PREHISTORY REVISITED

Because I began writing The Courage to Teach a decade before it was published, this book’s tenth anniversary feels more like a twentieth to me. In fact, throughout the book’s decade-long prehistory—during much of which I had only a title, a swarm of half-baked ideas, heaps of scrap paper covered with scribbled notes, and page after page of unusable text—I gave so many talks referring to my book in progress that some people got the impression it was a fait accompli.

I began getting calls from librarians: “Someone is trying to borrow a copy of The Courage to Teach, but I can’t find it anywhere. How can I get my hands on one?” My callers were generally not amused when I told them that I, too, wished I had a copy but that we would both have to wait until I actually wrote the thing.

That it took me a decade to write this book is due partly to the fact that I am a very slow writer. When people ask me what I do for a living, I tell them I am a rewriter. I doubt that I have ever published a page that has not been refried eight or ten or twelve times. As is true of many writers, I do not begin with a clear idea and then commit it to paper. The very act of writing helps me discover what I feel or know about something, and since each succeeding draft drives that discovery a little deeper, it is hard to know when to stop.

But the fact that it took me a decade to write this book is not due only to my slow hand. I also credit a generous providence for giving me time to accrue and assimilate two experiences without which the book would have been less grounded, less honest, and hence less helpful. One of these was a failure, the other a success. Today I count both of them as blessings.

Of course, the failure did not feel like a blessing at the time. Four years before The Courage to Teach was published, while the book was still a gleam in my eye—or a stone in my shoe, depending on the day—I spent a year as the Eli Lilly Visiting Professor at Berea College in Kentucky. By the end of that year, I had been reminded of two things related to this book: why the title was on target (at least, for me) and why I needed to write about teaching with as much humility as I could muster.

Berea College has served the young people of Appalachia since 1855. Its liberal arts program is offered tuition-free to students from one of the most impoverished regions of the United States, all of whom are given on-campus jobs to help operate the college and finance their own education. I had felt drawn to Berea ever since my graduate school days at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1960s, when higher education was roundly and rightly criticized for ignoring the victims of poverty. Teaching at a college with a social justice mission had long been high on my vocational wish list.

“Be careful what you wish for” is a cliché worth attending to. The year I taught at Berea was one of the most difficult of my life. As an affluent northerner who had only read about Appalachia, I was unprepared for the depth of the culture gap between my students and me, and I was often unable to teach across it. My own “capacity for connectedness”—a key concept in The Courage to Teach—frequently failed because I lacked personal knowledge of “the other.” Worse still, I was slow to acknowledge and repair my own ignorance.

These professional struggles were amplified by personal loss, and as I insist in this book, the personal can never be divorced from the professional. “We teach who we are” in times of darkness as well as light. In the middle of my year at Berea, in the small hours of a subzero January morning, I learned that my beloved father had suddenly and unexpectedly died. Far removed from the consolation of family and old friends, I was devastated.

Every day of my second semester at Berea I had to climb a mountain of personal grief and professional failure to drag myself back into the classroom while “the courage to teach” ebbed and flowed in me, mostly ebbing. I would not repeat that year for fame or money, but it left me with a pearl of great price: deepened empathy for teachers whose daily work is as much about climbing mountains as it is about teaching and learning.

My other pivotal experience during the ten-year prehistory of The Courage to Teach was an unqualified success, not because of me but because of the people with whom I shared it. From 1994 to 1996, at the request of the Fetzer Institute and with its generous financial and staff support, I designed and facilitated a program called “The Courage to Teach.” Working with twenty-two K-12 teachers from southwestern Michigan, I became an “inwardbound” guide, helping them explore the inner landscape of their lives through eight quarterly retreats of three days each, following the cycle of the seasons.

Technically, I led this program. Truthfully, those teachers led me. I learned lasting lessons from them about the discouraging, oppressive, and sometimes cruel conditions in which too many public school teachers must work; about the willingness of these good people to look within themselves for sustenance instead of waiting for someone to supply it; about the heart-deep commitment that keeps them coming back to the classroom—their commitment to the well-being of our children.

My two-year journey with public school teachers persuaded me beyond doubt that they and their kin are among the true culture heroes of our time. Daily they must deal with children who have been damaged by social pathologies that no one else has the will to cure. Daily they are berated by politicians, the public, and the press for their alleged inadequacies and failures. And daily they return to their classrooms, opening their hearts and minds in hopes of helping children do the same.

