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Hello, everyone,

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The notion of teaching participation seems to me intensely problematic. One view of teaching that Freire cautioned against, the banking model, dominates academic institutions. The expert teacher teaches the inexpert and passive student who is commanded to perform on cue. We all recoil at this scenario or we would not be involved in action research at all.

But, having recoiled, how do we do better? Over the past 12 years, I have taught a course on action research to a growing constituency of students and the process is always a great puzzle. It is necessary to provide a structure and a context for learning, which I do in the form of a syllabus and an initial presentation of some of my own views. But to continue in this vein and to enact the syllabus in the name of participation would be an intolerable contradiction for me – and BORING.

Gradually, I have moved to a process of asking the students to present themselves to each other, something they do uneasily at first. We need to know who is in the room, but we need to know more than that. I then ask them to articulate their "wants" from the activity, something that at least American students are extremely good at. We learn quickly to be consumers with wants and needs.

That done, I ask them to articulate their "offers", that is, what do they know, what experiences have they had that they could contribute to the rest of the group. This is hugely harder for most students. For some, they tell me that it is the first time they have ever been asked such a question and they feel insecure, incompetent, unhappy. Later, they often say that it was the first time anyone suggested that they, as students, might know something of value or "be" of value – and this includes many of my students who are above 30 years of age with years of work experience.

All of this speaks to the dramatic passivity that we have allowed to exist in "teaching" institutions and that has to be overcome. Only when the wants and offers are on the table can we reconceptualize the syllabus in terms of what they want to learn and what they collectively know that they can contribute to the process and what we have to go beyond the group to get for all of us. The syllabus is redone at this point and teams form to do different parts of what we have agreed on.

There is huge unease during this whole process and some students leave. Some get angry with me for "not doing my job" and telling them what to do. Eventually, the group gets going and finds a way to proceed and use me as well.

Later, as the end of the course begins to loom, I point out that I will have to deliver grades but that there is no rational way to do such a thing. I force the issue of self- and group evaluation and the class often again experiences a great deal of insecurity and vacillates about what to do. All the issues of fairness, performance, mutual contributions, etc. surface and they struggle with these issues together.

One of the ironies of this is that I also have to deliver the university’s required course evaluation at the end. Often the class takes on this task as well, on one occasion doing 6 weeks of evaluation and producing a 45 page single spaced document that I happily submitted to the department chair and dean to their complete puzzlement. Obviously participatory evaluation is not part of the institutional scheme either.

What is the moral of this already too long story. My dear departed friend, Donald Schön, was fond of quoting the aphorism that you cannot learn to ride a bicycle by reading a book. I have learned that you cannot teach/learn participation by talking about it; you have to create a situation where the need to participate is not negotiable and where the practice of participation is filled with uncertainty and risk – as it is in everyday life.

I am sure others of you have developed related strategies and, hopefully, better ones than I and my students have and I would greatly appreciate hearing about them.

Davydd

Davydd J. Greenwood,

Goldwin Smith Professor of Anthropology,

Director, Institute for European Studies

ON LEAVE: Academic year 2002-2003

Cornell University Society for the Humanities, Andrew D. White House, Room 215

120 Uris Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853 U.S.A.