There is nobody writing about teaching who is quite like Parker Palmer. His approach to the teacher's life, or choices, is not technical, not even really intellectual, but emotional and spiritual. His book's seven chapters give an idea of how he writes about teaching:
This book is full of good things. One that I particularly appreciated was his insistence that fear plays a major role in inhibiting good teaching and learning. Most of us are ready to accept that our students may experience fear: but Palmer insists that the fear of the faculty member is also a potent force. He maintains, for instance, that we retain educational structures which separate us because "they promise to protect us against one of the deepest fears at the heart of being human--the fear of having a live encounter with alien "otherness," whether the other is a student, a colleague, a subject, or a self-dissenting voice within." We also fear conflict, losing identity, and finally, the possibility that one of these real encounters which some teaching structures exist to prevent "will challenge or even compel us to change our lives."
Obviously it is against fears like these (not the good fears, those which make people "porous to real learning") that the title is addressed. And Palmer makes us remember that courage is, etymologically, a trait of the heart.
He is illuminating; he is inspiring; and he writes powerfully. His own confessions of failure and impatience, of classes which were disastrous, helps to keep the discourse, generally devoted to "uplift," anchored in reality.
Palmer makes it clear that he is not writing to give "tips," to provide "techniques," and this is because he thinks those are evasions of the deeper and more human project necessary for improved teaching and learning.
Perhaps it is a sign of my limitations that, from time to time, I did want--well, not a list of tips or gimmicks--but a slightly less philosophical approach to teaching and learning renewal. Thus I was happy to read about a Quaker structure, adapted for faculty use, called the "clearness committee." A teacher who wishes for some help with a problem in his or her teaching life convenes such a committee, of four or five colleagues; after this focus person provides a written statement of the problem, the committee meets for two or three hours in which the "committee members practice the discipline of giving undivided attention to that person and his or her question." They are discouraged from putting themselves in that person's place and forbidden to speak except to ask questions. The may not offer advice, suggest possible readings, encourage the focus person to speak to somebody else. And when the committee is over, they may not approach him or her with comments or suggestions. It is over.
There is something dignified and bracing and austere about the clearness committee, as Palmer describes it, which I would like to explore for myself.
He has an interesting discussion of the teacher-centered classroom (predicated on the idea that the teacher has all the knowledge and the only reason teacher and students gather in the same classroom is "to keep the teacher from having to say things more than once"), the student-centered classroom (in which "the teacher's role varies from facilitator to co-learner to necessary evil"), and his suggested third way, the subject-centered classroom. He describes this concept at considerable length: it is a community of truth built around a "great thing" which has " a presence so real, so vivid, so vocal, that it can hold teacher and students alike accountable for what they say and do." It is well worth reading him on this subject at length . . . and slowly. (Truth, by the way, he defines as "an eternal conversation about things that matter, conducted with passion and discipline.")
This is a book from which any teacher--at any level--will derive something valuable. It encourages us to take heart.
Merritt Moseley
UNC Asheville