‘If you don’t have a relationship with your tutor...you don’t care about the subject’: revisiting the role of the teacher - getting off the ‘sideline’ and ‘meddling in the middle’

ABSTRACT

We developed a pedagogy addressing both academic literacies and critical analysis where students would, with limited facilitation, actively engage with texts and each other. In this article we reflect on what the students who engaged with the pedagogy taught us: that teachers need to be much more than facilitators—we need to ‘meddle in the middle’. In developing the pedagogy we found the key obstacles were the liberal concepts of independence and objectivity—they led students to search for discrete objective ideas and to ignore the context shaping them. Drawing on the ideas of Theodor Adorno and of socio-cultural approaches to literacy, the pedagogy prompted students to sketch constellations on whiteboards of their understanding of the learning materials, drawing on lectures, readings, and their pre-existing knowledges. This article, reflecting qualitative research with students, reports their view that the pedagogy succeeded because of their interactive, engaged, relationship with their teachers. Considering those findings, we discuss how liberalism operates to repress students’ pre-existing knowledges and how this can be countered by teachers’ passion, care, and close engagement. What the students taught us was combatting liberalism requires more than well-scaffolded activities, but active, authentic, enthusiastic, relationships of trust that value both the contributions of students and teachers.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education
• pedagogies
• marxism
• teaching
• widening participation

Introduction

We developed a pedagogy integrating teaching of academic literacies and critical analysis by drawing on the work of German social theorist, Theodor Adorno. Adorno’s approach enabled us to address the key obstacle we had faced—the students’ neglect of the context from which claims were made in the texts examined, which we believed reflected the influence of liberalism’s emphases on independence and value-neutrality.

We witnessed dramatic improvements in the students’ work and their pleasure and confidence increase. Having practised the same pedagogy for two years, we sought to test our assessment and explore the students’ experience of the pedagogy.

The students confirmed the pedagogy’s success for them and more. They pointed to the difference made by the pedagogy’s embodied character, the way it fostered a learning community, the central role of teachers in their learning, and the liberating impact of discussing values. These insights have taken us beyond our original understanding of the pedagogy and indicated ways in which it can be further developed. We believe each insight warrants individual attention.

This article deals with the third insight: the central role of teachers. Here we present the findings from the students’ exploration of the pedagogy, as underpinned by Adorno’s use of dialectics and drawing constellations of texts’ contents: in particular, the students’ emphasis on the teachers’ role.

We had seen the pedagogy as promoting the students’ active learning through a close reading of the texts, with our actions limited to facilitating from the side (King, 1993). However, the students experienced—and desired—a much closer involvement. As Renay put it, they wanted a relationship with their teachers—their active, ongoing, involvement—and saw that as central to their successful learning experience. They changed our understanding of how the pedagogy operated and our roles as teachers.

We begin this article with a review of the relevant literature. As the emphasis on the teachers’ role contradicts central themes of contemporary scholarship in relation to teaching and learning, we first summarise those themes—particularly the emphasis on students’ active learning and their drawing on pre-existing knowledge. We then proceed to consider how liberalism operates to frustrate those objectives. We then outline the pedagogy that is the subject of this research, our approaches to data collection and methodology, and outline and discuss our findings in relation to the role of teachers in higher education. In that discussion we suggest that the emerging scholarship about teachers ‘meddling in the middle’ suggests a way to both grasp the students’ views about teachers’ roles and address the obstacles presented by liberalism.

Relevant literature

‘Guides on the side’

Contemporary literature concerning higher education pedagogy emphasises the need to actively engage students in learning as co-constructors of knowledge. It focuses on the cognitive, on students drawing on their pre-existing knowledge, and promotes the independent or autonomous student (Hoidn & Reusser 2020). These priorities found the drive towards ‘flipping’ the classroom—shifting the focus from the teacher to the students, and making teachers planners and resourcers of learning activities, and responsive, intermittent, ‘guides on the side’ and facilitators during activities, rather than ‘sages on the stage’ (Barr & Tagg, 1995; Berret, 2012; Hoidn & Reusser, 2020; King, 1993; Roehling, 2018).

This shift is founded on the view that effective learning only occurs where students are actively engaged in the process. Rather than a focus on lectures followed by discussion, in which the teacher is seen as the central influence, depositing knowledge (Freire & Macedo, 1987, p. 35) into passive students, active learning draws on the work of Vygotsky and others to approach learning as dependent upon the engagement of the learner (Hoidn & Reusser, 2020). This engagement, in turn, is seen to be dependent on engaging the students’ pre-existing knowledge and capacities to interrogate and incorporate what is being taught. The teacher’s role then becomes the establishment and facilitation of learning activities that scaffold from the students’ pre-existing knowledge to the desired new knowledge (Moll, 2014). The focus shifts to the students’ activities, with those of the teacher in the classroom taking on a more responsive focus, although remaining actively engaged in the co-construction of knowledge, using a range of approaches, including ‘clicker’ questions and ‘think-pair-share’ activities, to gauge, review and provide feedback to students in the process (DeLozier & Rhodes, 2017; McCarty & Deslauriers, 2020).

With this reversal of the teachers’ prominence, the value of student-to-student or peer-learning has been emphasised. Research demonstrates that student learning is enhanced when their primary partners in learning are other students—people who ‘speak their language’ and engage from a similar position (Smith & Bath, 2006). The promotion of learning communities has, for similar reasons, been seen as a powerful contributor to effective learning. They foster relationships, diminish isolation, promote inclusivity (Case, 2007; Christie et al., 2008; Jehangir, 2009; Wenger, 1998), increase students’ confidence and enable them to be ‘co-producers’ of learning (Christie et al., 2008, p. 568).

