Teaching Towards the Utopian...

Recently, I had to read a book by Jill Dolan called "Geographies of Learning". In it Dolan, primarily a theater and performance scholar, attempts to take perspectives on feminist and queer theory and apply it to a broader perspective of learning and intellectualism.

At the end of every chapter, she includes lists of questions or ideas that provide a sounding board or reaction point for the reader to think and interrogate the concepts brought up in that chapter. In one of the chapters, "Performance as Feminist Pedagogy," Dolan gives "My 'Ten Commandments' for Teaching" In an effort to foster understanding of my response, I include these here:

My "Ten Commandments" for Teaching

Finally, my ten personal commandments for teaching. I have to stress that these are my own; they've worked for me and they might work for others.
1. Teach to the highest common denominator. Students will rise to the occaision. Learning should be hard.
2. Teach for questions, not for answers. Focus on the gaps, the omissions, the whys, the maybes, but always take a stand around the knowledge you share or discover.
3. Teach to unsettle, not to create a safe space. Learning should be dangerous, because ideas and what they can do have real meanings and real effects.
4. Teach to learn something. Never teach the exact same syllabus twice, but always look for different readings, new input. Learn in front of your students, as you teach.
5. Believe that good writing is fundamental to learning anything and insist that students do it well.
6. Believe that students have a lot to teach one another. The teacher isn't the only one in the classroom with something important to say.
7. Believe that humanities/arts classrooms should be about learning the skills of analysis, about how to ask questions more than about transmitting correct readings of canonical texts.
8. Believe in embodied learning and teaching. Everyone's body should be on the line in the classroom, even if no one leaves their chair.
9. Be responsible to your own authority and power as a teacher. I give ths grades, so I have to be as organized, committed, and well prepared as I expect the students to be.
10. Believe in a classroom in which pleasure circulates freely: as desire, as humor, as intellectual inquiry, as the passionate commitment to ideas, theories, and practices.

Jill Dolan, Geographies of Learning. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2001.

I have a response that I have composed, but I will wait a day or two to post my opinion. Let me know what you think.