A few months ago we invited a colleague from the institution to give a short presentation in my department, sharing some of her ideas around research. At some point in the session, she said “I offer this to you, because…”. I forget the rest of the sentence but what was striking to me was how it had begun. It really resonated with something I’d read earlier this year, from Ronald Barnett’s book “A will to learn: Being a student in an age of uncertainty“. From Barnett:
Here are gifts given without any hope of even a ‘thank-you’, yet this ‘gift-giving’ looks for some kind of return. The feedback may come late; the marks may not be as hoped, but the expectation of some return is carried in these gifts. The student’s offerings are gifts and deserve to be recognized as such, despite their hoped-for return.
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The language that I have in mind is one of proffering, of tendering, of offering, of sharing, and of presenting and gifting. The pedagogical relationship may surely be understood in just these terms, as a setting of gift-giving that at least opens a space for mutual obligations attendant upon gift-giving.
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In the pedagogical setting, the student engages in activities circumscribed by a curriculum. Those activities are implicitly judged to be worthwhile, for the curriculum has characteristically been formally sanctioned (typically through a university’s internal course validation procedures). However, those curricula activities are not just worthwhile in themselves for they are normally intended to lead somewhere. In that leading somewhere, there is something that emerges, whether it be the result of a laboratory experiment, a problem that has been solved, an essay that has been submitted or a design that has been created. These are pedagogical offerings.
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Both the teacher and the taught put themselves forward, offer themselves, give themselves. They even, to some extent, exchange themselves.
I think that there is something incredibly powerful that happens when we begin to think about the work that the student submits (offers) as a gift. Something that they have given of themselves, a representation of the time, effort and thought they have put into a creative work. If we think about the student’s offering as a gift, surely it must change the way it is treated and the way we respond? How does feedback and assessment change if we think of them as responses to gifts? Or, as gifts themselves? Would our relationships with students change (be enhanced?) if we thought of their submissions and our feedback as mutual gifts, offered to each other as representations of who we are?