Primary, secondary and hybrid discourses

As part of this shift to student-centred learning, the literature emphasises that students only effectively learn by drawing on their pre-existing knowledge. This is the knowledge they start from, and which they use to interrogate and incorporate new knowledge (and often in the process revise their pre-existing knowledge). As such, these knowledges can be assets in the learning process (Daddow, 2017; Gee, 2011; Gonzalez et al., 2005; Moll, 2014).

The literature describes these assets as ‘funds of knowledge’ (Daddow, 2017; Gonzalez et al., 2005), ‘vernacular literacies’ (Hamilton, 2012), and ‘primary discourses’ (Gee, 2011, p. 153). ‘Funds of knowledge’ are the ‘historically accumulated and culturally developed bodies of knowledge and skills essential for household or individual functioning and wellbeing’ (Gonzalez et al., 2005, p. 73). Similarly, ‘vernacular literacies’ are understood to be everyday literacies students have developed in their own ‘everyday practices of reading and writing and the social relationships within which they are embedded’ (Hamilton, 2012, p. 11). A ‘primary’ discourse is the ‘initial discourse’ acquired by a person within ‘their primary socializing unit’ through which they learn ‘a culturally distinctive way of being an “everyday person”’ (Gee, 2011, p. 153). It:

gives us our initial and often enduring sense of self and sets the foundations of our culturally specific vernacular language (our “everyday language”), the language in which we speak and act as “everyday” … people, and our culturally specific vernacular identity.

All three emphasise learning’s relational character—that it is not merely a cognitive process and done independently (Christie et al., 2008), but an interdependent, social, process. Instead, they highlight how deeply learning is dependent on context: that students come from a variety of contexts, with varying language and cultural learnings.

The sociocultural approach to learning captures this relationality by drawing on the concept of discourse, treating it as:

a socially accepted association among ways of using language and … symbolic expressions, of thinking, feeling, believing, valuing, and acting, as well as using various tools, technologies, or props that can … identify oneself as a member of a socially meaningful group … ([as] … one … playing) a socially meaningful “role”, or … filling a [recognizable] social niche. (Gee, 2011, p. 158).

This captures education’s teleological and political character: that it promotes particular values. A person, in community, learns ‘instantiations of particular identities’ (Gee, 2011, p. 3), such that learning is not, and cannot be, neutral, but always about becoming ‘people like us’ (Gee, 2011, p. 3)—people who are participants in a particular discourse community.

Gee (2011) usefully distinguishes between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ discourses. ‘Secondary’ discourses are those:

we acquire later … within a more “public sphere” than our initial socializing group … within institutions that are part … of wider communities … religious groups, community organizations, schools, businesses, or governments. (Gee, 2011, p. 154).

Both kinds of discourse are shaped by power relations, producing dominant and subordinated discourses. Discourses are often thus ‘hybridised’ with primary mixed with secondary discourses, reflecting how social groups incorporate aspects of dominant discourses into their practices (Gee, 2011; Gonzalez et al., 2005).

Liberalism’s obstacles

Students can bring discourses of varying merit to their learning—the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’. They can, and do, bring hybridised discourses, and these hybrids frequently reflect liberalism’s influence. While, for example, we observed students vigorously contesting racist and sexist discourses, they conceptualised the problem as interference: that is, in terms of liberalism’s negative freedoms.

Liberalism is founded on two key concepts: independence and objectivity. It builds from an atomistic view of the world, in which all things have a separate essence or substance, with the character of all things, be they animate, sentient, or not, located internally (Firth & Erika, 2008; Giroux, 2018; MacIntyre, 1998, 2016). This independence—this separate essence—supports the view that a thing’s character is universal and fundamentally unaffected by its environment, including the values or interests of those who consider it: good knowledge of a thing is held to be objective, free of the influence of those seeking it (Deneen, 2018; Dyzenhaus, 1997, 1998). While liberalism’s rhetoric, particularly its emphases on freedom, has been decontextualised and universalised, it still reflects its historical origins: the interests and culture of Western feudal lords and emerging capitalists in denying their dependence on, and obligations owed to, others (especially those they depended on to secure their wealth, be they serfs, slaves or wage-labourers) (Losurdo, 2011). Liberalism has promoted formal claims to freedom but has not given those claims the substance to put them into effect—the acknowledgement of the deep interdependence of all who claim liberalism’s freedoms.

These foundations make liberalism repress and undermine other discourses. Liberalism is a dominant discourse. While it claims to be value-neutral, it is not. It imposes an atomistic, non-relational understanding of the self and locates its essence in rationality (Firth & Erika, 2008; MacIntyre, 1998, 2016). It cannot recognise the different, more interdependent conceptions of the self that characterise many other traditions and identities, including those of indigenous, non-white, non-patriarchal and non-heterosexual peoples (see, for example, Cobbah, 1987; De Sousa Santo, 2013; Vreugdenhil, 2017). It promotes freedoms for people who share liberal values—individualist freedoms (Losurdo, 2011) (‘people like [them]’ (Gee, 2011, p. 3)). Liberalism’s foundations exclude, rather than include, difference, notwithstanding its rhetoric of tolerance.

Drawing on the Enlightenment conception of rationality, liberalism exhibits a ‘dissolvent’ character (Bernstein, 2001, p. 98): like an acid, it corrodes alternative worldviews, including some students’ primary discourses. Liberalism’s insistence that public, including professional, spaces—and professional or ‘good’ knowledge—are value-neutral, renders other cultures irrelevant as merely personal or subjective. As a result, many students, having long experienced liberalism’s repression of their primary discourses, come to university having repeatedly heard that their ‘informal’ learning does not ‘count’. As such, liberalism operates to frustrate students’ active learning by devaluing their primary discourses. This not only provides an obstacle to effective learning, it promotes a ‘civic illiteracy … an inability … to grasp private troubles and the meaning of the self in relation to larger public problems and social relations’ that depoliticises and represses students’ sense of agency (Giroux, 2011, pp. 84, 85). It hampers their ability to become critical social workers. Others have expressed similar concerns about, and sought to address, the growing depth of liberalism’s influence on social work education. Fenton (2018), in her survey of recent literature, found a wide range of social work academics pointing out the depth of the influence of liberalism and the difficulties it provides for developing critical thinking.

