Against interpretation.

Introduction

In classrooms today, teachers spend an inordinate amount of time as observers of students rather than simply being in relation with them. Observing and then interpreting behavior seems to be the widely accepted path for informing and remediating both academic and behavioral problems. Teachers routinely analyze test results in order to inform subsequent instruction, and they regularly interpret misbehavior in order to develop behavior plans. Increasingly, the focus has turned to the individual student. Progressive and democratic forms of education claim it is vital that the teacher comes to know her students well. From this perspective, it is believed that, without full knowledge of her students' needs, interests and skills, the teacher cannot cooperatively create with her pupils an authentic or relevant curriculum, meaningful assessment and evaluation, or an atmosphere of trust and respect. However, I believe that an equally compelling argument can be made for there to be significantly less analysis and interpretation of students. Using psychoanalytic and philosophical rationales, one could issue a caution as to the extent to which individual students need to, or even should, become such known entities.

In efforts to make connections with students and between students and curriculum, educators seek to know more and more about their students and what makes them "tick." But, in our efforts to build such relationships, are we perhaps interpreting too much? Does the valuable time spent analyzing and interpreting promote or prevent effective changes in behavior? In coming to know our students so well, and in this time of funding by identification, are we truly encouraging transformation or are we inadvertently continuing the tyranny of the status quo?

The purpose of this paper is to call into question the progressive approaches of education that encourage teachers to analyze and interpret as a means to an end of coming to know students well. In building a case against interpretation, student-centred ideologies will be criticized for their emphasis on exposing deep and hidden truths. In doing so, I will turn to both the literature on psychoanalysis and then philosophy of power in order to argue for less interpretation of, and reduced data banks on, individual students. First, D. W. Winnicott's ideas on destruction and survival will be explored in the context of a concept he describes as object use. At the same time, a link will be established between the psychoanalytic setting and the classroom. Next, Michel Foucault's work on power and control will be discussed as it relates to making students known entities. Following that, a specific teacher-student relationship will be investigated and reviewed using the philosophical and educational works of Nel Noddings, Vivian Paley, Martin Buber, Paulo Freire and Friedrich Nietzsche. Last, this same relationship will be revisited using both Winnicott's and Foucault's ideas.

Winnicott's Use of an Object through Destruction and Survival

In his book Playing and Reality, psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott talks about his growing skill and confidence as an analyst who is able to wait until his patients arrive at their own understanding. He maintains that this understanding allows the patient to effect deep change within himself. The therapist's ability to wait, to withhold making interpretations, eventually leads the patient to develop the capacity to use the therapist in order to transform self and behavior. Winnicott explains that it "is the patient and only the patient who has the answers." (1) If one thinks of the teacher-student relationship as analogous to the analyst-patient one, then Winnicott's theory has significant implications for both teachers and students. Also, I believe that a classroom can be considered similar to the psychoanalytic environment insofar as they are successful only if relationships within them are predicated upon feelings of trust and acceptance. In this way, I think it is possible for us to gain some insight from Winnicott's ideas.

First, the teacher, like the analyst, serves as a guide while the student moves, actively and creatively, through the process of change. In order for this to be successful, however, the teacher needs to be accepting of both the student's independence in this process and his potential ability to develop the capacity to use the teacher. Borrowing from Winnicott's theory that the answers lie within the patient, one might say it is the student and not the teacher who is the agent of change. The extent of change, therefore, is dependent upon two things: how effectively the student uses the teacher and the teacher's competency in facilitating student learning and agency. I believe that this stands in direct contradiction to what happens in many classrooms today in which it is typically the teacher who acts to force change. She observes the student, looks for patterns of behavior, and reports her findings. She is revered as having the answers and is viewed as the one who fixes things.

Taking the locus of control out of the hands of the teacher will worry critics who prize, and place a priority on, the teacher as a skillful classroom manager and the classroom as a place of democracy. But I am not advocating for teachers to merely step aside or for anarchy to reign in the classroom. Rather, I am suggesting that the teacher consider adopting a different view of both her students and her role in the classroom. If Winnicott's ideas are to be successfully applied, the teacher must put students in positions of power, at the center of the transformational process, and create a classroom environment in which they are genuinely free to exercise that power. This will be uncomfortable for some, downright threatening to others. To put students in such a position requires not only faith but also that the teacher holds the underlying assumption that students are basically "good."

