In the last few years, I’ve been to an increasing number of initiatives that use business customer service training as a way to view the duties of a teacher. They always strike me as depressing to attend, because teaching is highly skilled and highly complex, much more so than any of the customer service I’ve done.
My feelings aside, it’s in the classroom where I see the more serious problems with this way of viewing learning.
Students know this intuitively, psychologists and sociologists know this through research and teachers know this by the reaction of students and by their own experience as students. Learning involves risk, because learning changes you. In order to learn, you have to accept and be able to negotiate the systems of reasoning that underlie a discipline, and the general set of assumptions that underlie college education.
After a college education, you are not the same person you were before you entered, something many students find out when they realize that they can’t even talk to friends and family who have not also had this experience.
The student cannot always be right, because learning changes you.
Students are not customers. They may be able to take their money elsewhere (maybe), but they’ll have to change no matter what. This means not only that customer service models cannot work, but also that they actively interfere with the process of learning because they insist that the consumer (the student in business-centered education models) can retain being right and not have to engage in risk to learn.
The student has to assume his or her previous ways of understanding could be wrong, or at least in need of correction If you aren’t in need of correction, don’t bother to pay for college; college is for people who know they don’t know everything. You can’t learn if you don’t believe you could stand to be corrected.
This is also the basis of the scientific method: If it can’t be falsified, it can’t be proven, either.
Of course, this goes both ways. In the student-teacher dynamic, the student cannot be the only person who could be wrong. A great deal of my teacher training was also wrong, in the spirit of discussing ‘wrongness.’ A teacher can neither always be wrong nor always right and, therefore, an authority.
I was trained to believe that I must always be right and can never apologize or otherwise behave as if undergraduate students could be potential peers. I think that is in error. Undergraduates, like people everywhere, will tend to fulfill a teacher’s expectations.
Expectations are not the only force operating in the classroom, but because undergraduates are professionals in training, they tend to take a great deal of behavioral cues from their teachers, who represent professionals to them.
A teacher has to know enough to be useful in the classroom, but must always be open to continuing to learn. Classrooms full of students have individual characters that require adaptation, just as the body of knowledge in a particular subject also changes and requires adaptation from the teacher to stay current. It’s a god-awful mess of work, but it is a necessary mess.
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In the classroom, this need for risk means that there must be a culture of mutual trust, no small feat for students and professors who may have had fairly negative experiences in education previously. That burden is heavy on the teacher, who has to be consistent and considerate when offered an opportunity to do so that doesn’t make learning more difficult (like allowing students to constantly turn in late work or grade inflation).
Through my teaching experience, I have previously not been stopped by illness, by worry over my own grades, by a divorce or, in two cases, couch-surfing because I could not afford to pay rent. I have tried to keep those things out of the classroom because of my position in it. The person directing the class can ill afford to put herself in the center of learning — my students should learn more about the subject than they do about me.
I have no doubt that I failed on occasion, for which my classes have my apology.
While I believe customer service models represent a threat to learning, I think that there is one thing which can be taken, albeit heavily modified, from the idea of customer service. In my years of working minimum wage, I noticed that customers would sometimes come in with the understanding that they needed something and the willingness to work with me to get it. In those cases, as in my classroom, I can help.
Even when the consumer or student was poorly prepared for the discussion, did not have the necessary supplies or was otherwise incapable of taking an easier route to get there, I could help. In teaching, unlike in customer service, I can see someone not just getting a product they want (as if learning could simply be a product! How awfully cynical and small that makes learning!), but someone in a position to have a better life.
For me, that is the better service.
