Palmer (1997) The Courage to Teach

^{Header image: KF in Midjourney}

We Teach Who We Are

• this book is built on a simple premise: good teaching cannot be reduced to technique; good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher

• As I teach, I project the condition of my soul onto my students, my subject, and our way of being together. The entanglements I experience in the classroom are often no more or less than the convolutions of my inner life. Viewed from this angle, teaching holds a mirror to the soul. If I am willing to look in that mirror and not run from what I see, I have a chance to gain self-knowledge and knowing myself is as crucial to good teaching as knowing my students and my subject.

Good teaching requires self-knowledge: it is a secret hidden in plain sight.

• How can the teacher’s selfhood become a legitimate topic in education and in our public dialogues on educational reform?

• The question we most commonly ask is the “what” question what subjects shall we teach?
• When the conversation goes a bit deeper, we ask the “how” question what methods and techniques are required to teach well?
• Occasionally, when it goes deeper still, we ask the “why” question for what purpose and to what ends do we teach?
• But seldom, if ever, do we ask the “who” question who is the self that teaches? How does the quality of my selfhood form or deform the way I relate to my students, my subject, my colleagues, my world? How can educational institutions sustain and deepen the selfhood from which good teaching comes?
• Reduce teaching to intellect, and it becomes a cold abstraction; reduce it to emotions, and it becomes narcissistic; reduce it to the spiritual, and it loses its anchor to the world.

• With striking imagery, Rilke offers us a mystic’s map of wholeness, where inner and outer reality flow seamlessly into each other, like the ever-merging surfaces of a Möbius strip, endlessly co-creating us and the world we inhabit. Though this book is grounded in the teacher’s inner terrain, it constantly segues into the outer forms of community that teaching and learning require.
• as important as methods may be, the most practical thing we can achieve in any kind of work is insight into what is happening inside us as we do it.

Technique is what teachers use until the real teacher arrives

Teaching is the intentional act of creating conditions that can help students learn

• The discerning innocence of young children deepens my conviction that at every level of education, the selfhood of the teacher is key.

Chapter I The Heart of a Teacher: Identity and Integrity in Teaching

By choosing integrity, I become more whole, but wholeness does not mean perfection.
It means becoming more real by acknowledging the whole of who I am.

STORY: Alan and Eric were born into two different families of skilled craftspeople, rural folk with little formal schooling but gifted in the manual arts….His was a self divided, engaged in a civil war. He projected that inner warfare onto the outer world, and his teaching devolved into combat instead of craft.

When Teachers Lose Heart We lose heart, in part, because teaching is a daily exercise in vulnerability Unlike many professions, teaching is always done at the dangerous intersection of personal and public life.

• Of course our students are cynical about the inner outcomes of education: we teach them that the subjective self is unvalued and even unreal. (re the instruction to not use “I”)
• The foundation of any culture lies in the way it answers the question “Where do reality and power reside?” For some cultures the answer is the gods; for some it is nature; for some it is tradition. In our culture, the answer is clear: reality and power reside in the external world of objects and events and in the sciences that study that world, while the inner realm of the heart is a romantic fantasy, an escape from harsh realities, perhaps, but surely not a source of leverage over the “real” world.

• Re-membering involves putting ourselves back together, recovering identity and integrity, reclaiming the wholeness of our lives. When we forget who we are we do not merely drop some data. We dis-member ourselves, with unhappy consequences for our politics, our work, our hearts.
  • KF: RTBF – persistent memory as a dis-membering force

• The power of our mentors is not necessarily in the models of good teaching they gave us, models that may turn out to have little to do with who we are as teachers. Their power is in their capacity to awaken a truth within us, a truth we can reclaim years later by recalling their impact on our lives. If we discovered a teacher’s heart in ourselves by meeting a great teacher, recalling that meeting may help us take heart in teaching once more.
• The constant contradiction between how I experienced myself and how other people viewed me created a painful, sometimes crippling sense of fraudulence.

• One of my favorite essays on teaching is Jane Tompkins’s ”Pedagogy of the Distressed.” 9 It seems to have been written directly to my divided condition. With wonderful candor, Tompkins says that her obsession as a teacher had not been with helping students learn what they wanted and needed to know but rather with “(a) showing the students how smart I was; (b) showing them how knowledgeable I was; and (c) showing them how well prepared I was for class. I had been putting on a performance whose true goal was not to help the students learn but to act in such a way that they would have a good opinion of me.”

