Being Present

As this will be my last blog post before IHE’s annual holiday break, I had thought to try to do some kind of year-end round up of what I viewed as the most important stories I’ve explored over the last 12 months.

But then I talked to a former colleague of mine, a very experienced and dedicated instructor who just finished their semester and said that in addition to the familiar sense of fatigue and needing a respite that seems to be an inevitable by-product of the structure of schooling, they felt something else for the first time: a sense of dread about what is coming next.

I’ve stayed in touch with this person because we share what I think of as a combination idealist/pessimist mindset. On the one hand, we both have a deep belief in the inherent value of the work of teaching and learning. In terms of work, I’ve never experienced anything more meaningful. They feel similarly.

At the same time, we are both deeply frustrated by the structures and system that govern the work of teaching and learning at both the secondary and postsecondary levels, and the ways these structures prevent teachers from doing their best work, or students learning as much as possible. These feelings are nothing new, but despite these feelings, neither of us has lost our belief in the importance of this work.

The work will always be worth doing.

But my former colleague is feeling not just tired at the end of this semester, but something deeper and more worrisome. They feel defeated.

I just don’t know if there’s a future for this stuff.

I’ll be honest, I don’t know, either. I am deeply worried about all kinds of headwinds that face education and educational institutions, not the least of which is the heedless embrace of AI-mediated (or even AI-dominated) experiences as some kind of inevitable and desirable future. For people who teach that reading and writing are inherently human experiences, this is indeed distressing.

I honestly don’t know what the future brings, which is why I’d rather talk about the present.

Fortunately, I have help in achieving this, because while I was emailing with my former colleague, I was simultaneously reading The Present Professor: Authenticity and Transformational Teaching by Elizabeth A. Norell, newly released by the University of Oklahoma Press as part of the series on Teaching, Engaging and Thriving in Higher Ed.

The opening sentence of the introduction says it all: “When you cannot be present, you cannot teach effectively.”

I learned this the hard way midcareer when I realized I’d stopped reading student writing and was instead processing it for the purposes of assigning a grade. This epiphany led to the changes in my pedagogical approaches I’ve written about ad nauseam. I wish I’d had a book like The Present Professor to help guide me at the time. The book is specifically targeted toward midcareer teachers who often find themselves at odds as their comfort and confidence in the classroom have increased, but the challenges ahead still seem daunting.

I have long been a skeptic of the self-care school of managing vocation-related stress because that framework seems to suggest that your best route for survival is to engage in a series of behaviors that allows you to recover from battle to gird yourself for the next conflict. Or, alternatively, we’re told how to check out of some aspect of our work and successfully compartmentalize between our working and nonworking selves.

I’ve found self-care a bad fit because I do not want to view my work as a battle, or to believe that to survive my work I must disengage from some part of it. The work is the point. The Present Professor suggests that this framework is not necessary if we start with reflecting on how we can be truly engaged with our work in a way that supports the needs of both ourselves and our students.

The book walks through the background and theory of what it means to be present and how this presence enhances the work of teaching and learning, before segueing to some brief case studies of different present professors (some of whom are not professors) and then finishing with a series of chapters with specific approaches and concrete things to try to develop one’s self-knowledge about how to be present.

Some material resonated with me more than other stuff, but to me, this is a strength of the book. Rather than suggesting there is a prescribed route, Norell makes it clear that achieving presence is a journey that will vary person to person.

I get that this may sound a little woo-woo to folks with more traditional viewpoints, who see education as a gantlet where the worthy prove themselves and the wanting fall by the wayside. The notion that success is best achieved through competition is deeply embedded in our culture, and our educational systems are no exception.

But I think if you look at the dissatisfaction among faculty that is edging toward despair, or the disengagement among students that is heading toward being entirely checked out and outsourcing their educations to ChatGPT, you have to believe that some shift in attitudes and approaches is necessary.

My former colleague is not soft or wanting. They’ve taught high student loads for many years, both college and high school, holding students to high standards by making them believe the work is worth doing.

I encouraged them to reflect on how much good work they’ve done by being present, semester after semester.

As Norell puts it in the book, “To [reflect on your own teaching past] is to recognize that learning and teaching are inherently human—and inherently social—enterprises.” I think my former colleague mostly needs a reminder of this after being buffeted by too many forces that are suggesting otherwise.

The Present Professor is the third in the Teaching, Engaging and Thriving in Higher Ed series, following Catherine J. Denial’s A Pedagogy of Kindness and A Teacher’s Guide to Learning Student Names: Why You Should, Why It’s Hard, How You Can by Michelle D. Miller.

Denial’s book directly challenges the notion of competition as the best fuel for educational achievement and suggests how to infuse educational spaces not with niceness, but kindness, a spirit that holds people mutually accountable to each other in order to create both uplifting and rigorous classrooms.

A Teacher’s Guide to Learning Student Names is a brief, practical guide to how to do the work of the title in a way that goes deeper than mnemonic tricks, by using this vital practice as a jumping-off point to consider the complications of memory and neurodivergence.

If you have been teaching this past semester, you are probably exhausted right now and want a breather, maybe to not even think about things for some period of time. After that breather, I suggest picking up one or all of these books as a way to help infuse fresh oxygen into your work.

We can do better than mere survival.