The Classroom: Encounter and Engagement

If you ask any teachers, K–12 students, or college students, many of them will likely inform you that the classroom is where they do their best work or where they feel the most confident. The classroom can be the place where relationships among types of content, teachers, and students become exciting, new, and alive. Unfortunately, this positive experience does not always occur and classrooms can be sites of struggle. Either way, some kind of teaching and learning is happening. The classroom is complex because it is more than just a physical space. In fact, it is a metaphysical space. I believe that this is the point of many of the essays in Alan A. Block’s The Classroom: Encounter and Engagement although readers are warned twice that the book may not have a point. First, in the essay “On the Asking of Questions,” he relates a vignette of a student asking the question “What’s the point?” regarding Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926). In this instance, the author responds that, "perhaps, the book doesn't have a point" (p. 63). In the afterword, William F. Pinar suggests a way for understanding Block's text. He suggests that this volume is an open activity to be read for its own sake (these are Block’s words to describe the aforementioned essay). It is not a means to an end. However, the nature of a book review is to determine the utility of the text under examination to possible readers. There is a pragmatic instrumentality to wanting to find out how a specific volume, one that implies it will give insights into a transformed classroom experience, can help us move toward achieving this type of classroom.

The main lens I use to engage with texts that aim to illuminate different ways of teaching and learning is whether they help prospective K–12 teachers believe in the increased capacity of the classroom for learning. I find connections that resonate with me when reading this volume of essays through this lens. Block is a full professor in Teaching, Learning, and Leadership at the University of Wisconsin-Stout, a place where he led a college classroom for over 25 years since leaving the high school classroom. Reading the summary on the back of his book, readers are led to believe that the author’s collection of essays will be intellectually challenging and help them rethink the classroom as a place for encounter, exploration, and engagement. These writings meet this goal. Block takes us on his journey of creating prefaces to prefaces through his experiences and challenges as a teacher educator of potential educators. Literature like The Centaur by John Updike (1963), the works of Philip Roth, and much of the canon of American literature like Thoreau and Melville are featured in the text. As a result, they seem to be required background to fully understand many of the author’s essays. While this may be a stumbling block for some, there are some truly illuminating ideas about teaching and learning in this volume. This text requires readers to slow down and journey with Block through his allegorical prose and existential dilemmas.

The first three essays deal with issues of pedagogies and classrooms at the college or high school levels. In Chapter One, "On the Beginnings of Ends and the Ends of Beginnings," Block states that even though educators have new semesters or new years (e.g., beginnings), the students that come before us are not innocent and are "already complex texts" (p. 9). In an age of accountability where everyone needs to be on the same page in education, this poses a pedagogical problem. The issue throughout the book is that classrooms are dealing with this specific point (the ends) rather than the process of arriving at the point (the means). I agree with this idea to some extent. Much of my own reading and writing has been about the role of uncertainty in the classroom. Uncertainty and doubt most often reside in the means rather than the ends. In many classrooms, standards and outcome statements determine these ends. The teachers and schools themselves are often left to devise the means.

The next essay, “On the Asking of Questions,” alludes to means. Block reflects on his pedagogical practices of posing questions for his students. Despite his 43 years as an educator, the author is “confronted by deep walls of silence” (p. 55) during a discussion of Updike’s The Centaur (1963). After this, he engages with the student mentioned earlier regarding the point of a Hemingway novel. Block reports that he comes away from this interaction with the realization that students have been taught to ask only instrumentalist questions. For example, what is the point? When is the paper due? To continue to illustrate that classrooms are not always a place for learning, he analyzes an episode of the early 2000s television show Joan of Arcadia for the essay "Saint Joan in the Classroom." The author returns to the idea that the modern classroom has an instrumentalist nature. Its focus is not on thinking and studying for their own sake. Instead, Block tells us that good teaching comes from wanting to pass on one's passion for learning, perhaps including the associated content or perhaps not. Regardless, this passion is stifled by the current classroom structure in the United States.

Block continues to reflect on the previous themes in his essay "The Last Lesson." While this piece relies to a great extent on the reader's knowledge of Roth’s I Married a Communist (1998), the author communicates the strange world that teachers inhabit. This is a place of requirements. Students ask questions that require answers. Teachers are also asked to measure the knowledge attained by students rather than the process of learning.

The final essay in The Classroom: Encounter and Engagement is titled “Cabins, Pequods, and Classrooms.” It provides an extended treatise regarding the idea of the cabin, or retreat, as a place of "struggle and discovery" (p. 159). Unfortunately, the analogy to the potential of the classroom as a similar type of place is not developed well. Despite this, readers become familiar with Block's cabin in the process. As a whole, this collection would perhaps be interesting reading in graduate level classes. It would also be suitable as a text for teacher educators for professional conversations. However, the book will not provide any answers on how a classroom can be transformed to become a place of engagement. The author asks questions about the potential of the classroom as being free of requirements, as places for encounter, exploration, and engagement. Perhaps this is the point of the volume.

References

Hemingway, E. (1926). The sun also rises. New York, NY: Scribner.

Roth, P. (1998). I married a communist. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin.

Updike, J. (1963). The centaur. New York, NY: Knopf.