• There are times when we must work for money rather than meaning, and we may never have the luxury of quitting a job because it does not make us glad. But that does not release us from continually checking the violence we do to others and ourselves by working in ways that violate our souls. [KF – IELTS]

• External tools of power have occasional utility in teaching, but they are no substitute for authority, the authority that comes from the teacher’s inner life. The clue is in the word itself, which has author at its core. Authority is granted to people who are perceived as authoring their own words, their own actions, their own lives, rather than playing a scripted role at great remove from their own hearts. When teachers depend on the coercive powers of law or technique, they have no authority at all.

…when my teaching is authorized by the teacher within me,
I need neither weapons nor armor to teach.

Chapter II A Culture of Fear: Education and the Disconnected Life

• How, and why, does academic culture discourage us from living connected lives?
• From grade school on, education is a fearful enterprise. As a student, I was in too many classrooms riddled with fear, the fear that leads many children, born with a love of learning, to hate the idea of school.

When a class that has gone badly comes to a merciful end, I am fearful long after it is over fearful
that I am not just a bad teacher but a bad person, so closely is my sense of self tied to the work I do.

• Fear can also play a positive role in students’ lives. When Albert Camus writes, “What gives value to travel is fear,” his words could easily apply to the forays that good teachers make with their students across landscapes of alien truth.
• When I ask teachers to name the biggest obstacle to good teaching, the answer I most often hear is “my students.”
• Finally I said that they sounded like doctors in a hospital saying, ‘Don’t send us any more sick people; we don’t know what to do with them. Send us healthy patients so we can look like good doctors.'” His analogy helped me understand something crucial about teaching: the way we diagnose our students’ condition will determine the kind of remedy we offer.

• Students are marginalized people in our society. The silence that we face in the classroom is the silence that has always been adopted by people on the margin, people who have reason to fear those in power and have learned that there is safety in not speaking.
  • For years, African Americans were silent in the presence of whites, silent, that is, about their true thoughts and feelings. For years, women were similarly silent in the presence of men. Today all of that is changing as blacks and women move from the margins to the center and speak truths that people like me need to hear.

• I now understand what Nelle Morton meant when she said that one of the great tasks in our time is to “hear people to speech.” Behind their fearful silence, our students want to find their voices, speak their voices, have their voices heard. A good teacher is one who can listen to those voices even before they are spoken so that someday they can speak with truth and confidence.

• we cannot see the fear in our students until we see the fear in ourselves. When we deny our own condition, we resist seeing anything in others that might remind us of who, and how, we really are.
• In the face of the apparent judgment of the young, teachers must turn toward students, not away from them, saying, in effect, “There are great gaps between us. But no matter how wide and perilous they may be, I am committed to bridging them not only because you need me to help you on your way but also because I need your insight and energy to help renew my own life.”
• The fear I want to get rid of is rooted in my need to be popular with young people; a need that may be endemic among people who become teachers but one that keeps us from serving our students well.
• Good teaching is an act of hospitality toward the young

• So objectivism, driven by fear, keeps us from forging relationships with the things of the world. Its modus operandi is simple: when we distance ourselves from something, it becomes an object; when it becomes an object, it no longer has life; when it is lifeless, it cannot touch or transform us, so our knowledge of the thing remains pure.
• (re disease / witches) Objectivism set out to put truth on firmer ground than the whims of princes and priests, and for that we can be grateful.

Knowing is how we make community with the unavailable other, with realities that would elude us without the connective tissue of knowledge. Knowing is a human way to seek relationship and, in the process, to have encounters and exchanges that will inevitably alter us. At its deepest reaches, knowing is always communal.

• People often lie in an effort to deny their fears and objectivism lies about both our knowledge and our power in hopes of avoiding the distressing evidence before our own eyes: we are ruining, not running, the world.

Chapter III The Hidden Wholeness: Paradox in Teaching and Learning

• Niels Bohr, the Nobel Prizewinning physicist, offers the keystone I want to build on: “The opposite of a true statement is a false statement, but the opposite of a profound truth can be another profound truth.”
• In certain circumstances, truth is found not by splitting the world into either-ors but by embracing it as both-and.
• In certain circumstances, truth is a paradoxical joining of apparent opposites, and if we want to know that truth, we must learn to embrace those opposites as one.
  • KF: K-12 cognitive dissonance; Mobius
• Good teaching comes from identity, not technique, but if I allow my identity to guide me toward an integral technique, that technique can help me express my identity more fully.
• Teaching always takes place at the crossroads of the personal and the public, and if I want to teach well, I must learn to stand where these opposites intersect.
• Intellect works in concert with feeling, so if I hope to open my students’ minds, I must open their emotions as well.
• When a person is healthy and whole, the head and the heart are both and, not either-or, and teaching that honors that paradox can help make us all more whole.
• In a culture that rips paradoxes apart, many people know nothing of the rich dialectic of solitude and community; they know only a daily whiplash between loneliness and the crowd.

