Among School Teachers: Bearing Witness as an …€¦ · Bearing witness to teaching and teachers...

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AMONG SCHOOL TEACHERS: BEARING WITNESS AS ANORIENTATION IN EDUCATIONAL INQUIRY

David T. Hansen

Department of Arts and HumanitiesTeachers College, Columbia University

Abstract. In this writing, David Hansen illuminates the aesthetic, moral, and epistemic meaning ofbearing witness to teaching and teachers by drawing upon a recently completed field-based endeavorthat included extensive school visits. Hansen shows how bearing witness can bring the inquirer close tothe truth of teaching. However, the witness must undertake ethical work to ready her- or himself for thetask. Even such readiness, which must be continuously re-won on each occasion, guarantees nothing.The witness in the classroom must work with faith, hope, and a deep sense of the worthwhileness ofteaching. Hansen suggests that the witness’s practice as well as testimony regarding the work can havea valuable influence on the consciousness, and conscience, of all who concern themselves with teachingand teachers.

… not so much looking for the shapeas being availableto any shape that may besummoning itselfthrough mefrom the self not mine but ours.

— A. R. Ammons, “Poetics”

I have seen such beautiful things in the world which, apartFrom desire, I should never have seen. I bless desire,the fault of its satisfaction; the fault of the world.I bless that fault: that, in its offeringdenying us all, denies us nothing,offers the world to us, not to have.

— William Bronk, “Unsatisfied Desire”

In recent years, philosophers of education have undertaken fieldwork inschools and other settings in order to address educational questions traditionallyapproached through theoretical analysis. As I understand these colleagues’ work,their aim is not to transfigure themselves into social scientists. Rather, they aspireto generate fresh occasions for normative inquiry. Their work fuses three relatedmoves: engaging firsthand what is happening in an educational setting, reflectingupon it through a philosophical lens, and posing questions about what could orshould be happening on a broader scale that is more just, closer to a conception ofthe good, and/or more beautiful. These scholars’ philosophically based fieldworkhas illuminated value-laden aspects of current policy, practice, and research thatmight otherwise remain in the shadows. Their work both complements andproblematizes social science–based research. On the one hand, philosophers haveexcavated epistemic and moral assumptions underlying various claims, and they

EDUCATIONAL THEORY Volume 67 Number 1 2017© 2017 Board of Trustees University of Illinois

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have shed new light on the meanings people ascribe to their work and lives. On theother hand, philosophers have shown how harmful narrowly framed social sciencefindings can be in the absence of larger normative considerations.1

The act of engaging in fieldwork can also be understood as a medium forbringing philosophy into the world rather than regarding it solely as a commentaryon the world. The French expression la philo descends dans la rue can be translatedas “philosophy enters the lived world.” The philosopher moves out into the openair. The philosopher immerses her- or himself in the experience of fellow humanbeings. Through this proximity, the philosopher becomes implicated in whattranspires. This posture leads, in a reciprocal manner, to a reversal of the idiomaticexpression. La rue descends dans la philo: The lived world enters philosophy. Thephilosopher becomes a conduit for its entrance. Philosophy becomes receptive, firstand last, and analytical in between. (Here and elsewhere I understand “analytical”in an everyday sense rather than as a distinctive approach in philosophy.) Fieldworkforms one doorway, among others, for the world to come into philosophizing andto influence its trajectory, even as the philosophizing yields insight into whatthe world has brought forth. Philosophizing becomes a mode of thinking theworld or, more precisely, thinking aspects of it. It is saturated by heeding thoseaspects, through opening oneself to their reality, and by the cumulative influenceof personal experience including significant reading and discussion with others.

In this article, I characterize the idea of bearing witness to teaching andteachers as an orientation in educational inquiry. The orientation puts the inquirerinto question even as the inquirer ponders events in the school and classroom.Witnessing necessitates ethical work on the self. To respond to the world of theteacher in a nonobjectifying manner, the person must cultivate continuously heror his aesthetic, moral, and reflective capacities. At the same time, bearing witnessnecessitates an ever-deepening attentiveness to what Jan Zwicky calls “resonant

1. This literature is growing steadily, but see, among others, Lawrence Blum, High Schools, Race,and America’s Future: What Students Can Teach Us about Morality, Diversity, and Community(Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2012); Walter Feinberg, For Goodness Sake: Religious Schoolsand Education for Democratic Citizenry (New York: Routledge, 2006); and Meira Levinson, No CitizenLeft Behind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). A noteworthy recent symposium on thetopic is Doris A. Santoro and Terri S. Wilson, eds., “Philosophy Pursued through Empirical Research,”special issue, Studies in Philosophy and Education 34, no. 2 (2015). For related discussions, seeNicholas C. Burbules and Kathleen Knight Abowitz, “A Situated Philosophy of Education,” Philosophyof Education 2008, ed. Ronald D. Glass (Urbana, IL: Philosophy of Education Society, 2008): 268–276;Meira Levinson and Anne Newman, eds., “Symposium on Philosophy of Education, Empirical Research,and Policy Analysis,” special issue, Theory and Research in Education 13, no. 1 (2015); and AndresMejia, “My Self-as-Philosopher and My Self-as-Scientist Meet to Do Research in the Classroom: SomeDavidsonian Notes on the Philosophy of Educational Research,” Studies in Philosophy and Education27, nos. 2–3 (2008): 161–171.

DAVID T. HANSEN is the Weinberg Professor in the Historical and Philosophical Foundations ofEducation and Director of the Program in Philosophy and Education at Teachers College, ColumbiaUniversity, 525 W. 120th Street, New York, NY 10027; e-mail<[email protected]>. His current areas ofscholarship are the philosophy and practice of teaching, conceptions of the relation between philosophyand education, and the criticism of educational values.

Hansen Among School Teachers 11

particulars.”2 These are moments, actions, expressions, and gestures that, amongother possibilities, bring the being of a human being into presence, howeverfleetingly. Such particulars “resound with being.” They “gather” the wholeness ofthe person. These evocative terms shed light on a perfectly recognizable experiencethat can happen anytime, anywhere, when a person suddenly and starkly sees inanother’s gesture the fullness, the singular substantiality, the sheer humanity, ofher or his reality. In glimpsing such resonant gestures, it is as if a cloud parts, afog lifts, and the person’s “is-ness” and “there-ness” in the world is truly there.This familiar, unplannable event can also occur when a person absorbs a new lens,perhaps through the experience of art, which hitherto she or he never imagined toexist.

To bear witness to teaching and teachers is to hone one’s receptivity toresonant particulars in the school and classroom. The posture calls for apatient, ungrasping approach toward the “quiet testimony” such particularsexpress. Quiet testimony, as Shari Goldberg elucidates the term in her study ofnineteenth-century American literature, emerges from attention to events andthings that typically go unnoticed. Quiet testimony marks “a range of encoun-ters undistinguished by official recognition.”3 Goldberg shows, however, thatsuch encounters constitute “a catalyst for a new approach to the world.”4 Oncewitnessed, the world of people, events, and things is no longer only a world tobe analyzed and used. Through heeding the quiet testimony of the everyday, theperson acknowledges reality in a new key. The person transforms even as her orhis horizon of reality broadens and deepens. The person can no longer move inthe world in the same way: the world is richer, more fragile, more precious. Thisnewly won responsiveness morphs into a new sense of responsibility. Bearingwitness to teaching and teachers is at once an education in responsiveness toeducational work, and an experience of what it can mean to share responsibilityfor education.

