It’s ten minutes to the hour. Walking down the hall I can see into the classroom where students are settling in, the laptop users along the wall outlets, puffy down jackets chinked between chairs; it is winter. Rising above the color and buzz a lanky male perches cross-legged atop one of the tables in the back of the room. Ball cap bill turned to the back, he calls out good naturedly, “Hey, Professor, why the big smile---is it because you are going to put the screws to us with this quiz?” He means the first of four quizzes during the course; it’s the end of the second week of classes. Time to get down to business. He looks incredulous when I reply that I’m smiling because I am so happy to be there.
The cross-legged student is a charmer---smart and susceptible to being engrossed by the material of this course. And like many twenty-something males who turn up in classes today, pretty much fearless in the face of my academic, or at least grade-dispensing, authority. I have arrived early to position the electronic props essential for the next hour and fifteen minutes of concentration. The choreography of the contemporary classroom.
Several students approach me with personal issues---future absences, work and family problems. Meantime I blank out the screen now humming down from the ceiling; at a later point I will want these students’ full attention on my words. Lecture materials cascade out of my bag onto the table, layered like strata on an archeological site. The hubbub subsides; the cross-legged student has slipped down silently from the table into his chair. We begin.
The cross-legged student is a charmer---smart and susceptible to being engrossed by the material of this course. And like many twenty-something males who turn up in classes today, pretty much fearless in the face of my academic, or at least grade-dispensing, authority. I have arrived early to position the electronic props essential for the next hour and fifteen minutes of concentration. The choreography of the contemporary classroom.
Several students approach me with personal issues---future absences, work and family problems. Meantime I blank out the screen now humming down from the ceiling; at a later point I will want these students’ full attention on my words. Lecture materials cascade out of my bag onto the table, layered like strata on an archeological site. The hubbub subsides; the cross-legged student has slipped down silently from the table into his chair. We begin.
What makes this twenty-first century classroom life congenial, a source of satisfaction different from before---when I wore a suit and the room was hushed until I filled it with my voice? Where are the challenges of teaching in this changed atmosphere?
These questions were gathering in my mind in the early weeks of a recent winter semester when an interview Parker Palmer popped up in on NPR. I recognized his name but had never read his book with the title that grabs: The Courage to Teach. So, decades after I’d begun to practice the craft, I sought out a manual. Decades into collecting materials and ideas, tips and techniques, it seemed high time to read this influential classic.
The Courage to Teach dates from 1998 and since then many of its concepts have percolated through pedagogy: the community of teachers and learners, acceptance of different learning styles, the futility of external power over students, the need for authentic dialogue in the classroom. These notions are familiar now. College and university centers for learning and teaching have promoted them across American campuses. Books and teaching materials of all kinds have disseminated classroom techniques (although Palmer is chary of the term) that foster successful learning.
Reading The Courage to Teach unearthed memories from the past. The title echoes Paul Tillich’s 1952 volume The Courage to Be, a philosophical-theological reflection on the mid-twentieth-century anxiety of meaninglessness, fear of freedom and autonomy, and the consequent appeal of totalitarianism. Coinciding with American interest in existentialism in the latter 1950s, The Courage to Be was read in colleges and seminaries in the 1960s, cited in the pulpit and in Time magazine.
Tillich’s postwar analysis of the human condition (or its title) must have spoken to Palmer. At least, this was my supposition. To teach without a sense of self, to stand with an aura of authority before learners perhaps adrift in an era of anxiety courts dangers ethical and political. Whatever our subject matter, we are not simply purveyors of “objective” information. In any case, nearly six decades after Tillich the availability of information has so proliferated that it compels teachers to devote time to teaching judgment and criteria beyond facts and data. Our role with students---as with ourselves---is to be part of a quest for understanding and, in Tillich’s terms, a quest for meaning.
Tillich’s postwar analysis of the human condition (or its title) must have spoken to Palmer. At least, this was my supposition. To teach without a sense of self, to stand with an aura of authority before learners perhaps adrift in an era of anxiety courts dangers ethical and political. Whatever our subject matter, we are not simply purveyors of “objective” information. In any case, nearly six decades after Tillich the availability of information has so proliferated that it compels teachers to devote time to teaching judgment and criteria beyond facts and data. Our role with students---as with ourselves---is to be part of a quest for understanding and, in Tillich’s terms, a quest for meaning.