The hard times I had with teaching and the good times I had with teachers in the decade before The Courage to Teach was published helped me write this book from a place of passion in myself. The word passion, of course, can mean intense love or intense suffering or both. The two go hand in hand in language as well as life.

THE FUTURE IS HERE

Today, a decade after The Courage to Teach was published—now that ten years’ worth of events have “gone through the formality of taking place”—how accurate was my crystal ball regarding the future of education, the needs of teachers, and the service I hoped this book might render?

My instinct that education would become more obsessed with externals, shrinking the space needed to support the inner lives of teachers and students, was, I’m sad to say, all too accurate. Of course, one hardly need consult the Oracle at Delphi to make such a prediction. The excesses of No Child Left Behind (NCLB)—a set of unfunded, even unfounded federal mandates that have done much to undermine teacher morale and stifle real teaching and learning—are the inevitable outcomes of a mind-set that cares about weights and measures more than meaning.

To those who say that we need weights and measures in order to enforce accountability in education, my response is, yes, of course we do, but only under three conditions that are not being met today. We need to make sure (1) that we measure things worth measuring in the context of authentic education, where rote learning counts for little; (2) that we know how to measure what we set out to measure; and (3) that we attach no more importance to measurable things than we attach to things equally or more important that elude our instruments.

Otherwise we will find ourselves—as I think we do—in the tragicomic situation that John Dewey lampooned some seventy years ago. Dewey was asked what he thought about the IQ test. His response, drawn from his childhood years on the farm, could easily apply to many of the “measures of learning” required by No Child Left Behind:

Dewey . . . likened [the IQ test] to his family’s preparations for taking a hog to market. In order to figure out how much to charge for the animal, his family put the hog on one end of a seesaw and piled up bricks on the other until the two balanced. “Then we tried to figure out how much those bricks weighed,” said Dewey.²

Today we say, in effect, “This child weighs seventy-six bricks’ worth of language skills, while that one weighs eighty-three bricks.” But we still don’t know how much the bricks weigh—and the kinds of bricks we use differ from one setting to another! As much as I wish I had been wrong, I was right in 1997 about our continuing obsession with educational externals.

On a happier note, I was also right about the way inner work can help teachers connect with their students (thus aiding and abetting learning) and empower them to resist the forces that threaten to undermine real teaching (of which NCLB is only the most recent example). In the decade since this book was published, I have heard from many teachers that its approach to teaching has helped them deepen, renew, and sustain their vocations in trying times. And later in this Foreword, I will cite some research that supports my anecdotal evidence.

But I was wrong about the potential audience for this book. Although I had worked intensively with a group of K-12 teachers several years before the book’s publication, I thought my readers would come almost exclusively from higher and adult education. These were the domains in which I had worked for three decades and had some degree of name recognition and from which I drew most of the book’s examples and illustrations. So it has been a source of surprise and delight to me that The Courage to Teach has been read by many public school teachers and administrators, to whose world I was a relative newcomer in 1997.

Equally delightful and even more surprising has been the readership this book has attracted in worlds other than education, including medicine, law, politics, philanthropy, ministry, and organizational leadership. Ever since the book came out, people have been asking me, “Why don’t you write a book called The Courage to Lead or The Courage to Serve or The Courage to Heal, since so much of what you say here applies to work other than teaching?” Every profession that attracts people for “reasons of the heart” is a profession in which people and the work they do suffer from losing heart. Like teachers, these people are asking, “How can we take heart again so that we can give heart to others?”—which is why they undertook their work in the first place.

But my most gratifying surprise of the past decade, related to The Courage to Teach, has been the extent to which we have been able to “put wheels” on its ideas by creating vehicles that bring the ideas to ground and provide transport for people who want to explore them.

