Citation: Gregory, Marshall. “Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Teacherly Ethos.” Pedagogy, vol. 1, no. 1, Jan. 2001, pp. 69–90, Web.

Summary:

In this article from the first issue of Pedagogy, Marshall Gregory lays out his belief that university faculty members must consider pedagogy as equally important to curriculum development.

Gregory starts the article by challenging the assumption that a great curriculum will automatically entice students to learn. He claims that professors who believe that great books and great art will sell themselves are naive and fail to understand that the art of implementing the curriculum, i.e. pedagogy, ultimately decides whether the content will be embraced by students.

Gregory contends that the Classical curriculum, mostly rote repetition and Latin translation, failed because the human element in education took a backseat to the texts themselves. Absent any direction or inspiration from a professor, how could direct translation of the Aeneid possibly lead to more enlightened thinkers?

For Gregory, the solution to this failed curriculum-based instruction is to have teachers develop an ethos that will make the curriculum more personal to the students. Why should a student be interested in a great novel? Not because the great novel is inherently interesting, but because the human being standing in front of you enthusiastically and personally endorses it for your education – and this person knows you as a person rather than as a name on a paper.

While skills may be hard to imitate, Gregory believes that students can more easily imitate a teacher’s passion, curiosity, and commitment about a skill, and then learn the skill with a sense of personal investment.

The precise ethos Gregory wants teachers to have is based on a friendship model. He does not mean friendship in the modern sense of two people who are intimate peers who want to please and not offend one another [paraphrasing his definition, not mine], but friendship in the sense of a trusting relationship where one person may criticize another without antagonism.

Gregory launches into a list of ethical qualities he believes every teacher should have: honesty, unpretentiousness, curiosity, humor, tolerance, courage, indignation, passion, charity, and love. He notes that these are usually considered personal rather than professional qualities.

The article ends by examining the teaching qualities of Socrates. Gregory argues that Socrates knew that being a good teacher meant challenging yourself and your students, and that in the honest communication between friends, real learning occurs.

Quote Bank:

• “All teachers need to remember that exposing students to a well-thought-out curriculum is not the same thing as educating them, if educating them means, as I think it does, helping them learn how to integrate the contents of the curriculum into their minds, hearts, and everyday lives” (69).
• “Anyone who ever thought that translating a requisite number of lines of the Aeneid every day as a purely grammatical exercise would automatically produce citizens of superior sensitivity and morality was surely not thinking but merely repeating delusory bromides” (72).
• “We can learn at least two things from the “failure” of the classical curriculum. First, we can learn that to expect any educational curriculum or system to make human beings morally virtuous in itself will always be an expectation absurdly and naively too high… The second thing we can learn is that the effects of curriculum should never be considered in isolation from the kind of pedagogy that delivers that curriculum.” (73).
• “Every good teacher should be able to vary pedagogical practice to meet the needs of student learning not according to some abstract definition (such as ‘collaborative learning is always best’) and not according to some ideological commitment to a single method (such as ‘the democratic ‘student-centered’ classroom’) but according to the demands of the material and the needs of students on any given day” (75).
• “What student learners see in front of them as they enter a classroom is not a disembodied skill or a dissociated idea but a person who has mastery over a skill or possession of an idea, and the first thing students respond to is whether the value of the skill or idea is recommended by the manner and the mind — in short, the ethos — of the teacher” (77).
• “Primarily, the kind of teacherly befriending I am talking about entails creating an atmosphere of classroom trust in which the teacher’s willingness to call a bad job a bad job is seen by the student as helpful and productive rather than as mean and destructive” (82-83).
• “The teacher who knows how to befriend students teaches them how to befriend the world: how to work for the humanization of the social order, how to be critical of self without falling into self-loathing, how to be critical of others without being thoughtlessly callous, and how to be compassionate of others without being unduly sentimental” (87).

Analytical Reflection:

This entire issue of Pedagogy is a fascinating rundown of all the divisions within the field of English, and contains many solutions to help heal those divides. Although published nearly twenty years ago, I found this article to have resonance with many of the issues teachers continue to face. I agree with Gregory that teachers need to consider pedagogy as equally important to curriculum planning.

I found Gregory’s claims about teachers needing an ethos to be compelling, but when he then defines a very specific ethos, he lost me. When I advised teacher interns, we always talked about becoming the best version of yourself as a teacher. No two teachers can share precisely the same ethos, but every teacher should contemplate the ethos that guides their pedagogy.

After reading, I wondered what Gregory would say about a curriculum like ours that is shared by a large group of teachers who are likely guided by as large a variety of pedagogical skills.  It’s kind of the reverse of his one-size-fits-all ethos. We all may have a different ethos, but we are in effect “selling” a curriculum not of our own creation. To me the two go hand in hand. If you trust somebody to teach, you must let them also take the reins of the content and approach so that they may find the appropriate curriculum for their pedagogical ethos. This is an issue facing many teachers at the high school level as the curriculum becomes more and more test-prep based.

[The 101 curriculum is expertly prefabricated by necessity because the labor force is untrained in curriculum creation – I get that. But, is that the ideal situation for the students? I’m not sure. To me, the ideal situation would be a wide variety of different curriculums that emphasize the same skills.]

In trying to find common ground between the wildly divergent research articles I read, I’m thinking that audience must play an important role both in how writing is taught and how teaching is conducted. I teach the students in my classroom, not myself or a fantasy version of the type of student I’d like to teach. All teaching occurs in a specific situation with a specific group of students – my students next quarter may despise the lessons my students this quarter enjoy. It’s up to me to understand how these classes are different and to adjust accordingly, rather than getting frustrated that they are not the same.

For a potential research project, I think it would be interesting to give students a similar writing assignment but completely change the audience for it. In other words, tell them that their audience is each other the first time around, and then change it to their boss or their parents or a scholarship committee the next time. Would the writing change significantly? [This needs a lot more thought, obviously, but I think it works as a general direction.]