){kind=logo}
){kind=icon}
){kind=logo}
){kind=icon}
In his book, Boundaries with Teens: When to Say Yes, How to Say No, psychologist John Townsend suggests that a starting point for educating young people is to remember one’s adolescence and keep it well in mind when interacting with them. What we felt, thought, and did at that time should always stand on our shoulder whispering in our ear what the youth whom we have in front of us may be living.
Take the above as an analogy of what can be a real, academic teaching-learning process in which a teacher is not only a transmitter of information but a practical guide who makes the journey with his students, identifying the questions and difficulties that he experienced when he was confronting knowledge for the first time.
To teach is to learn again.
Trying to explain something to someone based on what one knows without taking into account that the other party does not know about the subject has its risks. Perhaps the most common mistake is to let oneself be dazzled by the apparent simplicity of the knowledge acquired and to forget that to arrive at it, one had to journey on an arduous path. Ludwig Wittgenstein, the great German philosopher, was furious when his students and colleagues did not understand any of his ideas that to him were very clear. He wanted them to understand them with the same immediacy in which the ideas came to him.
A widespread error is wanting people to capture the meaning of an idea by themselves without further explanation. Having a clear idea does not mean it is easy to transmit it or for others to understand it. Ideas are not objects that are delivered by hand as if they were mail; the process to understand them is as arduous as generating them, and anyone who does not know how to describe/relive that process step-by-step from the beginning will need to have interlocutors who have gone through very similar means so that others (more or less) understand him. Most students are not this way. Minds as broad as the German philosopher will need a lot of patience to scrutinize their conclusions.
Let’s think about the teacher who starts at the end (i.e., with the knowledge already acquired) and tries to explain to us how she got to it. It takes a lot of experience to be able to remember step-by-step the path that led us to knowledge. We usually remember some points that were key for us, leaving many gaps unfilled. And more or less, what happened to Wittgenstein occurs: we want the student to understand us without having to explain the details. The result is partial knowledge, which, as we all know, when it comes to an understanding of a process, lets us understand only fragments.
Just think about installing a computer by following a manual that jumps from step 2 to 5. Or, if you prefer, remember the lousy signage that prevails on many highways in our countries. Road signs make significant assumptions, ignoring key turns and exits, and we end up getting lost, going in circles, and sometimes unable to reach our destination. It seems that these signs were intended for those who already know the way. If one wonders how it was that the person responsible for this designed such signage, there are two reasonable answers: Either he did not know the way well and proceeded arbitrarily, or he knew, but he did not test the route; instead, he just placed the signs based on his experience. Such a teacher has to encounter the questions of his students countless times to understand that one has to recap all the steps and explain things with pears and apples, as the expression goes.
Another fundamental mistake of those who proceed going ahead by traveling backward (from acquired knowledge to ignorance) is to explain things also in reverse; i.e., to take as reference points those that the student must reach, and that to us seem obvious, but about which the student has no idea. It’s like that pedestrian who, when asked how to get to the highway to Mexico City, replied: “Go straight ahead, and three blocks before the roundabout, turn to the left.”
In conclusion, the best teacher does not recapitulate starting at the end but places himself before the field of knowledge, journeying from the beginning and dealing again with all the accidents along the way, the possible crossroads, and, in short, the multiplicity of difficulties and risks, as if it was the first time that he traveled it. This has several advantages: one is that this way, you can be more explicit in the explanations because it is described step by step. Another is that not only are the results reporte but the processes are shown, which is, as we all know, much more enriching than the former.
But perhaps the greatest advantage of this procedure is that the teacher puts herself before the field of knowledge not as if before a stationary territory, fixed, always repeated, but in front of a living landscape, in constant change and movement. Knowledge, in general, is like this. Science itself, despite its apparent solidity, drives countless ideas that are called for review over and over again to understand and explain them. Notions such as the survival of the fittest, the Darwinian theory, are still discussed relevantly. The same occurs with many, if not all, scientific conclusions, and even mathematical sciences, which are supposedly infallible, present serious inconsistencies.
A teacher who teaches something as if it were the first time that he or she ventures in the subject also gives students the example that knowledge is always fresh and alive, and that it is better to put oneself before it (however simple and obvious it may seem, and no matter how many times we have discovered it before) with an open mind, with expectation, ready to be surprised, which not infrequently yields very different results than we were expecting.
Translation by Daniel Wetta.
Disclaimer: This is an Op-ed article. The viewpoints expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, viewpoints and official policies of Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey.
){kind=icon}
){kind=icon}
This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
)