By “we” I mean the people who joined me following the initial two-year “Courage to Teach” program to create the Center for Teacher Formation—which, because of the growing demand for its work from people outside education, has changed its name to the Center for Courage & Renewal.³ That “we” includes Marcy Jackson and Rick Jackson, the center’s founding and continuing codirectors; Tom Beech, Rob Lehman, Mickey Olivanti, and Dave Sluyter of the Fetzer Institute; and Sam Intrator, professor at Smith College, and Megan Scribner, freelance editor, who have done most of the heavy lifting for a series of edited books that flowed from The Courage to Teach, helping put our work on the map.⁴

Today, the Center for Courage & Renewal, working through a “Courage Collaboration” of one hundred fifty trained facilitators, offers programs in some thirty states and fifty cities to help people in many walks of life “reconnect who they are with what they do.” In what we call “circles of trust”—identical in spirit and practice to the circle of teachers who met at the Fetzer Institute from 1994 to 1996—the center works with physicians, lawyers, clergy, foundation executives, politicians, and nonprofit leaders while continually expanding its core work with K-12 educators.⁵

As I argue in the Afterword, much has happened over the past decade to affirm and advance this book’s emphasis on the inner lives of teachers and learners. One of those developments is a 2002 study by Anthony Bryk and Barbara Schneider published under the title Trust in Schools: A Core Resource for Improvement.⁶ Funded by the Russell Sage Foundation, these scholars from the University of Chicago “set out in the early 1990s to explore the dynamics of reform unfolding in Chicago schools as a 1988 law that profoundly decentralized school governance was taking effect.”⁷

Believing “relational trust” to be a vital but neglected factor in school success, Bryk and Schneider examined the impact of that variable on student achievement, as measured by standardized tests, comparing “the performance of schools with high levels of trust with that of schools where relations were not as strong.” As reported in Education Week:

They found that schools performing in the top quartile on standardized tests were more often schools with high levels of trust than those performing in the bottom quartile. They also examined the 100 schools that had made the greatest and least annual gains on standardized tests between 1991 and 1996, and matched those results against the teacher-survey data on trusting relationships.

They found that schools reporting strong trust links in 1994 were three times more likely to report eventual improvements in reading and mathematics scores than those where trust levels were low. By 1997, schools with high levels of trust had a one in two chance of being in the “improving” category, compared with lower-trust schools, which had only a one in seven chance. Schools whose staffs reported low levels of trust both in 1994 and 1997 had “virtually no chance of showing improvement in either reading or mathematics,” the authors write.⁸

Bryk and Schneider also found that relational trust—between teachers and administrators, teachers and teachers, and teachers and parents—has the power to offset external factors that are normally thought to be the primary determinants of a school’s capacity to serve students well: “Improvements in academic productivity were less likely in schools with high levels of poverty, racial isolation, and student mobility, but [the researchers] say that a strong correlation between [relational] trust and student achievement remains even after controlling for such factors.” ⁹

If the capacity to educate students well depends heavily on relational trust, on what does relational trust depend? Clearly, it depends on an educator’s capacity to “explore the inner landscape” of his or her own life, learning how to negotiate that tricky terrain in a way that keeps trust alive.

Relational trust is built on movements of the human heart such as empathy, commitment, compassion, patience, and the capacity to forgive. If the inner work necessary to cultivate such dispositions and counteract whatever undermines them is not seen as vital to educational success—and if institutional support for inner work is lacking—then this critical variable is left up for grabs. We know what its fate will be in a culture that is consistently corrosive of trust.

Bryk and Schneider have rendered a great service with their study. But I need to say—not as a critique of their work but of our mentality—that Trust in Schools reveals a secret that is hidden in plain sight. Who does not know that you can throw the best methods, the latest equipment, and a lot of money at people who do not trust each other and still get miserable results? Who does not know that people who trust each other and work well together can do exceptional work with less than adequate resources?

We all know these things, privately and personally. But in our public life, we refuse to credit what we know—indeed, we actively deny it—constantly succumbing to the institutional illusion that the logic of the human heart is irrelevant to “real-world” operations that must produce a strong “bottom line.” It is hard to know whether to call this disconnect, this denial, self-defeating or stupid or tragic or simply boneheaded balderdash. I think it would take all those words and some really strong ones to name with precision this particular form of institutional insanity.

I am grateful to Bryk and Schneider for pressing their findings into the public arena by advising educational policymakers to embrace “the importance of trust in the drive to deliver results.” They write, “From a policy perspective, we constantly need to ask whether any new initiative is likely to promote relational trust within school communities or undermine it.”¹⁰

We might begin that process by looking at the impact No Child Left Behind has had on relational trust in our schools. Once we have seen the damage it has done—and have understood what happens to an institution’s capacity to pursue its mission when we ignore the dynamics of the heart—we might learn how to craft policies that bear real promise of educational reform because they appeal to “the better angels of our nature,” are rooted in common sense about how the world works, and take seriously the inner landscape of teachers’ and learners’ lives.