In what follows, I will flesh out these compressed remarks while tetheringmyself to their source: a recently completed, long-term field-based endeavor thatpivoted around two closely related questions. These were: What does it mean to bea person in the world today?, and What does it mean to be a person in the role ofteacher today? Working with two doctoral research assistants, I devoted portions ofa year to a pilot study with two primary school teachers, in which I explored whatit might mean to pursue the questions through fieldwork rather than in solelytheoretical fashion. Buoyed by how responsive the teachers were to the questions,as well as by how vividly their classrooms revealed the play of being and becominga person, I organized a two-year-long inquiry involving sixteen teachers who work

2. Jan Zwicky, “What Is Lyric Philosophy?,” Common Knowledge 20, no. 1 (2013): 21.

3. Shari Goldberg, Quiet Testimony: A Theory of Witnessing from Nineteenth-Century AmericanLiterature (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 150.

4. Ibid., 14.


in eight different public schools in the same large, culturally diverse urban setting.The undertaking included extensive classroom visits. I devoted seventy-four daysto the fieldwork, typically sitting in on a classroom for two hours or more. Theeffort also included twenty-one three-hour-long dinner and discussion meetingswith the participating teachers, and forty-two individually recorded interviewswith them.5 These time- and space-intensive activities brought me close to thefront line of teaching in schools, as well as close to the question of what it meansto be a person in the role of teacher. They drew me into bearing witness to teachingand teachers.

The first section below examines the concept of bearing witness. My intentis not to venture a comprehensive account of the idea, but rather to introducesome key elements in witnessing as an orientation toward teaching and teachers.The subsequent sections render bearing witness from a lived or experiential pointof view. These sections will not take the form of a traditional philosophical,normative argument. Nor will they constitute poetry or literature, which havetheir own often unspoken normative dimensions. Rather, I intend the sectionsto embody a responsive orientation toward teaching and teachers that I hope, torecast a familiar term of art, will “speak” for itself. I follow this path because whilewitnessing is never complete until it has been shared and acknowledged by others,6

this truth does not imply that the communicating of it is necessarily separatefrom the witness itself. Rather than writing “about” witnessing, or articulating apoint-by-point theory of it, what I endeavor to write here constitutes a continuationof the witness I enacted in the classroom. Put another way, there is no break in thephilosophizing, as if being in the field is entirely “practical” while addressing thelatter’s features is where “philosophy” kicks in.7

I will try throughout to steer clear of representing teaching and teachers, in thesense of objectifying, appropriating, or speaking for them. But to realize this aim,I must also avoid representing or objectifying myself and the endeavor that is thesource of the witness. I do not know how successful this effort will be, since a finalproviso is that I cannot claim to have actually attained the platform of witness. AsI understand the concept, its ethical and moral entailments deny the individualsuch certainty. My hope is to put the orientation forward in a manner that mightserve scholars and teachers in coming to closer quarters with the unfathomablydeep educational meanings in teaching and teachers’ experience.

5. For details about the origins, formation, and activities of the endeavor, see David T. Hansen, JasonThomas Wozniak, and Ana Cecilia Galindo Diego, “Fusing Philosophy and Fieldwork in a Study of Beinga Person in the World: An Interim Commentary,” Studies in Philosophy and Education 34, no. 2 (2015):159–170. The undertaking incorporated a number of orientations — for example, the relation betweenfield-based and philosophical anthropology — in addition to what I have come to understand as bearingwitness.

6. John Durham Peters argues this point in his “Witnessing,” Media, Culture and Society 23, no. 6 (2001):707–723. I draw on his detailed analysis of the concept in the section that follows.

7. I think of the poet Wallace Stevens’s lines from his “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” (XII.1–2):“The poem is the cry of its occasion,/ Part of the res itself and not about it.”


An Introduction to the Idea of Bearing Witness toTeaching and Teachers

Bearing witness is a familiar if diversely employed term. At one end of itsspectrum of meaning, witnessing conjures a detached, neutral standpoint. At theother end, it evokes images of passionate moral solidarity with others. The witnessmay inhabit the “role” for no more than minutes. Alternatively, the witness’sexperience may transform her or his life, as well as the lives of others. Witnessingtakes its form and substance in response to that which calls it forth in the firstplace.

The witness in court attests to the facts of a case, and ideally does so withthe reliability and impartiality of a machine. The “expert” witness operates froma different standpoint. This person brings to bear in-depth knowledge combinedwith professional judgment. The expert witness is counted on to offer interpretiverather than solely factual remarks. In contrast, the witness at a wedding, a bank, ora law office signs a formal document and, through this bare act alone, attests to thevalidity of what has transpired. The religious witness expresses a revelation or aninsight into scripture, offering her- or himself as a vehicle of religious truth. Thesocial witness rejects a hierarchical social order and elects to live among the poor,the downtrodden, the abandoned, and the marginalized. There is no “blueprint”for the religious or social witness to follow (and the roles may fuse, as well). Everysuch witness ultimately charts a unique path.

Many persons have borne witness to large-scale human trauma, such as theatrocities of World War II. Here, the witness calls for a moral awakening, for justice,for remembrance, for a reckoning, even while meticulously recording the factsof violence. There is an ever-growing literature in this trajectory of witnessing.8

Scholars in education have begun to draw out its ramifications for pedagogy,curriculum, and research.9 As we will see, the idea of bearing witness to teachingand teachers that I elucidate takes its point of departure from a different, though

8. See, for example, Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans.Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 2002); Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony:Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992); JamesHatley, Suffering Witness: The Quandary of Responsibility after the Irreparable (Albany: State Univer-sity of New York Press, 2000); Kelly Oliver, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 2001); and Roger I. Simon, The Touch of the Past: Remembrance, Learning, and Ethics(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). I think also of the powerful, unclassifiable oeuvre of the literaryscholar W. G. Sebald, especially his The Emigrants, trans. Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions,1996); and The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions, 1998). Sebald’s wit-ness rarely takes the form of overt, normative argumentation, but his sentences pulse with a profound,passionate concern for justice and remembrance that truly addresses the attentive reader.

9. See, for example, Ann Berlak, “Teaching and Testimony: Witnessing and Bearing Witness to Racismsin Culturally Diverse Classrooms,” Curriculum Inquiry 29, no. 1 (1999): 99–127; David T. Hansen,“W. G. Sebald and the Tasks of Ethical and Moral Remembrance,” Philosophy of Education 2012, ed.Claudia W. Ruitenberg (Urbana, IL: Philosophy of Education Society, 2012): 125–133; and MichalinosZembylas, “Witnessing in the Classroom: The Ethics and Politics of Affect,” Educational Theory 56, no.3 (2006): 305–324. For an insightful account of Roger Simon’s important work on the relation betweenwitnessing trauma and education (The Touch of the Past, see note 8 for the full citation), see Mario


morally allied, origin with regard to fundamental questions of human respect. Iwrite mindful of the dignity of dedicated teachers, and how misperceived, or simplynot “seen” at all, much of their work remains in today’s zeitgeist. In a broad sense,bearing witness is an important response to teaching’s seemingly perpetual stateof precariousness and vulnerability to shocks from everywhere.

As mentioned in the introduction, bearing witness to teaching and teachersconstitutes, among other things, an attempt to move beyond objectification andits attendant forms of representation, even while retaining fidelity with the moraland intellectual lineaments of the practice.10 The orientation mirrors aspects ofthe familiar forms of bearing witness touched on above.

