Introduction of Retreat and New Scholars
President's Teaching Scholars Tell Their Personal And Professional Stories
Out of Classroom Extensions of Learning and Engagement
Teaching Scholars Describe Other Extensions of Learning
University
of Colorado
President's Teaching Scholars Program
Fall 2000 Retreat Report
President's Teaching Scholars Tell Their Personal and Professional Stories
Panel: Bob Pois, Denny Webster, Don Kleier, Fred Coolidge
The topic addressed was the shadow side of the teaching profession.
Bob Pois started the discussion by congratulating Jim on his interpretation of the movie. There were several things that struck him about the movie; one of the things was the juxtaposition of light and dark. He thought that Hitchcock was very sensitive to historical issues. When the film was made, we had had just gotten out of WW II, and we were in the Cold War, so light and dark were very important in describing this time. It was a very gloomy period: the war was over just six years earlier; the hydrogen bomb had been tested. Bob was impressed by the use of American public buildings, which are supposed to be representative of democracy but in this case were threatening. They were overwhelming buildings and reminded Bob of buildings put up by Nazi Germany. The black figure ensconced in the corner is indicative of this. The Capitol building is seen representationally, almost symbolically, contextualizing it. These elements we identify with America, such as Congress, are in shadow and murky or have a lamp-like comic quality.
Bob noted that the new Serbian president, Kostunica, is of course different from Milosevic but he is also similar to Milosevic. As a Serb nationalist, Kostunica was very much opposed to extending rights to the Kosovars, the Albanians in Yugoslavia; the shadow is clearly political to some extent. Kostunica is not formally Marxist in the way that Milosevic once was. There are distinctions, but how much of what is happening now is unconsciously or not unconsciously personal because Milosevic perhaps was able to carry out in an exaggerated form what the new Serb president may have felt as a Serb nationalist.
In 1969, Bob Pois was in Koblenz,West Germany doing research; he has always been a railroad fan. Koblenz was one of the last places in West Germany where one could see steam locomotives. This one was pulling up to the Koblenz railroad station, and he was watching it very intensely. He realized that someone was watching him very intensely. The stranger asked him when he thought the locomotive was built. It was built between 1935 and 1940. Then the stranger asked Bob what he thought the locomotive might have been doing during the war. Bob said he didn't know. The stranger knew exactly what this type of locomotive was used for during the war. He was Jewish; someplace down the line he was separated from his parents and one sibling. The last he saw of them was when they were being herded into a boxcar pulled by an engine that resembled the one they had both been watching. He had been saved by a Christian family who hid him at great risk. He loathed Germany but came back to visit the grandchildren of this family. Bob was registering what the stranger was saying but he was also annoyed because the stranger was interfering with what Bob wanted to see. Bob was enjoying a beautiful image. He didn't want to care about what it meant to the stranger. In discussing this in class, Bob tells the story to bring out the point that one can choose not to see something-- like people in Germany were doing during the war. The shadow here is that we each have our on interests. Some of us prefer to live in our own world, and we are not ready to deal with the consequences of seeing things for what they are.
Denny Webster said that she would talk about how she uses the shadow in teaching. She uses the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator in her research despite the fact that it was developed by woman who was not part of the club, as it were, and a man who talked to rocks as a child. Shadow issues presumably manifest themselves most often with members of one's own sex. Denny noted that the fact that she works in the School of Nursing with a background in women's studies allows her the opportunity to display her shadow almost everywhere. When Denny works with students, she is aware of the fact that she is introverted, intuitive, feeling, capable of making judgments. So when she has students who are in supervision who are doing clinical work with clients, she asks her students to tell her in a small group setting, what their goals are, what their blinds spots are, what pushes their buttons, and what their strengths are. Their strengths actually may be their shadows, and they may not be aware of it. Sometimes the students don't know how to answer these questions. Then Denny asks them, What lies do other people tell about you? What are the things that you seem to learn and then forget? The raw spots come out then. They might say something like, I can't stand dependent people or I hate people who are intolerant. Students discover that their strengths, blind spots, and buttons are often closely related.
