Teaching Requires Inner Courage

1. Teaching Requires Inner Courage The Courage to Teach by Parker J. Palmer

2. Palmer’s Thesis • Teaching involves a “tangle” of three elements. • Subject: “complex … our knowledge of [our subject] is always flawed and partial.” • Student: “even more complex … to see them clearly … and respond to them wisely … requires a fusion of Freud and Solomon that few [can] achieve.” • Self: “We teach who we are … [intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually].” • Good teaching “joins self and subjects and students” and guides us “on an inner journey toward more truthful ways of seeing and being.”

3. The Landscape of Self • Intellectual: “the way we think about teaching and learning” • Emotional: “the way we and our students feel as we teach and learn” • Spiritual: the “ways we answer the heart’s longing to be connected with the largeness of life”

4. Teaching Takes “Heart” • “Good teaching cannot be reduced to technique; good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher.” • “My ability to connect with my students, and to connect them with the subject, depends less on the methods I use than on the degree to which I know and trust my selfhood.” • “Good teachers possess a capacity for connectedness.” • Good teaching takes “heart in its ancient sense, as the place where intellect and emotion and spirit … converge.”

5. Teaching Requires Vulnerability • “Teaching is a daily exercise in vulnerability.” • “I need only parse a sentence or work a proof on the board while my students doze off or pass notes” or surf the internet. • “As we try to connect ourselves and our subjects with our students, we make ourselves, as well as our subjects, vulnerable to indifference, judgment, ridicule.” • “Teaching [occurs] at the dangerous intersection of personal and public life.”

6. Teaching and its Rewards “One of teaching’s great rewards is the daily chance it gives us to get back on the dance floor”“the dance … in which the old empower the young with their experience and the young empower the old with new life.”

7. Teaching as a Performance to Mask Fear (False Teaching) • “[Tompkin’s Question:] ‘How did it come to be that our main goal as academicians turned out to be performance?” • “[Tompkin’s Answer:] ‘Fear of being shown up for who you are: a fraud, stupid, ignorant, a clod, a dolt, a sap, a weakling, someone who can’t cut the mustard.’” – Jane Tompkins’s Pedagogy of the Distressed

8. The Teacher Within • Two truths about teaching • “What we teach will never ‘take’ unless it connects with the inward, living core of our students’ lives, within our students’ inward teachers.” • “We can speak to the teacher within our students only when we are on speaking terms with the teacher within ourselves.” • “Deep speaks to deep, and when we have not sounded our own depths, we cannot sound the depths of our students’ lives.”

9. The Authority to Teach • “We are mistaken when we seek authority outside ourselves, in sources ranging from the subtle skills of group process to the less than subtle method of social control called grading. This view of teaching turns the teacher into the cop on the corner, trying to keep things moving amicably and by consent but always having recourse to the coercive power of the law.” • “When my teaching is authorized by the teacher within me, I need neither weapons nor armor to teach.”

10. Palmer’s Practical Advice But this: Not this: Do this with significant learning experiences, with passion from allboth student and teacherand in a spirit of togetherness in learning.