A blog from the Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics (CRB)

The teacher as an example

PÄR SEGERDAHL Associate Professor of Philosophy and editor of The Ethics BlogTeachers want to affect their students. The intent, after all, is for students to acquire certain knowledge and skills. To achieve this, the teacher exhibits exemplars of what the students should know. The teacher talks in exemplary ways about the industrial revolution, about bioethical principles, or shows exemplars of what it means to “add 2” or what a “chemical reaction” is.

The students are then given exercises where they reproduce the exemplars in their own speech, writing and practice. Finally, they are examined. How well have they been affected by the educationally exhibited exemplars and by the exercises?

This description of the learning situation is greatly reduced. Not least because of its focus on the teaching of knowledge and skills. The teacher’s role is reduced to that of holding up exemplars of what the students should know (or be able to do).

But the teaching room contains one additional “exemplar” that is quite important: the teacher.

How does the teacher function as an exemplar? By being there as “a person who …” The teacher functions as a living example of a person who is engaged in history, in bioethics, in mathematics or in chemistry.

The teacher is an example of what one can be (historian, bioethicist …). Not just of what one should know.

The teacher’s exemplary role as “a person who…” can be problematic. Suppose that the physics teacher is a man who almost exclusively addresses the male students. He thereby shows (through his “exemplary” presence) that a physicist is (preferably) male.

Nevertheless, I submit that the teacher’s exemplary presence as “a person who …” is essential. Without it, the students become reduced. Education that puts too much emphasis on knowledge and skills may even make it exemplary that this is what an “educated person” is: A one-dimensional functionary equipped with certain knowledge and skills.

Who desires to be that? Is it even possible? Or is it to overlook what we inevitably are: living persons who…?

Pär Segerdahl

We care about education

1 Comment

  1. Julia

    Very interesting! This being aspect is especially relevant when we talk about teaching ethics.

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