With regard to a teaching style, Denny, as an introvert, prefers small groups. She likes being the "masked" woman who comes in and does a consultation and leaves. She also likes to get to know a small group of people over a longer period of time and watch them grow. Sometimes she has to do larger classes or interactive TV. Often these are four or more hours straight, and her shadow rises in the form of a migraine. She loses her vision right before these classes, and she has learned over time to bargain with her body to get through it. Her body on behalf of her shadow says she doesn't have to.
The bigger issue for Denny in being at a large teaching institution is that there are all sorts of levels of the shadow. There is the shadow between the individual and the collective; between the faculty and the university; and between personal values and institutional requirements. As a nurse, Denny said she is sweet, kind, caring, altruistic and would probably do what she does for free. However, she is aware that the university is a business and dependent on funding, and this results in large classes and teaching by Internet, and having to run a practice that is efficient. This level of the university she is aware of, but it doesn't fit what she is about. Add to that, tenure requirements, which have to be all things to all people. Individual choice is limited.
The priorities in administration also shift frequently. First there is a big push for research, then teaching, or publishing, and these shifting priorities result in practice fragmentation. And then there is the counting, which is antithetical to people who value others for their deeper and purer dimensions. In addition to counting things on her own vita, she has to count things on 45 other people's vitas. It can either feed the ego or deflate it. Denny said that she tries to stay clear in what is important to her rather than chase shifting priorities. As a division chair, she finds herself caught between the needs of the institution and fostering the growth of faculty members as individuals. Because she raised three adolescents, she is able to say to faculty who need guidance that she is sorry that they are unhappy but things need to be done a certain way, while they are "under her roof." Of course, she also wants to stay under this roof, but it isn't her roof. This conflict has led her to do some subversive things. These are the ways the shadow gets revenge. She has done this in her personal life and she does this now with her faculty. She tells them what they have to do and then she asks them what they would really like to be doing. Some take it this seriously. One of her students left, lives in Alaska, and keeps her Ph.D. a secret. Several others are looking at early retirement. Denny wonders if these are success stories or failure stories.
Don Kleier said that as a kid he used to talk to himself and run deals back and forth with himself. He didn't know it at the time, but he was talking to the shadows. One needs to pay attention to shadows. He read somewhere that everyone has an envelope with their secret mission for life inside. The trouble is you can't open it until you are 50.
Don sees one of his roles as helping students by helping himself come to terms with the shadows. Don looked at the movie and decided to go back and look at the study guide a little bit more. Hitchcock had really gotten to the anxieties about being alive. Don once read a book on existential psychotherapy, and it identified the four crises that humans become aware of and have to deal with: life and death, freedom and responsibility, isolation and relationships, meaninglessness and meaning. Hitchcock has hit these right on the head. The first time Don watched the movie he felt a little uneasy. He brushed it off at first as attributable to the fact that it was a 1950s film, and the characters were being so dramatic. But he began to realize that it was something else; he was sitting watching this movie by himself and feeling embarrassed. He could feel the tension that comes from life and death, freedom and responsibility. The one scene that really hit him was the scene in the bedroom when Bruno tells Guy to take responsibility for the murder.
Bruno is so isolated yet so savvy. Guy is so intense with relationships and yet so awkward. The meaninglessness of Bruno's life was highlighted when he said to Guy, "You are a lucky guy. You do things." His fantasies are doing things like riding in a car going 150 miles per hour blindfolded. The tension between those things is experienced by Don in his teaching. For example, when a student knocks on the door, and his first reaction is, "Geez, can't I have any peace around this place?" Or he is walking on the clinic floor and he is on a mission, and a group of students will come up to him. He again feels frustrated to be interrupted. Later on it is important to figure out the two sides of this. What is the shadow side that is having him experience unenjoyable emotions? To come into contact with that tension, figure it out, and then do something about it is a challenge for Don. He feels the need to spend introspective figuring out relationships with his own shadow.
