Nugent, D

AUT Scholarly Commons

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Conversations on Research: 
6th annual School of Education Conference 
 
 
Dean Nugent 
Senior Lecturer, Tertiary 
School of Education 
AUT 
 
Towards a pedagogy of teacher education: 
characteristics of the inquiring teacher from the 60’s  
counter-culture and a spiritual practice perspective 
 
You must Awaken to a fundamental emotional sense of Inhering in Indivisible 
Reality Itself – Which does not kill you, does not separate from you. Such is the 
fundamental nature of Spiritual awareness.  
Adi Da Samraj 
 
There is no “objective world” separate from Consciousness. You have no such 
“experience”. You have never had any such “experience”. All your 
“experiences” are in the medium of Consciousness. The proper investigation of 
Reality Itself, then, is a process in Consciousness. 
Adi Da Samraj 
 
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your 
philosophy. 
William Shakespeare 
 
My first approach to considering teaching in the mode of inquiry was very 
much influenced by a text published in 1969 and which I first encountered as a 
student secondary teacher in 1976. It seemed to me that Postman and 
Weingartner’s Teaching As A Subversive Activity was a most radical piece of 
writing. While today the late-‘60’s revolutionary tone might date it for some, I 
still find their vision inspiring and provocative.  
 
The authors posited that the inquiry-based pedagogy would have a unique and 
revolutionary impact on teaching. A small sample of their useful challenges 
(Postman and Weingartner (1969) italics theirs): 
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“The inquiry method is not designed to do better what older environments try to 
do. It works you over in entirely different ways. It activates different senses, 
attitudes, and perceptions; it generates a different, bolder, and more potent kind 
of intelligence…It will cause everything about education to change… (p.27) 
 
“The inquiry method is very much a product of our electric age. It makes the 
syllabus obsolete; students generate their own stories by becoming involved in 
the methods of learning… The older school environments stressed that learning 
is being told what happened. The inquiry environment stresses that learning is a 
happening in itself…(p.29) 
 
“From all of this, you must not conclude that there is no logic to the learning 
process. There is. But it is best described as a “psycho-logic”, whose rules, 
sequences, spirals, and splotches are established by living, squirming, 
questioning, perceiving, fearing, loving, above all, languaging nervous systems. 
Bear in mind that the purpose of the inquiry method is to help learners increase 
their competence as learners. It hopes to accomplish this by having students do 
what effective learners do.” (p. 31) 
 
“Knowledge is produced in response to questions. And new knowledge results 
from the asking of new questions; quite often new questions about old 
questions. Here is the point: Once you have learned to ask questions – relevant 
and appropriate and substantial questions – you have learned how to learn and 
no one can keep you from learning whatever you want or need to know.” (p 23) 
 
“There can be no significant innovation in education that does not have at its 
centre the attitudes of teachers, and it is an illusion to think otherwise. The 
beliefs, feelings, and assumptions of teachers are the air of a learning 
environment; they determine the quality of the life within it.” (p. 33) 
 
“We have a possibility for you to consider: suppose that you decide to have the 
entire “curriculum” consist of questions. These questions would have to be 
worth seeking answers to not only from your point of view but, more 
importantly, from the point of view of the students. In order to get still closer to 
reality, add the requirements that the questions must help the students to 
develop and internalize concepts that will help them to survive in the rapidly 
changing world of the present and the future.” (p. 59) 
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The book was written at the time of the “opening of the window” that occurred 
in the late ‘60’s and early ‘70’s – when a great questioning of the socio-political 
as well as of the religio-spiritual was occurring, especially in the West. I was 
entering into early adulthood and was profoundly influenced by that spirit of the 
times. 
 
Over the years I have come to understand that there is a seemingly unlimited 
number of elements interacting in complex ways in any “meeting” between 
teacher and students. I was blind to most of these elements and so my first 
faultering steps working in an inquiry mode were doomed to be difficult. 
Especially, as Postman and Weingartner suggested, it “activates different 
senses, attitudes, and perceptions”. Indeed, I would describe my beginning years 
as a teacher as a time of painful crises as I struggled to find my bearings. 
  
In the first years of my teaching practice I had also begun to notice that difficult 
situations with students could suddenly escalate and I could feel how my own 
reactions were majorly contributing to the situations. I began to move from 
generally conceiving of students’ being “the problem” (whether it be relative to 
their learning or to their behaviour) to suspecting, rather, that I was “the 
problem”. A subjective turn was occurring and the questions I was asking began 
to focus more on my disposition, my emotional states, my communication, my 
intentions. And how these could be affecting the learning circumstance for my 
students. 
 
