Bibliography
Dec. 31st, 2009 04:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_lady_lilyThe Courage to Teach - Parker Palmer
Now this is an interesting one. It's a strange fusion between a book about pedagogy and a book about spirituality. My guess is that if you aren't familiar with the traditions that Palmer is writing out of, most strongly that of the Benedictine Contradiction, the God side stays quite low-key, and when it does come out, it's made very clear why it is appropriate for it to do so. When you are actually quite geared up to this kind of thing, however, there is a certain resonance which really catches the mind and the soul. I'm actually a bit sad that I've read this during a non-teaching period, and might have to go back to it.
The general principle is that teaching is all about embracing paradoxes and living into them. So, for instance, Palmer talks about the paradox between his thirty years of teaching experience and his fear that he's going to be outed as a fraud every time he walks into a classroom. There's also the tension between the need for intellectual rigour and addressing emotional responses to material; to creating boundaries but leaving space for spontaneity; for involving students but covering the material. And plenty more.
There are three Big Things I've taken out of this. The first is the maxim that you need to be in touch with your own inner teacher, which sounds very cheesy, but actually is pretty much on the money. You can't and shouldn't try to pick up whatever the latest pedagogy craze is. Using technique A will be useless if you're someone who is better suited to use technique B, and all the workshops and teacher training in the world won't change that. That's not to say that technique isn't important - but that you should learn how to use technique in such a way that you keep your integrity as a teacher, and be happy to use what works for you and reject what doesn't. There's also a good point there about learning that while X works for you brilliantly, it probably won't work for your colleague.
This brings us to the second thing, which is that we don't talk about teaching enough, and certainly not in the kind of way where discussions based around our anxieties about teaching can be aired and respected without someone coming in an trying to problem solve or willy wave. The idea of collaborative praxis in teaching is, again, an interesting one - I have talked about methods and things to some extent with some colleagues, but the sense of a collaborative, supportive teaching community is something I feel quite enthusiastic about creating, should I get the chance. Note: this is highly, highly aspirational.
The third point was quite a useful way of articulating what a classroom should look like. The problem with our way of thinking about things, says Palmer, is that we go into binaries - we assume we can have a classroom that puts the teacher at the focus point (which tends to lead to lecture-based note-focused droning, the kind of hierarchical I have Access to Knowledge and you cretins had best worship at the altar of my wisdom stuff), or that puts the student in the focus point (whereupon anarcharchy and insufficient attention to the material reigns). Parker suggests a third model - putting the subject at the middle of the circle, and making that the focus of discussion - and assuming that everyone discussing the subject can learn from each other and from it, teacher included. It sounds bloody obvious, but when you articulate it, you realise with a bit of a bump how easy it is to fall into the Passing Down Of Knowledge model.
If you're interested in teaching, and think you can cope with a bit of inspirational language in the service of some rather interesting ideas, you could do worse than give this a go.
Now this is an interesting one. It's a strange fusion between a book about pedagogy and a book about spirituality. My guess is that if you aren't familiar with the traditions that Palmer is writing out of, most strongly that of the Benedictine Contradiction, the God side stays quite low-key, and when it does come out, it's made very clear why it is appropriate for it to do so. When you are actually quite geared up to this kind of thing, however, there is a certain resonance which really catches the mind and the soul. I'm actually a bit sad that I've read this during a non-teaching period, and might have to go back to it.
The general principle is that teaching is all about embracing paradoxes and living into them. So, for instance, Palmer talks about the paradox between his thirty years of teaching experience and his fear that he's going to be outed as a fraud every time he walks into a classroom. There's also the tension between the need for intellectual rigour and addressing emotional responses to material; to creating boundaries but leaving space for spontaneity; for involving students but covering the material. And plenty more.
There are three Big Things I've taken out of this. The first is the maxim that you need to be in touch with your own inner teacher, which sounds very cheesy, but actually is pretty much on the money. You can't and shouldn't try to pick up whatever the latest pedagogy craze is. Using technique A will be useless if you're someone who is better suited to use technique B, and all the workshops and teacher training in the world won't change that. That's not to say that technique isn't important - but that you should learn how to use technique in such a way that you keep your integrity as a teacher, and be happy to use what works for you and reject what doesn't. There's also a good point there about learning that while X works for you brilliantly, it probably won't work for your colleague.
This brings us to the second thing, which is that we don't talk about teaching enough, and certainly not in the kind of way where discussions based around our anxieties about teaching can be aired and respected without someone coming in an trying to problem solve or willy wave. The idea of collaborative praxis in teaching is, again, an interesting one - I have talked about methods and things to some extent with some colleagues, but the sense of a collaborative, supportive teaching community is something I feel quite enthusiastic about creating, should I get the chance. Note: this is highly, highly aspirational.
The third point was quite a useful way of articulating what a classroom should look like. The problem with our way of thinking about things, says Palmer, is that we go into binaries - we assume we can have a classroom that puts the teacher at the focus point (which tends to lead to lecture-based note-focused droning, the kind of hierarchical I have Access to Knowledge and you cretins had best worship at the altar of my wisdom stuff), or that puts the student in the focus point (whereupon anarcharchy and insufficient attention to the material reigns). Parker suggests a third model - putting the subject at the middle of the circle, and making that the focus of discussion - and assuming that everyone discussing the subject can learn from each other and from it, teacher included. It sounds bloody obvious, but when you articulate it, you realise with a bit of a bump how easy it is to fall into the Passing Down Of Knowledge model.
If you're interested in teaching, and think you can cope with a bit of inspirational language in the service of some rather interesting ideas, you could do worse than give this a go.
