Teaching, Creativity and Interpretation; Or, What I Learned from D.W. Winnicott and Nell Irvin Painter

January 12, 2012, 11:15 am

Donald Winnicott, 1896-1971

One of the many reasons I was happy not to go to the American Historical Association annual meeting is that I am starting a new job at a very different institution than the one at which I have worked for two decades. More than I usually do, I needed the time between terms to put together courses for students I have never met and who may also be very different from those I have known. I have had help in making my transition: new colleagues have sent me their syllabi, and they have been generous in critiquing drafts of mine, as well as answering the specific questions that help locate us as teachers. How much will the students read? Is the syllabus understood as a contract? Where is the writing workshop? What kinds of writing assignments work best? What type of guidance and support will my new students want from a teacher?

These are questions of strategy new hires usually ask me; asking younger professors what they know about teaching was a refreshing reversal. The whole process also brought me hard up against a far more existential thought that I have been turning over in my head: you can’t ever really know who your students are before you meet them, even if you have taught at the same place for many years. An unexpected feature of changing institutions in mid-life is that I am confronted with, and must reflect on, the invisible assumptions that have structured my teaching practice. One of these is that I should never presume knowledge of who I will be teaching, how they will learn, and what they will expect from me. Much of the work of a class may depend, in fact, on giving students the space, skills and materials to explain who they are and what they know. The idea that students learn from us may be a fatal detour: in large part, learning may depend on the access students have to their own capacity to teach themselves. Our role may be in freeing them to learn, cultivating their creativity, and creating an atmosphere that promotes self-confidence in their capacity to learn.

Nell Painter (photo by Robin Holland)

I am reminded of a story told in public by a former student of Nell Irvin Painter’s about having arrived at Princeton for her first year of graduate school. The student came to believe, as she attended class after class, that everyone in her cohort was better prepared than she and that — despite having had an excellent education — she did not “belong” at Princeton. Discouraged, this young person who had been told by her undergraduate mentors that she was so promising had come very close to deciding to pack her suitcase and go home. But because of one brilliant pedagogical moment she did not. Painter, who is a legendary teacher, opened her first class on Foucault by displaying a book bristling with post-its. She then mused aloud about having thought that many intelligent people might try to read such a book, be utterly mystified by Foucault’s language and syntax, and become dismayed. So, Painter concluded, this was where the class would begin: they would all learn the words. Together. So that they could speak to each other about Foucault.

Painter’s excellent assumption was that she didn’t know her students — and that she couldn’t possibly know what they didn’t know (the logical corollary here is that she also could not possibly know what they did know until, as individuals and as a group, they had a common language.) Hence, Painter made the shrewd and self-abnegating gesture of not beginning the class in the place that might have pleased and amused her, might have solidified her position of power over the students through displays of knowledge, and reified pre-existing power dynamics among the students. Instead, she began by insisting that everyone in the room be in the same place, together. This small but significant gesture kept this young woman in graduate school, and she has subsequently flourished in her field. Furthermore, by telling this story about herself, this younger woman also taught me a lesson about teaching that I will never forget.

There are many places to learn a lot of important strategic knowledge about teaching. But often it is an approach like Painter’s, which demonstrates an ethic more than a technique, that helps me re-think my actual teaching practice. Currently, because of a set of essays by psychotherapist D.W. Winnicott published as Playing and Reality (1971) and republished in 2005, I am thinking a great deal about how school can enhance or inhibit creativity. Winnicott is most famous for his development of object-relations theory, and for his pioneering work with troubled adolescents. But he also has a great deal to say about creativity, and the extent to which responding to the needs and desires of powerful others can be inhibiting and even destructive. Creativity, he argues, “makes life worth living.