Reading The Courage to Teach also sent me back to a second book from the pre-Palmerian past: Carl Rogers’ On Becoming a Person, published in 1961. Rogers opened up the world of the human personality beyond my inherited cultural and parental understandings and introduced me to Kierkegaard’s injunction to become “that self which one truly is.” The dignity and respect that Rogers’ fully attentive and non-judgmental stance accords another human being fixed the phrase “client-centered therapy” in my vocabulary. Palmer’s several references to Martin Buber and “I and Thou” must have been a clue. On Becoming a Person offered hope and optimism; it imparted a different kind of confidence to meet the world than the baccalaureate diploma I attained.[1]
The opening chapters of The Courage to Teach deal with identity and integrity, fear and paradox---Palmer is big on paradox, not surprising for a Quaker and mystic. All these chapters survey what he terms the “inner landscape” of teaching and learning. Now, about midway through, however, the ground shifts: Parker Palmer moves from the teacher-learner relation to the centrality of the subject matter as the terrain where both meet.[2] The classroom is neither student-centered nor teacher-centered; it is subject-centered.[3]
Something of a surprise here. Still expecting some ur-formulation of recent educational mottoes, I re-read the passage. Of course; we knew this all along. How could it be otherwise? It is the subject matter that lured us into our fields in the first place.
Something of a surprise here. Still expecting some ur-formulation of recent educational mottoes, I re-read the passage. Of course; we knew this all along. How could it be otherwise? It is the subject matter that lured us into our fields in the first place.
Reviewing my lecture notes the night before a teaching day, I am amazed at their density of information. Single-spaced with penciled notes crawling up the margins, their thoroughness is startling. Almost as startling to me is how my focus has shifted from masses of detail to problems and questions that continue to puzzle me after several decades of teaching. Some initially intrigued me in graduate courses; others have emerged over time. I have pursued them on my own, but I notice that more and more I raise them in the classroom.
For their part, students pose questions to which I can only respond that I do not have an answer, but that the question is good and worth some research. To paraphrase Palmer, our subjects are large and complex, while our knowledge and our skills remain imperfect and partial. The shift away from masses of detailed material has opened space for exchanges in an area once chock a block with data. In the hour and fifteen minutes formerly too short to cram in the requisite coverage of material I feel a certain spaciousness.
For their part, students pose questions to which I can only respond that I do not have an answer, but that the question is good and worth some research. To paraphrase Palmer, our subjects are large and complex, while our knowledge and our skills remain imperfect and partial. The shift away from masses of detailed material has opened space for exchanges in an area once chock a block with data. In the hour and fifteen minutes formerly too short to cram in the requisite coverage of material I feel a certain spaciousness.
Gathering in my mind this particular semester was a fresh awareness that each time I begin a Polish or Russian history course my own excitement as a learner returns. Once again, I am in thrall to my field, Slavic studies, just as I had been as a graduate student fascinated by history, literature, language. At that time Russian Formalism and the monumental figures of Roman Jakobson (1896-1982) and Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) dominated the field. We graduate students sailed along boldly, intrepid under the twin flags of binary oppositions and the dialogic imagination. I did not become a linguist or a literary theorist, but the insights of Jakobson and Bakhtin marked my understanding of Slavic languages and literatures, history and culture. The most basic notions of Jakobson and Bakhtin have nourished the lectures that I’ve composed, the readings I’ve chosen, and the discussions I’ve tried to stimulate. They nestle deep in every course.
Despite its prolixity, Palmer’s subtitle, “Exploring the Inner Landscape of the Teaching Self”, touched on something I recognized: congruity between the teacher’s inner and outer life, harmony between one’s knowledgeable self and the self who teaches. The teacher’s inner and outer lives meld without tension along the terrain of the course subject matter. In my own experience some congruity and harmony have grown increasingly palpable in recent years. I think I can even date it from roughly the time that texting replaced cell phone ringing, and students’ classroom comportment took another swerve downward.
When The Courage to Teach first appeared in print, the informality of teaching had already been advancing for three decades, since the late 1960s. Today colleagues decry the disappearance of classroom decorum. Syllabi catalog the proscriptions: alimentary (food and noisy wrappers), sartorial (hats), electronic (phones and laptops). The list grows yearly. Perhaps we should be surprised that the teacher-learner encounter still involves any layers of convention at all.
Vestiges do remain. When the chips are down---a student challenges my expertise, all electronic equipment fails, a death occurs on campus---I feel the layers fall away. Sudden exposure reveals the self; I teach who I really am. Palmer calls it teaching from within.
Vestiges do remain. When the chips are down---a student challenges my expertise, all electronic equipment fails, a death occurs on campus---I feel the layers fall away. Sudden exposure reveals the self; I teach who I really am. Palmer calls it teaching from within.
Outside of class students seem perpetually en route: they email from their smart phones. They work several jobs or must be absent from class to do training for a job, having searched for months and finally landed one. They care for siblings. They seem less and less healthy. Students’ inner and outer lives are in struggle, not harmony.
