Charismatic teaching and its globalisation
October 21, 2007 at 7:59 pm 3 comments
Professor (emeritus) Stephen Jaeger, Departments of German & Comparative Literature, Centre for Advanced Study, University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign
This paper can be downloaded from http://www.wun.ac.uk/theglobaluniversity/workshop.html
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1.
Ian Wei | October 23, 2007 at 3:12 pm
Thank you for a great paper which I think will ring true in the experiences of many as both students and teachers. Influenced partly by your paper and partly by your work on medieval pedagogy, it strikes me that while charismatic teaching can occur in any educational institution, it is not always equally valued and encouraged. Is it possible to generalise about why it is sometimes valued, and why at other times it is not?
2.
Adam Nelson | October 29, 2007 at 2:29 pm
This wide-ranging paper raises a number of questions. I’m particularly interested in one specific aspect of the analysis, namely, the link between “local knowledge” and “culture” and the idea that both are “extremely difficult for an outsider to assimilate” (11). As we look across history, would we not find that both “local knowledge” and “culture” are themselves often (perhaps always) products of cross-cultural interaction and exchange? Would we not find that ideas of “culture” are often (perhaps always) defined in relation to “other” cultures (either accurately or inaccurately), such that few cultures, if any, are pure or permanent but are instead constantly hybridizing?
These questions bring me to a question about the role of “charismatic teaching” in the transmission or transfer of “local knowledge” and “culture.” If charismatic teaching is “one form of the transmission of local knowledge, even more restricted ‘locally’ than language” (11), then what role, if any, can charismatic teaching play in an inter-national or cross-national educational context? If modern technology cannot facilitate charismatic teaching, could face-to-face interactions across national boundaries perhaps do a better job of realizing the benefits of the charismatic teacher . . . or is charismatic teacher too “restricted ‘locally’” to facilitate inter-national or cross-cultural learning?
I wonder what role, if any, the charismatic teacher might play in answering Ka Ho Mok’s call for East Asian teachers who are “confident in ‘their] systems and . . . proud of [their] cultures,” teachers who identify with the “rich traditions and cultures” of East Asia and “never look down upon [their own] rich scholarly traditions” (Ka Ho Mok, 15). If in fact the charismatic teacher is the “type” who can advance these aims, does the very idea of the charismatic teacher run the risk of being criticized as “western” (or locally restricted to “the West”)? If the idea of the charismatic teacher transcends particular cultures (even as this idea manifests itself in specific cultural guises), then perhaps charismatic teachers could be the ones to answer Ka Ho Mok’s call to “develop alternative academic paradigms for promoting cross-cultural understanding and cross-national policy learning” (Ka Ho Mok, 16).
I’m also interested in hearing what Professor Jaeger thinks of the Confucius Institutes, which Anthony Welch and Zhang Zhen highlight and Wang Yunlai and Dai Zhehua describe as seeking “not only [to] transmit and develop the cultures of their own nationalities, but also [to] promote the communication and exchanges among different culture” (Yunlai and Zhehua, 8).
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Professor Rosemary Deem | November 11, 2007 at 2:47 pm
Jaeger’s paper is important not only for its discussion of charismatic teaching (where some discussion of Max Weber’s notions of charismatic and routinised authority might usefully be brought into play) but also because it touches on the so-called crisis of the humanities which is a major theme of Readings, B. (1996)’s The University in Ruins. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press. Whilst I really appreciated the in-depth discussion of charismatic teaching, I was not utterly convinced by the argument that only face to face teaching can be a vehicle for this, not least because I had eleven years of distance teaching experience at the UK Open University, true it was in a pre-internet era but for a good many students there was only limited or sometimes no face to face tuition yet they remained highly motivated learners. Like Adam Nelson, I was intrigued by how Confucianism and charismatic teaching might be combined and wondered if Wang Yibing had considered the latter in his discussion of the internationalisation requirements for China’s HE system.