Exploring My Journey: Why I Embraced Educational Transactional Analysis

This is a personal essay of my interest in Educational Transactional Analysis.

I was about 16 years old when I went to Canada and lived there with Canadian families as an exchange student and enrolled in the local school. Going from a local school in India to a local school in Canada was going to awaken me to what learning could mean to a student when done differently.

My first day in school I waited to be told when to speak, my answers in class were rehearsed gauging what could be the right answer or get the maximum score or lowering my eyes to the ground when speaking to the teacher. I was not doing well in school, not because my grades were low, but I felt lost. There was no structure and I was required to take agency for my learning – something that was a shock to the student in me. For one of the first assignment, we were asked to choose how we would complete the graded assignment. The Adapted Child in me chose to write an essay while others chose to present a skit or write prose or create a poster. The way I was taught and how I learned were both being challenged daily for about 6 hours.

I wanted to bring these concepts back home to India because so many students would benefit from it. I wanted to build schools that allowed for student agency where children decided how they would learn and teachers would be facilitators for learning. We were not entirely successful in achieving this in the schools we built back home. Firstly, because no one understood how that would look like and I did not have the wisdom or knowledge to explore it. Secondly, funding from the government meant following the rules of what a classroom would like to the T.

Two decades later, I was introduced to Educational Transactional Analysis. This was the framework I was looking for then when we established schools.

Educational Transactional Analysis: Exploring the internal processes of educators and learners

Eric Berne in the 1960’s introduced the concept of ego states – the Parent, the Child, and the Adult ego state, each to be denoted by the capital letter. In each of these ego states individuals are experiencing behaviours, thoughts, and feelings. Behaviours, feelings, and thoughts in the Parent ego state are taken from parental and authority figures, in the Child ego state they are repeated from one’s childhood, while in the Adult ego state they are a direct response to the here and now.

Transactional Analysis is humanistic in that it offers a safe space to everyone, promoting this idea that we are all a product of our society and therefore carry frailties. We carry these not just in our personal and social lives but also in our professional life. A classroom is a space where education takes place through communication albeit not always spoken. Teachers, students and the invisible parents bring their selves into the classroom. The Educational Transactional Analyst promises to offer a potent, powerful, and co-creative space to help individuals works towards their autonomy in training and learning.

My Experience in Training

Last year when I joined the training to start working in this field I was out of depth. My trainers asked us what we wanted to learn today or what essay questions would you like to create for your exam. My first thought was ‘why is the trainer being lazy?’ – I had slipped into my Critical Parent ego state in simpler terms because my Adapted Child ego state was lost. Not to sound stupid I kept quiet and sent him a few options of essay choices. The response to which was ‘decide on the two that you will write and let me know’. He had seen through the games I was playing. To me any training was being back in school behind my desk and the trainer playing the role of the school teacher – the one who stands at the head of the class and tells us what is ‘expected’.

Applying the Concepts of Ed-TA in Schools

How would it work in schools if students were given the freedom to choose a topic of their choice. Would teachers find it difficult to accept their vulnerability for the lack of knowledge? Would they nurture the student trying to choose their own path? I remember my daughter receiving three presentation topics to choose from. I had asked if she could choose an entirely different topic while maintaining the theme the class was working with. We were refused. I went back to my experience in Canada where I unlearned to some degree what learning could look like. Why is it that at a primary level allowing students to choose their topic is not encouraged. What does that mean for teachers and what does that mean for students?

When in Canda, we were once asked to write an essay on ‘My journey to school today’. I wrote a realistic essay while my classmate wrote that the Queen of England impressed by his courage to go to school every day had sent him a carriage (something to that extent). I asked him to change it completely and his response was the marking is based on structure, grammar, and vocabulary and who is to say that I did not come to school in a carriage today. The teacher loved his essay, and he got a high score.

Our life experiences don’t impact us, but what we learn and what we are to learn from life experiences is where impact happens. My experiences around learning came from authority figures that were critical and created rigidity around what is to be learned, what permissions are to be given, and what is to be expressed. My classmates’ experiences were about having structure to stay the course but also having the freedom of spontaneity, creativity, and expression. This experience forced me to see that being teacher is not a role that one plays and a teacher’s life experiences around learning are an important element present in the classroom.

Who really is the teacher then is a question we must ask ourselves. Is it the person standing before us for it would mean that this person is responsive in the here and the now; or the teacher in the classroom has brought with them not only their parents and authority figures but also their behaviours, thoughts, and feeling from their childhood. The teacher in the here and the now would be an ideal teacher but how about a teacher that has the permission to stay in the in-between spaces.