Facts and Truth

Like a trustworthy witness in court, the witness to teaching and teachersmust be scrupulous about fact and dedicated to truth. Plato nicely illustrated, longago, the moral, epistemic, and political ramifications of this requirement. Nearthe start of the Republic, two young Athenians, Polemarchus and Cleitophon,breathlessly debate which of them has been a faithful “witness” (M𝛼𝜌𝜏𝜐𝜌ε𝜔) tothe tense encounter going on between Socrates and Thrasymachus. Cleitophonhas been a poor listener, or is reading things into his hearing. He misconstruesThrasymachus’s position, and Polemarchus points this out. Socrates intervenes tosay the issue does not need to be resolved, so long as Thrasymachus in fact meantwhat Cleitophon has just stated. Thrasymachus mockingly rejects the suggestion,replying that Socrates himself is a “false witness” who is trying to distort theargument in order to triumph (340a–341c2). Through this vivid exchange, Platodramatizes the stakes in the ensuing dialogue about justice and education. Truthitself is on the line: not just propositional truth (important as that is), but poetictruth, in the sense of “the truth of a friendship” or “the truth of a teacher’s life,”as well as ethical truth, in the sense of spotlighting how “true” persons are —whether they are “oriented” — toward justice and goodness. For Plato, the idea ofwitnessing calls into play the integrity, the seriousness, and the motivation of theparticipants. As I show below, these stakes hold for bearing witness to teachingand teachers.

Di Paolantonio, “Roger Simon as a Thinker of the Remnants: An Overview of a Way of Thinking thePresent, Our Present… ,” Studies in Philosophy and Education 34, no. 3 (2015): 263–277.

10. The literature on teaching as a moral and intellectual endeavor is wide-ranging in its purview.See, for example, John Dewey, “Moral Principles in Education,” in John Dewey: The Middle Works,1899–1924, vol. 4, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977), 265–291;Philip W. Jackson, Robert E. Boostrom, and David T. Hansen, The Moral Life of Schools (San Francisco,CA: Jossey-Bass, 1993); Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Virginia Richardson and Gary D. Fenstermacher,“Manner in Teaching: The Study in Four Parts,” Journal of Curriculum Studies 33, no. 6 (2001): 631–637;Matthew N. Sanger and Richard D. Osguthorpe, eds., The Moral Work of Teaching and of TeacherEducation: Preparing and Supporting Practitioners (New York: Teachers College Press, 2013); HughSockett, Knowledge and Virtue in Teaching and Learning: The Primacy of Dispositions (New York:Routledge, 2012); and Alan Tom, Teaching as a Moral Craft (New York: Longman, 1984).


“Called” to Witness

Unlike the witness in court, the witness to teaching and teachers is not calledto testify by an external, institutional source. Rather, to pose the matter metaphor-ically, the witness is called by the practice itself, and by the fate of the men andwomen who enact it. The witness looks out — literally, out in the world — forinsight, knowledge, understanding, and, above all, wisdom about the practice. Likea good qualitative researcher, the witness undertakes careful, self-reflective inquirythat includes appropriate planning, note taking, and systematic communicationwith others involved. Moreover, the inquirer-as-witness to teaching must haveintimate knowledge of the work, garnered through experiences such as one’s ownteaching and working with teachers, and through systematic study of teachers’ tes-timonials, philosophical and empirical research, and other sources such as film. Allsuch requisites fall under an umbrella of normative rather than solely descriptiveor analytical considerations. The witness does not search for causal or correlationalexplanations of phenomena in teaching. Rather, the witness hopes to gain insightinto the meaning, the import, and the truth of the practice.

Bearing witness to teaching and teachers is at once an ethical and moral ratherthan solely epistemic endeavor. Unlike the witness in court, who in many casesneed not prepare at all, the witness to teaching must work on the self, cultivatingaesthetic, moral, and reflective responsiveness to what Zwicky calls resonantparticulars. Unlike the expert witness, whose stance is clinical and detached, thewitness to teaching exposes her or his understanding of the work, and of the humanbeings who enact it, to constant questioning through the very experience of beingpresent in the educational setting.

Wonder and Concern as the Mainspring of Witnessing

The witness in court, having provided the requested testimony, is excused andmay henceforth never look back on the experience. In contrast, the witness toteaching and teachers — who could also be a teacher — is permanently markedby the undertaking. The person’s perception will never be the same again. She orhe may feel compelled, in the most disparate of situations, to testify, in the broadsense at hand here, about what teaching is and what it entails — at faculty meetingsin schools or universities, in the witness’s own work with students, at conferencesand other professional gatherings, and with family, friends, and others. The witnessdoes not presume to speak for teaching and teachers, as a self-appointed “guardianof the faith.” Rather, the witness speaks from a platform of wonder and concerngenerated through a long-term engagement with the terms of the work.

In my own case, the wonder springs, in part, from the very fact that somethingcalled “teaching” truly does happen or, put differently, happens truly: that personswho have metabolized the role really can have a good holistic influence on others.This fact is so obvious that it is almost impossible to feel the question of how itcould possibly have emerged from a world composed of earth, wind, water, andfire. As I will suggest later in the essay, the sense of wonder is (ideally) will-less,though not self-less.


Alongside deep wonder resides deep concern for the continued integrity ofteaching as a moral and intellectual endeavor — indeed, as a calling to many of itspractitioners — under conditions of contemporary educational policymaking. Ashas been amply documented in the literature, much of today’s social engineeringpolicy and research nexus treats teachers as, in effect, interchangeable functionar-ies carrying out externally mandated dictates. It operates from a deficit model ofteachers that involves auditing teachers’ behavior rather than addressing them aspersons with experience. It holds them accountable without providing meaning-ful grounds for them to give an actual account of their work. Current policy hasseriously harmed teachers’, and teacher educators’, morale.11

Teachers should be poised to give an account of their work. They take upthe role by choice and, in so doing, inherit a profound privilege and obligation.The majority of the hundreds of teachers whom I have known in my careeralready account for what they do, or at least attempt to do so: to their students,their students’ parents, their administrators, their close colleagues, and their ownconsciences. With the right support, they could offer more to the larger communityof educators. That support would include the gift of time and opportunitiesfor thoughtful, intellectual discussion and reflection. One of the rationales forinitiating the field-based inquiry at issue here was precisely to listen, over asubstantial period of time, to serious-minded teachers talk about what they do,and why, within an ethos of primordial questions about being and becoming aperson. I was not interested in “studying” their practice with an eye to adding toour “knowledge base.” Rather, I sought proximity in an ethical sense of that term.I sought teachers’ company: to be near them and their work over a long course oftime, and to let this “presence” wash over me. I sought to accompany them: tolook at teaching, in part, through an awareness of their eros as teachers, that is, oftheir deepest purposes and hopes about education’s promise.12

The interlacing of deep concern with boundless wonder resides at the verysource of bearing witness to teaching and teachers. The integrity and the merit ofthe witness, such as it is, depend on wonder and concern remaining in dynamic

11. For discussion of this point, see Christopher Day and Qing Gu, Resilient Teachers, ResilientSchools: Building and Sustaining Quality in Testing Times (London: Routledge, 2014); Brad Olsen andDena Sexton, “Threat Rigidity, School Reform, and How Teachers View Their Work Inside CurrentEducation Policy Contexts,” American Educational Research Journal 46, no. 1 (2009): 9–44; Doris A.Santoro, “Teaching’s Conscientious Objectors: Principled Leavers of High-Poverty Schools,” TeachersCollege Record 113, no. 12 (2011): 2670–2704; Doris A. Santoro, “Good Teaching in Difficult Times:Demoralization in the Pursuit of Good Work,” American Journal of Education 118, no. 1 (2011): 1–23;Doris A. Santoro, “‘I Was Becoming Increasingly Uneasy about the Profession and What Was BeingAsked of Me’: Preserving Integrity in Teaching,” Curriculum Inquiry 43, no. 5 (2013): 563–587; Sockett,Knowledge and Virtue in Teaching and Learning; and John S. Wills and Judith Haymore Sandholtz,“Constrained Professionalism: Dilemmas of Teaching in the Face of Test-Based Accountability,”Teachers College Record 111, no. 4 (2009): 1065–1114.