As a result, many students come to university having experienced alienation in their previous educational experiences—they had to sever that part of themselves that was rooted in their primary discourses (Gee, 2011; Read et al., 2003). They have already experienced a ‘dissonance between “who they are”, “what they say” and “how they say it”’ (Rai, 2004, p. 155). The demands of higher education can make this worse:

the culture of ‘independent’ learning is problematic … [It] … is based on an ethnocentric masculinist ideal of a ‘traditional’ student unencumbered by domestic responsibilities, poverty or the need for support … the type of ideal student who can succeed in the shortest … time with few demands on institutional resources … [This] ‘independent learner’ is something of a myth, but its continual reaffirmation … contributes to the exclusionary potential of much academic culture. (Read et al., 2003, p. 272).

Not all students experience this dissonance. Many come having experienced education that did ‘speak’ to them. There the influence of liberalism may have reinforced their primary discourses, or those parts of liberalism incorporated therein.

Liberalism’s alienating influence also works against the formation of meaningful educational relationships, including learning communities. Liberalism, particularly as exaggerated by neoliberalism, promotes an instrumental, fragmented experience of university life—a ‘rugged individualism’ (Wagner & Shahjahan, 2015, p. 250; Read et al., 2003) that isolates students and undermines the development of supportive relations. Hirst et al. (2004) conclude that ‘to challenge this, we need to develop educational practices that grow from an understanding of the importance of human relationships … and to find ways to facilitate … [their] growth’ (p. 76).

The pedagogy

Origins

The pedagogy was collaboratively developed by the authors, a social work lecturer and an academic literacies lecturer, in relation to the teaching of key second year social work units in a university in the Western suburbs of Melbourne, Australia. Social work places a central emphasis on the relationship between a service user (the self) and their environment. Within the critical tradition of social work, both the self and the environment are seen to be subject to structures of domination, reflecting social work’s origins in contesting the cruelties of nineteenth century capitalism and liberalism (Allan et al., 2009; Mullaly, 2007). Similarly, the socio-cultural approach to learning is concerned with structures of privilege and domination, and the way in which these are enabled discursively (Barton, 1994; Gee, 1996; Street, 1984). Becoming ‘people like us’ (Gee, 2011, p. 3)—people working within the critical tradition—depended upon grasping the intimate influence of the ‘environment’ or context on the capacity of any being, be it a person, or group of people, or a word or a sentence, to ‘be’ itself.

We found the changes in higher education, particularly its massification and marketisation, had attracted a much more diverse range of students, with all the possibilities that reside in that diversity. However, at the same time, we confronted the greater demands that diversity required to support students’ transition into higher education. We adopted a socio-cultural approach and sought to enable the students to bring their primary discourses to bear in co-constructing knowledge. We found that students tended to consider a text with limited reference to context. For example, in reading the following passage,

However, Goodin points out that all societies hold as dogma that social welfare deals with needs rather than wants. He explains that although there is no good, clear-cut reason to give … needs … .priority … almost all social welfare programs [do] (Macarov, 1995, p. 17).

They neglected the italicised qualifications and focussed on the underlined text. They treated ‘that context … in instrumental terms: as the dross from which the gold of knowledge has to be separated’ (Fox & O’Maley, 2018, p. 1600): that is, they treated knowledge (a concept) as independent of its context and ignored the words that expressed the author’s comments on the concept.

Having regard to the extensive critique of liberalism in the literature, we came to believe that the greatest obstacles to their effective learning were the influence of the concepts of objectivity and independence. These concepts have a very broad influence, given their centrality to liberal thought. We believed that the problem the students faced was not that they lacked an adequate literacy, but that they were too well versed in that of liberalism, which operated to block or repress their critical engagement with texts and, with that, their recognition of the opportunities to draw on their primary discourses.

After some experimentation (Custance et al., 2014; Grace et al., 2011, 2013), we found Theodor Adorno’s ideas provided us with the framework within which to address these challenges. His ideas also gave us the ability to seamlessly integrate academic literacies into social work units.

Implementing the pedagogy

We drew on two key features of Adorno’s work to develop the pedagogy: dialectical analysis and constellation-work. Adorno (1993), like Marx and others drawing on Hegel’s work, treated dialectics as founded on one key insight: that ‘nothing can be understood in isolation’ (p. 91). Every being was comprised of—dependent on—a range of relationships, making each thing an ‘ensemble of … relationships’ (Marx, 1975, p. 570). Adorno (1997) considered that the difficulty with any concept is that it can be so useful as to place a ‘spell’ over those using it (p. 33). It can lead a person to apply that concept thoughtlessly, without reference to variations or context. Adorno called this ‘identity thinking’: treating an object as a ‘specimen’ of (or ‘identical’ with) pre-established concepts (Jarvis, 1998, p. 177). It can lead to a person forgetting that every concept is an abstraction—that it emphasizes some features and neglects others, the ‘residue’ (Adorno, 1973, pp. 5, 138).

Adorno put this approach into practice considering any idea as part of a constellation. Walter Benjamin had introduced Adorno to the use of constellations as a framework for analysis: ‘ideas [were] related to objects as constellations are to stars’ (Jarvis, 1998, p. 175). In the same way that a constellation was constructed by focusing on some stars and not others, a concept was also a construction. Moreover, in just the same way that the perspective of the observer shapes her perception of the stars’ relationships, and her selection of those included in a constellation, so, too, the perspective of a person developing a concept could skew its construction. That process, however, could be reversed. A person could look at a particular being and its context afresh and draw a new, more accurate constellation. Dialectics provided the approach to do this: one could, by closely examining an object’s characteristics, identify and trace—or unbundle—the relationships that constitute the object. A person could try ‘trial combinations’ (Adorno, 2000, p. 32) of concepts, even in ‘playful’, ‘clownish’ ways (Adorno, 1973, p. 14), which might then reveal which relationships had been missed (the ‘residue’) ‘like a lock of a … safe-deposit box: in response, not to a … single number, but … a combination of numbers’ (Adorno, 1973, p. 163).