The world of education as we know it is filled with broken paradoxes
and with the lifeless results:

• We separate head from heart. Result: minds that do not know how to feel and hearts that do not know how to think.
• We separate facts from feelings. Result: bloodless facts that make the world distant and remote and ignorant emotions that reduce truth to how one feels today.
• We separate theory from practice. Result: theories that have little to do with life and practice that is uninformed by understanding.
• We separate teaching from learning. Result: teachers who talk but do not listen and students who listen but do not talk.

To become a better teacher, I must nurture a sense of self that both does and does not depend on the responses of others and that is a true paradox. To learn that lesson well, I must take a solitary journey into my own nature and seek the help of others in seeing myself as I am another of the many paradoxes that abound on the inner terrain.

Paradoxes

• The space should be bounded and open.
  • Space without boundaries is not space, it is a chaotic void, and in such a place no learning is likely to occur.
• The space should be hospitable and “charged.”
• The space should invite the voice of the individual and the voice of the group.
• The space should honor the “little” stories of the students and the “big” stories of the disciplines and tradition.
• The space should support solitude and surround it with the resources of community.
• The space should welcome both silence and speech.

• Rilke replies with this counsel: “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. . . . Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” 6

Chapter IV Knowing in Community: Joined by the Grace of Great Things

• Hikma: we turn toward community the kind of community that teaching and learning require, that can help renew and express the capacity for connectedness at the heart of authentic education.

to teach is to create a space in which the community of truth is practiced.

• I know of one college with a marvelous motto, “The pursuit of truth in the company of friends.” 2
• From Plato onward, the academy has been promoted as a microcosm of the body politic, a setting in which the habits of democratic citizenship can and should be cultivated. As Benjamin Barber has written, “This argument suggests not that the university has a civic mission, but that the university is a civic mission, is civility itself, defined as the rules or conventions that permit a community to facilitate conversation and the kinds of discourse on which all knowledge depends. . . . I mean to suggest much more than that democracy and education are parallel activities, or that civic training and the cultivation of knowledge and judgment possess a parallel structure. I am arguing that they are the same thing.” 3
• academics: we believe that no one except our peers can adequately judge our work and we are not entirely sure about them!

Re SEOI

• First, the evaluation system that the provost needs is nowhere in sight and what stands in its place is a dangerous impostor. We lack reliable mechanisms for evaluating teaching, unless one believes that all varieties of good teaching can be crammed into the scales of a survey questionnaire.
• It can take many years for a student to feel grateful to a teacher who introduces a dissatisfying truth. A marketing model of educational community, however apt its ethic of accountability, serves the cause poorly when it assumes that the customer is always right.

• we cannot maintain the objectivist gap between the world “out there” and the observer “in here” as posited by premodern science.
• In his landmark book, Personal Knowledge, the chemist Michael Polanyi shows how science relies on the fact that we, by “indwelling” the world, are given “bodily knowledge” of it an inarticulate and “tacit” form of knowledge on which our explicit and articulate knowledge depends. 10 KF: Aoki?

Truth Revisited

• Truth is not a word much spoken in educational circles these days. It suggests an earlier, more naive era when people were confident they could know the truth. But we are confident we cannot, so we refuse to use the word for fear of embarrassing ourselves.
• This training transpires in a far-off place called graduate school, whose purpose is so thoroughly to obliterate one’s sense of self that one becomes a secular priest, a safe bearer of the pure objects of knowledge.
• At its best, the community of truth advances our knowledge through conflict, not competition.
• Competition is the antithesis of community, an acid that can dissolve the fabric of relationships. Conflict is the dynamic by which we test ideas in the open, in a communal effort to stretch each other and make better sense of the world.
• understand truth as the passionate and disciplined process of inquiry and dialogue itself, as the dynamic conversation of a community that keeps testing old conclusions and coming into new ones.

Robert Frost: “We dance round in a ring and suppose,/But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.”