12. I am preparing a manuscript on the teachers’ experience in the endeavor, which will addresstheir overall responses to it as well as their testimony regarding the guiding questions about being aperson. This manuscript will consider relations between researchers and teachers, teachers and students,teachers and their colleagues, teacher educators and teacher candidates, and associated topics.


play. Wonder embodies, typically in an unspoken manner, the amazement of lovefor life, that it “is” rather than is not. As I sketch below, wonder makes possiblea mode of heeding teaching and teachers that fuses listening, perceiving, and“receiving” from them the truth of teaching. But wonder alone may dissipate intothe ether, leaving no trace, issue, or sign that others might note and act upon.Concern is equally crucial in bearing witness to teaching and teachers. The witnessenacts a reflective, critical solidarity with the practice, as mindful as possible ofthe forces undermining it while guarding against becoming a one-sided or naïveapologist. The witness works in a spirit of vivid, energizing remembrance oflong-standing educational values. This posture is not one of conservative nostalgiafor a past in teaching that never was. Rather, it is a forward-looking, questioningmode of keeping visible values such as the importance and dignity of the person inthe role of teacher and of the persons in the role of student. But concern alone maybecome narrow, brittle, and shrill. Conceived symbiotically, concern and wonderhumanize one another.13

Witnessing Teaching and Teachers

Fieldwork and the idea of immersion in a form of life often go hand in hand.Immersion allows the inquirer to learn how to move in a knowing way in thepreviously unfamiliar setting. The inquirer learns to identify singular events anddoings, and to engage in increasingly refined looking, listening, and note taking.

What does immersion mean for the witness to teaching and teachers? Who orwhat is a “knowing” witness, in the dual sense of knowing her or his way aroundthe practice and of being a witness upon whom one can rely? To address thesequestions, I will show how bearing witness mirrors aspects of a pilgrimage, ofpastoral work, and, in metaphorical terms, of “paying a visit to being.” Along theway I will interject several vignettes in which I render resonant particulars drawnfrom my field notes.14 As we will see, the experience of witnessing incorporatesrhythmic unpredictability and other, related tensions.

Witnessing and Pilgrimage

A pilgrim walks in faith and hope. The pilgrim has faith that there is somethingprofoundly worthy to see, and hope that the pilgrimage will deepen the sense ofmeaning and purpose in life, perhaps not just for the pilgrim but for others. Forexample, the moral pilgrim, to adopt a term of art from Iris Murdoch,15 may not

13. In this writing, I attend primarily to responses to wonder and their consequences, rather thanelucidate in an explicit manner resources to address the concern. To articulate the latter in an adequateway requires its own distinctive treatment — which depends, importantly, on first laying out the termsof bearing witness, as I am attempting to do here. A related note is that I believe a written witness canissue, through itself, a compelling invitation to educators, at whatever level of the system, to reexaminetheir sensibilities with regard to teaching and teachers: an endeavor that can lead to many modes ofpractical action.

14. For additional vignettes and further elaboration of the core ideas discussed here, see David T. Hansen,“Bearing Witness to Teaching and Teachers,” Journal of Curriculum Studies 49, no. 1, (2017): 7–23.

15. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Ark, 1985), 53.


know what the moral will actually look like as she or he heads out to find it inthe world. But the individual has faith it is there, and hope that the pilgrimage canhelp sustain it, in part by spreading the word about its reality.16

From the very moment I conceived the endeavor at hand here, and from thevery first step I took to visit a teacher’s classroom, I was carried by faith in theworthwhileness of teaching, and by hope that this inquiry might shed light on thatworthwhileness. Like Murdoch’s moral pilgrim, I did not know in advance what Iwould encounter in the school and classroom, or when or how I might encounterit. I felt moments of serious doubt that I would wend my way toward seeinganything. Would I be a pilgrim who failed to reach a hoped-for goal? Diogenesthe Cynic reportedly walked the streets of ancient Athens while holding a lamp,in broad daylight, seeking an honest person — and yet, by his reckoning, failingto do so. Immanuel Kant, whose account of morality remains highly influential,confronted directly the question whether humanity can in fact have confidencethat there has ever been a single action undertaken from genuinely moral ratherthan instrumental or self-serving motives.17 The pilgrim seems to face a permanentdanger: that wishing and fantasy will replace hope. The inquirer’s yearning maymanufacture, out of itself, what the inquirer aspires to see.

Nonetheless, I was borne along by the fusion of wonder and concern touchedon previously: wonder about the sources of beauty, truth, and goodness in teaching,and concern about the future of the practice that, in effect, forced me to becomeconscious of the necessity of faith and hope.18

The horrific shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, occurred on Friday, Decem-ber 14, 2012. The following Thursday, I found myself sitting in my usual cornerspot in Karolina’s Grade 5 classroom. Precisely at 10:30 a.m., the school princi-pal, Gracelyn Jones, came on over the loudspeaker, located above a blackboard onthe east wall of the classroom. She announced, in careful, precise tones, that sheneeded everyone’s attention because they were about to practice what she called“a safety drill.” Gracelyn let the words sink in for a few moments. Karolina’s fifthgraders instantly quieted down, without any urging from her or her classroomcolleague, Jolie, a special education instructor. Gracelyn continued: “We are goingto have a safety drill. First I am going to describe each of the steps you will need totake. Then, we will have the drill.” Again, she paused, before explaining that whenthe drill is announced, the teacher will lock the classroom door, while everyonewill line up along the wall in such a way that none of them can be seen from theclassroom door window. They are to stand there, silently, until an announcementstating the drill is over.

16. On this point, see Annette Baier, “Secular Faith,” in Revisions: Changing Perspectives in MoralPhilosophy, ed. Stanley Hauerwas and Alasdair MacIntyre (South Bend, IN: University of Notre DamePress, 1983), 203–221.

17. Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, 2nd ed., trans. Lewis White Beck(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1990), 23, passim.

18. By prior agreement, in the vignette that follows and elsewhere all names are pseudonyms.


Once more, a pregnant pause.

Then: “This is a safety drill.”

I had been present for a number of fire drills during my visits to the teachers’schools. In every instance, students seized the event as an occasion to joke, laugh,and tease, even as they wound their way out of the classroom and building.In this case, however, Karolina’s students bolted out of their seats and, withno talking whatsoever, squeezed themselves tightly against the wall. Jolie, theassistant teacher, instructed them to get organized quickly, even as she took up aspot herself. “No, it’s not safe yet,” she said about her position, and moved closerto the wall and farther from the door. “You all know what happened last weekin Connecticut,” she added abruptly. “So this is why we practice this, so we’reprepared for an intruder.”