WITH GRATITUDE

Finally, a word to my readers: thank you! Thank you for purchasing well over three hundred thousand copies of the first edition of The Courage to Teach and sharing them with students, colleagues, and friends. More important by far, thank you for taking this book’s vision of teaching and learning off the printed page and onto the front lines.

Today, I am even more hopeful about the potential for education reform than I was ten years ago because this book has introduced me to so many people who are teachers or administrators and reformers—people who care passionately about education, schools, and the learners they are meant to serve, who are willing to take the risk of acting on their passion.

Grounded in that hope, I have written an Afterword for this edition titled “The New Professional: Education for Transformation.” In it, I explore ways of educating the kind of person we need if professional work of any sort is to serve the world well. The new professional will not only master the core competencies of a field like teaching or medicine or law. He or she will also have the skill and the will to help transform the institutions in which that work is done—institutions that too often threaten our highest professional standards.

As many readers of this book have testified, “exploring the inner landscape of a teacher’s life” allows us to return, grounded and renewed, to the outer landscape of our lives. Having taken heart in the work to which we are called, we can give heart once again to our students, our colleagues, our schools, and our world—a world where heartlessness yields only to gifts and graces that come from within.

Gratitudes

In 1983, I published To Know as We Are Known: Education as a Spiritual Journey. That book opened opportunities for me to meet and work with teachers in diverse settings across the country: colleges and universities, public schools, continuing education programs, retreat centers, religious institutions, and “learning organizations” of many sorts—businesses, foundations, and groups working for social change.

In dialogue with this remarkable array of educators, I was challenged to write a book that would go beyond To Know as We Are Known in two respects: it would have a sustained focus on the practice of teaching and an approach to the inner life that is open to the varied paths of the devoted teachers I have met. The Courage to Teach is that book, and I thank the kindred spirits who have encouraged me along the way.

My special thanks go to Robert F. Lehman, president of the Fetzer Institute, where I am senior adviser. Through a series of institute projects, he made it possible for me to lay down my travels long enough to finish this book. Even more generous has been his faithful companionship on the inner journey from which this book emerges. Rob Lehman understands the inner life and its impact on the world of action at a depth rare and heartening. For his insight, friendship, and witness I am profoundly grateful.

Working with the Fetzer Institute has enlarged my experience of education. My own teaching has been primarily in universities and adult study programs, and most of the stories in this book come from those worlds. But betweem 1992 and 1997, I gained some insight into the lives of K-12 teachers by helping Fetzer create the Teacher Formation Program, a two-year sequence of renewal retreats for teachers in public schools. The program currently has sites in Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, South Carolina, and Washington State, and as this book goes to press, the Fetzer Institute is establishing a national Center for Teacher Formation to develop additional K-12 sites.¹

From 1994 to 1996, I led the first Teacher Formation group. My gratitude goes to the inspiring Michigan public school teachers who made that experiment so successful: Maggie Adams, Jack Bender, Mark Bond, Lauri Bowersox, Margaret Ells, Richard Fowler, Linda Hamel, Eleanor Hayward, Marianne Houston, Katherine Kennedy, Cheri McLoughan, Michael Perry, Linda Powell, Toni Rostami, Rick Serafini, Gerald Thompson, and Marcia Weinhold.

I am grateful, too, for the people who are giving the Teacher Formation Program a larger and continuing life. They include Judy Brown, Tony Chambers, Charlie Glasser, Eleanor Greenslade, Sally Hare, Marianne Houston, Marcy Jackson, Rick Jackson, Mickey Olivanti, Megan Scribner, David Sluyter, and Penny Williamson, my friends and gifted partners in program development; the staff of the Fetzer Institute, whose devotion and hard work—answering calls, writing memos, issuing checks, cleaning rooms, caring for the grounds, and putting food on the table—has kept the program afloat; and the trustees of the institute who believe in this work and have backed it: Janis Claflin, Bruce Fetzer, Wink Franklin, Lynne Twist, Frances Vaughan, Jeremy Waletzky, and Judith Skutch Whitson (trustee emerita).

For the past decade I have worked independently. Though I teach constantly—in seminars and workshops and retreats, “classrooms” of many sorts—I no longer teach in traditional settings with the same students for a semester or more, as I did earlier in my career at Beloit College, Georgetown University, and Pendle Hill, the Quaker living-learning community.

