“If you don’t love your students, you’re not a good lecturer!'' The student sitting in my office doesn’t mince her words. She’d like to write her thesis with me for her Educational Master's in Philosophy, and she looks at me with a determined expression. As far as she’s concerned, love is absolutely essential in education, and her thesis will be a plea for more time for it.
“Interesting topic,” I say. “Very relevant. Tricky, also. Do you have an idea already what you mean exactly when you say ‘love’? Have you read philosophers that can help you make that more precise?”
She will likely drop that term ‘love’ at some point, I think to myself. It’s bound to be replaced by something like ‘care’.
Love and love
Do you love your students? Or some of them at least?
And do you find that an uncomfortable question?
That discomfort would not be surprising, of course. Anyone who has followed Vox even a little over the past few years knows that things can go seriously wrong when lecturers love their students. Not least in my own faculty.
But, says the philosopher, we must distinguish between different kinds of love. Love is about being attentively open to another person and willing to care for them. In relationships between adults—romances, friendships—we expect that to happen reciprocally. This is different in relationships between parents and young children. Relationships between lecturers and students are, when all goed well, asymmetrical too. Moreover, they are focused on the student’s development. That is the aim we as lecturers are willing to care for. Conversely, students do not need to be open to us and our (developmental) needs in the same way. They are free to invest the time and attention that would require in their learning process instead.
Such warm and open attention from teachers can be crucial to learning. Stepping out of your comfort zone is difficult when you feel a businesslike or even judgemental gaze upon you; with a warm gaze, you are more likely to dare. Daring to make mistakes is easier when you know that a lecturer is looking at you with goodwill. Accepting critical feedback and learning from it is easier when you feel that the lecturer cares about your development.
Spring fever and admiration
Some forms of teaching are more personal than others. Small-group teaching, for example. Research master’s seminars. Mentoring groups. Thesis processes.
In such situations, it is not just lecturers who can come to develop feelings for their students, whether appropriate ones or not. The admiration students may feel for lecturers, because we can do something they themselves want to learn, is all too easily mixed up with infatuation at the age of 21. It is then up to us lecturers to redirect that admiring attention back to where it belongs: to the subject matter, to the learning process, to the development of the skills students aspire to.
This is a delicate process. And every semester, students fall in love with lecturers. Shall we talk about that more often?
Or the more uneasy situation, the other way round. We’re all human, especially in spring. Feeling attracted to a student is something that can happen. It’s not a crime. But it is a problem you need to deal with. Because how do you handle it without jeopardising the safe space that the student in question needs in order to learn? Make no mistake: as soon as a student realises how you feel, that safe space is gone. Attention that should be focused on the learning process will then shift to you, the lecturer in love, and to thoughts about what you might do. How do you prevent this? How do you, as a teacher, manage your feelings whilst allowing the asymmetry in the relationship to remain?
Another delicate process. I would very much like to see us supporting one another in this.
Pedagogical love
Teaching is a risky business. The student who wrote her thesis under my supervision ultimately chose the term ‘pedagogical love’. Her interpretation of it was rather idealistic. But I now see the value in her insisting on ‘love’. Because it clarifies that the lecturer-student relationship is closely related to other forms of personal relationship. Not just romantic/erotic love, by the way, but also parental love and friendship. It is up to us to keep the relationship pedagogical, that is to say: asymmetrical and focused on the student’s development.