All this time, Karolina stood calmly, in the middle of the room and somewhatapart from the wall, observing the children. After a short while, she posed aquestion to them: “How many fire drills have we had in our school?” “Many,”a number of students replied. Karolina proceeded: “How many actual fires havewe had in the school?” “None!” a larger number of children answered. “Right,”Karolina affirmed. “We’re not expecting this to happen to us either, but it’s goodjust to be prepared.” Her voice was neither as somber as the principal’s, nor asanxious as Jolie’s. It was identical to her everyday voice as a teacher, albeit (inmy hearing) a bit more deliberate.

Suddenly: “The drill is now concluded.”

Witnessing and Pastoral Work

Pastoral work is care-full work. It implies caring for others in concrete wayswithin the terms of a particular practice. For example, in his “Divinity SchoolAddress” Ralph Waldo Emerson characterizes the pastor’s work as a deeply per-sonal vocation. In his view, the work calls on the full aesthetic, ethical, reflec-tive, and spiritual being of the pastor, rather than just on the person’s commandof scripture and the liturgy. Emerson urges the young ministers in his audienceto put aside Bible and precept, when face to face individually with parishioners,and to become a receptacle for their fears, their worries, their concerns, and theiryearnings.19

The witness to teaching and teachers is not overtly engaged in care-taking inEmerson’s sense, though she or he is poised at any time to respond as a criticallysympathetic colleague. The witness aspires to be fully attuned to the teacher’sworld. The witness is mindful at all times of moving into a place — the teacher’sclassroom — that is not of her or his making. The witness is not of that place.As suggested previously, the witness cannot speak for it, though the witness can— with sufficient preparation — speak from a platform of knowledge, experience,wonder, and concern for teaching.

19. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson: Essays and Lectures (New York: The Library of America, 1983), 89,passim.


The witness remains conscious of the vulnerability of the teacher who opensthe classroom to a visitor: whatever mistakes, errors, or faux pas the teacher makeswill be on display. The witness is conscious of destabilizing or unsettling, to anunspoken degree, the environment of the classroom, particularly in the initialvisits. The witness is mindful of overtones of authority, power, and control thatmay inadvertently come through the classroom door with her or him, like aninvisible overcoat the witness carries in hand. (For many teachers, the only visitorswho come to their classrooms are school administrators or others who are there toformally assess their work.)

Because I was so immersed in the classroom world over the two-year-long dura-tion of the endeavor, I was privy to misjudgments, misinterpretations, blindnesses,and more, on the part of the teachers. This point in itself is not revelatory. Anyteacher who is less than divine falls short, perhaps in more ways than we have lan-guage for. The very moment the teachers permitted me to cross the threshold intotheir classrooms, I was instantly handed power. I could approach their work witha deficit model in mind, looking for what they lacked as teachers. The oppositeposture was equally available: to put on rose-colored lenses and romanticize thegood while letting the bad recede into the background.

To bear witness to teaching and teachers, however, involves neither approvalnor disapproval as such. It incorporates, instead, a strong normative commitmentto the worthwhileness of the work. Ideally, a spirit of care and concern for teaching,and for those willing to take on its obligations, pervades every word and gesture thewitness expresses. The witness brings an ethos of piety and reverence to the setting.There is nothing portentous or uncritical about these time-honored words.20 Theyattest to the witness’s readiness to heed the teacher’s reality that is so vividlyenacted in the classroom, moment by moment by moment. To “heed” this realityconstitutes at once an aesthetic, moral, and reflective responsiveness that contrastswith the meanings typically associated with the research term “observe” (I returnto this verb below).

One afternoon in November, Merritt had gone into the room adjacent to hismusic classroom to work with five students rehearsing a piece. He had instructedthe twenty eighth-grade students who remained in the classroom to collaboratein pairs and discuss the music composition he had distributed at the start of class.He reminded them of their semester-long experience with this mode of work. Heexplained they would walk through the piece orally before playing it musically,an activity that would come later in the period. I stayed behind in the classroom,in my usual seat off to the side.

Some fifteen minutes later, Merritt returned to the classroom to check on howthings were going. As he walked through the door, he turned to me and, with atongue-in-cheek smile, asked if I had seen anything having to do with “becoming a

20. For discussion of this point, see A. G. Rud and Jim Garrison, eds., Teaching with Reverence: Revivingan Ancient Virtue for Today’s Schools (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).


person.” Without a moment’s hesitation, I pulled from my witness a spontaneousdescription of how one of his Grade 8 students, Maria, had systematically helpedher partner Ramon. Ramon had appeared frustrated, distracted, and unwilling toget engaged in the activity. Maria kept her finger on the written music, constantlyturning to him, even as he jerked his head around the room, called out toother students, fidgeted with his violin and bow, looked down at his shoes, andmumbled about his doings from earlier in the day. Maria persisted, unflustered,without any comment on his conduct, and without impatience. Ramon slowlytransformed. He began to focus, and to follow her lead. In time he began to talkabout the music himself.

I described all this in the clearest, most concise terms I could, mindful thatMerritt was in the very midst of running his class. As I spoke, his face turnedinward and he looked down at the floor. I could see he was moved, to usethe peculiar English expression, though I could not discern “where” he went inthat moment. He said nothing. He raised his head and looked at me for a splitsecond, expressionless and yet “fully,” as if he had metabolized the event I haddescribed. He nodded his head slightly, then turned swiftly toward his students,who meanwhile had been jabbering away in pairs. “Okay, how are we doing!!!”

Witnessing and Paying a Visit to Being

While sitting in the corner of a classroom during my two-year-long witness,I sought to conduct myself as silently and invisibly as possible. Though I was aneyewitness to the teacher’s work, I sought to avoid eye contact with him or her.At the same time, I made a point of conversing with the teacher, however briefly,either before or after each visit. I also made sure to thank the teacher for lettingme be there, a gesture typically met by a smile and shake of the head, as if to say,“Thank me for what?”

The teachers did not know, and I could not have said at the time, that I was“thanking” them for the grace of being: for the “is-ness” of their work with childrenand youth, and for their enactment of the very Idea of teaching (the ideal madereal). I was thanking them for helping to bring into the world what was not therebefore: the education of their students, understood as more than acquiring fact andskill, and their own hard-to-see transformations in that very act, since teaching— as contrasted with training or merely passing along information — alwaysseems to modify the teacher, however microscopically in a given instance. Theteachers and their students were changing the world before my very eyes, againhowever infinitesimally against the larger scale of things. As a witness my seeingbecame “enmattered,”21 saturated with the ways the teachers and students weretransubstantiating what can so easily be taken for granted, or misperceived as merebehavior, in classroom “observation.” The witness is not an observer, as such, nor

21. Christopher A. Dustin and Joanna E. Ziegler, Practicing Mortality: Art, Philosophy, and Contempla-tive Seeing (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 233.


a recorder. But the witness is not merely following whim. The seeing is neitherobjective nor subjective.