So I was grateful to be appointed the Eli Lilly Visiting Professor at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky, in 1993-94. During that year, I was rebaptized into the realities of college teaching, and I wrote the first draft of this book. My special thanks go to Phyllis Hughes, Libby Jones, Larry Shinn, the late John Stephenson, and members of the Berea Friends Meeting for encouraging me to grow in my vocation.

I also thank my friends at the American Association of Higher Education (AAHE), where I serve as senior associate: Russ Edgerton (past president of AAHE, now director of educational programs at the Pew Charitable Trusts), Lou Albert, Pat Hutchings, and Ted Marchese. For a decade and more, they have encouraged and helped shape my work, giving me access to an extraordinary community of discourse that I could never have discovered on my own.

Most of the work on this book was done in 1996-97, and during that time I was blessed with four superb editors. All of them helped make this book better than it would have been had I written it alone.

Sarah Polster and Sheryl Fullerton were my editors at Jossey-Bass Publishers. I thank them for supporting me and challenging me in the right proportions and at the right times.

Mark Nepo is a poet, essayist, teacher, and editor extraordinaire. He read every word I wrote with care, commented on most of them with passion, pro and con, and tried to evoke my voice instead of imposing his own. For helping me find vessels to hold the treasure and for showing me treasure I had not seen, he has my endless thanks.

Sharon Palmer has lovingly shared all the ups and downs of this project and, with her keen eye and good heart, has worked to keep my prose lucid and my spirit whole. The dedication of this book only begins to suggest the depth of my gratitude to her—and to my father, the best man I have ever known.

Madison, Wisconsin
September 1997

Parker J. Palmer

For Sharon

And in grateful memory of my father
Max J. Palmer
(1912-1994)

Introduction

Teaching from Within

Ah, not to be cut off,
not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars.
The inner—what is it?
if not intensified sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming.

—RAINER MARIA RILKE, “[AH, NOT TO BE CUT OFF]”¹

WE TEACH WHO WE ARE

I am a teacher at heart, and there are moments in the classroom when I can hardly hold the joy. When my students and I discover uncharted territory to explore, when the pathway out of a thicket opens up before us, when our experience is illumined by the lightning-life of the mind—then teaching is the finest work I know.

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!

If you are a teacher who never has bad days, or who has them but does not care, this book is not for you. This book is for teachers who have good days and bad, and whose bad days bring the suffering that comes only from something one loves. It is for teachers who refuse to harden their hearts because they love learners, learning, and the teaching life.

When you love your work that much—and many teachers do—the only way to get out of trouble is to go deeper in. We must enter, not evade, the tangles of teaching so we can understand them better and negotiate them with more grace, not only to guard our own spirits but also to serve our students well.

Those tangles have three important sources. The first two are commonplace, but the third, and most fundamental, is rarely given its due. First, the subjects we teach are as large and complex as life, so our knowledge of them is always flawed and partial. No matter how we devote ourselves to reading and research, teaching requires a command of content that always eludes our grasp. Second, the students we teach are larger than life and even more complex. To see them clearly and see them whole, and respond to them wisely in the moment, requires a fusion of Freud and Solomon that few of us achieve.

If students and subjects accounted for all the complexities of teaching, our standard ways of coping would do—keep up with our fields as best we can and learn enough techniques to stay ahead of the student psyche. But there is another reason for these complexities: we teach who we are.

Teaching, like any truly human activity, emerges from one’s inwardness, for better or worse. As I teach, I project the condition of my soul onto my students, my subject, and our way of being together. The entanglements I experience in the classroom are often no more or less than the convolutions of my inner life. Viewed from this angle, teaching holds a mirror to the soul. If I am willing to look in that mirror and not run from what I see, I have a chance to gain selfknowledge—and knowing myself is as crucial to good teaching as knowing my students and my subject.

In fact, knowing my students and my subject depends heavily on self-knowledge. When I do not know myself, I cannot know who my students are. I will see them through a glass darkly, in the shadows of my unexamined life—and when I cannot see them clearly, I cannot teach them well. When I do not know myself, I cannot know my subject—not at the deepest levels of embodied, personal meaning. I will know it only abstractly, from a distance, a congeries of concepts as far removed from the world as I am from personal truth.

