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Education As a Gift
By Eila Estola
I intend to discuss the gift paradigm in education. I must start by admitting that it was only about a year ago that I first heard about the gift paradigm. I was finishing my doctoral thesis about relational morals in teachers' stories when professor Kaarina Kailo gave me Genevieve Vaughan's book "For-Giving, a Feminist Criticism of Exchange" (1997) and encouraged me to read it. While reading this book, I felt I had found the missing piece to my "thesis puzzle." And it was not only the missing piece but actually provided a name to the picture in my puzzle. The gift paradigm helped me to make deeper sense out of my interpretations.
When I learned about the gift paradigm, I had been working several years in a research project titled "Teachers in Change -A Narrative-Biographical Approach to Teachers' Life and Work" funded by the Academy of Finland. Whenever I refer to teachers' stories, I am talking about the stories analysed by myself and my colleagues in our earlier studies, on which my doctoral thesis was based. We used a collection of autobiographical stories produced by al group of 65 Finnish teachers (including 35 student teachers). There were only five men among these autobiographers, and all the others were women (Estola 2003: 34).
The project was based on the assumption that teachers' voices in education were not heard, although they play the key roles in the educational practice. Trying to hear these silenced voices, the members of our research group listened to even young teachers talk about love, caring, and teachers' close relationships with children and adolescents. However, this discourse was not heard publicly, and even the informant teachers seemed apologetic when talking about these themes (Estola 2002). After these experiences, it was easy to agree with Genevieve Vaughan's (1997: 31) claim: "I believe that the gift paradigm is everywhere in our lives, though we have become used to not seeing it."
The effort to find out something that is not obvious or is downright ignored, such as the gift paradigm, is a challenge for the researcher. According to Vaughan, the main reason for the general ignorance of the gift paradigm is that the gift paradigm emerges from motherhood. For this reason, it does not have the power and privilege to become heard. Many researchers (Noddings 1984; Bowden 1997; Ruddick 1995) have pointed out that the practices of motherhood almost force mothers towards a moral ity pivoting on human relationships. These researchers also emphasize that motherhood is not connected with biological sex. Instead, the mother is the person who takes care of the infant, though in the western countries this caregiver is, in most instances, the woman who has given birth to the baby.
When reading about the gift paradigm, I noticed that it had many similarities to the teachers' stories analyzed in our project. We had written about such words as "love," "hope" and "calling" in teachers' narrative identities (e.g. Estola & Syrjälä 2002; Estola 2003; Estola, Erkkilä & Syrjälä 2004). According to our inquiries, teachers use these words in a special, other-oriented way. Still, not even researchers have been interested in them. Because Genevieve Vaughan (1997: 30) herself mentions that the gift paradigm is very close to the caring and nurturing implicit in mothering, I thought that the manifestations of the gift paradigm in teachers' stories would be worth closer study.
In this article, I base my reflections about the gift paradigm on Genevieve Vaughan's (1997) book. I will first briefly introduce the gift paradigm and the exchange paradigm in the (Finnish) educational context. After that, I will analyze teachers' stories in the context of the gift paradigm from two perspectives. First, I will discuss the gift paradigm as a part of teachers' general view of teaching, which I call "narrative identity." Second, I will make some observations on the gift paradigm in educational practices.
The concepts of "gift paradigm" and "exchange paradigm" in
educational contexts
"Classrooms are places where many voices meet," write Freema Elbaz-Luwisch, Torill Moen and Sigrun Gudmundsdottir (2002: 197). There are voices from different times, places and people. The loudest public voice is heard from the administration, and it speaks more and more often with the words of business and the marketplace. The "marketplace discourse" is close to what Genevieve Vaughan calls the "exchange paradigm." Education, day care centres and schools are expected to be efficient and economical with children as their clients. Schools compete with each other, the best schools are ranked; children, pupils and students are said to be trained for the future and for the needs of the labor market. In brief, in this discourse, the human being is only an instrument of exchange, and the highest value is offered for the extraordinary, the winner, the best performance. The biggest investment is made in those who will pay back most, i.e. will be most productive in the future. This discourse is highly individualistic, encouraging people to search for their own good. (See also Estola & Syrjälä 2002) The "marketplace discourse" consists of the authoritative discourse of fathers, "who are felt to be hierarchically higher" (Bakhtin 1981: 342).