• Frost honors the transcendent secret of the subject at the center of the community of truth, a secret that is equally obscured by absolutism, which claims that we can know the full reality of things, and by relativism, which claims that things have no reality save what we know. The subject knows itself better than we can ever know it, and it forever evades our grasp by keeping its own secrets.
• Barbara McClintock

• To understand this more fully, we need only look at what happens when we rob great things of their integrity. In the study of literature, it is now common to teach classic texts through analytical lenses that show how riddled they are with the biases of their authors and their times. From this standpoint, it does not matter that Moby Dick reaches deep into such great things in the human experience as hubris and destiny. It matters only that Melville was a patriarchal bigot.
• David Denby has shown the hubris of this posture itself: it gives us, teachers and students alike, feelings of superiority to the text, thereby depriving us of the chance to learn anything from it except how superior we are. 20

Knowing and the Sacred

The health of education depends on our ability to hold sacred and secular together
so that they can correct and enrich each other.

• In a culture of disrespect, education suffers the worst possible fate; it becomes banal. When nothing is sacred, deemed worthy of respect, banality is the best we can do. What could be more banal than to stand in the midst of this astonishing universe, sifting its wonders through reductionist screens, debunking amazement with data and logic, downsizing mystery to the scale of our own minds? The root of all banality including, as Hannah Arendt named it, “the banality of evil” is our failure to find the other worthy of respect.24
• But in the Japanese self-defense art of aikido, this visual narrowing is countered by a practice called “soft eyes,” in which one learns to widen one’s periphery, to take in more of the world.

Chapter V Teaching in Community: A Subject-Centered Education

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
– WILLIAM BLAKE, ”AUGURIES OF INNOCENCE” 1

• Community, or connectedness, is the principle behind good teaching, but different teachers with different gifts create community in surprisingly diverse ways, using widely divergent methods.
• Objectivism is so obsessed with protecting the purity of knowledge that students are forbidden direct access to the object of study, lest their subjectivity defile it. Whatever they know about it must be mediated through the teacher, who stands in for the object, serves as its mouthpiece, and is the sole focus of the student’s attention.
• Passion for the subject propels that subject, not the teacher, into the center of the learning circle and when a great thing is in their midst, students have direct access to the energy of learning and of life.
• every part of the hologram contains all of the information possessed by the whole

The Microcosm in Medical School

• So the dean and his allies proposed a new approach, originally developed at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Its key feature is that students, from their first day in medical school, are gathered in small circles around a live patient with a real problem and are asked to diagnose the patient’s condition and prescribe a course of treatment.

The Microcosm in Social Research

• As our inquiry went on, my students began to understand several important things about the demands of concept formation. The concept called race is an artifact of the way our minds divvy up and simplify an intricate body of information about human beings.

Virtually all professionals have been deformed by the myth
that we serve our clients best by taking up all the space with our hard-earned omniscience.

• Our resistance to opening rather than filling the space is compounded by the fact that if we decide to change the way we practice our craft, it takes time to make the transition and while we are in transit, we are not very good at what we are doing. En route to a new pedagogy, there will be days when we serve our students poorly, days when our guilt only deepens.
  • To counteract guilt, I need at least two things: a rationale for what I am doing when I open a learning space…and an understanding of the skillful means required to keep such a space open.
  • As long as we do not understand that opening a learning space requires more skill and more authority than filling it up, we will lose our battle with guilt, and our teaching will default to covering the field. If we want to honor and develop the skills required to create a space for learning, we must name them and make them explicit.
  • I must define the course in a way more engaging than engorging, countering my tendency to inundate students with data, and allowing them instead to encounter the subject, each other, and themselves.

• When we learn to ask good questions, we discover that yet another competence is needed: the ability to turn a question-and-answer session between the teacher and individual students into a complex communal dialogue that bounces all around the room. My students will learn much more when I turn their eyes from always looking at me and help them look at one another.
  • I must deflect comments addressed to me and bounce them back to the group, perhaps simply by saying, “What do you all think about the point that Sandra just made?” but preferably by being more subtle. However I do it, this deflecting involves a challenge to my soul: I must learn how to trust that the community has the resources necessary to deal with the issue at hand.
  • But if I learn to ask good questions, deflect answers, and connect my students in dialogue, the job is still not done. I must learn the skill of lifting up and reframing what my students are saying so that we will have benchmarks of how far we have come and how far we have to go toward whatever we are trying to learn.
  • When we are willing to abandon our self-protective professional autonomy and make ourselves as dependent on our students as they are on us, we move closer to the interdependence that the community of truth requires. When we can say “please” because we need our students and “thank you” because we are genuinely grateful for them, obstacles to community will begin to fall away, teachers and students will meet at new depths of mutuality and meaning, and learning will happen for everyone in surprising and life-giving ways.