The work required to “know thyself” is neither selfish nor narcissistic. Whatever self-knowledge we attain as teachers will serve our students and our scholarship well. Good teaching requires self-knowledge: it is a secret hidden in plain sight.

LANDSCAPES INNER AND OUTER

This book explores the teacher’s inner life, but it also raises a question that goes beyond the solitude of the teacher’s soul: How can the teacher’s selfhood become a legitimate topic in education and in our public dialogues on educational reform?

Teaching and learning are critical to our individual and collective survival and to the quality of our lives. The pace of change has us snarled in complexities, confusions, and conflicts that will diminish us, or do us in, if we do not enlarge our capacity to teach and to learn. At the same time, teacher-bashing has become a popular sport. Panic-stricken by the demands of our day, we need scapegoats for the problems we cannot solve and the sins we cannot bear.

Teachers make an easy target, for they are such a common species and so powerless to strike back. We blame teachers for being unable to cure social ills that no one knows how to treat; we insist that they instantly adopt whatever “solution” has most recently been concocted by our national panacea machine; and in the process, we demoralize, even paralyze, the very teachers who could help us find our way.

In our rush to reform education, we have forgotten a simple truth: reform will never be achieved by renewing appropriations, restructuring schools, rewriting curricula, and revising texts if we continue to demean and dishearten the human resource called the teacher on whom so much depends. Teachers must be better compensated, freed from bureaucratic harassment, given a role in academic governance, and provided with the best possible methods and materials. But none of that will transform education if we fail to cherish—and challenge—the human heart that is the source of good teaching.

We are now engaged in a crucial public conversation about educational reform, but a conversation is only as good as the questions it entertains. This book raises a question about teaching that goes unasked in our national dialogue—and often goes unasked even in the places where teachers are educated and employed. But it should be asked wherever good teaching is at stake, for it honors and challenges the teacher’s heart, and it invites a deeper inquiry than our traditional questions do:

• The question we most commonly ask is the “what” question—what subjects shall we teach?

• When the conversation goes a bit deeper, we ask the “how” question—what methods and techniques are required to teach well?

• Occasionally, when it goes deeper still, we ask the “why” question—for what purpose and to what ends do we teach?

• But seldom, if ever, do we ask the “who” question—who is the self that teaches? How does the quality of my selfhood form—or deform—the way I relate to my students, my subject, my colleagues, my world? How can educational institutions sustain and deepen the selfhood from which good teaching comes?

I have no quarrel with the what or how or why questions—except when they are posed as the only questions worth asking. All of them can yield important insights into teaching and learning. But none of them opens up the territory I want to explore in this book: the inner landscape of the teaching self.

To chart that landscape fully, three important paths must be taken—intellectual, emotional, and spiritual—and none can be ignored. Reduce teaching to intellect, and it becomes a cold abstraction; reduce it to emotions, and it becomes narcissistic; reduce it to the spiritual, and it loses its anchor to the world. Intellect, emotion, and spirit depend on one another for wholeness. They are interwoven in the human self and in education at its best, and I have tried to interweave them in this book as well.

By intellectual I mean the way we think about teaching and learning—the form and content of our concepts of how people know and learn, of the nature of our students and our subjects. By emotional I mean the way we and our students feel as we teach and learn—feelings that can either enlarge or diminish the exchange between us. By spiritual I mean the diverse ways we answer the heart’s longing to be connected with the largeness of life—a longing that animates love and work, especially the work called teaching.

Rainer Maria Rilke gives voice to that longing in the poem at the head of this introduction: “Ah, not to be cut off . . .” He suggests that the spiritual quest for connectedness, rightly understood, will lead us out from the hidden heart into the vast and visible world: “The inner—what is it?/if not intensified sky, / hurled through with birds and deep/with the winds of homecoming.”

With striking imagery, Rilke offers us a mystic’s map of wholeness, where inner and outer reality flow seamlessly into each other, like the ever-merging surfaces of a Möbius strip, endlessly co-creating us and the world we inhabit. Though this book is grounded in the teacher’s inner terrain, it constantly segues into the outer forms of community that teaching and learning require. The inward quest for communion becomes a quest for outward relationship: at home in our own souls, we become more at home with each other.