As I mentioned, Genevieve Vaughan's descriptions of the gift paradigm sounded familiar to me against the background of teachers' stories. Generally speaking, the gift paradigm is opposed to the exchange paradigm. The gift paradigm does not expect any "pay back." A similar viewpoint has been presented by Hèléne Cixous (1997), who claims that the gift is also described by Marcel Mauss and Jacques Derrida in the context of the masculine economy, which does not talk about generosity. Instead, the gift in feminine economy allows giving without expectation of anything in return. The gift paradigm is oriented towards satisfying the needs of others and towards providing well-being to others. It is qualitatively rather than quantitatively based, and it therefore easily remains invisible, not being countable or quantifiable. (Vaughan 1997: 30-32.)
As far I have understood, Genevieve Vaughan developed the gift paradigm especially for language and economics. Despite this economic background, the main features of the gift paradigm are compatible with the relational moral in teachers' stories. For them, the "internally persuasive" discourse speaks about relations of love, trust, and caring. It talks about listening to children's voices and needs. Education is not seen as an efficient project but rather as a long and slow process. In contemporary society, this discourse is often silent, and if it is heard, it is often considered old-fashioned. For me, this "relational discourse" is a manifestation of the gift paradigm.
In classrooms, teachers simultaneously hear both voices of the "marketplace discourse" and voices of the "relational discourse." The former tempts them towards effective teaching and good results and the latter towards considering the children's needs.
The following quotation is from Tiina, a student math teacher who is struggling between these discourses:
There are many things that make you feel good. They are not necessarily directly related to pupils' learning. Rather, I think they are more closely related to attitudes. There was a ninth-grader who improved his mark by two units. I thought to myself that this was probably the first time he had ever had a positive learning experience at school. I was really happy about that.
Calling as the expression of the gift paradigm in teachers' narrative identities
I use the term "narrative identity" to refer to identity as a constantly told and retold story about "who am I as a teacher?" (Ricouer 1984). In addition, I refer to Charles Taylor's (1989: 47-48) concept of identity as a moral horizon, from which teachers find their solutions by trying to orient towards goodness and to provide an insight into the meaning of one's life.
"Calling" for me is the moral voice in teachers' narrative identities that basically determines the way in which teachers approach their work. Although some teachers recall their memories about a sense of calling from their childhood, the calling manifests and develops through practice. Calling neither implies an inborn ability to accomplish a specific task nor is it something self-evident. Rather, teachers often develop a sense of calling through highly strenuous and contradictory life experiences. (Estola, Erkkilä & Syrjälä 2004).
Calling can be described as two-dimensional: a teacher feels that she or he is serving others and also derives personal satisfaction from teaching (Hansen 1995). The next quotation describes one teacher's development of calling. Tiina writes:
I decided to become a teacher after some eventful episodes[...] So, this idea to become a teacher was really not a youthful dream. The more I think about it and the more time I spend at school, the more I feel that this will be my calling. It must be the greatest change that has ever happened in me -the feeling that I am heading in the right direction.
When we think of female teachers' lives and their connections with calling, there are also stages related to motherhood, such as pregnancies, deliveries and maternity leaves, which might support the sense of serving others' cause. The experiences of pregnancy may be one reason why women learn that neither their bodies nor their minds are only for themselves. Vaughan (1997, p. 36) describes this process:
I believe that women are socialized to be mothers. Since babies cannot 'pay back' for what they receive, someone must satisfy their needs free, without exchange. This functional Other orientation is made necessary not by the 'nature of women but by the nature of babies who cannot satisfy their own needs[...]'
Although I hesitate to emphasize the experiences of motherhood when talking about teachers' calling, motherhood should not be underestimated, either (Sikes 1997). Learning to be a mother can be a very demanding and even frustrating process, which makes the mother learn the lesson about giving without expecting the other to "pay back." One of our informant teachers, Helena, told of how the birth of her babies forced her to reflect on her own role as a mother and a teacher. She told of how, during her first pregnancy, she did not have any "maternal feelings," and after giving birth to her first baby, she often felt tired with the small, constantly crying, colicky baby. She wrote : "The first baby was a hard lesson for us and made us grow in a short time more than any other thing could have." Helena recalls the experience of feeling like a failure as a mother after admitting she found it "awful to be a mother." (Estola & Syrjälä 2002.)
We should not draw a parallel between gender and biological sex. Many male teachers are sensitive to the voices of relational discourse, although such sensitivity might come more easily to women. The multi-voiced educational practice is complicated: both women and men hear diverse, often contradictory voices, and they need continuously to make decisions as to which voices they listen to. There are many female teachers who do not listen to the voices of relational discourse. From my own history, I can retrospectively recognize the time when I served as the principal of a college for kindergarten teachers, when my sensitivity to relational voices was quite weak. This reminds me of Genevieve Vaughan (1997: 28- 29), who warns that joining the work force has somehow made many women speak in the voice of the patriarchy.
