What is teaching?
In which I reflect up ten years of teaching art -- and wonder what might lie ahead
For now at least, my “career” as a teacher at a university has come to an end.
I feel the need to write about it. I want to write about what this means to me: teaching.
I'm putting the word “career” in quotation marks mostly because I never approached teaching that way, as a career. It's important for me to note that to make a career was far from my mind when teaching. It also has been far from my mind when writing, in fact when doing any of the things that I enjoy doing.
(If I can give you one piece of advice: don’t follow my lead.)
When I use the word “enjoy” I do mean that. I had never thought of myself as a teacher before I became one, and I have come to enjoy teaching immensely.
Teaching is a privilege in all senses of the word. This fact became clearer to me every year I was doing it. Privileges come with obligations. For teaching this means that as a teacher, you’ll have to challenge yourself.
You won’t be able to shake the privilege. But you’ll have to try to develop a deep understanding of your privilege; and you should never forget that at some stage in the past, you were a student as well.
Seen this way, teaching is the voluntary burden of holding oneself up to the standards that one would like to have a good teacher meet. And there will always be room for improvement.
For me, good teaching entails making oneself vulnerable while trying to help those who put themselves into a vulnerable position. You can't be a good teacher if you don't embrace your own fallacies, fallacies that you want to erase, but that still exist because you're human. There's always something else to learn, something else to realize.
So to teach well means to be open, to be able to learn. You learn alongside your students. The lessons learned are often different even though sometimes, they're similar. I realized very early that teaching means to embrace what you don't know, what you don't see, and to make yourself know it, see it.
During the past decade, I've learned more from my students than they might imagine. I'm deeply grateful for that.
Over the course of my teaching, I have spent considerable time regretting that in the past I didn't know as much as I know now. I could have been so much more useful in the past, had I only known this... had I only been aware of that... had I only known the solution to every problem faced by every student.
By construction this is an impossible demand I'm putting on myself: as long as you’re learning, you will always know more as time passes. To some extent, teaching depends on what one knows. But to a usually larger extent, in the creative arts it depends on the inquisitive process itself. Teaching entails trying to inspire others to challenge themselves, so that they might find the answers to their creative problems on their own.
When that happens, one of teaching’s best rewards is being presented to you: I couldn’t describe with words being one of the first people to see the often amazing photographs/projects made by my students. On top of that comes the sheer joy of seeing someone succeed with a challenge they created for themselves.
So mostly, teaching art – in the sense that what can be taught is the method more than anything else – amounts to being an imperfect guide. You have some idea where you might be leading the person entrusted to you. Most of the time, you know how to be that one step ahead. But the reality is that you don't know if the path taken is the correct one. It might not be. It’s not like teaching math, where the answer to the problem “2 + 2 = …” is “4”, and that’s it.
I really meant what I wrote: art can be taught. But what is being taught is not being an artist, it’s not being creative. Instead, it’s getting acquainted with the method and with working out how it applies to every student in their own individual fashion.
For a teacher, there might be the moment when you will have to realize that the path you suggested it was not the right one, and you might have to suggest a different path. As a teacher, this often comes down to trusting your instincts. In nine cases out of ten, I couldn't say why I nudged a student down some particular path. It was a gut feeling. But there always was a problem resolved at the end, even as the path might have taken a strange left or right turn, that, however, only presented itself this way.
Making art is like baking a cake, except that you only have a vague idea of the ingredients and their amounts. There will have to be some heat (no heat: no art), but you won't know how much and for how long it will have to be applied. You don't know whether your art cake will be sweet or savory. Actually… Of course you know that it will be savory – can there be such an entity as sweet art?
But making art is not about the cake. If as an artist you’re interested in the end product, then I’m not sure if you’re a good artist. You might make good work. But more often than not, it will be merely good enough. So the moment you have your cake, you will want to see its faults (there will be many), and then it’s time to make the next cake.
Maybe this is a good way to conclude my thoughts on teaching: with time, the one thing I have stressed when speaking with students is that making art is about the process. Being an art student is an opportunity to learn about the process, the method that will get you to where you want to be.
Ideally, it’s the sheer difficulty, at times terror, but ultimately beauty of the process that makes it all worthwhile — and I could say that as much about teaching as about writing, making art, … anything creative really.
I found this tweet through Bryan Formhals’ Twitter feed (btw, Bryan writes a great newsletter). Even though the sentiment expressed therein comes out of a different world than the one I have been operating in, I immediately felt a kinship to the underlying conundrum: I am a writer (known for that) and photographer (not yet know for that), and I run a blog. In theory, I ought to fill all those other roles. But I don’t, because I can’t. I don’t have the time to do all those other things, and I don’t even know how to do them.
I should, though: I need to find a new job.
To be honest, this is a time of considerable trepidation for me: what will I do next? What will my next job be? Right now, I simply don’t know. And all of that against the backdrop of the pandemic and the civil unrest in the country. I don’t remember when I last had a good night’s sleep.
When I set out to write this Mailing List, it wasn’t my intention to focus much on aspects of my personal life. But life has a way of messing up one’s plans, doesn’t it? I don’t remember a time in my life where this many challenges came together.
That said, of late I have felt throughly invigorated in terms of my thinking and writing. Turns out writing these emails has been a part of that (as have the many generous and kind responses — thank you for those!).
I’m also happy with the recent pieces I published on my main site: if you haven’t read my review of Yurie Nagashima’s new book, yet, please have a look. It’s really more a piece about a camera’s emancipatory power and what that power can teach us all. The week before, I wrote about a group of World War 2 photographs taken by a German soldier against the background of my own biography. Feel free to tell me what you think of these articles.
As always, I hope this email finds you safe and well. If you live in the US, please wear a mask! Seriously!
And thank you for reading.
— Jörg
I’m a freelance writer, photographer, and educator currently living and working in the US.
This Mailing List is my attempt to bring back some of the aspects that made early blogging so great -- community engagement and a more relaxed and maybe less polished approach to writing and thinking about photography. You can find the bulk of my main writing on CPhMag.com.
If you like what you read and would like to support my work, you can. Large parts of my work are fueled by black and green tea, and I very much appreciate your support!
You can also support me by liking this email, by sharing it with others, and/or by emailing me back to tell me what you think. I'd love to hear from you!