Posed in other terms, the mode of perception that marks bearing witness is andis not a matter of will. On the one hand, the witness works at this will-less-ness,or willful-less-ness, to use a more accurate if cumbersome term. The witness haslearned, through experience, to be aware of how numbingly familiar classroomscan seem to even the most sympathetic outsider, so much so that the visitor mayunawares come to resemble the voyeur in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film RearWindow, who watches his neighbors through binoculars and, in effect, “demands”that something interesting happen.22 As witness, I must be wary of “demanding”that something “out of the ordinary” take place; I must work on myself. My willis called into play. I strive to relax the grasping tendency of my consciousness inorder to let what transpires “speak,” to “let it be,” such that classroom doings maybecome resonant particulars that call for my attention, rather than behavior thatdepends on my gaze. I concentrate and try to “listen” for quiet testimony. I can feelwhat the poet Rainer Maria Rilke calls the “interpreted world” clamoring at thedoor of my sensibility, exhorting me to settle for the all-too-well-known behavioralplatform of life in classrooms.23 The shouts outside that door cry out: We’ve seenall this before. We know what it means. Why are you looking again?

While sitting in the classroom, and while pondering things afterward, thewitness aspires to still the will: to move mentally and emotionally withoutimpatience, to be poised to receive rather than to seize. The fieldwork becomesan unplanned, and unplannable, series of occasions or moments, rather than alinear or consecutive process of “data collection.” The witness learns to wait, butdoes not await something whose form or appearance has been predetermined.24

The witness is in no hurry — and here, the two-year-long structure of theendeavor proved indispensable. The witness is not seeking “new” knowledge aboutteaching. Rather, the witness waits for teaching’s truths, its deep values, to disclosethemselves in the quiet testimony expressed through the medium of resonantparticulars. The witness approaches waiting for truth as a vocation.25 The witness

22. The notion of the voyeur (played by the actor James Stewart) making “demands” on reality derivesfrom the film critic Dave Kehr, who also remarks on how Hitchcock is interrogating his own craft throughthe substance of the story. Kehr’s review initially appeared in The Chicago Reader, a free weekly, but Ihave not been able to determine which issue.

23. Rainer Maria Rilke, “The First [Duino] Elegy,” in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. andtrans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Vintage International, 1989), 151, line 13.

24. This trope derives from Martin Heidegger, Country Path Conversations, trans. Bret W. Davis(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 75–76, passim. Also see James F. Donnelly, “SchoolingHeidegger: On Being in Teaching,” Teaching and Teacher Education 15, no. 8 (1999): 933–949; andJustin A. Garcia and Tyson E. Lewis, “Getting a Grip on the Classroom: From Psychological toPhenomenological Curriculum Development in Teacher Education Programs,” Curriculum Inquiry 44,no. 2 (2014): 141–168.

25. Rainer Maria Rilke, “Turning-Point,” in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. Mitchell,135, line 1.


is never passive, just as witnessing is not a passing act, though her or his activitydoes not call attention to itself.

To still the will, “to let the world come”: these terms mark a continuous,largely noncognitive form of making ready that baptizes, with an underlyingcurrent of feeling, the hours leading up to crossing the threshold of the classroom.In an entirely unplanned, unanticipated, and unpredictable manner, my witnesswould begin upon rising in the morning, with a silent but felt consciousness thatperhaps mirrors what the musician or athlete experiences the day of a performanceor a game. It is a making ready of the body and mind for the timeless minutes tocome of sitting still in the corner of a classroom, waiting for truth to disclose itselfwhile never knowing how or whether it might (often it did not).

There is no marking where my experience as witness begins and ends. It isan ethos that accompanies me wherever I go. The guiding questions about being aperson, and being a person in the role of teacher, hover in the air like a philosophicalversion of the prayer of St. Patrick: they are in front of me, behind me, and at myside. This ethos, this “company,” positions me for deep seeing, but not “because”of me. Unlike in many forms of qualitative research, I am not my-self “the bestinstrument” in the research. Rather, it is what I am not, or not yet, that opens theway. I can testify only through what I become, through what I receive, not throughwhat I am. “I” do not become “deep.” On the contrary, I shudder and thrill inawareness of how much there is in the teachers’ and students’ doings before myeyes that I cannot see and never will. The seeing is deep because the formativerealities of life in schools and classrooms are unfathomable and, if the witness canheed them, often remarkable.

As a witness, I cannot refer to “my” data because I have none, though I dohave a thick folder of tightly organized and carefully crafted descriptive notes(the witness’s responsibility to be as accurate and precise as possible). I am nota producer, but a receiver; not a painter, but a canvas; not a scribe, but an imprint;not a poet, but the as yet untouched page. I do not measure, but am measured. I donot eat, and yet am fed. An aesthetic, ethical, moral, and reflective photosynthesisensues from the light of the teachers’ and their students’ classroom worlds. The“data” metamorphose in the instant of reception, disclosing the contours ofeducation as an intellectual and moral experience.

One morning in October, Earl, an eleventh grade English teacher, is aboutto initiate a new unit with his class on August Wilson’s play entitled “Fences.”He reminds his twenty students that the first thing they’ll do is use, as heputs it, “an opinionator to activate your knowledge.” Since the play triggersquestions of tolerance and forgiveness, Earl poses several questions about thestudents’ own attitudes toward forgiveness. After he enunciates a question, stu-dents get out of their seats and gather in one or another corner of the roomwhere there is a hand-drawn sign reflecting their view: “strongly agree,” “agree,”“disagree,” “strongly disagree.” Earl’s final question is whether people should for-give their parents, including for what they may feel were egregious mistakes andfailures.


This question provokes strong opinions from the class. Most students arguethat forgiveness is ultimately the way to go. Patrizia, a student who does notagree, offers a range of comments about how harmful bad parenting can be. Sheengages her peers energetically, time and again parrying their counterarguments.

The discussion becomes heated, though not ad hominem (the teacher hasworked hard, since their first day of school, to help the class avoid such aturn). Suddenly Patrizia, in the very midst of saying “parents just have to beaccountable,” shakes her head vigorously and falls silent. She rushes to her chairby the far wall and, taking her seat, lowers her head on her arms. A tall girl,Cornelia, with whom she had been debating, goes over and, brushing the girl’sknee with her hand, asks “You okay, Patrizia?” The teacher, Earl, also goes overand, kneeling down to eye level, softly asks if she is okay. Patrizia keeps her headdown and offers no response. Meanwhile the class has been returning to theirseats, sensing that the opinionator activity has ended.

Earl turns on an overhead and shows the class the title page from their editionof August Wilson’s play. He asks students about possible associations with thesingle word that forms the title, “Fences.” On the overhead he jots down theirideas, while encouraging students to do the same in their notebooks. Within aminute or so of the start of this activity, Patrizia raises her head from her armsand follows the discussion, taking notes as do the other students. She appearscalm and composed. Suddenly she sneezes. In that very instant, Cornelia and theteacher both say “Bless you,” in a gentle but firm tone.

Knowledge and Truth in Bearing Witness

The witness to teaching and teachers lives out a paradox. While seated inthe corner of a classroom, the witness does not “know” what she or he is doing.The witness is not there to intervene, to guide, to instruct, to steer, to shape,to change, or to reform, all of which are overt purposes that create a sense ofdirection. In comparison with such knowingness, the witness appears aimless.Moreover, the witness does not know precisely what to look for. She or he isnot a botanist entering the forest with a clear understanding of what plantsto seek out. The person has no a priori, nor an a posteriori, checklist of what“counts” as an index or expression of the person in the role of teacher. In thevignettes above, to cast matters in literal terms, I was not waiting for a momentwhen a teacher and student would respond to an unsettled human being, orwhen two students would collaborate as their teacher had taught them to do,or when I could witness how a teacher responds to the collective anxiety of herclass.

