Notes on a Pedagogy of Unconditional Love

I had never considered that the theories I had developed as a counselor and Rosh Eidah at Ramah (most substantially during the run-up to being ראש בוגרים in 2003) about the nature of children and an ideal conception of working with them were anything revolutionary or special until I was told as much by my colleagues in "Research on Teaching" (Ed 711), a mandatory first-year course for Ph.D. students in Curriculum and Instruction at Boston College, taught by giant-of-the-field and former president of the AERA Marilyn Cochran-Smith.

Part of Marilyn's syllabus was reading a number of new books that were representative of current trends in research on teaching. One book that many of us read was Gerald Campano's doctoral dissertation, Immigrant Students and Literacy: Reading, Writing, and Remembering. I fell in love with Campano's book as I read it, watching what I felt was the practical realization (in an inner-city, under-serviced, immigration population, no less) of huge swaths of my work from camp in a "real-life" classroom. More importantly, Campano, an Assistant Professor at the Indiana University School of Education, gave me a resource and a contact inside of the academic establishment who seemed to "get it."

My copy of the book is sitting in my parents' house in Harrisburg, so I don't have the luxury of looking through it right now, but there are, if I recall correctly, two great חידושים in Campano's initial study: what he calls "the second classroom," an open-door policy that effectively created a relationship the field more often considers to be characteristic of so-called 'informal' settings, taking advantage of times before school, after school, and between classes for coaching, mentoring, and relationship building; and a focus inside his curriculum on the personal narratives and identity-building of his immigrant students - a creation of a textual framework within which the students could easily identify themselves and which served to enhance their literacy skills while also bolstering their emerging identities as immigrants and Americans.

Campano - who unfortunately stood me up for a meeting when I was in Bloomington in early March (and apologized profusely while trying to reschedule - hopefully something will work out next year when I'm back at IU) - has tons to teach to Jewish educators of all kinds, in my opinion, particularly on a topic I have come to call "a pedagogy of unconditional love," whereby an educator takes student-centered education to the next step and embraces the child as she exists, and from that existential point begins the educational process. It is such a pedagogy that has allowed me to create much of my conceptualization of the campers' role in my work at camp, including the notions (which still seem to be revolutionary when I introduce them to up-and-coming staff members, though I utilized them to great success in working with these same staff members) of "there's no such thing as a bad עדה, just bad ראשי עדה and bad צוותים" and "all kids are cute, smart, funny, and annoying - and if you can't recognize all four of those characteristics in each kid then you're missing something."

Professor Cochran-Smith and my fellow students both found it a tad surprising (to say the least) that I felt that Campano (a Filipino immigrant) had a lot to say to Jewish educators, and when I began speaking more about how I felt Campano's work fit into my own, a number of them encouraged me to write about it because it was so revolutionary. (I'm still not convinced, but I have great respect for the mostly more-experienced and extremely thoughtful and bright fellow Ph.D. students who were making the comments, so I'm not sure what to make of that either.)

Enter Theodore R. Sizer, the legendary educational reformer and author of Horace's Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School (in addition to two other books in "the celebrated Horace trilogy" - Horace's Hope and Horace's School). Horace's Compromise ended up on the list for my comprehensive exams, unsurprisingly, and I'm currently reading it (great, relatively quick read with gorgeously stunning prose and profound insight into both what education should be and how America's high schools currently don't match that vision). Early in the book - and, perhaps, further evidence that my ideas are less 'new and revolutionary' than reframed versions of good-ol' Deweyan constructivism - I realized that Sizer, as it were, is on my team.

Here, Sizer paints a large picture of adolescents, a complete picture, warts-and-all, though one clearly situated in a worldview of high school students that empathizes with them and inherently values them. In a sense, this model is where the pedagogy of unconditional love surpasses the efficacy of even the best parents - we can be objective, dispassionate when we need to, but still love them no matter what they do (or who they become):

They come in all sizes and shapes. There are good ones and bad ones, saints and liars, bores and inspirers, quick ones and dullards, gentle ones and brutes. Besides their age, they have in common the vulnerability that comes from inexperience and a social status bordering on limbo. They are children, but they are adults, too. Many are ready and able to work, but are dissuaded from doing so. They can bear children, but are counseled not to. They can kill, and sometimes do. They can act autonomously, but are told what to do, with some orders, such as school attendance, having the force of law. They share the pain of a stereotype, of gum-chewing, noisy, careless, bloomingly sexual creatures who are allowed to have fun but not too much of it. When they raise hell, they win sobriquets like that applied by a Boston bus driver, "little maggots." When they excel at some community service, such as sandbagging levees during a flood crisis, they win the surprised, happy plaudits of their elders.
We adults too easily talk of these adolescents as an undifferentiated blob of people, as a Client Group of an Age Cohort. We are quick to generalize about them - unless, of course, they are our own children. Then we feel the intensity of specialness [Check out Jack Cafferty of CNN.com on this exact point.] ; these young people are our own flesh adn blood, each of unique promise. That Age Cohort we talk about professionally is full of other people's youngsters, grist to become Products of the System, faceless agents of national defense, social orderliness, and economic revival. We forget James Agee's quite reminder [in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men] that each child, ours and every other one, "is a new and incommunicably tender life, wounded in every breath and almost as hardly killed as easily wounded."

Here, Sizer channels the Hebrew poet Zelda, and Rabbi David Z. Soloff - לכל איש יש שם:

... [G]ood teachers take note of these uneasy generalities, and then, freeing themselves as much as possible from the trap of stereotyping, deal with each student as an individual.

Finally (for now), Sizer takes us to the next situation, providing a response to the great critique of "flip-flopping," "making exceptions," and "hypocrisy" in engaging with adolescents. It is, as great scientists would note, an elegant and beautiful formula, finding the constancy not in the content that is meted out, as it were, but the process of meting out the content:

Even the most effective parent or teacher stumbles when asked precisely what is meant by "learner" and by "permit." It all depends on the child and the situation. One cannot shield an adolescent from all risk and hurt; to do so would be to deny that young person the essential opportunity to learn through failure. Thus, adult wisdom runs, curiously, to apparent inconsistency: effective adults change their attitude and rules (insofar as they can enforce these) as the learner learns. The absence of permanent absolutes - Regulations - can seem a waffle or a walk down both sides of the street. In fact, constancy is there in the process: I'll give you all the rope that I think you can handle. Most adolescents most of the time accept this learner's permit argument; indeed, many welcome it. Some reject it out of hand, because they see any rope to be all theirs. All adolescents reject it some of the time, inevitably as a part of their own learning. Wise teachers and parents wait, explain, encourage, criticize, love, and explain again. There is no more difficult teaching job than that of helping an adolescent into adulthood. Few jobs are more thankless and few more rewarding.

A pedagogy of unconditional love - a generative idea I look forward to expanding and publicizing.