Good Enough Teaching: The Application of Circle of Security Parenting in Public Higher Education

Theories of teaching are as numerous as the teachers themselves. They are outnumbered perhaps only by theories of parenting. Those of us with first-hand experience of both possess embodied, tacit knowledge of their common ground, yet the challenge to coherently articulate it appears to have largely gone unmet in the research literature. To the extent that there is an overlap between teaching and parenting, the practice of teaching can be more deeply informed by research on how children grow up to become—for example—responsible, healthy, mature adults. In this short research note I will attempt to outline how the popular contemporary parenting notion of the “circle of security” can be applied in a higher education context. I believe that teachers can cultivate intellectual independence when they create a learning environment offering both safety and appropriate challenges that expand on extant student capacities. We are, after all, their direct point of contact to their alma mater, their “nourishing mother,” and the word pedagogy itself derives from the leading or guiding of children. It is thus through our work that institutes of higher education can help students develop the informed moral autonomy needed to address the tasks of our era.

In his 2017 book for parents, Raising a Secure Child, the psychotherapist Kent Hoffman begins with the need for young adults to have an emotional safe haven in their caregivers. He argues responsible parents should encourage independent exploration, celebrate discoveries or achievements, and provide comfort upon the child’s return in times of distress to help them organize their feelings.1 Hoffman’s thesis draws on the work of British psychoanalysts Donald and Clare Winnicott, who, in the 1950s, introduced the ideas of a “holding environment”2—where young people can “manage difficult internal experiences by sharing them”3—and of the “good enough” parent,4 whose “active adaptation to the infant’s needs … gradually lessens” in response to the infant’s growing ability to tolerate frustration.5 In practice this means intervening with a child’s exploratory behavior as infrequently as possible, while being available with open arms to provide comfort when exploration results in distress. Since this is also an iterative learning process for the parent, Hoffman reserves the phrase “stepping off” the circle of security for when parents accidentally not meeting a child’s emotional needs can in turn promote their development of “a reflective self,” as long as it is followed by the process of emotional repair.6 The concept of “rupture and repair” prepares the child for an adult world in which others will fail to meet social expectations, and helps them understand that those failures can be followed by reconciliation. Despite justified parental anxiety about exposing children to the outside world, this process opens up the world for the child to engage with, offering opportunities to more skillfully navigate its endless frustrations and opportunities.

As a lecturer responsible for 200-level English literature and composition courses, determining the extent to which these frameworks can be applied to the classroom begins by understanding the background from which students arrive at CUNY. Their ambivalence towards higher education is understandable and they often present themselves in class in a way that signals disengagement: arms folded, still wearing a zipped-up coat, averting their eyes, focused on their phone, and responding nonverbally with hand gestures if possible. Because so many of its students are from low-income backgrounds, this particular university system maintains a distinctively vocational, career-oriented stance within the college ecosystem of the United States. At CUNY, there is a near-50% chance that students will be the first in their family to attend college,7 and a 55% chance of having experienced housing insecurity in the last year, with 14% having directly experienced homelessness.8 Nearly half of CUNY undergraduates come from families whose annual income is less than $20,000.9 So, when asked to write a short biography of their lives as an introductory assignment for my course, students routinely speak of their education as a means to a well-paying profession rather than the pursuit of a subject for intrinsic interest, satisfaction, or self-development. However, they also write of parental expectations at odds with their own aspirations, of creative or athletic pursuits that they still hold dear, and of having experienced quite shocking and extreme life experiences at a young age. The notion that a college classroom could serve as a place for personal development by discussing difficult experiences—either their own or those that they read about—tends not to be at the forefront of their expectations.

Given the insecurity outlined above, we might then ask: How can college teachers cultivate Hoffman’s idea of a “reflective self” in undergraduates? How can students become more intellectually dexterous, morally alert, emotionally secure, less socially withdrawn, and willing to become a lifelong learner? Since the economic gains from these metacognitive and “soft” skills may only be obvious in retrospect, it can be hard for teachers to persuade students of their value, despite the fact that they arguably form many of society’s bedrock institutions: marriage, participatory politics, the rule of law, and the compact of intercultural and intergenerational trust. That these institutions remain perennially in need of reform only underscores the dire need for engagement by students, for whom the stakes are highest by virtue of their relative youth. My answer is that student disengagement arising from ambivalence is driven, at least in part, by students’ doubts that higher education can still serve as a holding environment. Without such an environment, students may struggle to explore safely the forms of thought and practice through which undergraduate education prepares them for adult and civic life.

Faculty for their part may be ambivalent about such ideas in the wake of conservative critique of so-called “safe spaces” in higher education. Holding environments, however, are for establishing the trust necessary to encourage exploration, rather than an absence of risk. Clare Winnicott made clear in her 1955 commentary in relation to adult social work that reliability and the trust arising thereby make up the very structure of an adult holding environment:

we become, so to speak, a reliable environment, which is what they so much need—reliable in time and place…. We remember details and know exactly where we left [them] in the last interview.10

A holding relationship offered by a college teacher provides the student with a parent-like attentive connection that helps a young person emerge from adolescence better prepared to participate in the institutions of civil society, beginning with college. As graduates, they may well expect to see the values of their classrooms replicated in their professional and political lives: offices where employees can voice difficult but important issues, and public debates where the mutual appreciation for holding spaces makes it easier to respect those they differ with.