At the same time, I was primed to note such moments through the steady effortof readying myself to bear witness that I had given myself over to from the startof the endeavor, and which I have characterized in this writing. I had become aknowing witness in the sense of grasping the necessity of waiting, of attending, ofpositioning myself to apprehend what might be given me to witness. I was moreknowing with regard to being sensitive to the possibilities and limitations in thewill to represent, to explain, to account for, to taxonomize, and to objectify. This


knowing is agentive. People say “that carpenter knows her way around wood” and“that basketball player knows his way around the court.”26 I slowly learned toknow my way around the classroom as a witness.

Bearing witness does not add new knowledge to the field regarding such thingsas instructional technique, curriculum content, assessment, or school and class-room organization. Teachers themselves, and subject- and organization-focusedresearchers, are best positioned to yield such knowledge. Bearing witness doesnot provide in this sense. It does not produce. Its poetics are not about changingthings in the world, as such, in the manner of typical educational interventionsand researches. A poetics of witnessing is more about changing ourselves as edu-cational inquirers, teachers, program developers, teacher educators, policymakers,and consultants.

Change into who or what? Change in what manner? Change according towho or what? What is the source of this obligation to transform? Why respectthat source? These challenging questions become thornier in considering thelimits of the communicative instrumentalities at the witness’s disposal. In hiscomprehensive taxonomy of the concept “witness,” John Peters recalls the factthat all forms of witnessing remain incomplete until they are acknowledged byothers.27 But what does the witness to teaching and teachers communicate? Whatis the “it” at the center of her or his speaking? Iris Murdoch provides suggestivelanguage in her interpretation of what a painter like Paul Cézanne or a poet likeRainer Maria Rilke is attempting to do. They are not saying “I like it” or “I approveof it.” Rather, they are saying: “There it is.”28 In the hands of some artists, Murdochavers, the “there it is” renders injustice, cruelty, violence, and hopelessness sopalpable that it may be hard to look out at the world at all. In the hands of others,the “there it is” evokes the reality of the good, the true, and the beautiful. The“there it is” inspires and motivates others to be at their best: their most reflective,loving, and concerned, rather than their most judgmental, hateful, and indifferent.

The witness who writes of teaching and teachers hopes that the “is-ness”of the “there-ness” calls out to the reader, saying, in effect: “Think about it,‘give’ it thought, as the English expression has it, give something of your-self toit, put something of your-self at risk, rather than merely analyze it.” But whilethe witness’s “there it is” may function like art, this possibility does not makethe witness an artist. Put another way, the ideal of a clairvoyant seeing into theheart of teaching, and of a perspicuous rendering of such, does not make suchdoings possible. Crucially, this effort can help the witness learn to glimpse andto hold the resonant gesture long enough to say: There. But this “hold” itself

26. With regard to knowing wood, I think of Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking, trans. J. GlennGray (New York: Perennial, 2004), 14–15, 23, passim. On knowing basketball, consider John McPhee’saptly named account of the star player Bill Bradley: A Sense of Where You Are (New York: Farrar, Strauss& Giroux, 1999).

27. Peters, “Witnessing,” 710.

28. Murdoch, Sovereignty of Good, 59.


so often remains an ideal rather than an achievement. Emerson was true to lifewhen he suggested that an “unhandsome condition” of our being-in-the-world isthe evidently permanent inability to freeze time and movement. The glimpse, thegesture, “slip[s] through our fingers then when we clutch hardest,” and can fail toinscribe us, our very being, with the moment’s truth about being and becoming aperson.29

The witness to teaching and teachers seeks to render but not to represent.“Render” denotes forming, or fashioning, and giving over what is due. Theterm mirrors its French cousin rendre, which connotes among other meanings“giving back” and “returning in kind.” The witness is oriented from a platformof wonder and concern about the practice, and puts forward her or his glimpseinto gesture: that is, her or his gesture about the parabolic significance builtdeep into teaching’s gestures. Perhaps the witness’s gesture can be nothing morethan that. Perhaps it can go no “further.” Perhaps it should not aspire to doso. Once again, paradox emerges. The witness aspires to “be there” and “not tobe there.” As touched on previously, the person bears witness to teaching andteachers precisely by “getting out of the way” in order to let the truth of thework disclose itself and shine forth. To echo the epigraph from the poet A. R.Ammons that heads this essay: The witness’s fundamental eros is to be a conduit,a vehicle, a handmaiden. But as human beings for millennia have experienced,if they let their thought run far enough, and if they give themselves over totruth wholeheartedly enough, they soon run into an aporia of expressivity. Thestep to enunciate appears to instantaneously objectify the world, and thus todistort its reality and our real relation with it. This predicament threatens togenerate stasis, quietude, perhaps even withdrawal in the face of failure. But thewitness moves into the world, in the first place, precisely because she or he rejectswithdrawal.

The difficulty of writing a witness mirrors the difficulty of its enactment in theworld. Consider once more Cézanne’s deep foray into art. In one of his reflectivemoments he remarked: “A minute in the world’s life passes! To paint it in itsreality! And forget everything for that. To become that minute, be the sensitiveplate …”30 Cézanne does not just want to “capture” the passing moment. Hewants his painting to be the passing moment, not to be “about” it. But how canbecoming “be”? How can being “become”? Cézanne takes up his instruments —paints, brushes, canvases — and works them as best as possible, even while lettingthe scene-in-view work on him. As he knew intimately, his instruments can playtricks on him. They can surprise him in wondrous ways, but they can also leadhim (again, surprisingly) to where he does not want to go. So it is with writing awitness. The words sometimes appear to come of their own accord, and feel right.At other times, the words “take over” and lead the writer astray from the truth of

29. Emerson, Essays and Lectures, 473.

30. Quoted in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M.Edie, trans. William Cobb (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 169.


things. A fencing duel, a competitive pas de deux ensues: the mongoose and thesnake snapping at and jumping back from one another. Language lunges and wantsthe witness to write this way, when what is most necessary of all is to write thatway, that is, the way of what is there, what held the witness as she or he in turnbe-held it.

The epigraph from the poet William Bronk at the start of the article sug-gests an inhabitable and unfrustrating, if also incomplete, response to these per-plexities. It is the denial reality sets — that it will not be captured — thatreleases the witness to have some faith in her or his rendering. The witness’spurpose is not to capture that reality, to contain it, to bound it, much less to con-trol it. The aim is to do right by it, not as if one could be a mirror to nature,but as a being in nature, in the world, attesting through one’s witness to thatvery being. The witness to teaching and teachers seeks living truth, truth thatdedicated teachers live by, if not in so many words. Such truth is not proposi-tional, conjoined as such truth is with the alternative of falsifiability. The con-trast with truth to work by, of teaching’s truth, is not epistemic as such, butethical and moral. The person who does not see or grasp teaching’s truth isnot “wrong.” Her or his “false witness,” to recall Thrasymachus’s epithet forSocrates, is not epistemic in the sense of wissen or savoir. Rather, the personis inexperienced in the ways of teaching, or perhaps as yet lacks perspicuousgrounds for adequate judgment, or perhaps is at present locked in a dogmaticorbit.