Fred Coolidge noted that Carl Jung was probably half Freud's age when they first met. They were only friends from1906 to 1913. Freud told Jung, "You are going to be my crown prince." When they had their breakup, it was Jung that went and talked to rocks. He would see patients and then go out to the lake and make little rock statues. He was virtually psychotic from the breakup of this relationship. Part of the breakup was because of dreams. They were coming to America and on the way agreed to interpret each other's dreams. Jung told a dream about being in a basement with skulls. Freud stopped him and said, "You want me to die." Jung said he didn't think that was true. Then he asked Freud to tell him a dream. Freud answered, "Who are you to interpret my dreams?" The rigid father and the son had to breakup, but later Jung's son said that Jung was always checking up on how Freud was doing. And Freud thought about Jung as well. Freud lived 26 more years so they could have talked to each other and shared a lot more. Jung writes later he had this dream of hunting Sigfreid and trying to kill him. Here Jung isn't recognizing his own shadow. Here is someone who understands the shadow, can write about the shadow, and can't integrate his own shadow.
Just before his death in 1961, the BBC asked Jung about doing a book and a TV series for the layperson. Jung said no and added, "By the way, I don't change my mind." Then he had a dream that he saw laypeople and started talking to them and they understood him. He changed his mind because of the power of dreams. He got his five best friends together to help write the book, Man and His Symbols. He wrote the first chapter and ten days later he died. A friend put the book together after his death. In the book Jung talks about our minds being evolutionary warehouses or museums. Freud believed that everything that was in the unconscious had passed through consciousness, but we deny it. Part of their split was because Jung believed in evolutionary archetypes that we share in common because our DNA is all in common, and these archetypes push themselves onto our personality. Five of them he thought more advanced than others: masculinity and femininity occur because of animus and anima; these archetypes have survival value. There is a self archetype that integrates all of these. But the central figure is the shadow, it is the most instinctive basic archetype that allows us to kill. Jung writes, "The sad truth is that man's real life consists of a complex of inexorable opposites: day and night, birth and death, happiness and misery, good and evil. We aren't even sure that one will prevail against the other, that good will overcome evil, or joy overcome pain. Life is a battleground, always has been, always will be. If it were not so, our existence would come to an end." The shadow thrusts itself into our lives like Bruno thrusts himself into Guy's face.
Fred noted that Jim had said that Hitchcock had the image of this movie in his head before he filmed it. What is the difference between an image and a dream? In dreams, we see our archetypes. According to Jung, visions are nothing but waking dreams. So with Hitchcock, although he has an ego, his archetypes will thrust themselves into the movies. Therefore, one can't overinterpret a movie like this. Hitchcock put them in there either purposefully or unpurposefully, but, if not purposefully, these things were still in his unconscious.
In the group discussion, Hiroshi Motomura brought up the issue of the shadow in teaching. How does the concept of the shadow help us? We use the terms of ambivalence, tension, and conflict to try to understand who we are in relation to the shadow. He wanted to differentiate between shadows in our lives in general and how the shadows might inform what we do as teachers. Denny mentioned the institutional vs. the individual. We may have shadows as institutional teachers or individuals. There are probably many varieties of shadows in the teaching profession. We may think of the students as our shadows, which brings up some classic issues of teaching—the degree of intimacy with students (codes of address, contact, etc.), how much the teaching-student relationship is like a parent-child relationship. One of the interesting things about the teacher-student relationship is that we think of the students as our shadows but they don't feel we are theirs.
Tom Huber said that it struck him that the title of the whole retreat was the engaged learner, not the engaged teacher. What are we doing to deal with the students' shadows that prevent them from being engaged learners? He had dinner the evening before with a 15-year-old, and he was thinking how do junior high and high school teachers get past the shadow to get to these kids? They are the true heroes, in Tom's opinion. How do we get our students past their shadows?
Jim Palmer suggested another book, Power in the Helping Professions. It's mainly about psychiatry, but it's also about doctors, social workers, and teachers. The author, a Jungian psychologist, discusses unacknowledged power drives under the guise of caring for others. These professions are centered on caring but also have a need for control and power. As teachers, we can't get away with it or from it, partly because of the grades we must give. Teachers spend a lot of time denying the power that they have.