These two ‘tools’ were introduced to students through lectures, where the lecturer modelled the dialectical unbundling of the relationships that constituted key concepts, drawing and expanding constellations of relations on the whiteboard. The choices involved in the concept’s construction were highlighted, as were the values that drove those choices, so as to demonstrate that every concept was a social construction, a selection from an experience, from a particular value base, with ‘gaps’ that warranted evaluation.

Students then practised whiteboarding constellations in the tutorials. In groups of four or five, they stood before whiteboards and drew constellations of the lecture, and then the assigned readings, starting with the simple prompt: ‘what struck you?’. There were no right or wrong answers. They only had to be drawn from the relevant text or, in bringing their primary discourses to bear, directly relevant to it. All that was asked was that they unbundle the relevant text: each, starting with what struck them, worked out to connect their points to those of others in their group, weaving constellations within constellations.

While the students undertook this whiteboarding we, as tutors, separately visited the groups, often more than once, and often at the students’ behest. We sought to avoid proffering ‘answers’ or acting as experts. Rather, we sought to understand their perspectives, encourage them to develop and explain them, and to promote the students’ consideration of all facets of the text. Where they focused on parts of the text, or on parts of paragraphs or even sentences therein, we guided them to consider the omitted parts, and the reasons for their omission. Where they appeared to have strayed from the text, we guided them to return to, and reconnect their points with, it—to give the text priority, not anyone’s views about it. Where they drew on their primary discourses, we encouraged them to clearly demonstrate their ties to the text and how they contributed to our understanding (or critiquing) it. In every instance we asked the students to ‘put it up’ on the whiteboard. Diagrammatic examples of how students whiteboarded constellations of the above passage from Macarov, indicating how those constellations were modified in light of the tutors’ prompts, are set out in the Appendix.

Following this, students, in their groups, stood by their whiteboards and explained their key points to the balance of the class (including why those points ‘struck’ them). Following each group’s presentation, others could ask questions or make comments. We, as tutors also did so, so as to prompt them to share aspects of our previous conversations with them at the whiteboards, and to encourage them to build on or add to their predecessors’ contributions—or explain their differences. Moving from group to group, the class constructed an enlarged constellation, stringing insights from whiteboard to whiteboard together. In this process, we, as teachers, consistently prompted them to make those connections, often through questions but also by referring back to relevant aspects of our whiteboard conversations. We lent them our experience in developing and presenting analyses.

Further detail of the pedagogy is provided in Fox and O’Maley (2018). This includes examples in its Appendix of ‘snuggling up to text’, constructing constellations from a text, and students incorporating their experience into constellations.

Data collection and methodology

We sought to integrate the teaching and learning of academic literacies and critical analysis. We believed that the pedagogy achieved our aims: that it integrated the learning of academic literacies and critical analysis, effectively addressed the obstacles posed by liberalism’s emphasis on independence and objectivity, and promoted a vibrant, productive, learning community. Student evaluation surveys independently undertaken by the university immediately prior to this research indicated our impressions reflected those of the students: the surveys reported students’ overall teaching quality satisfaction as 80% and 94% for the two units involved. We sought to better test our impressions against those of the students. In particular:

1. Whether the pedagogy changed the way in which they analysed a text; and

2. What other aspects of the pedagogy affected their learning experience and whether they found them helpful.

We used an interpretative qualitative methodology which employed focus groups and individual semi-structured interviews to apprehend students’ understanding of their learning experience (Denzin & Lincoln, 2011; Liamputtong, 2013). Focus groups enable participants to feel comfortable and hear their peers’ contributions, which can trigger additional contributions (Patton, 2002). Semi—structured interviews enabled participants to say things they may otherwise have been reluctant to say, which provided a more in-depth understanding of their learning experience (Kvale & Brinkman, 2009). The focus groups and interviews included open-ended prompts for students to comment on all aspects of the pedagogy, including their overall experience, the lectures, whiteboarding (including interactions with other students and teachers while whiteboarding) and reporting back (including interactions with their group, the broader class and teachers in that process).

We employed an inductive analysis of the transcripts (Thomas, 2006). The data was then coded following Strauss and Corbin (1998) coding process to identify a network of codes and themes: open coding to identify a range of codes; grouping them into a larger set of themes; axial coding to determine any subthemes and link to relevant concepts; and a final review of the data in light of those settled themes. As noted in the Introduction, this produced the following key themes: the difference made by the pedagogy’s embodied character, the way it fostered a learning community, the central role of teachers in their learning, and the liberating impact of discussing values. This article focuses on the teachers’ central role, which drew together sub-themes concerning passion, care, and the teachers’ ongoing interaction with students.

Ethics approval was granted by the university’s ethics committee. The 42 students who had been involved in 2016 were invited to participate. Eight students did so. The research was undertaken after marking in the units was complete, so as to ensure students did not feel coerced in any way to participate in the research. Since the research was undertaken on campus during the break between semesters, this may have affected the number of participants. While we have given the students pseudonyms to protect their identity, we endeavour to represent their voice as much as possible below.

Findings

Our research indicates that relationships of authentic connection and trust between students and teachers powerfully contribute to effective, transformative, learning and that the pedagogy promotes those relationships. We use ‘teacher’ to refer to our roles here, rather than lecturers and tutors, to avoid any suggestion of hierarchy and to reflect how both forms of interaction contributed to the relationships.