If she or he understandably responds, “Okay, how do you know what thetruths of teaching are?” I can only reply: “I do not know them in the epis-temic register you are evoking.” To be sure, as emphasized previously, accu-racy about facts is indispensable. The love of teaching as a human endeavorthat the witness embodies can distort as much as support clear-eyed (eyewit-ness) seeing. But truth as I have encountered it as a witness is not a ques-tion of evidence and counterevidence as conventionally framed, as if the truthsof teaching can be reduced entirely to those of cause and effect. If positivistsocial scientific research indicated that a teacher’s sensitivity to students hadno “effect” on grades or test scores, it would reveal a strange (if not frighten-ing) form of ethical ignorance, inexperience, or forgetfulness to recommend thatteachers can henceforth dispense with sensitivity — instead of knowing the truth,learned very early as a child in school, that such sensitivity is indispensable,rather than a discretionary “technique,” in genuine educational work with theyoung.

The knowledge I have of the truth of teaching, such as it is, emerges primor-dially from reception rather than from attempts at analysis and explanation.31 Put

31. I am thinking here of how Emerson concludes his essay on the experience of being a human being.He writes: “All I know is reception; I am and I have: but I do not get, and when I have fancied I hadgotten anything, I found I did not” (Essays and Lectures, 309). The epigraph from William Bronk echoesEmerson’s testimony.


another way, the truth of teaching is in the feeling of it, first and last, with thatfeeling shaped, disciplined, and educated by a serious, self-critical engagement withthe work. I can ready myself for truth, and put myself under the sway of such truth,by opening myself to ethical proximity with teachers. I can be among them. “Tobe among”: the phrase can be purely behavioral or descriptive in meaning. But itcan also mean to be surrounded by, in the company of, in the midst of, a memberof: to be with, rather than standing off to the side. More strongly, to be among canmean to be implicated, at stake, and in question: la rue descends dans la philo.To be among teachers is to be in a position to influence them, through the sheeraffirmation of the work embodied in one’s presence, and to be influenced by them,not just by their words, but by bearing witness to the discouraging failures andfrustrations they encounter, to their joys and accomplishments, and to everythingin between.32 My witness of the truths of the practice may be confused and poorlyrendered. I may be an inadequate witness. But I can (ken) say, “There it is,” andhope that others will convey it better.

Concluding Note: Philosophical Fieldwork that Points

In their special issue on philosophers of education undertaking fieldwork, TerriWilson and Doris Santoro pose the question, “[W]hat is the distinctively philo-sophical work that philosophers of education do when they engage in empiricalresearch?”33 Wilson and Santoro recognize that no single answer can address theirquestion. There are, potentially, as many responses to the question as there areconceptions of “philosophical work.” Moreover, the editors understand that notall forms of fieldwork are “empirical” in the technical, philosophical sense of thatterm. In this writing, I have suggested that one approach to fieldwork in educa-tion is through the enactment of bearing witness as I have sought to enunciate it.The orientation embodies, in the many-sided senses of that verb, heeding the quiettestimony expressed through resonant particulars. I have traced how the approachhas philosophical origins in wonder and concern, and how it has philosophicaldimensions with respect to every element that comprises it. I have characterized anumber of them, in the sense of portraying their character-in-experience: modes ofperception, receptivity, waiting, stilling the will, and rendering rather than repre-senting. I have drawn upon metaphor — the witness as pilgrim, as pastoral guest,as visitor to being — to illuminate the nature of witnessing. I am aware of how

32. I did not deploy in a systematic manner the concept witness during my time with the teachers,simply because I was not ready to do so. My capacity to speak of witnessing, such as it is, has developedslowly. It is worth noting, however, that the participating teachers attested time and again to the valuesin having a person versed in teaching come to know their work, not with an eye on “improving” it butin taking it seriously and talking about it. The structure of the long-term endeavor, featuring extensiveclassroom visits, group discussions, and one-on-one interviews, made possible a rich and wide-rangingdialogue between us. As mentioned in note 12, there is much I hope to say in the future, not only aboutthe teachers’ responses to the experience (including the writing a number of them have undertaken), butabout the larger import of bearing witness for ways of relating and of building community among peopleinvolved with teaching.

33. Terri S. Wilson and Doris A. Santoro, “Philosophy Pursued through Empirical Research: Introductionto the Special Issue,” Studies in Philosophy and Education 34, no. 2 (2015): 116.


compressed, because of space limitations, this written witness remains, and ofhow many unanswered questions it has doubtless provoked. I hope the writingconstitutes a fruitful introduction, wherein each part encapsulates the whole andvice versa.

An on-the-ground way to rephrase Wilson and Santoro’s summative questionis to ask, What is the point of bearing witness to teaching and teachers? In anegative sense, as I have implied throughout, the point of communicating it, ofputting the witness into form, is not to increase control over teachers, students,and the classroom. This negative aim does not imply an uncritical posture towardteaching and teachers. Quite the contrary. It is common knowledge that someteachers, like some schools, do a poor job of educating. As I hope to show elsewhere,bearing witness can illuminate in telling fashion how problematic or miseducativea teacher’s approach may be — and yet, in such a manner that fresh groundfor communication with that teacher opens up, precisely through the witness’sreceptive rather than controlling mode.

In a positive sense, if we convert the noun into a verb, bearing witness pointsto aspects of truth, goodness, and beauty in teaching that are not easily dis-cernible, but that help constitute its very being. Bearing witness draws out thequiet testimony dedicated teachers and students express through their daily workabout what it means to be and to become a person. Witnessing shines a lighton the often subtle drama of their potentially transformative day-by-day inter-action in the classroom. “Quiet,” though not quietude, constitutes the watch-word. The horizon of being and becoming in the classroom tends to be belowthe radar. Thus the witness to teaching and teachers trucks in gestures andglimpses. The witness attempts to (be)hold them care-fully, not by setting themin amber or pinning them to a wall, but rather through buoyant, flexible prosethat nonetheless (ideally) possesses the strength of silk. The witness keeps theseglimpses of being and becoming present so that they do not swiftly recede fromview, like a dream vivid in sleep but vanishing from the instant one’s eyesopen. And yet the witness also reverses, as well, that familiar image. She orhe aspires to open eyes to what may otherwise appear dreamlike and in theshadows, but which has its vital, generative substantiality. “The most dizzyingencounters with truth,” Shari Goldberg reminds us, “may be delivered by themost unprepossessing of vehicles.”34 By becoming responsive to everyday edu-cational reality, the witness shares responsibility for its continued viability andintegrity.

Educational administrators, policymakers, researchers, teacher educators,teachers, and others in the system often seem to dwell in very “loud” environ-ments that teem with pressures to “produce” in the here and now. The witnessoffers no program or blueprint for changing such conditions. She or he knows thatthe witnessing must be completed, by those who hear it, in their own way. But thewitness communicates, rather than remains silent, in order to influence educators’

34. Goldberg, Quiet Testimony, 12.


consciousness of what is at stake in making decisions that affect the persons teach-ers and students are becoming. The witness can touch their conscience, so long asthe witness has felt that touch her- or himself.

THE FIELDWORK REPORTED HEREIN was made possible by a grant from the Spencer Foundation,Chicago, Illinois, and by a research award from Teachers College, Columbia University. I am gratefulto Amy B. Shuffelton and three anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and wide-ranging criticism.My thanks also to John Fantuzzo and the students in his philosophy and education writing seminar atTeachers College (Spring 2016) for their invaluable criticism of an earlier version of the manuscript.

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