And it was by no means easy to answer these questions. How can we know 
what is happening  in the formal learning circumstance? The classroom has a 
complexity of points of view and perceptions. Each conceiving, perceiving and 
emoting human entity is creating a version of the “reality” of the situation and 
each is interacting in an elaborate cause and effect manner with others. What do 
we really “know” about what is going on? We are only ever having a very 
partial experience of reality. 
 
Years passed as I painstakingly learnt to be open to observing and considering 
more and more of the elements of the pedagogical “situation” and to notice 
some of my unexamined presumptions. 
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When I took up my first formal position as a teacher educator in 1985 I had the 
good fortune to be associated with a team of teacher educators who were 
prepared to investigate their own motivations and practices as teacher educators 
in a context of on-going dialogue which included the participants on their 
courses as well as with each other. Until then, although I had valued 
relationships with many teacher-friends, my exploration of teaching had seemed 
in some ways to be a solo journey. By the time I took up the practice of a 
teacher educator I observed that I was maturing in a personal capacity to be with 
companions in a more relational and interdependent way.  
 
At the same time, my own inquiry into the relationship between subjective and 
objective realities led me to consider what was being explored in the discipline 
of transpersonal psychology and before long, at the age of 36 years, I found 
myself at the feet of a Spiritual Master (Adi Da Samraj) and experiencing his 
“Radical” Reality-Way of Adidam. This was revelatory and opened a 
completely new view of reality and I knew that I would be guided by the 
relationship with him for the rest of my life. It was clear to me, indeed, that my 
eyes are covered over by images of a separate “self” and my mind held captive 
by visions of “the world”. That this was a bondage and delusion that could only 
be gone beyond with the help of someone who had transcended all limitations 
seemingly imposed on the human condition and was turning about to help 
others. My previously rather random self-study had, it seems, opened my heart 
to recognizing a teacher who could guide me beyond my limited experience of 
what is happening. 
 
The spiritual practice he offers involves the progressive transformation of one’s 
whole understanding of reality. All certainties tend to fall away. All attempts to 
make familiar and to control, motivated by fear, begin to be understood. And 
one also appreciates the mystery of our being together in this place for this brief 
time between life and death; and the preciousness of being able to meet and not 
be afraid and to stop from killing each other or violating each other in some 
form or another; to feel how we are all in the same boat here – in need of love 
and to live in the sphere of love. To create together from that place. A place of 
ultimate happiness. To grasp the lesson of life: that you cannot become happy, 
you can only be happy. The necessity to practice happiness from an ever 
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depthful and wounded feeling of our mortal condition. To participate in the 
creating of the “sheltering” and sanctuary for all. 
 
For most of my career as a teacher educator I have been involved in this 
intensive contemplative way of life and I have been trying to identify and 
articulate how that way of life has influenced my teacher education pedagogy. 
In an important way I feel it has strengthened my inquiry-based stance. It has 
opened up a greater range of human experience and belief to be examined and 
provided a moral foundation and purpose to my teaching practice. I work to try 
and give beginning teachers a feeling for examining their teaching from the 
point of view of the learner. One approach to this is to be asking them to 
observe and evaluate the quality of the teaching-learning happenings that they 
are experiencing in my sessions. In other words, I look to initiate an inquiry into 
their immediate learning experience – as student-teachers. I offer my own 
teaching to be “de-constructed” in an undefended manner. My own inquiry is 
increasingly from a disposition of “not-knowing” and more open to exploring 
different possibilities. 
 
Postman and Weingartner described the inquiring teacher as one whose basic 
mode of discourse with students is questioning in order to open minds to 
unsuspected (by the teacher as well as the students) possibilities. In the midst of 
all our questions, I hold the vision that sooner or later our explorations and 
conceptualisations together will manifest in change of practice and point of 
view – relative to our teaching and our lives.  
 
Inquiring teachers do not look for a single statement as the answer to a question 
but rather, as Postman and Weingartner put it, they require as many as possible, 
reasons, causes, and meanings. They are cautious about implying any sort of 
limits on learning and thus their lessons develop from the happening of the 
students interactions and not from a previously determined “logical” structure. 
 
In this brief extract I have indicated my interest in establishing a relationship 
between an inquiry-based stance and a spiritual practice that can inform a 
teacher education pedagogy. 
 
References: 
 
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Postman, N., & Weingartner, C. (1969). Teaching as a subversive activity. New 
York: Dell Publishing. 
 
Avatar Adi Da Samraj. (2010). The aletheon. Middletown: The Dawn Horse 
Press. 


Towards a pedagogy of teacher education: characteristics of the inquiring teacher from the 60’s counter-culture and a spiritual practice perspective

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Towards a pedagogy of teacher education: characteristics of the inquiring teacher from the 60’s counter-culture and a spiritual practice perspective

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