Contrasted with this is a relationship to external reality which is one of compliance….Compliance carries with it sense of futility for the individual and is associated with the idea that nothing matters and that life is not worth living. In a tantalizing way many individuals have experienced just enough of creative living to recognize that for most of their time they are living uncreatively, as if caught up in the creativity of someone else, or of a machine. (87)

This passage struck me because teaching is, to a greater or lesser degree, an exercise in demanding compliance. We create lists of things that must be done; we insist that our students be in a certain place by a certain time and remain until we allow them to depart; we give grades in the expectation that those things will be done by a certain deadline and to a specific quality; we create rubrics so that everyone will receive a grade that hews to a similar set of standards, regardless of what any given student is interested in thinking about. We attend to “coverage” of a subject, hoping to ensure that students will be able to advance to the next level with a set of competencies that will allow them to learn more.

And yet, by doing this, do we ensure that students have really learned what we teach — or even more important, that they have made sense of the materials in some way that connects to the reality they inhabit? All kinds of research suggests that it is often not the case. Here I find that Winnicott’s attention to the therapist’s often over-eager desire to display interpretive prowess to be a useful critique of the professor’s felt need to convey mastery over (and shape students’ understanding of) a particular body of knowledge. “It appalls me to think how much deep change I have prevented or delayed in patients,” Winnicott writes, “by my personal need to interpret. If only we can wait, the patient arrives at understanding creatively and with immense joy, and I now enjoy this joy more than I used to enjoy the sense of having been clever. I think I interpret mainly to let the patient know the limits of my understanding. The principle is that it is the patient and only the patient who has the answers. We may or may not enable him or her to encompass what is known or become aware of it with acceptance.” (116; emphasis mine.)

The correlation of teacher and therapist is not an exact one, and as a history professor I am not a fan of just dumping the “facts” on the table as if they told their own obvious truths. This latter strategy is one conservative intellectuals urge on us as properly counter-interpretive and unideological, as if facts were not themselves generated and chosen through ideological and interpretive apparatuses. However, I think there is something to be said for recognizing that students are intellectuals prior to their appearance in our classrooms, despite the fact that their lack of access — or inability to convey — their own creativity might make it difficult for us to “know” them in the way, say, historians “know” each other through common languages, literatures, methods and signs.

Students know a great many things, despite the fact that sometimes they can’t say what it is that they know because they don’t have the words yet. It’s no wonder that this is the case: much of their education is geared towards reflecting authority back at itself. In papers, examinations and class discuss, the interpretations and hierarchies of fact that teachers have insisted on are recycled in such a way that they can short-circuit creativity altogether. This has become even more of an unseen burden for all of us in recent years because of an increasingly test-driven secondary school culture; and a political atmosphere in which college and university teachers are being corralled into declaring and meeting desired “outcomes” of courses and majors that disregard what students might come to us wanting and needing to learn.

Winnicott might suggest that we replace this model of teaching as commodity exchange:

teacher –> student —> testing company/employer

with a pedagogical model based on what he calls “mirroring,” (160) by which the teacher provides a set of materials, and then assists the student (or a collective of students) in understanding what s/he, or they, knows. The desired outcome (which is paradoxically achieved by displacing a desired outcome) would be the student’s growing capacity ”to move from dependence to autonomy” (146) that is nurtured in an atmosphere of respect and affection. Pedagogy would then look more like this:

(teacher <——> student) = learning > creativity/society/culture

In the following quotation from Winnicott, I have inserted the word “teaching” for psychotherapy and “student” for patient. See how it reads, and whether it resonates with what you imagine might happen in a classroom that attended to the latter model:

[Teaching] is not making clever and apt interpretations; by and large it is a long-term giving back what the [student] brings….if I do this well enough the [student] will find his or her own self, and will be able to exist and feel real. Feeling real is more than existing; it is finding a way to exist as oneself, and to have a self into which to retreat for relaxation. (158)

In addition to being a touchstone for thinking about how to teach the students I do not yet know, this may also be the best ethical basis for the political and social rehabilitation of liberal arts curricula that are being diminished and eliminated under neoliberalism. Putting student creativity at the center of our pedagogy also reveals the intellectual barrenness of current education policies, in many elite private institutions as well as in public institutions, which are thinly disguised strategies for training competent and docile workers at all levels of the economy, rather than cultivating citizen/laborers who are critically in touch with their own humanness.

