Parker J. Palmer

The courage to teach : exploring the inner landscape of a teacher's life

Foreword to the Tenth Anniversary Edition. Gratitudes. Introduction: Teaching from Within. I The Heart of a Teacher: Identity and Integrity in Teaching. II A Culture of Fear: Education and the Disconnected Life. III The Hidden Wholeness: Paradox in Teaching and Learning. IV Knowing in Community: Joined by the Grace of Great Things. V Teaching in Community: A Subject-Centered Education. VI Learning in Community: The Conversation of Colleagues. VII Divided No More: Teaching from a Heart of Hope. Afterword: The New Professional: Education for Transformation. Notes. The Author. The Center for Courage & Renewal. About the CD. Index.

The Heart of a Teacher Identity and Integrity in Teaching

But at other moments, the classroom is so lifeless or painful or confused -and I am so powerless to do anything about it -that my claim to be a teacher seems a transparent sham. Then the enemy is everywhere: in those students from some alien planet, in that subject I thought I knew, and in the personal pathology that keeps me earning my living this way. What a fool I was to imagine that I had mastered this occult art -harder to divine than tea leaves and impossible for mortals to do even passably well!

Teaching with Heart and Soul: Reflections on Spirituality in Teacher Education

This article revolves around two questions: Is there a “spiritual” dimension to good teaching? If so, do spiritual considerations have a place in teacher education? Defining spirituality as “the eternal human yearning to be connected with something larger than our own egos,” the author answers both questions in the affirmative, and he explores the implications of these answers for teacher education. The article pays special attention to a “pedagogy of the soul” that respects both cultural diversity and the separation of church and state and is relevant to institutional and social change as well as personal transformation. The article is not rooted in empirical research (though a recent study is featured in it) but is a reflective piece that grows out of the author’s three decades of exploring, writing about, and working with educators on the spiritual dimensions of K-12 and higher education.

A New Professional: The Aims of Education Revisited.

was born in 1939, so my first few years on earth intersected with the Holocaust. And yet, as I was growing up on the North Shore of Chicago, no one told me that this history of inhumanity was part of our history, of my history—this despite the fact that Jews on the North Shore at that time were residentially segregated to keep “people like them” apart from “people like us,” a practice driven by the same darkness that led to “the final solution.” The personal implications of the Holocaust escaped me until I decided to become a professor, animated in part by the belief that education can humanize us. That belief was severely shaken when I began learning about the German academy’s complicity in mass murder. Some of the best-educated people on the planet had seen the barbed wire fences and the flames in the night. They knew what occurred. But, taught to value intellectual detachment above engagement with the world, they refused to recognize what they knew. Thus they collaborated with evil. Does education humanize us? Sometimes, but not nearly often enough. We have yet to uproot the myth of “value-free” knowledge, and hence we turn our graduates loose on the world as people who know, but do not recognize that our justice system often fails the poor, that corporate logic usually favors short-term profits over sustainability, that practical politics is