Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2014
Three-fourths of the 180 Centers for Teaching Excellence found in U.S. colleges and universities have been developed over the last decade. Excellence in Teaching has never been discussed more. Yet clarity about what actually constitutes quality in teaching is not at all apparent. This essay suggests a contrast between two ways of conceiving excellence in teaching—an excellence of achievement as compared to an excellence of desire. The one, based on a marketing model of education, stresses measurable outcomes, with an emphasis on the acquisition of information. The other, drawing from themes in the history of Christian spirituality, evokes a wisdom tradition that nourishes unsatisfied desire as a principal goal. In the latter, less importance is ascribed to the teacher's self-conscious need to call attention to his or her particular competence. Set free from “the maintenance of control,” the teacher can be more open to a common search (and excellence) to which everyone contributes.
1 The University of Kansas Center for Teaching Excellence website has a listing of “Online University Teaching Centers,” including 180 such programs in the United States as of September, 1999. Of these, some 75 percent have been developed within the last decade.
2 Palmer, Parker speaks favorably (and critically) of the Marketing Model of academic community life in his book The Courage to Teach (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998), 93f.Google Scholar Comparing it to Therapeutic and Civic models of academic community life, he goes on to suggest an alternative of his own anchored in a shared community of truth.
3 Paolo Freire criticized this notion of the “banking” concept of education as an instrument of oppression in his still-valuable book, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Seabury, 1970), 57–74.Google Scholar
4 Leclercq, Jean, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, trans., Misrahi, Catharine (New York: New American Library, 1961).Google Scholar
5 The phrase “excellence of desire” could easily be misunderstood. I certainly do not mean to suggest that good intentions or “wanting to do well” could ever substitute for actual competence in teaching, no more than one's wishing he or she had been good could be counted as a true “baptism of desire” in traditional Catholic teaching. In each case, priority is attached to that which drives and sustains a person throughout the whole of his life. On the “baptism of desire,” see Catechism of the Catholic Church (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1994), 321.Google Scholar
6 Gregory, said in his Life of Moses, II. 239Google Scholar, “This truly is the vision of God: never to be satisfied in the desire to see him. But one must always, by looking at what he can see, rekindle his desire to see more.” See Gregory of Nyssa: The Life of Moses, trans., Malherbe, Abraham J. and Ferguson, Everett (New York: Paulist, 1978), 116.Google Scholar
7 Feast of St. Mary Magdalen, Roman Rite, July 22, Office of Readings. Quoted in Sheldrake, Philip, Befriending Our Desires (Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria, 1994), 43.Google Scholar
8 Lévinas, Emmanuel speaks of the way one's deepest desire is ever fed by absence, suggesting that “Desire nourishes itself, one might say, with its hunger.” Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Lingis, Alphonso (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University, 1969), 34.Google Scholar
9 Dunne, John S. C.S.C., The Music of Time (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1996), 41.Google Scholar
10 Ibid., 16. Dunne draws his phrase “the transcendence of longing” from Adorno's, TheodoreKierkegaard (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 1989), 140.Google Scholar See also Dunne, John S., The Peace of the Present (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1991), 72–79.Google Scholar
11 See Jaeger, Werner W., Early Christianity and Greek Paideia (London: Oxford University, 1961).Google Scholar
12 The Sayings of the Fathers (Alphabetical Collection), Macarius the Great, 23. See Ward, Benedicta, ed., The Desert Christian: The Sayings of the Desert Fathers (New York: Macmillan, 1980), 132.Google Scholar
13 This is the second of the Buddha's Four Noble Truths in the Dhammacakka-pavattana sutra.
14 “Right Aspiration (or Intention)” is the second step of the Eightfold Path in the Buddha's teachings.
15 Emmanuel Lévinas makes this important distinction between “need” and “desire.” See Lévinas, Emmanuel, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans., Lingis, Alphonso (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 33–35.Google Scholar See also Farley, Wendy, Eros for the Other: Retaining Truth in a Pluralistic World (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996).Google Scholar
16 What Thomas Merton once wrote to a young activist could be said as readily to a young teacher: “When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the truth of the work itself” (Merton, Thomas, The Hidden Ground of Love, ed. Shannon, William H. [New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1985], 294).Google Scholar
17 This is the tension Augustine described in the tenth book of his Confessions, when he prayed, “Late have I loved you, Beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved you! Lo, you were within, but I outside, seeking there for you, and upon the shapely things you have made I rushed headlong, I the misshapen. You were with me, but I was not with you” (Augustine, Saint, The Confessions, trans. Boulding, Maria [New York: Vintage, 1998], 222.Google Scholar
18 See Illich's, Ivan distinction between education and “schooling” in Deschooling Society (New York: Harper and Row, 1972).Google Scholar
19 Quoted in Bly, Robert, News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1995), 126.Google Scholar