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historiann

This is a very smart and timely post. Sitting on the urge to preen as the smartest person in the room is really a great way to encourage more student creativity and participation in the conversation, although it’s not always easy when students are recalcitrant in their silence and there’s another book to be read next week and another paper due the week after that. Your thoughts are especially timely now as manh of us are also writing syllabi and thinking about the teaching we’ll be doing this term. I love that story about Painter–I tried something similar with my graduate students last term to demystify a course which is mystifyingly called just “historigraphy,” and I hope it had the intended results (although I didn’t assign them any Foucault.)

I knew a lot of Princeton grad students in my cohort in the early 90s, and a number of them have said the same thing to me about feeling like the admissions committee mistake, and how they were convinced that they were the only dummies in the room of super-smart and sophisticated other grad students who had it all figured out. That’s pretty much how I felt my whole first year at Penn, too, and I make a point of telling my grad students this because it’s good for them to know that the first year of grad school is hard wherever you go, and because it reminds me of what it was like before I knew the signs, the language, and the secret handshake.

You’re clearly approaching your new position with a great deal of thought and care that I’m sure will be repaid to you many times over. It’s like we do in core yoga classes: by being thrown off-balance a bit, you have to find new strategies for doing the same move, and in so doing you’re working out and building up new muscles, new strength, and new ways of listening.
Guest

The most important thing to do is to have a very clear structure regarding how students will be graded so they know what to expect and are not ruled by anxiety. If students feel unstable from week to week they often find uncertainty more oppressive and stifling than the teacher’s authority and they shut down. (I do not take attendance and I have window periods for turning in work rather than ironclad due dates, so students can focus discourse on ideas rather than excuses and begging about lateness, absences, or late penalties. Nonetheless I have a very clear and through study guide explaining research sources and my grading rubric.)

Also my sense is that students are more fearful of peers judging them than they are of the teacher setting discussion rules, so don’t be afraid of making rules and enforcing them.

Once the students know how they can get the grade they want, they have all the leeway to spend the semester expressing themselves and letting you know who they are. Professors vary on the subject of calling on students in class. I think it is good to begin class by going down a row and asking students what they came up with on their latest journal assignment, because it prompts every student to speak and avoids the problem of students feeling like they are inferior to the talkative peers who dominate discussion. If cold calls are a regular ritual at the start of each class, then they become something students expect and they do not feel like they are being picked on, but they still learn ow to speak publicly and be part of discourse. Some colleagues I know disdain cold calling and think it is better only to let students speak when they want to.

Creating a safe discussion sace is very difficult and I doubt any professor is perfect at it. Be easy on yourself.
altoii

Thanks for this, TR, great post. I’ve always been grateful to Steve Crites (like Nell Painter, a brilliant teacher), who actively engaged his undergraduate students with contemporary debates in religious thought. It meant the world to me – helped me see my creativity and appetite/aptitude for scholarship – and I’ve always tried to do the same with my students.
pchoffer

Folks: a fine thought-piece by a teacher who cares about her students and about her impact on them. But is it gendered? Do male and female teachers and male and female students teach and learn differently? I know that the notion of gendered upbringing leading to different ways of responding to others remains controversial, but as the posts above, particularly by Ann Little, hint to me (or maybe I’m just reading into them) there may be some truth to these ideas.
I know that I was most impressed as a graduate student by the “great man” in front of the lecture hall–erudite, flawless in delivery, a true master of the material. He was my model–though in reality he might be nasty, indifferent, or simply oblivious to my own sense of inadequacy. I did not need that professor to nuture me. I had parents who did a fine job of that. I did not need him to bolster my sense of self-confidence. I knew the road was long and hard, and I had to earn every step along it. I knew that I was competing against every other student in my very first colloquium. They were Rhodes Scholars and Woodrow Wilson fellows, and had attended better schools. They did not stumble over the language requirements, having studied abroad. I barely survived those years. I still have the letters from Oscar Handlin and Donald Fleming threatening all manner of “humiliations galore” if I did not improve my performance.
Reading Claire’s and Ann’s words makes me realize that my approach to graduate learning was in the competitive male mode, a mode that was very different from what they appreciated in their own experiences and what they brought to their own classrooms. Now, near the end of my career, I wonder if I have gotten it wrong all along. All best, Peter
5768

