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Book Review by Carrie L. Whaley, Ed.D., Assistant Professor of Education

The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life
Parker J. Palmer
November 1997, Jossey-Bass Publishers, ISBN: 0787910589

Check it out in the Emma Waters Summar Library or Buy It At

Could teachers gather around the great thing called "teaching and learning" and explore its mysteries with the same respect we accord any subject worth knowing? In this sequel to To Know As We Are Known: Education as a Spiritual Journey, Palmer claims we need to learn to do so, for such a gathering is one of the few means we have to become better teachers. In the first half of this book, Palmer guides readers through the inner work of cultivating the ground from which "communities of learning" grow. In the last half he turns to growing community from that inner ground into the classroom and the larger world.

Palmer examines the disconnected life in Chap. 2, A Culture of Fear, by looking at three places where fear shuts down our capacity for connectedness: in the lives of our students, in our own self-protective hearts, and in our dominant way of knowing. He reminds us that although we can have fear, we need not be fear-if we are willing to stand someplace else in our inner landscape.

In Chap. 3, Palmer discusses paradoxes in teaching and learning and suggests six paradoxical tensions that represent the complexities of classroom dynamics and the space in which it occurs:

1. The space should be bounded and open-bounded by a question, a text, or a body of data to keep the focus on the subject at hand, but open to the many paths down which discovery may lead.
2. The space should be hospitable and "charged"-a safe place to find nourishment, while at the same time, full of the risks inherent in pursuing the deep things of the world.
3. The space should invite the voice of the individual and the voice of the group-it must be a place for students to find their own authentic voice, as well as a place in which the group's voice is gathered and amplified.
4. The space should honor the "little" stories of the students and the "big" stories of the disciplines and tradition-the small realities that grow in students' lives as well as the big stories of the disciplines we study.
5. The space should support solitude and surround it with the resources of community-learning demands solitude, time alone to reflect and absorb; but it also demands community, a dialogical exchange in which our ignorance can be aired, our biases challenged, and our knowledge expanded.
6. The space should welcome both silence and speech-words are not the sole medium of exchange in teaching and learning; we educate with silence as well.

The six paradoxes add up to sound pedagogy, in theory. The remainder of the chapter explores what they look like in practice.

The following three chapters, Knowing in Community, Teaching in Community, and Learning in Community are pivotal ones for a Christian university such as Union, where we strive to be teachers of excellence. Palmer offers a sacramental definition of community-that it is an outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible grace-and that becomes the heart of his vision of a model of community in education. He examines three models of community from other disciplines-a therapeutic model, a civic model, and a marketing model, but found all three to be wanting. He offers, as an alternative model of community in education, that of "creating a space in which the community of truth is practiced."

In Chap. 5, Palmer confronts two common classroom models: the teacher-centered classroom, in which the teacher has all the knowledge and the students have little or none; and the student-centered classroom, in which students are regarded as a reservoir of knowledge to be tapped, are encouraged to teach each other, and the standards of accountability emerge from the group itself. Rather than either of these, he suggests a subject-centered classroom, which puts neither teacher nor student, but subject at the center of the pedagogical circle. In a subject-centered classroom, teachers and students are more likely to come into a genuine learning community, a community that does not collapse into the egos of students or teacher but knows itself accountable to the subject at its core.

Finally, in Chap. 6, Learning in Community, Palmer points out that the norms for dialogue in educational circles alternate between "guarded nicety" and competition-ones in which our conversations are either polite talk about content or technique, or competitive encounters in which we question each other's claims and think oppositionally about what we are hearing. Such a culture creates barriers between colleagues rather than creating a community that encourages risk-taking. Our willingness to try, and fail, as individuals is severely limited when we are not supported by a community that encourages such risks. He concludes this chapter with suggestions of new topics for conversation, ground rules for dialogue, and the need for leadership to provide a hospitable space for the conversation to occur. This is probably the most powerful, and perhaps the most beneficial chapter in the book for anyone who guides dialogue, with students or colleagues.

From the first chapter, in which Palmer examines identity and integrity in teaching, to the last, in which he walks the reader through the process of becoming part of an authentic movement in education, this book will give careful readers the opportunity to go beyond themselves and find the courage to live out of the most truthful places within, and the courage to invite their students to come alongside them and do the same.