Teaching as an art and science Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Teaching as an art and science - Essay Example Most schools and colleges run for only nine months in the year altogether, and there is seldom any necessity for a teacher to be on call every hour of the working day. Of course there is a great deal to be done outside teaching hours. Some of it is routine -- preparing examinations, reading papers, interviewing pupils. Some of it is research and preparation. But much of this kind of work can be done in one's own time, at one's own home, or in the quiet of a book-room. The great advantage of this is that comparatively few teachers are tied to the desk, chained to the telephone which begins to ring at nine on Monday morning and is still chattering at noon on Saturday, or limited for vacations to a fortnight in July among the millions of exhausted factory-workers (Highet, 1950). Teaching is an art form. The educator is an artist and, as artist, aims at creating an experience of enduring meaning. Varieties of techniques are developed to generate this extraordinary experience. Success is measured in the degree that students and educator have this experience. Sharing in or participating in the development and enhancement of knowledge is one of the richest of aesthetic moments. The rare teacher who understands and creates the conditions for such moments becomes a seminal image in student memories. Students who participate in a magic moment of learning become and remain a source of delight and pride for the artist - they become, with reverence, his or her students. But, if education does have an aesthetic dimension, what is it and what is its connection with the ethical constituents of teaching and learning The answer is found when learning is conceived of as a shared experience given form by a most special aim or end. The point at which the tensions of struggling individual selves, the distinctions of rank and function flower into a unity of shared meanings that enhance the experience of teacher and student constitutes the end, the target, the bull's eye of the academic process. An understanding of what shared meanings enhance our lives indicates how they are to be shared, that is, what the ethics of teaching are (Hook, Kurtz, & Todorovich, 1977). Teacher and learner strive to know how the social, biological, and physical processes that constitute existence can be unified in ways that render our lives more wondrous, more humane, more gratifying - that is, more wise. This communal process, the communal development of wisdom itself, becomes the criterion, the aesthetic measure of the quality of teaching and learning. To repeat, the aesthetic objective - the sharing of meanings in ways that promote mutual growth - serves as the criterion to evaluate the worth of the means employed to teach. Are the means employed conducive to developing habits that constitute intelligence and confidence in judgment Do the means render one more sensitive to the beauty of learning from and teaching others Do we gain a growing appreciation of what actions establish connections with the social, biological, and physical world that sustain becoming The "ethics of teaching" is quite clearly, then, the effort to understand and implement those actions that stimulate