Teacher as Mailman?

In the introduction to her edited collection Delivering College Composition: The Fifth Canon, Kathleen Blake Yancey takes on the issue of the way that college composition instruction is "delivered" to college students. The focus of the book and the essays it contains is to discuss the new and ever changing environments in which college composition is taught: the traditional classroom, online environments, service learning opportunities, etc. -- the purpose being to explore and theorize different methods of delivery. One such method of delivery in the future might be an interactive CD, according to Charles Schuster (qtd. in Blake Yancey 4).

The metaphor of delivery has always been a part of rhetoric, dating back to its origins. However, I wonder about its usefulness in applications beyond speech environments. Schuster's vision of a future course, as represented by the above citation, seems to turn knowledge into a literal package, one that is delivered to your doorstep. This has been occurring for years, of course, in the form of correspondence courses. But the very nature of this type of course begs the question, "if knowledge can be delivered to your doorstep, why do we need teachers?"

This question may be at the very center of the erosion of public education in America and with our education system's top-down mentality of the application of standards for courses, as exemplified by standardized testing and NCLB, teaching to these tests, the heavy reliance on textbooks for course content, the encroachment of for-profit universities and other educational services on the educational system, and on and on. That is, to a certain extent we have thought of knowledge as a package that can be delivered to students for a long time.

Rhetoric has a lot to do with that conceptualization of knowledge. Traditionally, teaching is often equated with "lecturing." In fact, my job title says that I am a "Lecturer." The idea that this job title suggests is that knowledge is rhetorically and metaphorically delivered to students in the space of the classroom through the medium of my voice.

But this brings us to a very important question: If knowledge can be neatly packaged and delivered (literally or metaphorically) as course content, then what is the need for a teacher? The content can be created by experts in the field, packaged in textbooks or interactive software and delievered to students' doorsteps. The postal service too slow? Packages can also fly in through the open windows on your computer screen, once you've entered your credit card number, of course. Don't understand something in your knowledge package? Google it! Or use wikipedia. It's all at our fingertips. The long and short of this process is, if knowledge can be delivered easily in this way, why not cut out the middle man? Who needs a teacher to repeat something that someone can read in a text book? Why aren't we all home-schooled?

It boils down of a crisis of education: Why should we spend millions on supporting a public education system when the delivery of knowledge through the medium of teachers seems so needlessly wasteful, given the way that technology has transformed means of delivering knowledge?

I'm hoping that some of you are resisting this line of thinking. I'm hoping that as you're reading you're thinking, "Hey, we need teachers. Teachers are important." Because that's what I think. If teachers are important to the educational process, then they aren't just "the middle men." It stands to reason that something else is occuring the classroom that isn't being captured in this model -- that knowledge can't be "delivered" to students. And so to think about knowledge delivery is a very dangerous proposition because it misrepresents what is occurring in a classroom environment.

So what is happening in the classroom? The problem is that we don't really know for sure. We're so used to thinking about knowledge as a concrete object that can be relocated from one mind to another that we have difficulty seeing past this model. My educated guess is that knowledge is constantly being RE-created in the space of the classroom. This happens during discussions, during assignments, during activities. I would say that the job of a teacher is to help students think in a new way, a way that they weren't able to think when they entered the class. Facts are meaningless without the mental apparatus for collecting and combining them in specific ways.

These new ways of thinking (or as Belenky et al. termed them, "Ways of Knowing") can't be delivered to students, no matter what the packaging is. They only occur through negotiation and reinforcement. Students have to learn how to move over and around new obstacles. They have to develop for themselves mental mechanisms for dealing with specific problems. And that is the job of a teacher.

A teacher is a guide on a journey of exploration. She points out specific view points, blazes a trail, treks off into a familiar country that is familiar to her but is a wilderness to a student. All the while, a negotiation is taking place. The teacher says, "Let's use this path." Students say, "I want to go this way." The teacher says, "Let's see what's over there." Students say, "I'm lost." The teacher says, "Let's retrace our steps."

All the while, students are learning to explore a new territory, and each student will experience the territory differently. The teacher shows the way.

Works Cited

Blake Yancey, Kathleen, Ed. Delivering College Composition: The Fifth Canon. Portsmouth: Boynton Cook, 2006.