I
stand in front of a classroom of 50 some odd skeptical faces and introduce myself. I can see it in their faces. They can’t believe that this woman, who looks like she is a student, is actually the teacher. They immediately wonder: Is she straight or gay? Single or married? How old is she? Is she one of those feminazis or will we be able to express dissenting opinions?
Such is my experience of teaching Intro to Women’s Studies at Hunter College. It is one of the biggest challenges I’ve ever faced, and also, one of the greatest opportunities for making me a smarter, more inclusive, more dynamic thinker and writer.
I was reminded of this (I haven’t been able to teach since I’ve been touring for my book) while reading The Courage to Teach by Parker Palmer. It is an incredibly moving perspective on what it takes to be a truly enlightened, committed, effective teacher.
Palmer bravely argues that teachers must bring themselves—authentically and fearlessly—into the classroom if they want to change students’ lives. He denounces the defensive posture of old-school teaching, the notion that there is one body of knowledge, a solid and unchanged Truth, and that it is the teachers job to impart this knowledge on the student. Instead, he writes: “To teach is to create a space in which the community of truth is practiced…the hallmark of the community of truth is in its claim that reality is a web of communal relationships, and we can know reality only by being in community with it.�
In this way, Palmer often echoes the relational psychology movement of the 70s and 80s (Carol Gilligan, Jean Miller Baker), although he doesn’t references these gals explicitly. I imagine he would attest to being deeply influenced by feminist psychology.
He advocates that teachers get comfortable with paradox—the essential balance in an alive and challenging classroom. The essential paradoxes, he argues are:
1. The space should be bounded and open.
2. The space should be hospitable and “charged.�
3. The space should honor the “little� stories of the students and the “big� stories of the disciplines and tradition.
4. The space should support solitude and surround it with the resources of community.
5. The space should welcome both silence and speech.
He reminds the reader that we don’t just teach a subject, we teach students how to think with an open, critical mind. He writes, “In a flattened, desacralized culture, thinking is not what happens when we are taken—or threatened—by surprise. Instead, we reflexively defend ourselves by reaching for a weapon that we know how to use, an old idea who use we mastered long ago.�
I can’t recommend this book more for those who are brave enough to enter classrooms charged with leading the conversation. It reminds you that it is hard because it is so damn important. It reminds you that it may just be the most important job on earth.
Next time: Searching for Angela Shelton, the film, and Finding Angela Shelton, the book, and then my girl Kate’s book on the wild subculture of competitive college cheerleading: CHEER!
0 TrackBacks
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Not Oprah’s Book Club: The Courage to Teach.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.feministing.com/cgi-bin/movabletype/mt-tb.fcgi/6995
Weekly Feministing Newsletter
Feministing RSS Feed
My professor recommended this book to me before my first gig teaching undergraduates. It is, indeed, wonderful.
As an educational scholar and former elementary teacher, the rhetoric in this book is similar to the grand platitudes seen elsewhere with regard to teaching. It is reminiscent of the days when naive, young women teachers were expected to lay themselves at the alter of the child and sacrifice their dignity and personal lives in the process.
All of these lofty ideals do not translate into practical and realistic pedagogical tools. Parker's principles sound nice and perhaps quaint, but do little to actually reform instruction or change the prestige of educational professions. Effective and meaningful teaching is a difficult and stressful task. The profession will not become more important or receive more respect, particularly primary teaching, unless we discontinue the inspiring and heroic psycho-babble.
Granted, one must be energetic and motivated to teach, but many people are inspired and motivated and do not belong in the classroom. One must genuinely enjoy the company of children. Yet, these are prerequisites and not exhaustive characteristics. Instead of appealing to emotion only, we must also acknowledge that teaching requires complicated technical knowledge and methodologies. If to teach is only to inspire, then it sounds like a lot of people can do it, and that is not true.
Does Palmer say whether these "essential paradoxes" apply more to some subject areas than others? I'm trying to imagine how these principles would actually be applied in my subject (mathematics) where there is a more or less correct approach to most of the problems we pose to the students (especially when teaching the basics).
Minor nitpick: Her name was Jean Baker Miller, not Jean Miller Baker.
Courtney I love your book reviews even if you're causing me to spend way more money than I should at Amazon.com :)
I'm reading choices right now and have been alternately crying or bouncing around the house with anger at what these women went through.
I am really excited to read this book since I am also teaching undergrad in both psychology and sociology and am struggling to make the bare bones of psychology interesting and expansive while still covering all that I am required to
For me, Parker's points are good touchstones in the middle of a hectic year of teaching. Sometimes they can be a little warm and fuzzy, but nonetheless centering. I disagree a bit with shaun in that texts like this may not increase the prestige of the profession, but I've never expected prestige. I'm in favor of any viewpoint that encourages me to be myself in the classroom--without censoring my views and style.
I haaaaaaaaaated this book. I had to read it for grad school and thought it was the cheesiest stuff I'd ever read.
But I'm just one haggard ESL instructor.
two more amazing books about teaching:
Teaching Community
and
Teaching to Transgress
both by bell hooks
This quote:
sets off all of my "dangerous postmodernist woo" buttons. Now, perhaps I'm being uncharitable because I don't actually understand what that quote means, so could someone please explain to me how this quote is in fact significantly different from the statements "there is no such thing as objective reality" and "alternative ways of knowing are as valid an approach to truth as the traditional, Eurocentric scientific method"?I'm holding out hope that the quote from the book means something different from what it appears - what is this "web of communal relationships" that is reality? Does the author perhaps mean something different from the word "reality" than I mean?
"Granted, one must be energetic and motivated to teach, but many people are inspired and motivated and do not belong in the classroom. One must genuinely enjoy the company of children."
Hey! Lots of students are adults! ;)
"Does Palmer say whether these 'essential paradoxes' apply more to some subject areas than others? I'm trying to imagine how these principles would actually be applied in my subject (mathematics) where there is a more or less correct approach to most of the problems we pose to the students (especially when teaching the basics)."
Remember when Doonesbury covered that?
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.scientists/msg/516d46ea00d22528
I found this book to be sentimentalist claptrap. What little of Palmer that I didn't think was useless I thought was obvious.
Tara K: I am a retired ESL teacher.
When I look back on those years I ask myself why I put so much of myself into this work.
All this touchy-feeliness does not confront the real problems of teaching, which are institutional in nature.
No one book or class will ever, EVER prepare people for teaching. But Palmer adds a whole lot to the discourse, and many teachers find his framing really useful. Yes teaching is a technical skill that is wildly devalued in out culture. But technically competent teachers with no heart and no conception of a community of learning are just a potentially dangerous as bleeding hearts with no skills.
"But technically competent teachers with no heart and no conception of a community of learning are just a potentially dangerous as bleeding hearts with no skills."
Right on!