Everlasting love #lovelearning

'The only way to do great work is to love what you do.' said Steve Jobs, and here's another great quote: 'A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.' - Bob Dylan.

I haven't actually done a day's work for several years. Sounds bad, I know, but the truth is - I'm incredibly lucky to be in a job that I really love, and the bonus is that I get paid to do it. I previously wrote about this in a post called live to learn. Teaching is what I'm paid to do, but it leads to further reward for me because I learn a lot while I'm teaching. What I'm really in love with is learning. It's a love I have developed for my work that has gradually built over the last 20 or so years, and it shows no sign of waning. Any teacher will tell you that education is no bed of roses, but even through all the less positive aspects of the job, I still get a buzz out of helping others to learn, and seeing students achieve their full potential.


The Greek word for this kind of love is pragma. It describes an enduring, long lasting love that can survive the trials and tribulations of life. It's a love that has the resilience required to stand the test of time, but it also allows you to reflect back on the good times and not so good times, and appraise their value. Pragma is a love borne out of a realistic and rational consideration of the object of one's love. It's a love that lasts.

When applied to relationships, pragma represents a fair exchange, a symbiosis that benefits both parties. Those who are in pragmatic relationships often connected because of practical considerations, rather than physical attraction. This is the kind of love observed in older married couples, who have stuck to their vows and been faithful to each other throughout the years. This explains a lot to me about why I fell in love with teaching. It's because I can see the rewards I gain from the effort I put in to preparing, teaching and marking student assignments.

Teachers need pragma - to develop an 'everlasting love' - if they are to survive in a highly pressurised environment. Are you in love with learning?

Photo by eek the cat on Flickr


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

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.

All you need is love #lovelearning

Sixties pop group The Beatles sang 'All you need is love,' and then they broke up. It took them years to reconcile their differences. Love is a fragile thing. It requires nurturing with care. More songs, poems, stories and movies have been written about love than any other subject under the sun. It inspires, it overwhelms, it makes us weep, it makes us smile, or dance with joy. We are all subject to it, and we all succumb to its subtle powers at some point in our lives.

In yesterday's post I wrote about the many kinds of love we encounter, and highlighted the problem that we only have one word to describe them all. The Greeks had many words, one of which is Agape, an all encompassing, sacrificial love, borne out of devotion to the object of one's love. This kind of love is apparent in education when teachers go the extra mile and do extraordinary things to support their students and encourage them to achieve their potentials. It's the kind of love that prompts us to go on marathon runs to raise money for those less fortunate than ourselves. It's what prompts people to throw themselves unthinkingly into a rough sea to save a stranger from drowning. The deep relationship that can be forged between teachers and their students can lead to extraordinary results, and numerous authors have written about this.

Other kinds of love are equally important, not only in education, but in all facets of life. There is a form of love expressed in the Greek word Phileo which means brotherly love, friendship that does not involve any form of romantic involvement. It's where the word philanthropy comes from, to which the word Anglophile (love of English) owes its origins, and was also the inspiration for the name Philadelphia - the US 'city of brotherly love'. Phileo is a love that describes feelings of belonging, and a sense of common purpose. It's the same sense of belonging that Abraham Maslow described in his hierarchy of human needs. It's something we all crave, and is often experienced in social groupings, friendship circles and clubs, where children (and adults) share a common purpose and goals. It's also why many of us join social networks and use social media - we want to connect to others who have similar interests and backgrounds. We want to share. We want to belong.

Phileo is related to another Greek word, Koinonia, which is translated as sharing, participating together, and ultimately enjoying being together with others. Phileo is often needed when children are required to work together, and it's often the case that the groups who enjoy being together perform better. It's about fellowship - going through the same experiences and meeting challenges together. Collaborative learning is on the rise in modern pedagogy, because teachers have discovered that children tend to learn more when they discuss, compare and contrast their ideas. The essence of good collaborative learning is when students work together to achieve a common goal, and draw on each other's strengths and abilities to reach that end. Phileo love is the vital ingredient in this process, because it binds the group members together, and the outcome is mutual respect and support. In such rich learning contexts, love really is all you need.

Photo by Ibrahim Ludaj on Wikimedia Commons


All you need is love by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

What's love got to do with it? #lovelearning

The lecture my colleague Phil Selbie presented this week to my final year primary education students was quite unusual in a number of ways. To start off, he played Tina Turner's pop anthem, got everyone clapping along, and he even performed a bit of a dance too. His message was clear - what you are about to listen to is not an ordinary lecture. In fact Phil's lecture was about an unusual subject - at least, unusual in that we don't often hear about it in education - love. His theme was love of learning, love of education, and especially love for each other. He argued that the success of teaching and learning is dependent upon good teacher student relationships, and that love was paramount. Phil (his name, appropriately, is loosely derived from the Greek word Phileos, meaning brotherly love) made the remark that love is a word that is easily confused in our western culture, because in English at least, we only use the one word for what turns out to be a large spectrum of different kinds of emotion and attachment - a complex array of loves, from mild affection, through passion to absolute adoration.

Here's the problem: Teachers can get away with saying they love their subject. They can even say they love teaching at their school. But if a teacher to say they 'love' their students, what they mean might easily be misconstrued when in fact what they probably wish to express is that they are dedicated to their students and are fully committed to helping them achieve their potential. Teaching is seen as one of the 'caring professions' for good reason. The problem is that 'love' is a word that is too often misrepresented because it has many meanings, Phil argued, but teachers need to care deeply about their students if they are to help them to achieve their full potential. The Ancient Greeks, he showed, had many words for love (some accounts suggest about 30), each descriptive of different aspects of what it means to love, to care. This huge repertoire of words highlights the importance the Greeks bestowed on love. Love seems to have been eroded and undervalued in our technology driven and fragmented society - hence the lack of vocabulary to express it in all its forms.

The highest kind of love, said Phil, is Agape - unconditional love, devotion to others, possibly to the point of self sacrifice. Many teachers exhibit this kind of selfless love, he argued, staying behind after school, running after school study groups, sports training, exam revision groups, going the extra mile. This kind of selfless dedication to children's education largely goes unrewarded, but the school often relies on this kind of goodwill from its staff. For teachers who practice Agape love, the best kind of reward is to see students achieve and succeed where they would otherwise have failed. It is this kind of love for humanity that attracts people to the teaching profession, because they get the chance to make a real difference in young people's lives. As we all know, while doctors save lives, teachers make lives. Just the identification of being human together and feeling a connection to other thinking, feeling human beings - this is Agape love, and it should be central to the ethos of being an effective educator.

I intend to explore more of the ancient words for love and their implications for education in future posts.

Photo by Hu Totya on Wikimedia Commons


What's love got to do with it? by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.