The fragmentation of work and learning challenges the vaunted multi-tasking capabilities of their generation, sabotages their efforts to focus, to concentrate. Learning requires concentration and not only now in the classroom. They will need the same ability to concentrate in the future, to persevere in jobs, and to pursue what we exhort as life-long learning. What facilitates concentration---beyond manners and decorum? I think it is fascination with a subject so absorbing that one forgets oneself. How can I entice these students to enter deeply into the subject matter of our course, deeply enough to promote the concentration essential now? If students can concentrate deeply here in the classroom, perhaps they can replicate the process elsewhere and repeatedly in life.
The fragmentation of work and learning challenges the vaunted multi-tasking capabilities of their generation, sabotages their efforts to focus, to concentrate. Learning requires concentration and not only now in the classroom. They will need the same ability to concentrate in the future, to persevere in jobs, and to pursue what we exhort as life-long learning. What facilitates concentration---beyond manners and decorum? I think it is fascination with a subject so absorbing that one forgets oneself. How can I entice these students to enter deeply into the subject matter of our course, deeply enough to promote the concentration essential now? If students can concentrate deeply here in the classroom, perhaps they can replicate the process elsewhere and repeatedly in life.
This same semester when reading Parker Palmer, I watched a PBS program in which a young African woman imprisoned during civil war in her country and threatened with torture or execution, recounted how she kept her sanity by learning a foreign language. Her desperate concentration helped her maintain some small degree of equanimity in inhuman conditions. She turned incarceration and maltreatment into a time for learning; learning became a refuge. Psychologically as well as physically, she survived.
Her story reminded me of the many memoirs of concentration camp victims and Gulag prisoners who recited Torah or poetry from memory. The power of concentration, of total immersion in a world of knowledge beyond ourselves, can support the human spirit in the most acute, relentless, and terrifying situations we know.
And what of the elusive congruity between the teacher’s inner and outer life? That I experience congruence in my existence in the classroom today, an inner and outer life that have come together, is a convergence of disparate life experiences. The many pieces that have gradually moved toward connection have jagged edges and have been for decades far apart. Accidental experiences which first took me to Poland and encounters with amazing people there and along the way (few were scholars) shaped both my learning and my development as a person.
Only the distance of years reveals how valuable were experiences, collisions with people and events over which I had so little control. Now what seems pivotal in the process was the attraction, the captivation with a subject that occurred and that impelled me to study, to concentrate. Understanding---knowledge---emerged slowly and partially. Time has intensified this dimension of what Palmer phrased as “the centrality of the subject.”
Only the distance of years reveals how valuable were experiences, collisions with people and events over which I had so little control. Now what seems pivotal in the process was the attraction, the captivation with a subject that occurred and that impelled me to study, to concentrate. Understanding---knowledge---emerged slowly and partially. Time has intensified this dimension of what Palmer phrased as “the centrality of the subject.”
What seems to make this twenty-first century teaching life congenial and satisfying to me is somehow connected to the informality of the classroom which allows me to experience the congruence between my inner and outer life, my scholarly and teaching self, a shared humanity with my students. The challenge of teaching in this changed atmosphere involves finding new ways to let the subject matter captivate students, and so in turn promote the concentration that allows learning to develop. If I can exhibit that congruity at all, then perhaps such an experience can give students hope. Hope that their fragmentation, their anxiety, may gradually abate. Confidence that captivation may occur when a student finds his or her subject.
I’m glad that I found Parker Palmer late in my teaching life. Had someone handed me The Courage to Teach years ago, I probably would have been impatient with it. I would have skimmed it, frustrated at the tedium of therapeutic language. But just now it hits the spot. There are still things I can learn. I can read it for teaching, but better, I can read it for myself.
[1] In an October 2000 review of The Courage to Teach, Neil Lutsky noted Parker Palmer’s debt to Carl Rogers, writing that
“there's more than a faint echo of Carl Rogers in Parker Palmer (although Rogers is not mentioned in the book). What matters most in Palmer's scheme is the apparent authenticity of the teacher's commitment to his or her vocation and role. Inauthentic teaching reflects a turn from the deep personal valuing of the self toward, largely, the conditions of worth specified by the norms of contemporary ‘objectivist’ culture. “
Lutsky, N. (2002). “Should it matter who the teacher is? A review of Parker Palmer's The Courage to Teach.” In W. Buskist, V. Hevern, & G. W. Hill, IV, (Eds.). Essays from e-xcellence in teaching, 2000-2001 (chap. 7). Retrieved [June 30, 2009] from the Society for the Teaching of Psychology Web site: http://teachpsych.org/resources/e-books/eit2000/eit00-07.html
[2] Palmer shifts gears a second time with the last section of the book on the social microcosm.
[3] Ch. Four, pp. 116-117.
