Teaching Undiminished: A Reply to My Critics

Abstract

At the time of writing “Teaching or Facilitating: A False Dichotomy” (Stewart, 1993) I was unaware of any philosophical analysis of “facilitating” and consequently thought of my treatment as only an initial mapping of relatively unchartered waters. That it is a concept in need of further analysis is a view I take to be shared by Roland Case, Ken Harper, Susan Tilley, and John Wiens, for at the end of their critique they confess that facilitating is an “admittedly vague and ambiguous notion” (Case et al., p. 297). Their critical response provides an occasion for further exploration of a troublesome but rather prominent educational concept. That said, I shall not go into all the objections raised. Several are extreme or ill founded and others are based on misrepresentations of what I said. My critics would do well, in fact, to heed Catherine Beattie’s caution which they quote with approval to introduce their own piece. I am said, for example, to “categorically dismiss” proponents of facilitating for their ideas (p. 287), to offer a “blanket condemnation” of teachers-as-facilitators (pp. 290–291), to brand the facilitating movement as “wrong-headed” (p. 290), to insinuate that facilitation is a “foolish craze” without theoretical or empirical grounding (p. 292), and to “deprecate” facilitators’ concerns with the learning environment (p. 295). I did not exactly mince words in my treatment of the concept, it is true, but a more assiduous reading of the article will show these rather zealous-looking reactions to be wide of the mark and not particularly well attuned to the overall position I developed and defended. That position by no means denied value and place to facilitating in the teacher’s instructional role. But it warned against exaggerating its value and place and becoming seized of the notion to the point where the activities of teaching are all but dismissed, and it developed arguments for taking the warning seriously. I characterized facilitating as falling under the strategic acts of teaching and therefore as “subsidiary” to teaching proper. By that I meant facilitating consists of various activities concerned with external material conditions for learning rather than the intellectual acts of teaching per se — that is, with creating a physical and social environment or climate that helps foster learning (for example, by displaying attractive curriculum materials, or organizing activity centres, collaborative projects, group discussions), acting as a resource person and guide, and so on (Stewart, p. 6). To say that facilitating activities are subsidiary does not imply that they are incompatible with intellectual acts or that the two are mutually exclusive. I realized, however, that “creating amicable