The first step is establishing tangible, reliable social norms for expected behavior, so that a student can enter a classroom safe in the knowledge that the professor has, for example, committed to learning their name and perhaps a general grasp of the student’s academic and personal interests so they do not withdraw into insecure anonymity. Keeping track of their in-class contributions by referring to remarks made by them in previous classes is part of the same practice of enhancing identifiability and ensuring a sense of social continuity between classes. This includes in-class responses to points made by students in their written work. Many students typically won’t take part in class discussion until they have received their first round of feedback on an assignment. These norms reassure students that they aren’t submitting assignments to a digital repository from which they get only a letter grade in return. Finally, encouraging students to build on their own ideas—or that of a peer’s—makes up the “exploration phase” of the circle of security. A teacher can celebrate this as a parent would for a child, standing ready to offer an intellectual safe haven to avoid unnecessary embarrassment if they stumble at any point in the process, with simple phrases such as “that was a challenging paragraph to read out in front of everyone” that validate the adventure the student undertook in front of their peers, rewarding the risk they took of undergoing momentary exposure to the whole class.

The poor financing of public education limits all of this. In classes of 25 or more students, it can be particularly burdensome for a teacher to implement and maintain these ideas, especially in the beginning weeks of the semester with classroom role expectations still being formed on both sides. While parents may find such continuity easier to maintain, teachers with large classes will have to spread their attention further and thus thinner. Classes that serve as lecture sections or “jumbo” courses with 40 to 70 or more students can hardly be considered to involve any pedagogical reciprocity beyond scores received for performance on electronically graded exams. That we cannot extensively advise and support every student is one of the central stress points of teaching in under-resourced environments: what would provide a transformative experience for one student would neglect the needs of the onlooking others. A particular risk is that it is easier to grade students against a generic rubric of criteria (did they incorporate three to five secondary sources?) instead of against their own progress (did they incorporate sources that demonstrate new learning?). Holding a space by keeping track of their individual progress encourages growth, but requires the teacher to identify their particular skills and limitations as an incoming student, as well as the goals they can reasonably be expected to achieve, and both of those assessments will vary from one student to another.

When parenting, by contrast, Hoffman makes clear that when it comes to those in our care, it is impossible to spoil an infant by providing them with too much attention.11 In this sense, a relationship between a teacher and student never reaches the depth and variety of that between a parent and child. Parents are responsible for helping the child organize their emotions; teachers can create a reliable environment, but addressing emotional difficulties is best left to counseling services, even if it may be directly affecting their performance as a student. Inevitably then, what we call “good enough” parenting has a parallel of good enough teaching,12 and ultimately both may be constrained by resource limitations as well as deliberate choice to challenge those in our care. In the same way that parents progressively withdraw supervision from their children in order to facilitate their independence, good enough teaching involves pulling back from student supervision, leaving them to give longer, more detailed answers to questions, and to respond to each other’s remarks without teacher intervention. This serves as the in-class equivalent of what is called “scaffolding” in rhetoric and composition teaching, in which teachers provide progressively more challenging writing assignments throughout the semester in order to build on learned competencies: A cluster of two-page writing response papers on the basic elements of a contemporary mainstream novel early in the semester leads into a four page close reading analysis of a Shakespearean monologue, which in turn supports a six-to-eight page final research paper on an abstract theme or concept, calling for secondary sources and interpretive skills with experimental American poetry of the postwar era.

Teachers are not parents to their students, but they do routinely serve as parent-like figures by, for example, encouraging playful exploration within recognized boundaries, or judging the merits of their behavior against the precedent of social norms. In the final analysis, teaching and parenting could perhaps be defined as the practice of paying careful attention to those we are qualified to transform. Good teachers push their students to become independent explorers of difficult subjects. In this sense, good enough teachers who set up classrooms with stable environments to encourage exploration can render themselves redundant in the best possible way by making their students autonomous enough to meet the challenges of upholding civil and civic values without needing to remain in the safe harbor of pedagogical instruction. Beyond providing the simple comforts of care and safety, parenting and teaching are the cultivation of a type of maturity that the world will inevitably demand from all of us.

Dedication

This article is dedicated to my father, recently retired after forty years in public higher education.

About the Author

Sam O’Hana Grainger (PhD Candidate, English)

Sam O’Hana Grainger (he/him) researches creative lifespans, and teaches at Hunter College, CUNY. His work has been published in The Chicago Review.

What is the best piece of parenting advice you’ve received?

They’re not doing it to annoy you.

What is the worst piece of parenting advice you’ve received?

I don’t remember being offered any!

What is the best piece of teaching advice you’ve received?

Some students just want to get their B and get outta there.

What advice do you want to offer Graduate Center student-teachers who are thinking about parenthood?

Start a joint checking account.

What advice do you want to offer all Graduate Center student-teachers?

Use teaching as an opportunity to develop your coaching and public speaking skills.

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