We also want to emphasise that the relationships experienced in these classes were the product of the commitment and efforts of both the students and the teachers. As we discuss in our article on how the pedagogy promoted a learning community, it turned on the students’ repeated investment in the class. This investment was not a single event, but a repeated expression of commitment. It turned on:

an infinite etceteration of interactions … As … [a teacher] puts herself forward, so the students return the compliment … This is even more than a ‘pedagogy of recognition’ or … ‘ … affirmation … it is a pedagogy of mutuality’ (Barnett, 2007, pp. 129, 133).

Ideally, we would have considered the way in which the students’ accepted the pedagogy’s invitation to build a learning community together with the discussion in this article. However, word limits would not have allowed an adequate exploration of that aspect of the research.

The students placed a striking emphasis on the teachers’ contributions. Minh described the relationship as ‘connectedness … [when] people … feel … connected to the [teacher] … they are … likely to learn more’. Renay more forcefully insisted:

If you don’t have a relationship with your tutor, there’s no trust, there’s a power imbalance: I don’t ask questions, and I don’t want to … and I don’t care about the subject … It makes you disengaged completely.

In speaking of the learning community, Rochelle said ‘you guys [the teachers] create that. You … set up that … notion … and we all run with that’.

The students described the teachers’ creation of enabling conditions, including approachability; refusing asymmetrical power relations; genuine engagement, ‘you can’t fake being interested … and actually paid attention’ (Kendra); consistency; and emotional intelligence, ‘he’s my teacher, he cares for me emotionally … [and] understood me’ (Minh). They emphasised the influence of the teachers’ passion and excitement. They emphasised their care and explicit encouragement. Minh saw them saying things:

to encourage people … [as] important … [giving] hope … [like saying]: “It’s hard, but you can do it” … it’s very helpful. I know we are adult students but many … struggle. If they hear some kind word, it helps them … continue … people feel encouraged and … good about themselves.

They saw the creation of the community beginning in the lecture and continuing in the tutorial:

With your tutorials … it’s always a class. Everyone is always involved … if someone’s not involved, you’ll get them involved … it’s always like a team … you’ve made it this place where everyone has the … idea of it being groupwork (Renay).

The students saw this influence as ongoing, including through the teachers’ visits to their groups as they whiteboarded: ‘in a positive way … [it] forced people to be collaborative’. The teacher/student relationship promoted reciprocity: ‘because they’re so helpful … I want to put the work in for them’ (Kendra). Rochelle found the teachers’ ‘higher level of expectation … makes me want to … strive harder … [unlike] other classes’.

The students described other teachers as ‘just there to teach’, whereas, in this class, the teachers ‘want to mentor students … they [do] … a lot more … they’re very … hands on’ (Tarsha). They valued this interaction while whiteboarding. Tarsha found this ‘really helped, especially when you … came round … and asked [me] to unpack what I had said … rather than … going off on a tangent … [she’s] like bring it back, bring it back on track, it’s like yep, the train’s back on track’. They found these interactions very useful, even though the teachers ‘were very strict on not … giving you answers, you’ve got to figure it out for yourself’ (Renay).

The interactions promoted their confidence in reporting back:

when we’re … at the whiteboard and you say ‘ … elaborate’ or ‘explain’ … it’s like, ok, you’ve … listened … and you haven’t told me it’s wrong … so you push me to think deeper, and I have … confidence … because [I’ve] … got past that first level (Renay).

They also found them helpful while in the process of reporting back. Kendra remembered ‘a lot of times … you … commented on us individually … at the end.’ It made her feel that the teachers ‘were interested and … wanted us to learn’.

Rochelle summed up the students’ view of the teachers’ contribution:

just … keep doing what you’re doing … you guys have created such a great opportunity for people to really engage with the content and … make … connections with other people. That community sense is something we have lost … and you guys have … helped … bring that back.

Discussion

We believed that the pedagogy provided the platform or scaffolding to enable the students to actively construct new knowledge, largely independently of us as teachers. The students experienced the pedagogy, and our relationship with them, differently. From their perspective we were not facilitating from the ‘side’ but were in the ‘middle’ of things and—in their view—this close relationship was essential. The findings indicate the centrality of relationships to effective education, and that the pedagogy promoted their development. They show how the pedagogy did so and how vital the teachers’ participation was to their emergence and success.

The contemporary literature’s emphasis on the need to actively engage students in learning as co-constructors of knowledge, particularly its focus on the cognitive, and on promoting the independent or autonomous student, does not capture the students’ belief in the centrality of their relationship with their teachers. The students’ views indicate that we, as teachers, played a central role in the development and operation of a productive learning environment because of our:

• passion,

• care, and

• ongoing engagement with them—our ‘meddling in the middle’ (McWilliam, 2009, p. 288).

Passion

The students emphasised our passion: how it was infectious and ‘made … [them] excited’. Barnett (2007) describes this as ‘pedagogical passion’—passion oriented to ‘making connections … with the value of the objects in mind, both the intellectual field and the student’ (p. 135). It is not merely a passion for the object and centred on ideas, as suggested by the contemporary dualisms of student/teacher-or-idea centred teaching, but both: it ‘implies an orientation towards making connections’. It ‘is the ability to be [personally] “magnetized toward the vision of an imagined good”’ and draw others to it (Barnett, 2007, p. 135; Case, 2007, p. 131; Dal’Alba & Barnacle, 2007, p. 681).

A vision of the good life and underlying values are central to any discourse community, and to becoming part of that community. They are central to becoming social workers: the Australian Association of Social Workers defines social work by reference to certain foundational values (Australian Association of Social Workers, 2020, p. 5). Values and their underlying passions are even more important to the critical tradition of social work, with its greater emphasis on contesting privilege and oppression. Embracing those values, and learning to confidently apply them, is central to becoming a critical social worker—to becoming ‘people like us’ (Gee, 2011, p. 3).

