The Courage to Teach
Reviewed by Janice Albert
“The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life” by Parker J. Palmer; San Francisco, Jossey-Bass 1998. $22.00
The Courage to Teach: A Guide for Reflection and Renewal” by Rachel Livsey in collaboration with Parker J. Palmer; San Francisco, Jossey-Bass 1999. $8.00
A HISTORY INSTRUCTOR at a nearby college tapes all of his lectures. During class meetings, he sits beside the tape recorder while he and the students listen to the day’s lesson. Students take notes because they will be examined on this material. This instructor is the darling of the college administration because great numbers of students can be enrolled in his courses. Can this activity-presenting a nearly endless stream of information at scheduled times-really be called teaching?
Parker Palmer, author of “The Courage to Teach”, would say no. Drawing on his own experience and a wealth of inspirational material, Palmer develops a theory of teaching that asks instructors to put aside the conventional idea that teaching tricks and optimized working conditions will make the classroom a better place. He asks for reform that begins when we develop a greater sense of our own integrity. Indeed, the subtitle of his book is “Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life.” The teacher who sits like an automaton while he and the class listen to his tapes exemplifies a crucial problem: teaching from a divided self. That is, Professor Drudge, desperate to please the college administration with its demand for high enrollments, and determined to please the discipline of history with its demand for accuracy and detail, puts himself and his students last. He has forgotten that teaching is a human activity.
The genius of Palmer’s book is that he knows that this human activity can invite pain. “Unlike many professions, teaching is always done at the dangerous intersection of personal and private life. 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.”
How do these words ring for you? For me, they call up the memory of a young man discarding his essay by dropping it into the wastebasket on his way out of class-the essay I had labored to show him how to improve. There’s another scalding moment, after reading a favorite poem to a freshman class, when I looked into stone-faced expressions and glazed eyes. Our fear of the judgment of the young is Palmer’s painful truth.
How then are we to go back into the classroom and put ourselves on the line a second time? Palmer reformulates the problem in Chapter V, after asking teachers to see themselves as guides in a learning community, one in which anyone might hold a piece of truth. He offers two examples of curricula in which the subject is put first, and students are allowed to engage it directly, not mediated through the instructor but in the company of the instructor. Surprisingly, one of these programs is in a medical school, where students begin by looking at a sick person. His second example is from one of his own classes, Methods of Social Research. (Palmer is a sociologist with a doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley.) He believes that if students begin with a concrete example, which he calls the microcosm, the good teacher can lead them to their own discoveries of general principles. But this same teacher must have the confidence, the inner authority, to open the conversation to the students in a genuine way. The classroom must be both “hospitable and charged.” That is, students ought to feel invited to speak, yet constrained to respect the primacy of the subject itself, and above all to respect each other.
Many of Palmer’s views could be stated more simply, and at times he labors to express a subtlety that might be stated with more snap. Indeed, there is a carefulness about the book that is off-putting. In part, I think this is caused by his need to express ideas that are well-understood by Quakers but which he does not want the reader to interpret as narrowly sectarian. The importance of the community, the notion that truth is directly accessible to the inquirer, and the practice of delegated leadership are familiar ideas to Quakers, less so, to followers of more authoritarian religions. Readers who pride themselves on having no religious affiliation at all might avoid a “Quaker” book entirely.
For my part, I am more disturbed by Palmer’s inconsistency in providing notes to document his claims. When discussing the success of service-learning programs to improve students academically, he cites a 1993 article from Education Evaluation and Policy Analysis. Yet in the same chapter, he offers a lengthy discussion of a model of medical education brought to his attention by a dean at “a large research university.” The dean is extensively quoted, but never named. Palmer tells us that the plan itself was developed at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, but I wanted to know more. Predominantly, the notes at the end of chapters refer to the work of poets, including William Blake, Marge Piercy and Rumi. Some take us to the work of Annie Dillard and Rainer Maria Rilke. In general, they testify to Palmer’s wide reading in the humanities. However, his work as senior advisor to the Association for Higher Education must bring him into contact with other documentary evidence that would help his readers and support his claims.
A guide to accompany The Courage to Teach is available. Written by Rachel Livsey, The Courage to Teach: A Guide for Reflection and Renewal offers a set of questions to promote engagement with Palmer’s ideas. For the adjunct working alone, the material would be an excellent source of journal self-assignments. Palmer’s book offers a way out of the isolation of broken teaching by invoking a subject-centered classroom, where the teacher and students mutually engage in an exploration of “a great thing.” He says that when he listens to students describe their great teachers, “a passion for the subject” is the trait they often name. “I always thought that passion made a teacher great because it brought contagious energy into the classroom, but now I realize its deeper function. Passion for the subject propels the 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.” Many teachers have days when they come out of the classroom more energized than when they went in. Palmer’s book provides a key to increasing that number of days for teachers and students.
