way of being in the world. Likewise, resolve your focus on the colony, and the constituent elements are lost. This can be applied anywhere that scales of investigation are significant. A liver pathologist attends to individual liver cells, as well as the whole organ. To describe the behavior of starlings, we have to zoom out to consider their collective action in contributing to a murmuration.
And as teachers, we have to hold in mind our individual students in tension with the whole classroom. As I read about the various factors that act on our students, the ways in which their broadest behavior patterns are dictated by internal and external factors, I found it more and more helpful to think of my classroom as a complex system, one created collectively by my students (and me!) when we acted according to a set of simple, local rules. I wondered: if I can articulate a set of rules that students know without knowing, could I imagine a way to encourage a countervailing set of rules, that created a different emphasis and balanced our insistent focus on the individual and the market?
You can imagine what my first rule was, given my fixation on individual effort/reward above. But the task is developing the tacit, local rules that act on young people (here I imagine high-school-aged students) that align with the broader task of schools in our culture, which I label here the develop of free persons. Here were the six that I articulated:
Local Rules for the Development of Free Persons
- Individual rewards come from individual effort only.
- Maintain the social hierarchy.
- Produce as efficiently as possible.
- Pursue familiar tasks.
- In absence of stimulus to keep attention, fall back on bio-factors (tired/hungry/restless)
- Keep control by any means necessary.
These need some unpacking, but I’ll just comment on two of them. #3 draws up that we’re talking about the output of artefacts that demonstrate that I know what I’m talking about, and these should be turned out in as little time as possible. Academic dishonesty, which is a huge factor in school (especially now with the widespread availability of AI), enters the game for this reason; and the “efficiency” I indicate here is more about “vulnerability-minimizing effort” than actually doing something that takes less time or energy. For instance, a teacher will behold a students wide-ranging efforts to cheat on a paper or test, and will at some point mutter to themselves, “it would have been easier to just learn the thing!” Yes, but more importantly, no. This would mean the student would be vulnerable to failure. They’re vulnerable to failure if they cheat too, but at least then they deserve it. Failure when you’ve tried is indicative of your failure as a person, a nasty little byproduct of the meritocracy (and neo-Calvinism, while we’re at it).
In fact, #3 along with #2 and #6, are rules that are meant to avoid vulnerability, admitting ignorance, or social tension at any cost. These rules exist for a reason. They are not bad. They are defenses, leaky and inflexible defenses, wielded by young people who haven’t developed a flexible and resilient sense of self yet. Our goal here is not to overthrow or ignore these rules, as if by wishing them gone they will disappear. In fact these rules apply to other groups of people in schools — make it a checklist and bring it to your next faculty meeting, and see how much behavior can be sourced to one or more of these rules!
If these are local rules for free persons, we need the countervailing rule, those which imply the communal, democratic, compassionate causes that we espouse. I countered each of the 6 with its antipode, resulted in:
Six Local Rules for the Development of a Democratic Society
- Cultivate communal wealth (unity)
- Foster difference among equals (diversity)
- Attended to democratic process (solidarity)
- Open to newness (not-knowing)
- Be present to everything happening right now (bearing witness)
- Letting go in action (compassionate or appropriate action)
Each here answers to its companion in the prior list. The parenthetical notes are an alignment of this list with the Three Refuges/Treasures and the Three Tenets of Zen Buddhism. One of the advantages of participating in a community of ethical practice is often someone else has already made the list you need! Unity, diversity, and solidarity correspond to that which a Buddhist takes refuge in, and commits to uphold: Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. The Three Tenets are more like guides to action — they were the first lesson I learned as I began my practice of contemplative care and chaplaincy in hospices.
The relationship to a religious tradition is also salient on the basis of my connection above — how do you pursue the practice of these local rules in a world that incentivizes their opposites? How do you create a concerted, holistic, communal result in classrooms that contributes in some measure to a healthy democratic society, that balances the emphasis on free individuals, hold them accountable and gives them context to grow in skill, compassion, and wisdom?
This would go a long way to answering the question: What can a classroom do? I’ve already presented a breathless argument for what a classroom is and why students do what they do, so now it’s time to see the potential for change by the teacher — an asymmetric member of that classroom community.
I have two thoughts right now, and I intend to test them this year.
First, I have to say the six rules for democratic society every single day in my classroom. Every. Single. Day. By April my students should have these memorized. I don’t care if they roll their eyes when they say them, or mock my very mockable tone — if they have memorized them by years’ end, they will have them and will be able to lean on them when they need them, likely when they least expect it. It has to become a part of them, just by being in that class every time they are there.
Second, we have to have fun. My class is so not fun. I’ve always put so much stock in an open and dynamic classroom that I never, ever, ask myself, “how can the kids have fun with math?” It’s a blind spot, and a mistake. I think games and fun and play in general allows for a unique but fundamental kind of relationship building. It embodies the principles I’m teaching. It lets in some joy, lends some buoyancy to those local rules. If we have a moment where we successfully realize the communal open rules, and we’ve had some fun, I think the kids are more likely to agree that it’s good that we’ve done it this way.
When I was considering this last point, I remembered a line of poetry I was saw at the head of a chapter in a book I couldn’t remember, but I knew it must be important because I remembered it so well. It was:
On the seashore of endless worlds, children play. -Tagore
I cast about for a bit and fumbled on Google for a while, not quite able to compose the line, but then found a result that hit me like a thunderbolt: it was the psychoanalyst and pediatrician Donald Winnicott, describing the location of cultural experience in Playing and Reality. Here he described play in children as a mediating, third space in between the child’s personal psychic reality and experience, and the real world. In pathological cases, restoring the collapsed third space in a person is the work of a therapist, but in general, we have all relied on this in-between place between inner life and outer reality to become who we are. And it this space writ large that becomes culture.
Considering this in the light of complexity and emergence, I saw the development of classroom culture with individual students as the creation of a emergent, sentient entity at a higher scale of inquiry. The third space created communally, the place where students explore and play among themselves and with elements in the world around them, is the soul of the classroom. What is necessary to foster this space, to protect it from fracturing into unrelated component pieces, is trust. Winnicott, in his dense and evocative style, says that it is here that experience “creates living” — and so in some sense, the classroom itself is alive, has consciousness, adapts to changes, can grow. The one, out of the many, harmonizing as a community.
So! The classroom has a soul, the beginning and end of my process here, and a surprising combination of my reading of complexity, theology, progressive pedagogy, depth psychology, and the Dharma. I thought to call it “The Classroom as Buddha” or “The Classroom as Sentient Being” or “The Classroom as Cosmos” — but then I thought, it was there at the beginning! I just had to turn it, just so.