Passionate teaching helps undo liberalism’s influence by treating passions and values as central to learning and doing social work, rather than as irrelevant personal considerations. Moreover, passionate teaching legitimates students discussing what they are passionate about and drawing on their primary (and other) discourses. This passionate engagement provides a model for students and assists processes of acquisition. It enables students to ‘ become “connected knowers”…, recognising that learning is not divorced from the balance of their lives but encompasses ‘the affective side’ (Jehangir, 2009, p. 46).

This passion promotes a learning community and can help address the alienation and disempowerment students have previously experienced. It works to overcome the isolation that ‘independent learning’ promotes: passion promotes connections.

Passionate teaching—the explicit teaching from and to values—can promote students’ sense of agency. This was such a powerful experience for the students we consulted and reveals the potentials of values-centred teaching so starkly, that we will address in a separate article.

Care

The students saw these passions enacted as care. They experienced the teachers as approachable, interested, and emotionally invested. They particularly emphasised the way in which the teachers expressly encouraged them. This care countered their experience of liberalism’s repressions. It made the classrooms a safe space to experiment. This went beyond a sense of neutrality, of the liberal freedom of expression. The prompts and questions—the deliberate reference to other student’s contributions and to that of the student presenting—made the students feel that the teachers ‘were interested … and … wanted us to learn’ (Kendra) and individualised each student.

Barnett (2010) sees this care as enabling becoming as ‘authentic encounters with a [discipline] … can yield a transformation in the student … [as they are] encouraged to “leap forth”… into strange, open-ended and challenging situations’ (p. 47). A teacher’s care or solicitude can enable students to gain the knowledge, skills and confidence to move beyond liberalism and draw on other discourses.

Meddling in the middle

Rather than King’s (1993) ‘sage on the stage’ or ‘guide on the side’, writers such as McWilliam (2009), Bobis et al. (2019), and others (such as Fischer and Hanze (2019) and Stover et al. (2019)), suggest that this care is enacted as a ‘meddler in the middle’:

This meta-category is descriptive of active interventionist pedagogy in which teachers are mutually involved with students in assembling and/or dis-assembling knowledge … Meddling … [re-positions] teacher and student as co-directors and co-editors. (McWilliam, 2009, p. 288).

As ‘meddlers’, teachers have a more central, engaged, and ongoing role than planning and facilitation:

Meddlers have clear intentions about what they do, and they … energetically … [do] it … They provide support and direction through structure rich activity in which they themselves are highly involved. They do not take over the work …[but demonstrate] the technical expertise of an experienced and capable teacher-as-leader, and … [put] into practice strategies that require both themselves and their students to stay in the zone of “sense-making and joint problem solving” (McWilliam, 2009, p. 290, our emphasis).

‘Meddling’ recognises the manner in which teachers blend pedagogical practices together (McWilliam, 2009).

Acquisition and learning

In this regard Gee provides a helpful framework to conceptualise how teachers ‘meddle’. He helpfully distinguishes between express instruction and learning that occurs through immersion in an environment by building on Krashen’s (as cited in Gee, 1996) distinction between ‘acquisition’ and ‘learning’. Acquisition follows from exposure to:

models, a process of trial and error, and practice within … groups, without formal teaching. It happens in natural settings that are meaningful and functional in the sense that acquirers know … they need to acquire … [what] they are exposed to in order to function and they in fact want to so function. (Gee, 2011, p. 167).

This immersion or apprenticeship in the discourse community allows learners to become ‘people like us’:

The practices of a Discourse … contain in their … interactional structures the “mentalities” learners are meant to “internalize”. Immersion in such practices—learning inside the procedures, rather than overtly about them—ensures that the learner takes on perspectives, adopts a world view, accepts a set of core values, and masters an identity often without a great deal of … awareness about these matters, nor, indeed, about the Discourse itself. (Gee, 2011, p. 164).

In Gee’s view both primary and secondary discourses are best attained through acquisition rather than learning. While students’ activity is central to acquisition, it is dependent on interaction with teachers—mastery ‘requires exposure to models in natural, meaningful, and functional settings’ (Gee, 2011, p. 174). Teachers’ activities both precede and interact with those of students. Teachers have a central, active role in acquisition, as both models and as planning and facilitating ‘opportunities [for students] to speak and write the discourse in the “presence” of a competent speaker who can, by responding, help … shape their usage’ (Northedge, 2003, p. 178).

Learning, however, emphasises the teacher’s activity. It involves knowledge developed through teaching (explanation and analysis), including ‘some degree of meta-knowledge about the matter’ (Gee, 2011, p. 167).

Gee sees the capacity to engage in critique as dependent on overt learning. To critique the way in which discourses shape them, students must develop ‘a “meta-language” or a “meta-Discourse” … for the critique of other literacies and the way they constitute us as persons and situate us in society’ (Gee, 2011, p. 174). Critique of one discourse always draws on another, and this requires ‘meta-level knowledge about both’ of them. This ‘liberating literacy’ is ‘best developed through learning, though often learning applied to a discourse one has to a certain extent already acquired. Thus, liberating literacy … almost always involves learning, and not just acquisition’ (Gee, 2011, p. 174).

The balancing of opportunities for acquisition and learning is the work of educators. This often occurs in complex combinations. For example, a student learning a language benefits from immersion in discussions in that language, but that same student’s understanding of the language is repeatedly enabled by the explicit explanation—teaching—of grammar, etymology and links to other languages and their grammar. It involves an alternating mix of acquisition and learning. A teacher’s varying interactions can be characterised as involving:

three key roles. The first is to ‘lend’ the capacity to frame meanings within the … discourse. The second is to plan, organise and lead excursions into [that] … discourse … [and] the third is to ‘coach’ students in speaking [it] … competently. (Northedge, 2003, p. 178).

