The power of love #lovelearning

In my two most recent posts I considered the role love plays in education. This mini series on love was inspired by a lecture from a colleague entitled 'What's love got to do with it?' delivered to my final year primary education students. The key take away from his lecture was that all good relationships have a basis of love and good teaching needs good relationships. He bemoaned the fact that we only have one word to describe a large spectrum of loves, whereas the ancient Greeks had many. Using the word 'love' in many contexts does not necessarily connote romantic involvement or sexual intent, but can mean any number of other affections, but it is so often miscontrued, simply because we are forced to use the same word for many different kinds of love. An exploration of the words used in ancient Greece is therefore a useful exercise.

In my last two posts I outlined the place of agape in education. Agape is a self sacrificing love that causes people to do extraordinarily acts of kindness and altruism. I argued that many teachers have this kind of love, and this is what drives them to be so dedicated to their students. I also wrote about phileo - a brotherly kind of love that relishes in social connection and mutual experiences. It is this kind of love that we experience working in a great team, or involving ourselves in a club or association, and it is an essential ingredient in effective collaborative learning.

Another relevant kind of love in education is storge - often described as similar to parental love. It is the unconditional love parents have for their children, no matter what those children might do or say. Some would say this is a kind of love that is blind to imperfections, only seeing the best in our children and never holding a grudge. How does this apply in education? The educational theorist and psychoanalyst Carl Rogers once referred to 'unconditional positive regard' which is an acceptance of any student, regardless of their previous misdemeanors or track record. He argued that such acceptance of students promoted a better, more equitable form of education, because it presupposed nothing, and any achievement became possible. Students did not feel marginalised, nor did they feel the need to play up to a stereotype. Rogers' kind of unconditional pedagogy was person centred, where individual responsibility was placed upon each student.

Sometimes, teachers label certain students as 'trouble makers', or 'low in intelligence' or 'lazy', often on the word of other teachers, or rumours. This is a human attribute, and it is difficult to break free from this kind of bias. Also, as Rosenthal and Jacobson once demonstrated, such expectations of behaviour can evoke a biased form of pedagogy, where students eventually become what they are predicted to be - in a sort of self fulfilling prophecy. It is therefore important that as teachers, we give our students a second (and even sometimes a third or fourth) chance. If we care for our students as would a parent, and demonstrate that storge love.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons


The power of love by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.