Teaching - A Vocation or A Profession?

Is teaching a vocation or a profession?

I just started an online course, Open Content Licensing for Educators, through WikiEducator. Interestingly, the first session begins with the question, "Is teaching a vocation or a profession?" Like so much of my learning journey, I seem to find more questions than answers. Some participants talked about the "call" to teaching, about the need for dedication and the express satisfaction one gets from teaching. Others talk of the hours of hard work that teaching requires and how lends itself to a profession.

As an undergraduate student, I had a number of teachers who made it look easy, as though it were as natural as breathing to simply walk into the room and start teaching. Although I am new to teaching, I can already see how wrong I have been and the amount of hard work that goes into planning and preparing content and lessons and in evaluating learners and ourselves to continuously create a better learning experience.

Do I think teaching is a vocation or a profession? While I think teaching requires a certain degree of dedication and there is definitely an aspect of satisfaction that comes from teaching, I don't know that I would define it as a vocation based on these criteria. I brought dedication to my work as a librarian and there is satisfaction in helping a patron find the answers they are searching for, so I don't believe this is isolated to just teaching. And I wonder if calling these types of work, vocations, removes a sense of professionalism from the job. If it creates an illusion of a "naturalness" to the act of teaching that somehow dismisses the hard work involved or excuses those who don't put in the hard work and are the "bad" teachers. The excellent teachers that I work with, that I watched teach so "naturally" in my undergraduate, work hard to be excellent by evaluating themselves, learning new techniques, and continually studying the practice of teaching and learning.

What's my teaching philosophy?

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been considering my teaching philosophy. It's the driving question of the exit interview for PIDP 3100: Foundations of Adult Education and we spent some time discussing a variety of models in PIDP 3210: Curriculum Development over the past two weekends.

It's a tough question for someone with minimal practical teaching experience so in my usual fashion, when I feel uncertain about something, I research. It's my comfort zone. To this end, I took the Teaching Perspectives Inventory and can't say that I was too surprised by the results. My highest perspective was Nurturing, which states that "effective teaching assumes that long-term, hard, persistent effort to achieve comes from the heart, not the head" (taken from the TPI website). An important aspect featured in this perspective is not to fear failure and to support "effort as well as achievement" which I would agree is a definite component to my teaching and my learning. Even in my own learning, it's not about getting the best grade but rather being able to see improvement and effort which leads to a sense of pride in the work I have accomplished. My next highest result was Developmental which believes that "effective teaching must be planned and conducted 'from the learner's point of view' and this aligns with the philosophy George Siemens discussed in his interview with Howard Rheingold. We need to help learner's create their own paths to knowledge in order to make learning meaningful to the learner. In the words of the TPI, help create bridges to knowledge.

Along with the Teaching Perspectives Inventory (TPI), I picked up a copy of Pratt's book to read and I was struck by his observation that often as instructors, while it is important to think about new teaching techniques and different ways of assessing learners; an "important way in which we develop as instructors ... is through critically reflecting on what we believe about teaching and learning" (Pratt, 1998, p. 12).

Pratt, D.D. (1998). Five perspectives on teaching in adult and higher education. Malabar, FL.: Krieger Publishing.

OpenEd Conference - Vancouver, B.C., October 16-18, 2012

"That is not it all all,

That is not what I meant, at all."

(taken from T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Purfock and used very cleverly by Gardner Campbell)

I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the OpenEd Conference this month in Vancouver, B.C. It was an almost overwhelming experience. As someone new to this field, I learned an incredible and am still trying to process it all. But I must say for me, the absolute highlight of the conference, was Gardner Campbell's keynote address, Ecologies of Yearning, which you can access here: http://openedconference.org/2012/program/archive-of-sessions/day-1/day1-9am-c300/.

It was as though he scratched an itch that I have had for years. He talks about the "double-bind" of education. For example, we want our students to be creative but structure the creativity out of any assignment we give them. It must be 5 pages long, double-spaced, APA format, cite 5 sources and 2 of those must be peer-reviewed, etc. And while there is a need for students to learn how to write a research paper, is this what we really want to assess? Does this effectively show us what students have learned? Is this the best measurement of learning?

I don't have the answers to these questions but I know I want them.

A Vision of Students Today ...

Russell Day from Simon Fraser University used this video in his keynote address at the 10th Annual UNBC and CNC Teaching and Learning Conference - August, 2012.

A short video summarizing some of the most important characteristics of students today - how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime. Created by Michael Wesch in collaboration with 200 students at Kansas State University. (description taken from the YouTube website)

“In teaching others we teach ourselves”

A little bit about me ...

I’m a … learner, teacher, teaching assistant, environmentalist, graduate student, librarian, instructional designer, book lover, literature nerd, tourist, mother, wife, daughter, sister … student of the world.

I have created this blog to narrate my journey through the Provincial Instructor’s Diploma program.