From the male teachers' stories, I have picked one short quotation from a young student teacher writing about his dreams as a teacher. "In a short and busy period of time, I want to become both a mother and a father figure that these kids from such different backgrounds can really trust. I know this could prove to be emotionally trying, but it could also be very rewarding." (Estola 2003:188)This brief statement can be taken as an example of the gift paradigm and Other-oriented relational discourse without the expectation of return. It also tells us about the emotional vulnerability and hardness of the work. The quote reminds us of "trustful hope": a teacher who never gives up (van Manen 1991).
In my thinking, calling as a way of serving others is a concrete manifestation of the gift paradigm in teachers' stories. It emerges in practice when teachers find the children calling them. This metaphor of Max van Manen (1991) about children's call fascinates me in its concrete imagery and reminds me about the power of children. This image is easy to connect with motherhood: when the child calls, the mother has to answer. Answering to this call, however, may be harder now than ever. In our educational institutions, the loudest discourse is more and more often the exchange-oriented "marketplace discourse," which speaks in the voice of the patriarchy. For this reason, all efforts towards strengthening the gift paradigm in narrative identities are welcome. I would like to claim that 'calling' is teachers' own word to talk about the gift paradigm. We should revitalize that concept. It would help to make the gift paradigm more visible.
Gift paradigm in embodied educational practices
Until recently, the body has been a taboo in the discussion of educational practices. It has been either totally ignored or referred to indirectly. On the other hand, at least in sociology, anthropology and feminist research, the body has been a topic of active interest (Featherstone, Hepworth & Turner 1991; Jacobus, Keller & Shuttleword 1990; Jokinen 1997).
The silenced voices of the gift paradigm and the body seem to me something that would be worth of looking at together. In educational research, the body has been written between the lines by using such words as 'manners' or 'tact', or by describing the ways in which teachers move, talk, or smile (Hansen 2001). Max van Manen, when talking about teachers' style, refers to the body explicitly (1991: 121), pointing out that style is "the outward embodiment of the person."
Teachers' stories are, however, full of references to the body that seem to bear resemblance to the gift paradigm: touching, happiness or exhaustion, gentle and hostile bodily contacts, hugs, looks, and many others. Feminist research has indicated that body writing is especially explicit in women's stories (Bleakley 2000). George Lakoff & Mark Johnson (1999) have conclusively argued that our language has a material basis. The language talks about the body with words and metaphors, as does the next quotation from Liisa, a Finnish primary school teacher:
The most difficult thing in this demanding job of teaching is the perpetual presence. You cannot hide your own being, feelings, and attitudes behind the subjects you are teaching. Every moment, no matter what kind of a phase of life you are living in, you have to be there. You have to be present in the very situation where learning takes place and where the developing individuals, your pupils, are watching you. At the same time, they are modeling themselves on you and also need guidance and encouragement.
When I analyzed teachers' stories of this kind with my Israeli colleague, Freema Elbaz-Luwisch, we suggested that teaching could be seen as embodied physical labor (Estola & Elbaz-Luwisch 2004). We were, however, advised to drop the concept "physical labor" because physical labor was said to involve hard and heavy work that requires muscles and strength. The notion of physical labor has notably masculine connotations: it speaks with the voice of a man in authoritative discourse, "which demands that we acknowledge it[...]" (Bakhtin 1981: 342). Yet, teachers' stories tell about different aspects of physical labor. Those voices make teachers' work physical because the body is the main vehicle toward children (Mitchell & Weber 1999:124). Using the vocabulary of the gift paradigm: the gifts in educational practices are given through and by the body.
Silva Tedre's (1999) views encourage us to read this concept of "physical labor" in a more polyphonic "Bakhtinian" way, assuming that the collective voice of women would be heard in this discourse against another voice, that of the father, because teachers' stories include frequent references not only to the physical heaviness of teaching, but also to affectionate looks, hugs and touching. Tedre points out that there are very many different bodily activities that have remained totally unspoken because they have traditionally belonged to women and to privacy.
Liisa, a Finnish primary school teacher, middle-aged and mid-career, writes about the concrete physical demands of teaching.
The teacher's work requires surprisingly good physical fitness. To be standing on your feet all day, going from one pupil to another in the class, to prepare schoolwork, and possibly even to teach give physical education require strength and good health. But even more strength can be required by factors taxing the mind, such as work-related stress, the noise filling your ears from all around you, the settling of quarrels between pupils, the imbalance of personal relationships in the school community, and other such factors.