Indeed, the correlation between teacher and therapist is far from exact but this article admirably points out the commonality as being one of the limits of interpretation in the effect on the student/client, something with which I couldn’t agree more. As someone in the exact sciences (if we oppose them to, say, the conjectural sciences) I have tried to think of my class as languaged beings (who just happen to be labelled by us as “students”) who are trying to enter into a new language, who work to use the unique dialect of the course language amongst themselves to learn that language in the context of a collaborative, non-lecture classroom. This is a radical break from how I approached my class when I began teaching 30 years ago and myself naively thought the world depicted by the exact sciences as in exact correspondence with the precise terminology of science, and tried to get the class to also believe this. The terminology may be precise but may also be regarded as an impasse in the symbolization of the Real, the best science can do at the current time.

With lecture I greatly overvalued my ability to “reach” the students and make–that is, presume and assume to make–meaning for them by the brilliance of my own language interpretations. And while they identified with me and loved it, that in itself was an obstacle to the majority for making meaning on their own by the use and discovery of how to use language. In no longer interpreting the world for my students by lecture I now see them develop as languaged beings who are in the process of becoming (for it is more than “learning” I hope), working with the text of their textbooks to extract and make meaning on their own by using the language of that text. They do it admirably, and language transfer occurs, howbeit much better than by lecture. I hope they are finding a way to exist which was not there for them before they took the class.
cmorpork

Impressive analysis, in the grand tradition of Socrates and Paulo Freire. I especially like the acknowledgement that “students are intellectuals.” Of course! Everyone is an intellectual. The realization is so simple, and yet so pregnant with implications.

But I’m uncomfortable with the conclusion. Teaching should not be about finding “a self into which to retreat for relaxation.” Teaching should be about challenging – upsetting and uprooting – taking students out of their comfort zone. Comfort is not the goal – it is the problem.

In my experience, most undergraduates do not have an innate knowledge of say, history, that needs to be nurtured and encouraged. They usually have very little life experience at all – and they enter the classroom with all sorts of unexamined habits and ideological baggage. Nurturing creativity and curiosity about a subject are crucial – and can be done in a way that is personally empowering to the student – but not at the expense of abdicating all authority.
captain_chronicle

This brings back memories of the Almighty Foucault for me. I studied Foucault in France (in French, bien sur), so I definitely felt like everyone was better prepared than I was – and they were! Michel F. is one of those of those scholars that you need to read a book written by someone else about him as a “run-up” to the experience of reading his one books. Later, when I started inserting bits of pieces of Foucault in my instruction to students, I was very mindful to ensure that “everyone was in the same place”.

The only other thing that comes close is to read Kant’s critique on pure reason. Kant himself sent his half-written manuscript to a friend for an opinion, only to have it returned by the friend who told him, “Returning your manuscript with an unfinished critique for fear that I shall go mad!”
captain_chronicle

Oh, remember too that iconic prof from the sixties, Dr. Ivan Illich – wrote his famous “Deschooling Society” in 1971, arguing that “school makes people dumb”, Hah!
mycantarella

I love this piece. First as a former Princeton Dean and woman of color, I am a Nell Painter fan. I still have on my shelf my copy of Winnicott from my own doctoral work in American Studies. But more importantly the lessons here are ones that need to be heard by faculty everywhere. We need to get into our student’s heads and come at them from where they are. I hear far too often about faculty frustrated about students not getting it. But if we talk to them from our own base of experience instead of taking the time, as Painter did, to go at it from where they are we might connect better. In particular students want to know how the work they are doing in class will be relevant to the rest of their lives– and in particular– their work lives. If we take the time to learn what our alumi are doing with what we taught them, for instance, we can respond and give evidence to our students that what we have to offer is worth their attention in the way that matters most to them.

