I have, only recently, come upon Parker Palmer’s “Courage to Teach”, a workshop program for teacher renewal. My experience with it has been through written descriptions rather than actual participation. Nevertheless, I have been very impressed by the great heart in this work, work that leads teachers to understand their gifts as human beings, and how they might find the heart at the center of their educational mission. Palmer’s contention is that education at its best has the heart at its center, and that from that all learning flows. Heart will always focus on the human being at the center of our enterprise, rather than on methodology or content. As he says, good teachers possess “a capacity for connectedness”, offering up “soul, or selfhood, as the loom on which to weave a fabric of connectedness between themselves, their students, their subjects, and the world” (Schools with Spirit, p. 133).
The work in which he is engaged has the public school teacher as its focus, and rightly so. Most education in the US is delivered in the public school setting, and it is that venue, with its overworked and underpaid (and, more importantly, underappreciated) staff that the greatest emphasis must lie if we are to sustain a socially vital cadre of people who see their life’s work as a mission and not just a job. One wonders, however, how some of the concepts might apply to a private school setting such as the one in which I work.
The fundamental question that he asks in his writings about teaching is, “Who is the self that teaches?”, and surely this is a question for each and every teacher to answer for him or herself, irregardless of the circumstances in which they teach, K-12 or college, public or private. He says that this is a fundamentally difficult question to answer, probably because there is no uniform answer. Rather, the answer is specific to each individual who enters the profession. An adequate answer to the question can only result from great introspection, a willingness on the part of all of us who work in the classroom to examine who we are at our core, examine the respect we have for ourselves and what we do, and understand the respect that we wish for our students. He seems to be saying that, without adequate self-analysis—of our motivations, of our commitment to our own growth and to community–, our efforts to ensure that the educational enterprise will thrive into the future are doomed.
To that end, he examines the teacher’s role, since Palmer’s contention is that the teacher has a huge role in creating conditions that make learning possible: “I have no question that students who learn, not professors who perform, is what teaching is all about: students who learn are the finest fruit of teachers who teach. . . . I am also clear that in lecture halls, seminar rooms, field settings, labs, and even electronic classrooms—the places where most people receive most of their formal education—teachers possess the power to create conditions that can help students learn a great deal—or keep them from learning much at all. Teaching is the intentional act of creating those conditions, and good teaching requires that we understand the inner sources of both the intent and the act.”—emphasis mine (6). Notice the final statement: “good teaching requires that we understand the inner sources of both the intent and the act”. What is meant by “inner sources”? I can only assume that the “inner sources of . . . the intent” means what motivates me (as one example of the great mass of teachers nationwide), as an individual with my life circumstances, to engage in teaching as a profession in the first place, and continue to be engaged in teaching over the course of a career (in my case 39 years). As he goes on to show later, the essential “intent” comes from the heart, and we must understand the heart of the teacher, the emotional and spiritual base of the individual and how teaching and the core values of the individual are in synergy.
Answering the question of intent for myself, personally, I would have to say that I entered teaching in 1970 knowing that I always wanted to be involved in schools because school felt like a safe place, a place where ideas could be played with, a place that had boundaries and structure, a place that was unambiguous, a place that rose above the dehumanization of the “for profit” world where human beings were mere cogs in the wheel of a capitalist ethos that put profit before purpose and earnings above endeavor. I was, and still am, enthralled by the world of ideas, and can get rapturous when a new thought or a new way of viewing a known reality takes hold of me; it is this same sense of wonder, excitement and rapture that I hope to communicate to my students. These feelings can evolve out of the simplest of circumstances. I have delighted at seeing students delight at finally “getting” how to use the two primary past tenses in Spanish and then starting to use them correctly the majority of the time, and this emotion is just as intense as when discussions in a literature class take us down the road of women’s rights, machismo, and the ways in which societies attempt to control desire (a piece I commonly teach in the upper levels is Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba which features all of these themes prominently).
So, if my “intent” is to lead my students to the same level of excitement that I have for whatever it is I am teaching, the “act” must be in line with the intent. In other words, HOW I go about trying to achieve my goal of excitement and engagement must be consistent with the goal I am seeking to achieve. This is where I think Palmer is especially ingenious. If I understand his writing, he seems to be saying that effective teaching is about the “heart in action”. If I set my intention as getting the students excited about (pick your topic), and I am operating from the heartfelt intent which drove me to teaching in the first place (one of them, at any rate), then how I go about creating the circumstances for my students’ excitement, my “act” must be consistent with my intent. I am not talking about pedagogy or methodology, necessarily, but rather about how the actions I take in bringing about learning reflect my heart’s desire to help the students understand my excitement, and through it tap into their own potential excitement.
Look for more posts about this topic, since I find it fascinating, and Palmer a strikingly cogent writer and thinker.