Chapter VI Learning in Community: The Conversation of Colleagues

• Teaching is perhaps the most privatized of all the public professions. Though we teach in front of students, we almost always teach solo, out of collegial sight as contrasted with surgeons or trial lawyers, who work in the presence of others who know their craft well.
  • We pay a high price for this privatization. Consider the way teaching is evaluated. When we cannot observe each other’s teaching, we get evaluation practices that are distanced, demoralizing, and even disreputable. Lacking firsthand information about each other’s work, we allow the artifacts of the student survey to replace the facts that can be known only in person.

• “Critical moments” is a simple approach I use in faculty workshops to invite people to share their practice in an open and honest way. I begin by drawing a horizontal arrow on a chalkboard, representing the movement of a course from beginning to end. Then I ask people to name the critical moments they experience along that time line as a course proceeds. By critical moment, I mean one in which a learning opportunity for students will open up, or shut down depending, in part, on how the teacher handles it. “In part” is an important qualification, for one of the challenges of teaching is the fact that not all critical moments are under the teacher’s control.
  • In leading this exercise, I try to make it clear that people are to speak about their own classroom experience and not counsel colleagues on what should happen in their classrooms. And on the rare occasion when someone tries to hand out such advice, I ask the person to stop.

Mataphors [300]: “When I am teaching at my best, I am like a (Sheepdog).”

• [Flawed,] But the guidance I need, and the power I need to follow it, is in the psychic energy of the metaphor itself.

Good teaching cannot be reduced to technique:
good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher.

Ground Rules for Dialogue

• In academic settings, these conventional rules [of politeness] are overlaid with another set that encourage competition: we should question each other’s claims, think oppositionally about what we are hearing, and be ready with a quick response.
• If we want to support each other’s inner lives, we must remember a simple truth; the human soul does not want to be fixed, it wants simply to be seen and heard.
• If we want to see and hear a person’s soul, there is another truth we must remember: the soul is like a wild animal; tough, resilient, and yet shy. When we go crashing through the woods shouting for it to come out so we can help it, the soul will stay in hiding. But if we are willing to sit quietly and wait for a while, the soul may show itself.
• [12-stepish] The Quaker structure I have adapted for use with faculty is called the “clearness committee.” It sounds like a name from the ’60s, and it is the 1660s.
• Then members of the committee begin their work, guided and constrained by the basic and nonnegotiable ground rule of this proceeding: members are forbidden to speak to the focus person in any way except to ask that person an honest, open question.
• As a member of many clearness committees, I have been privileged to witness a remarkable thing: human beings in dialogue with their inner teachers.
• Fifteen minutes before the committee is scheduled to end, someone asks the focus person if he or she wants to continue with the questions-only rule or would be willing to accept some mirroring in addition to more questions. Mirroring does not mean an opportunity to give advice. It means reflecting to the focus person things he or she said or did but might not be aware of:

• In the middle of a course and again toward the end, a colleague I have selected comes into my classroom for half an hour or so, and I take my leave.
  • This approach not only gives colleagues a way to tap into each other’s teaching but also puts them in dialogue with the student experience.
  • Furthermore, it gives students a voice more vivid and nuanced than a questionnaire allows, because their true feelings can be elicited through sensitive interviewing.
  • Finally, it requires that students listen to each other, an action that might reframe their experience: the student in the back row who cannot abide the course must listen to the one in front who finds it a life-changing experience.

 Chapter VII Divided No More: Teaching from a Heart of Hope

The genius of social movements is paradoxical: they abandon the logic of organizations so that they can gather the momentum necessary to alter the logic of organizations.

How movements work

• Stage 1. “divided no more,” – find centre
• Stage 2. form communities of congruence – find community
• Stage 3. start going public
• Stage 4. A system of alternative rewards

<Skimmed to end>

Liu, E. (2004). Guiding Lights: The People Who Lead Us Toward Our Purpose in Life. Random House.

See more here: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/take-a-tour-of-great-teachers/article4115854/

• Receive before you transmit
• Unlock, unlock: It’s not ineptitude or deficits of talent that keep people from learning, but insecurity.
• Zoom in, zoom out: “All thinking is analogy-making. All learning is analogy-finding. All teaching is analogy showing,”