Next, Winnicott's focus moves from the analyst to the patient as he discusses how the patient develops the capacity to use the analyst. In particular, Winnicott outlines how this first begins as an isolated and individual experience. Strangely enough, this is called object-relating. Then, as the analyst withholds interpretations and allows the patient to develop trust in the psychoanalytic setting and techniques, the patient develops the capacity for usage. This change from relating to usage, Winnicott states, "means that the subject [patient] destroys the object [analyst]." (2) What does this mean for students and teachers? Well, this transition from relating to usage, Winnicott goes on to say, does not happen automatically or merely with maturation. Rather, the teacher, as one "good enough," (3) facilitates it. She does so not by coming to know her student well but by creating the circumstances that will allow the student to thrive and change. What are those circumstances? I believe that one of the most important circumstances is that the teacher does not interrupt the process of change within the student through her interpretations and analyses. In addition to abstaining from making interpretations and analyses, the second way a teacher facilitates this process is by surviving the student's attempts at destruction.

Ordinarily, one thinks of destruction in negative terms, as the impulse to destroy or ruin. But, in Winnicott's progression from relating to usage, destruction refers to the potential liability of the object (analyst) to not survive. If it does not survive, it retaliates instead. However, if there is survival, and not retaliation, the subject (patient) comes to love and value the object. Only now can the subject use the object that has survived. Therefore, the goal is to test the object. If the object survives, the subject can love and value it and then, most importantly, can use it. From an educational perspective, this has several implications. If the teacher retaliates, the student does not experience change. This could be due to a number of reasons. The teacher may retaliate by turning to measures of control, such as behavior plans or punishments and rewards. Conversely, she could talk with the student about his or her misbehavior. This conversation, though, would likely focus on her observations and analysis of the reasons for the student's actions. This would be tantamount to a second form of retaliation. In addition, the teacher's retaliation may not only hinder change but also disempower the student. For example, if the teacher retaliates by calling for more testing and observation of the pupil, this takes the transformative process out of the hands of the student and places it back with the teacher. Thus, the student's agency decreases. Last, if there is retaliation and not survival, the student loses out on the opportunity to use the teacher to enrich his own educational experiences.

On the other hand, if the teacher does not retaliate but survives destruction, then the student can use the teacher. At this point, the student and the teacher have the potential to enter into a relationship of a reciprocal nature. This relational notion of using the teacher is what distinguishes it from the negative connotations associated with instrumental use of others and therefore bears further discussion. As Winnicott explains, deep and lasting change occurs only after achieving object-usage. In this process of achieving object-usage, the student and teacher first exist as shared reality (in object-relating) and then separate entities. Thus, they maintain their individuality but are also connected. Winnicott's thoughts are echoed throughout the work of Jessica Benjamin. Benjamin speaks of this same process in her theory of intersubjectivity in which the self and other are seen as both distinct and interrelated. The student will not develop the capacity to use the teacher, and therefore his behavior will not change unless, as Benjamin states, the self "grows in and through the relationship to other subjects ... [and] that the other whom the self meets is also a self, a subject in his or her own right." (4)

Thus far, I have explained D.W. Winnicott's notion of using others and have related it to both the teacher-student relationship as well as the educational setting. Throughout this explanation, I have not once mentioned interpretive work. The teacher has not spent time collecting data, testing, analyzing or observing. Neither has the focus been on gathering information in order to create and implement a behavior plan or system of rewards and consequences. Instead, it has been the teacher's survival of the student's attempts to destroy her, achieved by withholding retaliation, that has enabled the student to both use the teacher and experience fundamental change.

Making the Student a Known Entity

Today, in contrast to Winnicott's ideas, there is a hunger for knowledge that is rife in most progressive and democratic pedagogies. For example, Winnicott's work reminds us that, as the student comes to develop the capacity to use the teacher to effect behavioral change, the teacher first has to be accepting of the student's independence and potential for success. At first glance, this acceptance seems reminiscent of Nel Noddings's confirmation, a vital component of practicing with an ethic of care. Noddings asserts, "When we confirm someone, we spot a better self and encourage its development." (5) Confirmation is grounded not in a Kantian single ideal or set of expectations applied to all. Rather, it is some admirable, or at least acceptable, unique potential in each individual that will come to fruition only in encounter or relation. Furthermore, confirmation requires trust and continuity. "It is a loving act founded on a relation of some depth," (6) and in this regard it is imperative that the teacher has a strong knowledge of the student and what he or she hopes to become. Unlike Winnicott's idea of acceptance, though, the teacher has to know the student well in order to confirm him. In fact, Noddings goes so far as to say that "we respond most effectively as carers when we understand what the other needs and the history of this need." (7) Typically, this knowledge of the other is constructed through meaningful, open-ended dialogue, when the teacher is fully engrossed in and motivated by the student's needs. Noddings argues that the teacher does not use a predetermined set of strategies to change behavior. Instead, the teacher first attributes the best possible motive for the student's misbehavior. She does not do this through abstraction but by attempting to understand the other's perspective. However, the teacher can only do this because she has both constructed a deep knowledge of the student and listens attentively to what he has to say in order to ascertain his needs. Therefore, Noddings's idea of confirmation employs all of the analysis and interpretation that is so noticeably absent in Winnicott's approach.

