Letters from the Liminal: A Teacher’s Lessons from Orson Welles

Orson Welles was just 25 years old when he directed, co-wrote, starred in and produced his very first feature.

As an enthusiastic trainee teacher, I used to say teaching felt like putting on a performance.

The analogy made sense at the time: the adrenaline of stepping into a classroom, the constant balance between improvisation and planning and the pressure to stay in character - even when I fluffed my lines. But looking back now, I wonder: ‘should I have been the one who was performing at all?’

The question was inspired after I stumbled across an old interview by the late, great American actor and director Orson Welles. In it he described the role of the director as ‘overrated’. As a long time lover of cinema, this struck me as odd. It’s a profession that seems as technical and methodical as it is visionary and creative. But Welles went on to explain that a director’s craft often lies in how little they intervene. Directors set the stage, guide the lighting and allow others to take the spotlight.

Now with the benefit of a little over a decade’s worth of teaching behind me, it struck me how closely this correlates with the role of an educator. In a similar way to a director, a teacher doesn’t need to dominate the room. Instead, we try to create the conditions and offer cues so that the students, not the teachers, can take the leading role. They are the performers, with their own character and flair and are not passive spectators.

Welles was an artist who believed in trusting those he collaborated with. He valued actors who brought their own interpretations and saw his role not as a dictator of his vision but as a nurturer of potential. Students, like actors, thrive when they are given proprietorship of their learning. My current students (mostly) don’t want to be told what to do, they want to shape their own path, and find their own routes.

In other interviews, Welles admitted that he didn’t know how to make a film on his first attempt, and this, this was the reason it was good. He valued intuition over technique, and argued that not knowing the ‘right’ way freed him to try something new. As I’ve become more experienced as a teacher, and the creative aspects have become more mechanical and systematic, I can see the wisdom that underlies Welles’ words. While theory and structure offer something valuable, there’s also power in not knowing. Welles urged directors to ‘be ignorant’. The classroom is a web of such complexity that pre-set models sometimes simply cannot fulfill their purpose. For any teacher in their early, turbulent months, that should be a liberating thought. When responding to the room, the teacher mustn’t be afraid to try something that just feels right. Teaching thrives on risk and responsiveness.

So maybe teaching isn’t a performance after all, or at least our performance. Perhaps our job isn’t to be on the stage, our place is better served behind the curtain. In the end, we are the directors and Orson Welles was the teacher of the lesson, that you don’t need to know the rules to create something extraordinary. You need to believe in the scene unfolding before you, and trust that with the right light; others will step onto the stage and shine.