In practice, we see these roles operating in a different sequence: excursions are planned in advance, then ‘capacity’ is lent in the classroom, and that loan effected—and superseded—through ‘coaching’.

Lending capacity

The loan of capacity helps build a learning community as it promotes intersubjectivity. This, combined with passion and care, promotes connection—‘a common focus for some shared meaning making’ (Northedge, 2003, p. 173). They promote a dialogue about a common object, bringing ‘shared framing assumptions into play so that all are attending to the same aspect of the world’ (Northedge & McArthur, 2008, p. 113).

We began to lend capacity through the lectures, working through—modelling, sometimes with overt teaching—the analysis of a relevant concept or text. Students then drew constellations in the tutorials—repeating and building on what presented in the lecture (acquisition). They were freed to engage with the new discourse through the teachers’ loan of their capacity to do so:

Teachers … lend students the capacity to frame the meanings of a … .discourse by opening up ‘conversations’ … and sharing in a flow of meaning. As students join with the teacher in sharing meaning they also share something of [its] … frame of reference … They … experience how the framing works, what kind of framing it is.. (Northedge, 2003, p. 173).

This is what the constellation-work enabled. It enabled students to immerse themselves in a text with other students, and then with the teachers. In ‘swimming … in that shared flow of meaning’ (Northedge & McArthur, 2008, p. 114) together, students could request the teachers help identify the relationships between different parts of the text—they could return to learning—and then switch back to experiment and practice those skills (acquisition).

This loan of capacity is more than setting up scaffolding and then guiding from the side. It is continuously interactive, shifting to and from, and mixing up, acquisition and learning:

scaffolding can sound like an “arm’s-length” activity, with the teacher … standing back while students pursue their enquiries, whereas here we are talking about the teacher jumping in and swimming alongside the students within a flow of shared meaning. It is a communal activity, intended to support students in becoming enculturated within the discipline community (Northedge & McArthur, 2008, p. 114, our emphasis).

The teacher becomes a ‘meddler in the middle’.

Coaching

As the students’ capacities develop, ‘meddling in the middle’ emphasises coaching:

Classroom discussion [including] … ‘coaching’ … allows students to share in the group’s intersubjective framing … and … participate … in shifting that … around as they bring their usage of the … discourse into sharper focus. The teacher ‘coaches’ by reframing ideas that emerge within the group, to make them work within the terms of the specialist discourse. (Northedge, 2003a, p. 179).

Working with students at the whiteboards and in the process of reporting back we constantly guided students to reframe or better frame their points with regard to the texts and their development as critical social workers. As noted under The Pedagogy above, we prompted students to reframe their views so as to ensure that they were founded in the text and their reasons for emphasising some aspects of the text over others were clear and relevant to becoming critical social workers. We were ‘very hands on’ (Tarsha), ‘[pushing students] to ‘think deeper’, to better elaborate and explain (Renay). We worked to ‘bring [them] back on track’ (Tarsha).

This coaching involves the teacher making judgment-calls in concrete situations. Biesta (2012, p. 44) describes this as ‘the very heart of teaching … the need for concrete situated judgements about what is educationally desirable, both with regard to the aims … and … means’ in a ‘concrete situation with … concrete students at … [a] particular stage in their [education]’ (Biesta, 2015, pp. 677–8).

These judgment-calls often involve ‘teachable moments’:

Teachable moments arise … spontaneously [where there is] … a confluence of students’ … cultural identities, developmental growth and change patterns, together with their … needs, interests and curiosities. Teachers’ careful observation, recognition and interpretation of these opportunities … help to form an emerging purposeful instructional action. (Hyun & Marshall, 2003, p. 113).

These moments are ‘joyful events in the rhythm of teaching and learning when previously hidden connections are established’ (Woodhouse, 2011, p. 219). While they can be planned for, they cannot be completely anticipated, and may not even be revealed by students unless they occur in the course of interaction. These calls concern both technique and timing: the student ‘receiving just the right amount of the right kind of support, at the right time for just the right period’ (Glasswell & Parr, 2009, p. 356).

These ‘teachable moments’ appeared throughout our classes. In some instances, they emerged in small group work, from the student’s first efforts at whiteboarding—connections made tentatively, hesitantly, with students on the verge of erasing them. We called attention to and celebrated those connections and prompted the student to explain and elaborate them. The pedagogy, in promoting a shift to more relational, contextual, reading takes away the securities of finding ‘correct answers’. In centring activity around the students’ values—what struck them—and enabling their drawing on their primary discourses, it took them away from the security of objective answers and of avoiding critique by claiming something was their personal opinion. As students took these risks they helped created ‘teachable moments’.

These moments regularly occurred in the midst of conversations with students at the whiteboards whilst they sought to respond to our prompts for development, to get ‘back on track’ (Tarsha), or gain assurance that their views were not ‘merely’ personal opinions but potential contributions to the class’s knowledge. Opportunities also presented with the broader group, often, in the midst of presentations, particularly in light of the accumulation of different students’ insights, that ‘confluence of … cultural identities, developmental growth … change patterns … needs, interests and curiosities’ (Hyun & Marshall, 2003, p. 113) would only need a comment or two from us to ignite the drawing of deeper insights.

judgment calls are not only instrumental but normative, as ‘education … is a teleological practice … which implies that decisions … always have to be taken with an eye on the desirability of what … [they] are supposed to bring about’ (Biesta, 2010, p. 500). The pedagogy requires students to choose which features of a text to consider and whiteboard, and which not. It allows choices to be made as to which aspects of a student’s primary discourse, if any, to connect and share on the whiteboard and when reporting back. Students are repeatedly called on to make value judgements, and teachers to assist them in doing so. All of these choices were made by students who had completed two or three semesters of study within an eight semester course directed towards the development of critical social workers. As noted above, education in critical social work is often transformative. It contests the dominant celebration of independence and objectivity and promotes the expression of otherwise repressed and devalued cultures, including their primary discourses. It often involves a dramatic shift for students, one that is not easily made—one in which we, as more experienced in the critical tradition, could readily identify and support.