My concern for the inner landscape of teaching may seem indulgent, even irrelevant, at a time when many teachers are struggling simply to survive. Wouldn’t it be more practical, I am sometimes asked, to offer tips, tricks, and techniques for staying alive in the classroom, things that ordinary teachers can use in everyday life?

The question puzzles me, because for twenty years I have made practical use of the approach taken in this book, leading workshops and retreats for educators of all sorts. I have worked with countless teachers, and many of them have confirmed my own experience: as important as methods may be, the most practical thing we can achieve in any kind of work is insight into what is happening inside us as we do it. The more familiar we are with our inner terrain, the more surefooted our teaching—and living—becomes.

I have heard that in the training of therapists, which involves much practical technique, there is this saying: “Technique is what you use until the therapist arrives.” Good methods can help a therapist find a way into the client’s dilemma, but good therapy does not begin until the real-life therapist joins with the real life of the client.

Technique is what teachers use until the real teacher arrives, and this book is about helping that teacher show up. Yet even if it is true that inner work has practical outcomes for individuals, the question of practicality arises in another form: How can educational institutions support the teacher’s inner life, and should they be expected to do so?

That question is worthy of a thoughtful answer, so Chapter VI is devoted to it. For the moment, I will turn the question around: How can schools educate students if they fail to support the teacher’s inner life? To educate is to guide students on an inner journey toward more truthful ways of seeing and being in the world. How can schools perform their mission without encouraging the guides to scout out that inner terrain?

A SELDOM-TAKEN TRAIL

My focus on the teacher may seem passé to people who believe that education will never be reformed until we stop worrying about teaching and focus on learning instead.

I have no question that students who learn, not professors who perform, is what teaching is all about: students who learn are the finest fruit of teachers who teach. Nor do I doubt that students learn in diverse and wondrous ways, including ways that bypass the teacher in the classroom and ways that require neither a classroom nor a teacher!

But I am also clear that in lecture halls, seminar rooms, field settings, labs, and even electronic classrooms—the places where most people receive most of their formal education—teachers possess the power to create conditions that can help students learn a great deal—or keep them from learning much at all. Teaching is the intentional act of creating those conditions, and good teaching requires that we understand the inner sources of both the intent and the act.

Most of my teaching has been in colleges and programs for older adults, but in recent years I have been enriched by working with public school teachers, from kindergarten through the twelfth grade. I have learned much from my K-12 colleagues, including these two things: teachers at all levels of education have more in common than we think, and we should not be so glib about which level we call “higher.”

Kindergarten teachers often understand the craft better than those of us with Ph.D.’s, perhaps because students in the “lower” grades are like the child in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” They do not care what graduate school you attended, who chaired your dissertation committee, or how many books you have written, but they quickly sense whether you are real, and they respond accordingly. The discerning innocence of young children deepens my conviction that at every level of education, the selfhood of the teacher is key.

“Who is the self that teaches?” is the question at the heart of this book—though answering that question in print has been more challenging than I imagined. In writing and rewriting this book many times over the past five years, I have learned how tempting it is to stay with the “whats” and “hows” and “whys”: those questions are more easily answered in prose and translated into proposals for fundable programs!

But I have persisted with the “who” question because it marks a seldom-taken trail in the quest for educational reform, a trail toward the recovery of the inner resources that good teaching always requires. Real reform is so badly needed—and we have restructured education so often without reaching that distant dream—that we should be sending expeditionary parties down every trail we can find.

I have persisted for another reason closer to the bone: “Who is the self that teaches?” is the question at the heart of my own vocation. I believe it is the most fundamental question we can ask about teaching and those who teach—for the sake of learning and those who learn. By addressing it openly and honestly, alone and together, we can serve our students more faithfully, enhance our own well-being, make common cause with colleagues, and help education bring more light and life to the world.

Chapter I

The Heart of a Teacher Identity and Integrity in Teaching

Now I become myself. It’s taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people’s faces . . .

—MAY SARTON, “NOW I BECOME MYSELF”¹

TEACHING BEYOND TECHNIQUE

Not long before I started this book, as summer took a slow turn toward fall, I walked into a college classroom and into my third decade of teaching.

I went to class that day grateful for another chance to teach; teaching engages my soul as much as any work I know. But I came home that evening convinced once again that I will never master this baffling vocation. Annoyed with some of my students and embarrassed by my own blunders, I pondered a recurring question: Might it be possible, at my age, to find a new line of work, maybe even something I know how to do?