Truth
is the Center:
Teaching
and Learning Beyond Postmodernism
Don
Thompson
Pepperdine
University
6/30/2004 11:09 AM
The center of the educational enterprise is neither the student, nor the teacher, but truth. The goal of the academy is to create a space[1] where faculty and student learners can form a community that practices obedience[2] to truth.[3]
Throughout much of the twentieth century, university faculty represented the center of the academy. Faculty members were the measure of an institution’s intellectual capital and thus its worth. University reputation was viewed both internally and externally in terms of faculty members’ scholarly reputation, productivity, and ability to secure financial resources for research and connection to the private sector. In a healthy response to this faculty-centricity, much of higher education’s recent discourse has been calling for a shift to learner-centeredness[4]. This shift has pushed the focus from the podium to the seat, from the authoritative center of the faculty speaker to the center found in the mind and experience of the student-learner. It calls for the academy to pay attention to the experiences of the learner, to their engagement with faculty as teachers first, researchers second. In effect, this is higher education living out its own instantiation of post-modernism, arguing that knowledge is acquired, valued, and constructed by the learner and her peers[5]. The post-modern shift urges us to move from teacher as absolute guardian, source, and dispenser of knowledge to the student as consumer, manager, creator of knowledge by means of her social learning process.
However, this amounts to the institutional pendulum over-swinging the gravitational center. The center of this learning-teaching dyad is truth itself, being the sum of all knowledge and virtue embodied in life’s author, God. With truth at the center, faculty and students occupy positions of balance in the community as co-pursuers and co-learners of truth. Students and faculty come to the university community because they desire and seek truth, knowing that it shapes them as they synchronously engage in its pursuit. They love truth and in so desiring it, are transformed by it. Perhaps this is what the post-modern thesis is really saying. We are only transformed when we seek and are sought by truth. Truth is an agent of change, affecting all members of the academy. This is the main business of the academy: change, growth, and development in the light of truth, in obedience to truth. This transformative process is the agent to help learners (again, both faculty and students belong here) grow, develop, and mature into the beings they were intended to become. It is the unfolding mystery of truth’s own nature and being, bringing about the maturation and flowering of its pursuers. Truth draws and develops the faculty and students as they co-pursue its boundaries in the classroom and beyond. Truth is the teacher whose pupils are faculty and students.
Truth
Truth is the great teacher of its own subject, the shepherd and the sheep rolled into one. Truth is the embodiment of God’s revealed nature in his physical, spiritual, intellectual, emotional, and social universe. Truth is the original curriculum after which all academic and life curricula are modeled. Truth is the logos of teaching and learning. Without truth, there is no academy, no dialectic, and no educational quest. Truth is synonymous with its creator and author, with whom we as co-learners and co-pursuers are bound in a kind of mutual covenant (truth comes from the word troth, representing a vow or pledge) to become obedient and subsequently to become its disciples and its community. The university is a community of obedience to truth.
Truth drives our pedagogy and our pursuit. The way we learn is the way we recognize and apprehend knowledge. In other words, truth contains[6] the a priori rules for its pursuit. Truth gives us both the end and means by which we are to engage with and pursue it. Truth comes packaged with its own means for discovery, in the form of its covenantal partner, the human academy. Without pursuers, truth remains inert and silent. Without hearers, listeners, mentors, and students, it is incapable of movement and incapable of expansion. We matter to truth. No other source of knowledge or wisdom can accomplish its own being and its means of pursuit. Truth is a living, dynamic, vibrant source of its own pursuit, of virtues, of life itself. The search for truth is the original quest of Plato’s academy and so it is ours as well. This is the quest that brought all of us, faculty members and students alike, to the academy in the first place. It is our reason for existence.
For evidence that truth is the center, consider what
it is that draws faculty to the academy at all. Love of our discipline. Faculty members pursue their disciplines
because they are disciples of truth, at least the component of truth found in
their first love – their discipline.
All teachers began as and continue as learners and maturing masters of
the truth found in their chosen field.
This pursuit takes the form of scholarship and research that requires of
faculty a commitment and obedience to their discipline in order to advance
their field and be advanced by it. Of
course, faculty members also desire connection with students in order to
celebrate their discipline. The agenda here is to make disciples of their
students. Faculty members model their
love of learning and truth pursuit to students in order to make students lovers
of the same truth they have found. But,
a faculty member’s first love is their discipline, their field. Their second
love is their students, whose growth as disciples they wish to engender.
Teachers are really learners in disguise. Plato argues[7]
that there is no teaching, only recollection.
In other words, we learn when we reflect, repeat, and reinforce what we
have apprehended. The old adage – if
you want to learn something, teach it, is further evidence of Plato’s
claim. We learn when we teach, because
this is the teacher’s continuous recollection process.
Learning is obedience to truth. It is the pursuit of
truth as well as the experience of anagogically being shaped by truth. Students
come to university in order to mature and grow. Students become students, or “disciples” of learning because they
seek knowledge and its attendant liberation.
They seek to match their passion with their ability and skill in the
form of their chosen major or degree program.
That is, they seek to be disciples because they desire to engage with a
discipline. They seek degrees that prove that they have become disciples. Thus,
they do not come to become learners, but rather to grow and undergo
transformation as they are liberated by wisdom and truth.
They also come to be a part of a community at the
special place known as the college campus. Nowhere else do we find both the
senior and junior members of a group desiring the same thing. Namely, to engage with truth and be
transformed by it as they comprehend and advance it. Ultimately, of course, students join the community because they
are apprentices desiring to master an intellectual craft and this is where the
journeymen work and practice their arts, in engagement with truth itself.
As Thomas Merton said, we engage with truth because
we wish to discover or in some cases recover our hidden wholeness[8]
as individuals and as community. Only truth can feed and guide this. Hidden wholeness is another name for the
freedom found through virtue acquired in obedience to truth.
The goal of the academy is to create a space where faculty and student learners can form a community that practices obedience to truth.
[1]
It
is important to keep the idea of space as large as possible. It is a metaphor
for our capacity to be a university, for our giftedness in resources in
the form of our location, facilities, support systems, environment, culture,
faculty, students, curricula, finances, and Christian mission.
[2] The word obedience refers here to the process of
transformation and growth. Disciples engage in a discipline when they obey its
rules and follow the tutelage of its masters. I am writing a parallel work
“Obedience to Truth” that will address the ways we help students grow, develop,
and undergo transformation in the university experience.
[3] Parker Palmer’s original phrase, from his work To Know as We Are Known, is due to desert father Abba Felix: “To teach is to create a space where obedience to truth can be practiced.”
[4] From Teaching to Learning -
A New Paradigm for Undergraduate Education. Barr and Tagg, Change Magazine,
November/December 1995.
[5] Foucault refers to the process of apprehending truth as discourse, whereby the learners use their contextual framework to build truth out of consensus and discovery. See his The Archaeology of Knowledge.
[6] Emerson’s essay Nature has this wonderful statement – which transcends the educational process: “Every man’s condition is a solution in heiroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth.”
[7] Plato places this discussion in his Meno dialogue. “There is no teaching, only recollection.”
[8] From Thomas Merton’s Monastic Journey.