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IN:SIGHT Surrender



May 18th, 2022—Words have meaning beyond their obvious use and context. Words can often interact with the human heart in ways that open or close off opportunities for growth. In the field of education some words are employed in a combative stance to rally followers to one position or another. Words are never neutral in meaning, purpose or power. Even the word education, which is a natural human endeavor, is burdened with competing political, economic, spiritual and social outcomes. Conflicting purposes can be a good thing in that they expand the field of knowing by inviting in unexpected ways of seeing the world. Imagine trying to fully describe an object resting in the middle of a room from only one perspective. What cannot be seen is just as important to a complete description as what can be seen. And even if multiple perspectives are known but not integrated and compared, a rich description of that object will remain hidden.


There are some words describing education that are common and generally accepted as status quo. For instance, accountability, standards, outcomes, assessments and career readiness. These are good words for describing a particular purpose of education that values defined end goals. Yet other words are just as essential to the task of naming teaching but are less common in the vernacular. They are more fluid, organic and less tangible. For instance, heart, soul, and ineffable. Both sets of words are important, and both elicit different feelings and conceptual categories when uttered aloud.


Lately I have been exploring another set of words that seem to push beyond the broad categories of the outer-technical and the inner-spiritual. They invite me to drop below competing notions of what it means to be a teacher into a space of unification and harmony. A short list of those words include, yield, submission, conduit, acceptance, harmony, sacrifice, trust and surrender. For me these words are a natural extension beyond the broad and increasingly common use of heart and spirit to describe teaching. Although an important next step in my understanding of deep self as educator, I find the movement into this framing of education to be challenging and difficult.


These words are far from value neutral. They imply and require a letting go of elements of identity that are central to Western ways of defining self. Additionally, some of the words carry a strong religious connection and meaning which can be easily conflated with the more universal sense of their value to describe the core of teaching. Yet, for me they represent a deepening of my practice as an educator which includes a change in my internal state of being as well as my external actions in the classroom.


As a starting premise for this conversation let me note that I believe that every teacher, in fact every person, carries around a heart filled with potential. A source of meaning geared toward serving self and others in ways that are unique to each person. And that the current education system is not well tuned to the identification, cultivation or release of those talents to serve the greater good. For educators, the candle of truth that burns in their heart is the flame of their call to serve and care for students, emotionally, intellectually, spiritually and physically.


As I reflect on the potency of words to inform my practice, I can speak about the ones that are easier to hold and those that I’m prone to resist. On the easier side are acceptance, harmony and trust. On the harder end are words like surrender, conduit, submission and sacrifice. It is true that the easier words like acceptance and trust were difficult at one point in my career. This suggests, perhaps, that these descriptors of teaching as more developmental than hierarchical. In other words, it was not always easy to accept my gifts as a teacher, and at times I’m still hesitant to do so. But in accordance with my belief about the presence of unique gifts in each person, I have grown in acceptance of my inner-truths and my willingness to trust their reliability in my practice.


As I became more familiar and confident in the application of these skills, I found them to be both trustworthy and puzzling. Where do they come from? What responsibility do I have, if any, to use them for the greater good? Is it possible to overuse them? And at what point do I have to give up a sense of control over these gifts and simply accept their existence and act on their potential to foster change? It is this last question, the one related to control and will, that I’m most intrigued by these days.


In all cases, submission, surrender, and yield imply some form of letting go. This might be as minimal as a willingness to set aside technical responses to an educational dilemma and instead drawing on the less well-defined ineffable elements of teaching. A sort of teaching stance that is grounded in “I don’t know what else to do. I’ve tried everything I can think of, so what do I have to lose by trying something creative, novel or instinctual?” Letting go can be as complex and identity defining as releasing the hold of ego on notions of self. This form of letting go is much harder because the Western intellectual tradition invests the ego with power to inform personal and professional choices. Notions of self and ego are often intimately combined. To separate the two requires elements of will, agency and self-determination that are often not associated with formal schooling which values intellectual and social conformity.


Submission and surrender, for me, are the most difficult to live into. They carry a lot of connotations related to loss of autonomy and free will. Both words strike at the center of rational ways of identity formation, notions of individualism and self-determination. Submission and surrender imply some degree of compliance and acceptance of an external hierarchical force directing my decisions. And deeply rooted in this view of external power over autonomy is a sense of paternalism, the implication of a deficit in my teaching or personhood that needs remediation and control.


Yet I’m beginning to understand submission and surrender through a very different, asset-based, lens. Surrender and submission are not a giving up of autonomy, they are a claim of independence grounded in a deeper source of wisdom. In this case, to yield to my gifts is to empower deeper notions of self that go beyond the socially constructed qualities manufactured by ego and self-interest. I find that there is a sort of illogical logic that functions on the assertion that there is meaning and self-coherency on the other side of yielding. To take this leap into the coherent ineffable requires courage and vulnerability. I can only say that the more I accept and lean into the silent logic of my gifts, the more I surrender to their potential and the more freedom I experience. And the more my pedagogical choices feel authentic and in alignment with student learning needs, the freer I am to share my gifts with others, knowing that their source is inexhaustible.

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