Because collaboration is a way of doing things, talk about it is
vulnerable to the vacuities and inanities that often characterize
discussion of educational process. Because collaboration has been a theme
in efforts to improve U.S. education for more than a decade, talk about it
has accumulated a certain load of assumptions and routine declarations.
For the opening of this new forum I thought it might be helpfulat
the risk of earning my own characterizationsto recall just what
teachers in schools and colleges can share.
Fields of Knowledge
Collaborating teachers can share knowledge. That all teachers teach
something, and that for certain subsets of school and college teachers
these things sometimes coincide, is the essential basis of collaboration,
the clearest reason for the comparison to "common ground." These shared
fields of knowledge are why all the school improvement programs of the
National Endowment for the Humanities are collaborative programs. Teachers
in higher education are often thought to have an advantage in this area
because they also have a responsibility for cultivating new knowledge that
their school colleagues seldom share. Nonetheless, school teachers bring
their own advantages to this common ground. Large issues of pattern,
integration, comparison and synthsisthe neglected domain of
scholarshipare quite visible in the course of their broader teaching
responsibilities. Moreover, they must answer to intellectually restless
charges who expect to be able to use what they are learning. Using
knowledge requires, as David Perkins points out, going beyond the
acquisition of information to far richer kinds of understanding. In this
sense, knowledge, education's common ground, deserves that title more than
agriculture's common ground. The latter, as has been argued with great
eloquence, is subject to the "tragedy of the commons." While it is in the
interest of every individual to graze or cultivate the common ground as
intensively as possible, this very intensity of use diminishes the value
of the commons to all. Knowledge is not the same kind of good; it
flourishes when it is used. I think this is why collaboration among school
and college faculty members goes so well when content is the primary focus
of their concern and procedure receives at most incidental attention.
Students
Teachers in schools and colleges very often have students in common. This
is true in a broad national sense: the successes and failures of the
schools become the next generation of possibilities and problems for
higher education. But it is even more true in a local sense: patterns of
articulation especially within metropolitan areas and states mean that
students with whom school teachers are working one year will be the
responsibility of their higher education colleagues the next. The
pertinent details of what and how and why those students learn are so
specific and nuanced that they are best addressed in a rich, ongoing
conversation among their teachers. Spanish teachers engaged in a
continuing study of the language and literature they teach have far more
sophisticated ways of thinking about the transition of their students from
high school to college than achievement test scores or the equation of two
years of high school study to one year of college study. Collaboration
that has a particular group of students in common can mean that their
effort and learning at the secondary level is not wasted or repeated at
the college level. This possibility underlies much of the appeal of
school-college collaboration in local settings.
New Teachers
The image of students moving from school to college suggests more a
commercial metaphor than an agricultural one, and indeed the transition of
students from high school to college is reciprocated by the passage of
some of these college students back to the local schools as new teachers.
Barry Bluestone has recently called attention to the strong return on
public investment generated because graduates of urban colleges and
universities tend to remain in a metropolitan area, contributing to its
economic growth. In the case of teacher education, a mutually reinforcing
cycle can develop. Because of collaboration in subject matter areas,
teachers in the schools may be able to send better prepared students to
the local colleges,which in turn may be able to send better prepared
teachersback to the schools. The reciprocal, long-term benefits possible
in this connection between student articulation and teacher placement
offer a balanced, stable structure for collaboration, though one in which
the common ground looks more like an agora than an agricultural field.
Teaching
One might expect a great deal of school-college collaboration around
issues of how to teach. After all, teaching is something that, by
definition, teachers at all levels do. But such an expectation would be
disappointed. Concern about and attention to teaching does tend to be
explicit and well developed (if somewhat mechanically) among school
teachers. In higher education, however, even wonderful teachers can be so
diffident about how they teach as to appear almost speechless. This state
of affairs is not inevitable. Discourse about teaching does not have to
involve cookbook approaches, management by objective, "paradigms" and
"findings." Ideally it would be rooted in some specific subject matter,
since teaching ten Emily Dickenson poems requires somewhat different
approaches than a survey of Chinese history. It could have less to do with
trading tricks than with mutual efforts and encouragement to remain
clearthrough a kaleidoscope of different circumstances, students,
and topicsabout the essentials of effective teaching: providing
clear information about what is expected, opportunities for thoughtful
practice, informative feedback, and strong intrinsic or extrinsic
motivation. David Perkins has summarized these principles under the
general pedagogical starting point he calls Theory One: "People learn much
of what they have a reasonable opportunity and motivation to learn."
Self-Governance
If one can hope that ease and assurance in considering how to teach would
spread from school teachers to college and university teachers, it can
also be hoped that the latter's traditions of self-governance would be
shared with the schools. It is true that academic governance in higher
education is rooted in the research function of the professoriatenot
in the teaching functionand ultimately (in the United States) in the
Constitutional protections of freedom of speech. But increasingly a
different case is being made that teachers in each school need to
institute self-governance practices like those of their higher education
colleagues. The case typically fuses arguments made under the rubrics of
site-based management and teacher empowerment. In any school it is the
group of teachers as a whole that must exercise responsibility for the
education of that specific group of students. Further, because of the
variety of students and learning situations, and the flexibility needed to
respond constructively to them, teaching in today's diverse, rapidly
changing society must be less like learning to follow an orchestral score
and more like playing in a jazz ensemble. This felt imperative for faculty
self governance in the school sometimes lies beneath a not-unusual
sensitivity about the structure of school-college collaboration itself.
One group ofteachers needs very much to exercise something like what the
other group routinely carries out as "committee work."
A Certain Kind of Moral Relationship
Finally it seems to me that teachers have something in common that is
seldom talked about but perhaps deserves more attention: a certain kind of
relationship, not with each other, but with their students. It is, among
other things, moral relationship whose logic has always terrified me. It
is inherently unequal; it is transformed when anything like equality of
knowledge is achieved. It can work well when the teacher makes use of
strategies and observations that are not shared with the students. Unlike
parents' relationship with their children, a teacher does not really have
to face the consequences of his actions: children are around for twenty
years, or even a lifetime; students generally disappear with the semester
or at least graduation.
Teachers' relationship with students may be important to understand
because it typically crosses a generational boundary, perhaps the next
line of fissure in American society. But it may be even more important to
understand because it involves proper conduct when a power differential
between two parties will not be soon or easily overcome. We like to think
of relationships as involving the agreement of freely consenting equals.
It has not been easy for us to learn how to act in situations where
another individual, group or nation is not necessarily going to have
countervailing power.
I don't mean to suggest that being teachers together should involve
surveying some new territory for ethical theorizing. But I would like to
recall that, when taken seriously, teaching can be a morally disorienting
situation. Manipulation seems almost a daily practice; power is exercised
with no balance, few checks and mostly invisible consequences. To keep my
bearings on this ground, I have found it useful to think of teaching as
also being utterly subordinate to the knowledge, in all its demanding
intricacy and complexity, that one is trying to share.
This is the moment in the life of school-college collaboration to move
from ad hoc projects to reliable, institutionalized arrangements. This is
the period of "systemic reform" directed at orchestrating the large
interlocking organizations and structures that shape U. S. education.
These are good reasons that it is also time for teachers at all levels to
stand and cultivate their common ground.