In the last few weeks I’ve been exposed a lot to questions and discussions about teaching kendo, online, with friends, different sensei… Seen my history as a low-rank dojo-leader, it is indeed, a subject that never fails to pique my interest.

My favourite idea is that especially as westerners, we should always strive to remain students, and should never really see ourselves as “teachers” — as in “the one who has knowledge and dispenses it to a (dependant) crowd” with all the bad ego dynamics that it can entail.

According to a particular K7 sensei’s point of view, if you know more, your concern should be to put people in the right tracks and give them tools or hints that will help them become self-sufficient in their learning process. (Give a fish to a man, he’ll eat for one day, teach him to fish, etc.)

By getting rid of the stereotypical teacher-student relationship and by stopping to want to emulate the classical Japanese student-teacher dynamics — which can lead to nasty ego-trips in westerners — an instructor can just feel like they’re giving beginners a hand, a nudge in the right direction, which allows them to never negate the student in themselves ; for while they are showing the ropes to beginners, they themselves still can learn and polish their kendo.

Since I heard that viewpoint, the way I should try to be a dojo leader has become much clearer and gotten easier to implement and live with : my role is mainly to keep the group together, to find ways to motivate the different individuals within it, but the road to knowledge?

That’s something we are on together.