Often, this seeking to know can be found in every facet of student-centered schooling and because of the very nature, in its present form, of the institution of school itself. Michel Foucault explains this best when he discusses his philosophy of power. He describes power as "not something that is acquired, seized or shared, [not] something that one holds on to or allows to slip away." (8) Rather, it is relational and becomes apparent only when it is exercised. Now, the focus is on how power is exercised rather than by whom or from where. What are the practices, techniques and procedures that exercise power or bring power into effect? Power, Foucault suggests, is exercised by virtue of things being known and people being seen. In a school, one has only to look at assigned seating in classrooms, timetables, and marks to see how control is achieved by virtue of the physical structure. In addition to the physical structure, behavior plans and punishment are examples of the way behavior is supervised, largely, through coercive and normative sanction. When describing supervision of the physical structure, Foucault speaks of panoptism, or the "ensemble of mechanisms brought into play in all the clusters of procedures used by power." (9) Specifically, he refers to Jeremy Bentham's panoptism as a technological invention whereby surveillance is carried out in schools. Observers in this model then learn to develop files, systems of marking and classifying, and the integrated accountancy of individual records in order to compare, differentiate, hierarchize, homogenize and exclude. It seeks, in other words, to normalize.

This model of power can be seen in many aspects of student-centered assessment and evaluation policies. For example, under the guise of making evaluation more meaningful and student-directed, teachers may ask their students to self-assess and self-evaluate. For instance, students are asked to identify their strengths and weaknesses and are requested to comment on their own work. Borrowed from business models of micromanagement and growing out of contemporary procedures of individualization, Nikolas Rose outlines how, "in compelling, persuading and inciting subjects to disclose themselves, finer and more intimate regions of personal and interpersonal life come under surveillance and are opened up for expert judgment, and normative evaluation, for classification and correction." (10) In short, these measures are like examinations and the system of confessions that Foucault finds can be so useful for gathering information on individuals in order to judge and differentiate them. In essence, they permit the teacher to control the student.

Paulo Freire would agree with the premise that control is at the heart of teachers' analyses and interpretations of students and their behavior. Freire believes that teachers control their students by treating them as objects. Further, he outlines how dominant elites (which characterizes most teachers) regularly think without the people (students) but "do not permit themselves the luxury of failing to think about the people in order to know them better and dominate them more efficiently." (11) In this way, the student begins to respond to the values, goals and standards of the teacher. In doing so, the teacher desires to know how her student apprehends reality--but only so she can dominate him more effectively. To this end, Freire asserts:

   teachers make increasing use of the social sciences and technology,
   and to some extent the physical sciences as well, to improve and
   refine their action. It is indispensable for teachers to know the
   past and present of students in order to discern the alternatives
   of their futures and thereby attempt to guide the evolution of that
   future along lines that will favour their own interests. (12)

One could go so far as to suggest that the more the teacher knows the student, the more controllable he becomes. Ironically, this practice of self-disclosure is carried out daily in classrooms across North America under the pretense of democracy and empowerment.

The Incident

From power and control one segues easily into notions of authority. It is here that I wish to introduce a teacher-student relationship and particular incident from elementary school that will be used to further elucidate the arguments made thus far. The student, let us call him Jason, was in Grade 5 at the time and reading several grades below expected levels of performance. In addition, he had been abandoned by his mother at a young age and had entered into foster care as a toddler. Jason's behavior was typified by angry outbursts, a refusal to accept responsibility for his own actions, and a street sense that had enabled him to survive thus far but was not conducive to learning and socializing within a school setting. Subsequently, the district psychologist and behavior team identified Jason as being characterized by "severe behavior." Such identification already puts Jason in the dubious position of being a known entity, a case. According to Foucault, this means "it is the individual as he may be described, judged, measured, compared with others, in his very individuality; and it is also the individual who has to be trained or corrected, classified, normalized, excluded, etc." (13) The extent to which Jason was known could not be underestimated. He had undergone many hours of testing and observation until a diagnosis was reached and a label assigned. As a result, after much data collection and interpretation, I, as Jason's teacher, knew all about his life history, anger triggers, and academic standing. I knew of his strengths and weaknesses and about the difficulties he had relating to others.

