*Instead of writing new posts for June, July and August I will revisit past posts, share the essence of the original post, reflect on its relevance for today and offer new insights and perspectives. I’ve been writing IN:SIGHT since September of 2016, so I will have plenty of material to draw from. I invite you to scroll back through the older posts to see what captures your inner eye or energizes the heart of your teaching.
September 7th, 2022—In my December 28th, 2020 post I explored the role of mystery in teaching. I wrote:
I look to nature as my first teacher about mystery. As a child I remember watching birds flying on delicate feathers, tadpoles maturing into frogs, and dragonfly nymphs splitting open to allow fully formed adults to emerge. My heart, more than my head, asked, how could this be happening? What mystery was going on that I couldn’t see, yet was so evident and powerful in the formation of life? More recently, the close visual-proximity of Saturn and Jupiter has invited me to contemplate the mysterious movement of the planets, stars, and constellations. The science of astronomy has tools, theories, and mathematical formulas to describe the push and pull of cosmic forces. It knows how the immense spaces and elemental energies of the universe act in relationship to each other. Yet for all its power and knowledge, it is not science that draws me to the birds and the stars, it is wonder and awe. Nature is my first teacher, but it is not my only teacher. As an educator, I’m reminded that the classroom is also central to my experience of mystery.
At the time of the December 2020 post, COVID was rampant, and all classes were online. I was wondering how I could connect with the various forms of mystery that inhabit the classroom when my students were separated by digital windows. I assumed that mystery was only present when people were physically present to each other. I learned how wrong I was. Mystery is a quality of learning that is available to all educators and learners, and a person’s physical location is not likely to diminish the inherent human quality to wonder, to experience awe, and to interact with that which is bigger than self and self knowing. In my December post I reflected on why I lost track of mystery as core to my teaching.
I know what this about. The transition from face to face to online instruction was too quick, a matter of days. My attention was focused on getting comfortable with the functional elements of Zoom and mastering a Learning Management System (LMS), while minimally advancing my goals of reflection, transformation, and transcendence.
Over the last two years I’ve continued my studies and reflections on the role of mystery in teaching and understandings of effective instruction. My explorations have led me to several truths and practices that were once more widely accepted when considering the role of mystery in the day to day lived experiences of educators.
The first truth is that mystery and its active form, mysticism, are central to the life energy of teachers committed to social activism. The theologian, Dorthee Soelle, in The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance works to “to erase the distinction between a mystical interior and a political exterior” (p. 3). She argues that mystery and mysticism, as an embodied experience, is universal and not confined to particular people or places. It is a mistake to think or to act as if only people of deep faith, who have committed their life to study and practice, can access the mysteries of life. To be fully engaged in the world, working toward liberation, requires attention to the mystical as a spiritual practice. bell hooks (2013), the noted educator and social justice advocate makes the link between mystery and activism even clearer when she argues for the necessity of spiritual energy when addressing the dehumanizing tendencies of education, “weariness often emerges as spiritual crisis. It is essential that we build into our teaching vision a place where spirit matters, a place where our spirits can be renewed and our souls restored” (p. 183).
My study of mysticism and mystery led me to an important story about the early roots of western higher education in antiquity, 2nd and 3rd centuries. At that time, the ecumenical city of Alexandria, Egypt was a thriving intellectual and spiritual community where Jewish, emergent Christian, and Greco-Roman scholars and theologians started schools. These early centers of learning, according to John McGuckin (2017), are the ancestral roots of modern-day institutions of higher education. Without glossing over the dehumanizing social and gender inequities associate with the early history of higher learning, I want to focus on a form of pedagogy that offers current educators a pathway to mystery as central to their craft.
In antiquity, there were two types of educators: pedagogues and mystagogues. Pedagogues employed rote memorization, strict rules, and physical punishment as educational tools. It is perhaps not surprising that they were known as the “ear benders”. Mystagogues relied on mystery, parable, and story to mystify the curriculum. Their goal was to break apart the forms of learning characteristic of the pedagogue and invite students into awe, complexity, and emergent knowledge.
It seems that the current field of education overly values the general practices and principles of the pedagogue over those of the mystagogue. As evidence I point to the standardization of teacher performance, the lists of curriculum standards guiding student learning, books and articles of effective educational practices, and an emphasis on efficiency as an indicator of educational success. I don’t want to dismiss the importance of structure and standardization. These pedagogical forms have value which I employ in my teaching.
I do want to invite into the conversation the wisdom of mystery and the pedagogical strategies of the mystagogues. What might your teaching look like if you worked to mystify, to stir the placid waters of learning, for your students? What if you brought them to the edge of not-knowing or wonder as an indicator of mastery? What are the questions, the mysteries you see, at the center of the content and subject matter you teach that your students can explore with you?