judgment calls reflect how values found every discourse, and the learning and acquisition of that discourse. They reflect the need to subvert liberalism’s repression of values and that this requires a more ongoing, engaged interaction than setting scaffolding in place and guiding from the side—and that judgment calls require an extensive knowledge of the discourse’s founding values and how they shape the discourse. These are the calls made to help students recognise the often hybrid nature of their discourses, to identify and draw on the ‘good’, and to recognise and critique the influence of the ‘bad’:

This is a story where teachers are not dispensable resources for learning, but where they have something to give, where they do not shy away from difficult questions … and where they work … on the distinction between what is desired and what is desirable … this is not only a question at the level of individual students … but also has to do with the public role of the teacher … so as to (re)connect … [education] with the wider democratic transformation of individual ‘wants’ into collectively agreed upon ‘needs’. (Biesta, 2013, p. 459).

‘Meddling’ moves from lending capacity to coaching to community. It enables a ‘joint educational voyage’ that ‘trades on … an infinite etceteration of interactions’ (Barnett, 2007, pp. 129, 133). It enables students to become co-constructors of knowledge and the full embodiment of a learning community where the teacher is certainly not the ‘sage on the stage’ and where no one, neither teacher nor student, is ‘on the side’.

Risks

Our claim for the recognition of teachers’ central role does not mean that concerns that they might privilege an idea or ideology, and exclude others, are misplaced. It is to say that this risk is unavoidable—all education is ideological (Biesta, 2010; Gee, 1996, 2011; Lea & Street, 1998)—and that this risk has already been realised in liberalism’s influence today.

The risks inherent in a teacher’s influence must be evaluated with reference to the risk we are trying to address: in this case, liberalism. Failing to address liberalism would limit critical social workers’ capacity to promote the discipline’s goals, if not rendering them vulnerable to co-option by the very forces the discipline opposes. Moreover, the risk of oppressive teaching is partly addressed by the values that critical social work aims to address and its commitment to critical reflection.

The AASW Code of Ethics (Australian Association of Social Workers, 2020, p. 7) states that the profession is committed to ‘three core principles of respect for persons, social justice and professional integrity’, which include democratic values. The critical tradition of social work, given its closer focus on the influence of power than conventional social workers, provides even stronger safeguards through a much stronger focus on values that are antithetical to those of liberalism: interdependence, compassion, and collaboration (Fox, 2020).

Further, this commitment is embodied in social work’s practice of critical reflection (Chenoweth & McAuliffe, 2021; Morley et al., 2020). This ‘involves understanding the ideological functions of [personal] … beliefs … to assess whether these … run counter to the fundamental … values’ in order to ‘lead to changed (improved) professional practice’ (Fook & Gardner, 2007, pp. 36, 19).

Neither a statement of values nor a commitment to reflexivity are guarantees against the abuse of power. They are, however, core parts of ‘being people like us’ (Gee, 2011, p. 3)—critical social workers.

Limitations of the research

The findings rely on the students’ perceptions, some of which may be influenced by the power inherent in their relationship with the researchers/teachers. The number of participants was relatively low. As noted above, this may have reflected the timing of the research. The research was exploratory and thus did not seek definitive answers and direct transfer to other contexts, but to inform our understanding and practice, as well as gain insights that might apply to other aspects of social work education. Further research could engage a higher number of students and explore the pedagogy’s application in other areas.

Conclusion

As part of a project seeking to integrate the teaching and learning of academic literacies and analytical skills for critical social work, we developed a pedagogy to address what we found to be the key obstacles: the liberal concepts of independence and objectivity. We believed that the pedagogy was effective, and that we understood why, and sought to test those beliefs against the students’ experience.

The students pointed out that the relationships between the students as a class, and between the students and teachers, were far more important than we had understood. We realised that we contested liberalism by not only challenging its core concepts, but by relating differently—by treating relations as more than means to ends, but as primary and central.

The students also indicated how the pedagogy promoted those relationships. In particular, they pointed out that we teachers had to be ‘meddlers in the middle’. We needed to model, lend our expertise, and coach them, repeatedly making judgment-calls (value-judgements) as to when we needed to be sages, to meddle, and to let them flow.

Our research confirms much that is emphasised in the literature today: the importance of students actively engaging in the construction of knowledge and being able to draw on their primary discourses in doing so. However, it indicates that the repressions of liberalism are not easily evaded and that more support—support that goes beyond the cognitive and beyond scaffolded activities—is needed: that students need those who have mastered the discourse to share their passions, invest their care, lend their capacities and coach them.

Disclosure statement

We have no known conflict of interest to disclose.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John Gerard Fox

John Gerard Fox has taught and researched in critical social work for 15 years with interests in theories of the self that better capture its social, interdependent nature, and in learning and teaching those theories in both higher education and other educational organisations such as community and activist groups and museums.

Pauline O’Maley

Pauline O'Maley has worked in second chance education and academic literacies for many years. She has worked with both academics and students to enhance both learning environments and experiences.

Appendix

One of the passages whiteboarded and discussed by students was the following:

However, Goodin points out that all societies hold as dogma that social welfare deals with needs rather than wants. He explains that although there is no good, clear-cut reason to give … needs … .priority … almost all social welfare programs [do] … and … attempt to defend themselves from the charge that they are answering ‘mere’ desires (Macarov, 1995, p. 17, emphases added).

In the following constellations, words in bold and underlined are from the text and are the focus of analysis, those italicised were added by students in seeking to interpret the text, and other words (not in bold nor italicised) are from the text.

1. Original constellation

(Prior to any visit by either teacher)

2) Revised constellation

(Following a visit where tutors invited students consider other words from the same sentence)