ON BEING THE GOOD ENOUGH TEACHER

Abstract

Interactions between students and teachers always take place within a specific force field constituted by local dominant belief systems, which may differ markedly from the beliefs of individual teachers, and from claims to honor abstract inquiry, critical thinking and skepticism about absolutes. That inevitably uneven disposition of local vs. official powers puts students at risk for misunderstanding terms of conversation that are legible in bracketed academic discourses, puts minority student groups at risk of unequal acknowledgment within the dynamic that opposes an institutional to a locally dominant perspective, and especially puts teachers at risk of blindness to their own positioned assumptions of superiority. Thus, when teachers are on what is always majority students' own hegemonic turf, especially when they encounter the religious differences of self-contained groups marginalized in national contexts, they may tacitly dismiss such beliefs and the capacities of students who hold them. Such local conditions for learning may create blindness to the professional responsibility to encounter students as equals in regard to any form of belief. Teachers thus may betray the pedagogic call to focus on the knowledge base they profess and creating receptive attitudes in classrooms as appropriate contexts for their interactions with students.