Jason, as a case, was now labeled abnormal and viewed and treated as different from others, just as Vivian Paley's student, Lisa, viewed rejected classmates as different. However, as Paley remarks in her book, You Can't Say You Can't Play, "They are not different. What makes them outsiders is simply that they are treated as outsiders." (14) Together with Jason's classmates, I too treated him as different. I did so, first, through extensive observation, then by the imposition and maintenance (through surveillance and rewards) of a behavior plan and, finally, by excluding him from regular classroom participation every time he misbehaved. In doing so, we were all party to the social construction of Jason as an outsider and had gotten into the habit of excluding him. Ironically, the more this treatment continued, the more aggressive Jason became. His behavior did not improve, relative to existing standards of accountability, as I am sure Nietzsche would have predicted when he said that "punishment tames [makes hard and cold] men, it does not make them "better"--one might with more justice assert the opposite." (15) The rewards and punishments provided Jason were in fact not linked to the good and bad behavior. On the contrary, they were borne out of an arbitrary set of rules and consequences having been both historically, and in the present, willed to power. Then, those in authority, namely Jason's teachers, the school's administrators, and district policy makers, fashionably imposed them. Consequently, just as Paley remarked about how the approach is, generally, to help the outsiders develop the characteristics that will make them more acceptable to the insiders, it became my goal to change Jason's behavior. Swiftly and perhaps even unintentionally, it came to be that, "all the mechanisms of power which are disposed around the abnormal individual, to brand him and to alter him," were at work. (16)

In seeking knowledge about Jason and trying to diagnose what was wrong and correct it, I was wasting valuable time on Nietzsche's doer and passing moral judgments on his deeds. With Nietzschean ressentiment, I had projected onto Jason a label of evil and, as evidenced by my attempts to alter his behavior, I needed to place blame on him for behavior I could not control. I was not, as Nietzsche would suggest I should, looking at this situation from many different perspectives. I had assumed my role as informed authority figure and oppressor instead of controlling my "Pro and Con and [disposing] of them [in order to] employ a variety of perspectives and affective interpretations in the service of knowledge." (17)

In trying to analyze Jason's behavior, I never entered into a genuine dialogue with him. Although we had many conversations, these conversations were a tool for me to analyze him further, not to enter into dialogue. I believe, like Buber, that simply being present with another is a vital aspect of true dialogue. However, by establishing neither the necessary conditions nor adopting the appropriate attitude, I failed to be present with Jason. As Martin Buber so eloquently states, "I do not find the human being to whom I say You in any Sometime and Somewhere. I can place him there and have to do this again and again, but immediately he becomes a He or a She, an It, and no longer remains my You." (18) Once I had placed Jason in space and time in order to analyze his behavior, he became an It. Embarrassingly, I was exercising what Freire would call vertical authority and acting with an oppressor consciousness whereby everything around me, including this young student, was transformed into an object of domination. With hypocrisy and inalienable might, I wielded my authority over Jason with the establishment of this relationship of oppression.

One day, after a particularly explosive encounter, Jason pushed me into a bookcase. Strangely, I did not, to borrow Winnicott's idea, retaliate--as I had in every instance up to this point! It was as if the world had suddenly stopped and, for reasons for which I still cannot lay claim, I turned to Jason and told him, "I will never leave you. There's nothing you can do or say to your classmates or me that will ever make me leave you." I had gone forth in a most unteachable way, Buber would suggest, in that my reactions to Jason were neither prescribed nor preordained, not premeditated or as a result of interpreting his behavior. Rather, I had drawn that circle that excluded everything else and "the one needful thing [had become] visible: the total acceptance of the present." (19) That relation to Jason as a You was unmediated. It was so created because "nothing conceptual intervened between [the] I and You, no prior knowledge and no imagination; and memory itself [was] changed as it plunged from particularity into wholeness. No purpose intervened between [the] I and You, no greed and no anticipation; and longing itself [was] changed as it plunged from the dream into appearance." (20) I was not consciously thinking of prior run-ins, of behavior plans or analyses, though I wonder if somewhere deep in my head I had done a quick mental calculation as to their previous ineffectiveness? No. I was standing before an enraged boy and, with an open mind and strong heart, responded to his invitation (That push!) with words of presence. It was only through my survival of Jason's attempts to destroy me, and because I did not retaliate, that Jason and I then achieved mutual recognition. How did I know? As I outlined earlier, Winnicott talked about the subject coming to love and value the object that survives destruction. The next day, after greeting Jason as he entered the classroom, he responded by encircling me with the warmest and yet most unanticipated hug I have ever received.