Marcia Y. Cantarella PhD, Author, I CAN Finish College: The Overcome Any Obstacle and Get Your Degree Guide
northernbarbarian

One way to adapt Winnicott’s model to teaching may be to upend his statement that “[teaching] is not making. . . apt interpretations” by highlighting the fact that teaching IS making an interpretation and showing students where some of the choices are being made. We all know that we create narratives in class, even in discussion-based classes. I am acutely aware of this when teaching my survey of modern Middle Eastern history [a lecture course with space for discussion], where every other sentence I say could be challenged by somebody. I am sympathetic to the idea of giving students the tools to find their own intellectual paths, but also wary of going too far toward the “constructivist” model of education where students are supposed to teach themselves and each other and the instructor disappears. There are basic facts students must learn first in order to realize their intellectual capacity.
richardtaborgreene

silly
http://www.facebook.com/people/Gail-Linsenbard/1446579932 Gail Linsenbard

All teachers concerned about the current obsessive attention by administrators to testing and assessment in education should be should be heartened by this article.
11144703

“Painter [...] might have solidified her position of power over the students through displays of knowledge, and reified pre-existing power dynamics among the students. Instead, she began by insisting that everyone in the room be in the same place, together.”

Even better, Nell should have asked the students to be ready to discuss areas in which Nell knew nothing. That way she could reverse hierarchies and engage the students to teach the teacher while Nell share her (new) insights about the new material to the students, effecting a radical egalitarianism. That way she could valorize a new pedagogical paradigm that discards rigidly sexist, racist, homophobic, classist, lookist, speciesist, western structures for oppression.

tenured_radical

That hit a ten on the sarcasm meter, didn’t it?

physioprof

“This passage struck me because teaching is, to a greater or lesser degree, an exercise in demanding compliance.”

That’s an interesting assertion, because socratic dialogue-based teaching is not that way at all. The way that I teach physiology to medical students is to adopt a stance of intelligent ignorance, and by posing artful questions to my students, to provide a context in which they essentially teach themselves. It is the opposite of demanding compliance.

And that dude is holding his cigarette in a totally fucken uppe way.

tenured_radical

Liking the input on socratic dialogue; as for the cigarette, no shitte. I liked it because it was so gay — or so English, take your pick

seekeroftruth

“Putting student creativity at the center of our pedagogy …” can also transform their lives. I am teaching a freshman composition class currently with a creativity theme. Students, unguarded, say things like they “will have to wait till they graduate to become creative.” Or they “were creative once on a project but that was play, not work.” This is at a selective institution and I am an adjunct elsewhere also. The next generation has a load of problems to solve. Really — they need to be able to both memorize and theorize, invent and take inventory. Too many people through the doctorate put subject in front of process, paradoxically, even as they engage in complex processes. Know your students — even if knowing their limits and viewpoints jars your expectation.
austracademic

As Painter makes clear, one cannot have a conversation until one has a vocabulary for the conversation. I think (or at least hope) we have all had the experience–and the delight–of finding (or even better, creating) a term for a phenomenon and the power that this term has given. I think, for example, that while sexual harassment existed for centuries before someone encapsulated this experience by this term, the people, usually women, who experienced it had no easy way to identify what occurred. As a result, they found it difficult to communicate quickly their experiences, and their experiences were thus often ignored. I have seen students previously inarticulate in my classes become more sure and willing to engage in discussion once they have a vocabulary to express their thoughts concisely and accurately. (And, increasingly this is not just the particular vocabulary of the discipline, but by developing the enlarged vocabulary of an educated, intelligent person. I do not teach English, but we often will consult a dictionary and a thesaurus on our laptops to clarify that the words we are using actually mean–and mean as accurately as possible–what we intend.)

May I also suggest that we need to be careful that “creativity” does not lead to allowing students to substitute uninformed or poorly informed opinion to substitute for well-developed reasoning based on critically assessed evidence. I teach students who, for the most part, are poorly prepared for higher education. While I agree that they receive the “facts” based on my determination (and on those generally accepted as significant by others in the field), everyone must start somewhere, and then begin to critically analyze–and be encouraged to do so–these facts and their interpretation. Students may be resentful and resistant when pushed to support their conclusions with evidence which bears the weight of scrutiny, but we must persist in requiring that their ideas are informed if their creativity is to be worthwhile to themselves and to society.