The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life

Christian Century, Feb 4, 1998 by Janet Forsythe Fishburn

By Parker J. Palmer. Jossey-Bass, 199 pp., $22.00.

Parker Palmer adds a much-needed voice to discussions about education, which tend to focus primarily on curricular reform or on learners. His premise is that "good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher."

Palmer is well known as a lecturer and writer. He leads workshops for teachers in colleges and universities, public schools and religious institutions. Many of this book's themes were introduced in his well-received book To Know As We Are Known (1983).

Teaching requires courage because education is an attempt to "lead out" from within the self a core of wisdom that has the power to resist falsehood. For Palmer truth is an eternal conversation about things that matter. He is extremely critical of the belief that knowledge can be objective. It is because all knowledge is affected by the knower that he takes the inner life of the knower so seriously.

Palmer wants teachers to realize the extent to which their inner landscape colors their view of everything that happens in the classroom. Classroom disasters emerge from unacknowledged "shadow" areas of the teacher's personality. As an example of this inner dynamic, Palmer describes the day he let "the student from hell" so monopolize his attention that he ignored everyone else in the class.

Although most of the book is about teachers and teaching, he also attends to students and subject matter. Palmer is careful to describe how students and teachers interact around specific subjects, so that his perspective will not be mistaken for therapy or merely a concern with process in the classroom. Integrity can come through participation in a community of learners who are willing to accept diversity, ambiguity and creative conflict as part of education.

Palmer has listened carefully to teachers' complaints, especially their comments about their lack of collegiality. Although teachers can learn more about teaching from each other than from any other source, opportunities for this kind of interchange are rare. Palmer says this will change only if teachers take responsibility for planning some form of dialogue about teaching. Otherwise, teaching will continue to be a very privatized activity that occurs, for the most part, behind closed doors.

The book is richly illustrated with stories designed to prompt readers' reflection on their own teaching experiences. The stories come from many sources, including Palmer's own experience. Palmer is an engaging writer who wants to draw his readers into dialogue.

This book could also provide a provocative focus for any faculty engaged in curricular review. Because it is an extended meditation about teaching grounded in the tradition of Western spirituality, it would be particularly apt for a seminary faculty.

Reviewed by Janet Forsythe Fishburn, professor emerita of teaching ministry at Drew University Theological School in Madison, New Jersey.