Of course, the obvious question is whether or not Jason's behavior changed (and had he changed it). But before answering that question, I think another, perhaps more vital, question needs to be asked and answered: Had my behavior changed? Indeed, I no longer sought to analyze and interpret every situation with Jason after that significant push. Nor did I look for patterns of behavior, discuss anger triggers, or request any more testing. Just as Jason's misbehavior decreased as he developed the ability to use me (in the manner suggested by Winnicott), so did mine. Yes, my misbehavior--my desire to control and change his behavior and the acts I justified in this pursuit--diminished as well. I was no longer in search of truth and certainty through observation, analysis and interpretation. Over the ensuing months, Jason's violent outbursts lessened in both frequency and intensity. We were both transformed.

Conclusion

It is difficult, Nietzsche rightfully asserts, to explore truth, absoluteness and certainty when so much of science points in one direction over another. Are there really any absolutes or truths, he may ask? We must call everything into question; indeed, we must call into question the values of such absolutes as "absoluteness" and "certainty." We should not be ruled by laws and causes as Kant would have it, not be caught up in causality and thereby living oppressed in Buber's It-World. Nor, I propose, should we be so easily swept away by the tide of individualism that is so much a part of progressive learning objectives and teaching strategies. Rather, it is incumbent upon us to not only assume several different perspectives but to do so critically. As such, one might approach behavior and academic problems with less interpretation and analysis, just as Winnicott suggests. Ultimately, we may find that transformation is not only possible, but also even more likely, when the teacher searches less to know and understand the student and simply stands in relation with him. Indeed, as Buber would have it, this "can be done only if [the teacher] enters as a partner into a person-to-person relationship, but never through the observation and investigation of an object." (21)

Like Winnicott, Freire shares this commitment to the individual as having both the ability and the responsibility to be a liberator, to transform behavior and situations of oppression. He suggests that when the student resists and there are conflictual student-teacher relationships, then change is needed. Jason could certainly be described as resisting, and our relationship was most definitely a tumultuous one. In the end, Jason learned to confront reality critically, simultaneously objectifying and acting upon it. Then, by developing the capacity to use me, Jason transformed both of us. Once I survived Jason's attempts at destruction by not retaliating, I no longer had to analyze and interpret, to use behavior plans and punishments and rewards. I could be in dialogue with Jason, treat each occasion as a teachable moment, and assure him that I would never leave. No longer was there a controlled and deliberate separation of subject and object, self and other. Instead, the drive towards reconciliation had led to the teacher-student with the student-teacher. It became a classroom in which the traditionally vertical patterns of relationship were broken and replaced by ones in which I was "no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is herself taught in dialogue with the students." (22) No longer were actions analyzed, interpreted, restricted and prescribed, all of which had been limiting our ability to be in relation with each other. Ultimately, it was this relation that enabled Jason to grow and change as an individual. Our challenge as teachers, then, is to strive to always first be in relation with our students so that they may transform and flourish.

Jodi MacQuarrie

Simon Fraser University 

Notes

(1) D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (Middlesex, UK: Penguin, 1971), 102.

(2) Ibid., 105.

(3) For discussion on Winnicott's notions of the "good enough mother" and how this idea of "good enough" may relate to teachers, as well, see Winnicott, Playing and Reality, p. 104. Refer also to Charles Bingham's work, "Pragmatic Intersubjectivity, or, Just using Teachers" in the Philosophy of Education Society Yearbook, 2004, for a more detailed explanation and educational application of the teacher as one "good enough."

(4) Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 19-20.

(5) Nel Noddings, The Challenge to Care in Schools: An Alternative Approach to Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 1992), 25.

(6) Ibid., 25.

(7) Ibid., 23.

(8) Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (London, UK: Penguin, 1981), 94.

(9) For discussion on Bentham's "Panopticon" as a model for surveillance and the use of confession, see Michel Foucault's Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon (Brighton, UK: Harvestor, 1980).

(10) Nikolas Rose Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self, 2d ed. (London, UK: Free Association, 1999), 244.

(11) Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York: Continuum, 1970), 131.

(12) Ibid., 153.

(13) Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979), 191.

(14) Vivian Gussin Paley, You Can't Say You Can't Play (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 68.

(15) Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann & R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1967), 83.

(16) Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 199-200.

(17) Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, 119.

(18) Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Touchstone, 1970), 59.

(19) Ibid., 126.

(20) Ibid., 62-63.

(21) Ibid., 179.

(22) Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 44.