Jim Symons noted that in the arts, they deal with this rather directly. Part of actor training is become conscious of the shadows in oneself, that "other" that the actor plays. Actors and actresses have to experience emotional recall, a sensitivity to something that happened at five years of age, perhaps a deep repressed emotional memory. They may be playing a character where that emotion is necessary and rather than faking it and pretending the emotion, they have to find that emotion in themselves. They must bring it back to the surface again so that they can know what it feels like so they can identify with the character.
When faculty work with young student actors, they have to be careful of how they tap into these emotions. Sometimes people can tap into something that they can't handle. But it is a part of acting, writing, composing, etc., that students explore these parts of themselves that they are not really aware of. One case of this was a young man who had been cast as a charming looking young fellow; he had played Pippin in the musical of the same name, and he was wonderful and perfect in this type of role. The next year Jim cast him as Teddy, in a play calledWhen Are You Coming Back, Red Rider?" Teddy and his girlfriend stop at a small restaurant and for the hell of it begin to terrorize everyone who is there. Teddy is a very disturbed young man, a Vietnam vet. When Jim cast the young man in this type of role, the young actor was stunned. Jim told him that he had a feeling he could do it. In preparing for the role the student realized he had been presenting a persona and beneath this there was another serious dark side. It is important in growing up to make the darkness conscious. This relevation can be liberating.
Gene Abrams brought up the fact that the shadow may not be pathological and perverse but a source of creativity. Arthur Koestler wrote a book called The Act of Creation. He develops a whole theory and gives examples of how the unconscious plays a role in the mind of a creator, not only in the arts but also mathematics and the sciences. Perhaps this is another way to look at the shadow.
The Teaching Scholars discussed the notion that something is destroyed for something else to be created and that creative people can move between the light and the shadow. However, if an artist lets the shadow erupt, as in the case of Jim Morrison, the artist can die in the process. The shadow is a primitive spirit that has allowed us to survive, but it must be harnessed and reintegrated in a positive way.
Fred noted that most of Jung's patients came in as mature, successful people, and they would complain of being bored. They had many material possessions and they didn't realize that the riches are within and in reintegrating the shadow. Jung said, "The patient is forged between the hammer and the anvil." So it isn't an easy task.
What does this mean in relation to the term "role model" in terms of the teaching profession? We must remember that we are learners as well as teachers.
Don Warrick said that in his graduate class, Leading and Managing in Changing Times, they actually deal with these things as well. Genuineness as opposed to wearing a persona is emphasized. Research indicates that leaders who are very straightforward—who are genuine instead of playing the role of a leader—are much more effective. Employees want honesty from their leaders. This is a significant discovery for graduate students because they have an image of what they think is a leader. When they play an image rather than just be a good leader, they have difficulty. This is especially difficult for women because they have an image of what a male leader is like, and they discover that just being themselves at their best works far better. It doesn't get as deep as shadows but these students have to do all sorts of awareness gathering about their interpersonal skills, team skills, and their leadership skills, whether they treat people with value or devalue people. They fill in a lot of the blind spots with the help of their fellow students.
Tom said that he felt no matter what we do we are dealing with "depth" in our positions. Students relate to us with their shadows. In Tom's department, they attract reentry women. He is struck by the fact that often, after about two years in the program, one of these students will come to a faculty member really distraught because she is getting divorce. Professors empower them in their relationships. That's how we discover we are affecting people on a really deep level.
Marty Bickman teaches literature and has done a lot of work with Jungian concepts. He reflected on Tom's comment about how we deal with adolescents. He has been a junior high and high school teacher He was in a seminar about educational philosophy at Boulder High School with teachers and parents. Everything that anybody said was about control. He asked this group, What about teaching them something? What about learning? A sociologist said that one of the reasons that high schools repress such things as long hair or short skirts, or repress adolescent sexuality is that they themselves are so attracted and threatened by the adolescents. So we have to be careful that when we try to control our students, we are not actually trying to control the other side of us.
Annual Retreat Report
The President's Scholars Teaching Program
Mary Ann Shea, Ph.D., Director.
MaryAnn.Shea@Colorado.edu