The “art of teaching” calls up well-known names in education like John Dewey, Mortimer Adler, Maxine Greene, and Parker Palmer. With each name comes a unique color or intonation defining teaching in different ways. Dewey alone described the teacher as an artist, lover, gardener, composer, social engineer, and more (Simpson, et. al. 2005). As a florilegium, the “art of teaching” encourages all the different metaphors that illuminate what it means for teaching to bloom.
Serving as a through line in many of these conversations, the art of teaching thrives through a kind of expressive personality. Friendly and open personalities often mark excellence in teaching: successful teachers have been shown to express their trust in students and willingness to invite students into their intellectual curiosity (Bain 2004). The freedom to convey these traits derives from the particular choices a teacher makes in the wording of their syllabus, the ways they draw student attention, their sensitivity to human emotion. This mélange cannot be prescriptive, for its elements are many. Instead, individual teachers, guided by theory, experience, principle, inspiration, and instinct, cultivate their particular approaches that, in turn, define their teacherly profile. As such, the art of teaching has been compared against the idea of “craft,” which typically denotes standards of practice and closely-defined products from field experts. Such an approach, so goes the argument, enervates the teacher’s ability to respond to the unique needs of students when designing, redesigning, or customizing a course (Lupton 2013). To borrow from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, there are as many kinds of teaching as there are teachers in the world.
However, this art can be hampered when the conditions governing learning in a course are not set by the teacher. As Maxine Green writes, when the teacher has freedom to establish conditions for learning that encourage curiosity and welcome diversity of opinion and representation, they create space for students to express the “energies and preferences” that invite further learning (Blue Guitar). A syllabus can emphasize these points; a course design pursuing particular learning objectives can be aligned to meet these principles; but only the ongoing perception and creativity of the teacher in daily decisions, narrative flow, directing of attention, and encouragement of student thought can cultivate a consistent learning environment as such. James Lang writes that, more than technology, design, objectives, and content, being fully present with students provides the most vital impression for them. Distracted teachers guided by technological prompts or measurable practices alone can only succeed so far; present teachers, committed to their students and invested to the point of their own excitement fueling student creativity, perform a balance and work of empathetic teaching that can only be called an art.
If art is human expression about the world, then teaching is human expression about the unfolding and ever-changing ways that we think and learn about the world. This art must be relational, for the ways we learn about the world cannot be pointed to and dissected, but only embodied and experienced: patience, empathy, collaboration, awe, and transformation.
