Teaching: The Midwife's Art

"I cannot teach anybody anything; I can only make them think.” Socrates

Socrates once compared teaching to a midwife’s art—an obvious metaphor of his role as a dialectician. Like a midwife who assists a woman to deliver what is already within her, Socrates would question his pupils as a means of extracting (or deconstructing) knowledge already existing within them. At the end of the dialog, a student would end up answering his own questions. The metaphor offers an implicit comparison between passive, skilled guidance and active intervention. A teacher can either overtly dictate the learning process of his students or play the role of a facilitator. This distinction assumes added relevance with reference to the teaching of a subject like composition writing, where the product ought to be the outcome of a highly individualized process.

In her essay “Why I Used to Hate to Give Grades,” Lynn Z. Bloom observes that “current composition theories agree on the importance of dialogic discussions in which all students have a right to speak up and speak out.”—a modern day equivalent of Socratic paradigm of learning. In the context of composition classes, such a dialogic/inquiry-based process can be used as an effective teaching tool. It offers students the opportunity of establishing themselves as independent thinkers. However, the implementation of this learning model has significant pedagogical implications since it aims at establishing a level playing ground for the teacher and students—the center of author-ity shifts from the teacher to the students. The teacher ceases to be an omniscient figure. In his new role, he does not furnish students with ideas but prompts them. He motivates them to identify issues, ask meaningful questions, and consider possible answers before they actually respond to the writing task. In other words, he places his students at the center of the knowledge creation process.

There are several teaching strategies that support inquiry-based learning. One of this is the adoption of process-driven approach in composition classes. Process pedagogy emphasizes the usefulness of dialogs as a teaching technique. It challenges the traditional, authoritative models of teaching, in which know-all instructors talk "at" ignorant students. Instead, process pedagogy empowers students by getting them to talk about their writing at every step of the process. The principle of dialog is also a foundational component of classroom practices like collaborative writing. Classroom collaborations can assume different forms ranging from workshoping of writing assignments to peer reviews. The advantage of such a practice is that it offers scope for free exchange of ideas between the participating members without compromising their integrity as individual writers.