In educational practice, such words as "love," "hope," and "care," which are used by teachers when talking about their moral horizons, have embodied material backgrounds. They refer to certain practices rather than emotions (see also Ruddick 1995). When we connect this idea with the gift paradigm, it is obvious that an important part of for-giving consists of concrete, material gifts in the world of nurturing. Genevieve Vaughan (1997: 37) describes the development of nurturing the child first with goods and services and later with words. In this interaction, the mother is not the only giving person because the child participates in turn-taking with the mother. Genevieve Vaughan (1997: 37) distinguishes turn-taking from exchange: "The motivation in turn-taking is not constrained reciprocity, but sharing, alternating giving and receiving, and communication."
The next quotation from a teacher' story is an impressive example about the "for-giving" face of the child. It is also an example about the importance of the body in for-giving practices in general. "I shook hands with my future pupils and wished them a happy summer. A small girl came and hugged me hard, pressed her cheek against my breast and looked round-eyed into my eyes, trustfully. Let that look give me light, strength and love with these 'last ones' of mine."
In educational practices, gift giving takes place through bodies both symbolically and concretely. The smaller the children, the more the teacher's body has to be concretely close to them. The older the children, the more diverse gifts are given by their teachers. Teachers give gifts by providing knowledge in different subjects, manners, cultural traditions, arts, etc. In that sense, teachers' work, similarly to mothers', reaches far into the future. And although teachers do this without being justified to expect any "payment back, there are, at least from time to time, situations where they experience a strong sense of turn taking. Maybe those episodes especially support teachers to continue their work. Let us listen to how a student teacher wrote about teaching. "I was impressed by the aspects of the teachers' stories which made it clear that, even in the most modest conditions, the teachers did the most dedicated work, developed new solutions, and turned down general beliefs to which they did not adhere."
Conclusions
I started by arguing that, similarly to the generally neglected gift paradigm, there are silent voices in teachers' stories that should become heard. In this paper, I have talked about calling and embodiment as voices that reveal the Other orientation in teachers' work. This Other orientation is what connects teaching with the gift paradigm.
We could help to make the Other orientation more visible and louder by revitalizing the words that are spoken in its voice. In addition to the words "calling," "gift," "love," "hope"', and "care," we could also include "generosity" (La Caze 2002) and especially "gift"'. It is, however, not enough to use these words but to be careful that they are used in an Other-oriented sense. For instance, "hope" also has a male voice, which speaks about a concept that can be measured and tested by using "hope scales" (Snyder 1994). As far as I understand, "gift" has an extra benefit compared to the other words mentioned above:
it brings economic and global questions into play. For that reason, it should become part of teachers' vocabulary not only implicitly but also quite explicitly.
As concluding remarks, I want to mention two probable reasons why the voices of the gift paradigm in education have become silenced.
First, in the project of professionalizing teaching, it is problematic that the overwhelming majority of teachers are women, who tend to approach their work based on the paradigm of motherhood. The tendency to respond to other people's needs and to approach people as individuals is considered "an obstacle to professionalization, a deficiency, or a disorder" (Henriksson 2000: 86-88). This attitude ignores the societal significance of women's practices and implicitly assumes women's experiences and ways of thinking to be inferior to those of men; they are self-evident in the home context, but lack any wider significance (Vaughan 1997: 51, 239; Freedman1987: 78-79).
Second, teachers' voices are not heard because the female identity has remained silenced. The discourse of autonomous identity has been so loud that the different relational identity of women has not even been recognized (Enoranta 1996, p. 132, referring to Nicole Brossard). Female subjectivity has never been able to develop into the kind of autonomous individuality that is characteristic of modern (male) identities. The ideal of autonomous identity is an element of the exchange paradigm. If we want to make the gift paradigm flourish, we should not encourage women to adopt this autonomous identity. Instead, it is important, as Vaughan points out, to encourage 'women and men with caring values to stop nurturing the patriarchy' (Vaughan 1997: 29).
Finally, it makes sense to remind ourselves that the entire ideal of autonomous identity is a fantasy: "Each human is a part of the collective because her/his identity is formed by using the collective's material, cultural and linguistic gifts, which are given to each of us by others, and are given by each of us to others." (ivi: 107). Charles Taylor (1989: 35-37) writes about the same topic it by saying that every person can only be as individualistic as the cultural context allows her/him to be.
I want to close with a quotation from a female student teacher. It summarizes what I have written about Other-oriented teacher identities and educational practices.
I want to recognize and overcome the problems of being a student, a child, a person. This sounds wonderful on paper, which is why I want to see myself achieve this goal over and over again, time after time, tirelessly and with tenacity. I hope that I possess flexibility and openness, I hope that I have wise eyes and a warm heart, I hope that I can be a person for people. I really hope that this is not merely fictitious prose and an overused clichè.
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