Hidden Drivers of Pedagogic Transactions: Teachers as Clinicians and Designers

There is more to teaching than introducing a subject matter, or giving an answer to a quest, and there is more to learning than incorporating an expert's views in a domain. To learn is to develop one's own ways of doing and thinking through personal experience, and in transactions with people and things. To teach is to provide occasions— for oneself and others—to grow, or augment potential from within. Teaching, in other words, is about designing the encounters and the spaces that foster genuine exploration, expression, and exchange of intriguing ideas and feelings, on safe ground. Learning-rich settings come in many shades, and no one fits all. One "hidden dimension" that drives all pedagogic transactions is the quality of the dialogue between mentor and learner. This dialogue can be direct or mediated, it can be verbal or embedded in the artefacts meant to mediate the transaction, or "objects-tothink-with". I draw from my experience as a clinician— in the Piagetian sense— to rethink the act of teaching as a mutual design inquiry. I focus on the art of listening, mediating, and negotiating the multiple voices, perspectives, and agendas, as well as the mutual hopes and expectations that inform any form of pedagogic intervention. I show that in every teacher lays a clinician and a designer.