The Heart of Teaching: Finding Your Place as a Teacher

1. The Heart of Teaching: Finding Your Place as a Teacher Joseph Kyser, CEIT & STH

2. Introductions Name, School/Department, Preferred Name 5 second Pause

3. Structure My Hope Set of questions Reflect for 2 minutes Discuss as a full group Scholarship

4. Getting Started: Your Identity as Teacher • What does it mean for you to teach at Boston University? • What are you trying to achieve with your teaching? What is your aim, goal, or purpose? • What experiences, emotions, or reactions do you want to have in connection to your teaching?

5. Begin to Dig: Focusing on the Student • What experience do you want your students to have in your classroom? • How do you actively engage your students throughout a class session? • What expectations do you have for your students? What constitutes an “ideal student” in your class?

6. Digging Deeper: Building Community • How is community intentionally built in your classroom? Unintentionally? • How are you learning in community within your discipline? How does that learning influence your classroom? • How does community foster deep connections between you and your students, your students and your discipline, and your discipline and you?

7. Digging Further: Tapping into Wholeness • What does “educating thewhole student” mean to you? • What does “teaching from your whole self” mean to you? • How are elements of these principles evident in your classroom today?

8. Finding the Heart of Your Teaching • How does transformationoccur in your classroom? • How does your classroom promote liberation for you and your students? • How does your classroom encourage the integration of content knowledge and the ”human experience”?

9. Scholarship • Parker Palmer • The academy is disconnected • As teachers we often hide behind our fears • Community helps resolve many of these issues • Community in the classroom • Community between colleagues • Community within a subject-centered education From: The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life

10. Scholarship • Rachael Kessler • To teach at our best selves requires us to know our deepest selves • We do this through: • Finding times of silence and stillness (rest) • Defining our meaning and purpose • Finding joy in what we do • Using creativity to feel inspired • Accepting the unknowns of the universe From: The Soul of Education: Helping Students Find Connection, Compassion, and Character at School

11. Scholarship • Paulo Freire • Education can be used to oppress or liberate individuals • Challenges the traditional viewpoint of teacher-student relationship in light of power differences • Calls for an education based on dialogics • Dialogue is essential as we explore content, human-world relationship, and generative themes From: Pedagogy of the Oppressed

12. Scholarship • bell hooks • The classroom should be a place of freedom and empowerment • Pulls from feminist theory of liberation • Promotes a multi-cultural approach to the classroom • “Any classroom that employs a holistic model of learning will also be a place where teachers grow, and are empowered by the process. That empowerment cannot happen if we refuse to be vulnerable while encouraging students to take risks.” From: Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

13. Scholarship • Tobin Hart • In this information age, knowledge has a transforming power that must be utilized more in the classroom • The classroom must address the different ways of knowing and learning (multiple learning styles) if students are to be transformed • Believes transformation calls us to a deeper knowing in the heart where “paradox and possibility open up. Old divisions of either/or move even beyond multiplicity to seeing with a singular depth, to the unifying heart of things; the loving heart is the bridge between worlds.” From: Information to Transformation: Education for the Evolution of Consciousness

14. Questions?

15. The Heart of Teaching: Finding Your Place as a Teacher Joseph Kyser, CEIT & STH