It is crucial that we challenge any feeling of shame or embarrassment that teachers who do their job well might be tempted to indulge when praising ourselves or being praised by others for excellent teaching. For when we hide our light we collude in the overall cultural devaluation of our teaching vocation.
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One of the dangers we face in our educational systems is the loss of a feeling of community, not just the closeness among those with whom we work and with our students, but also the loss of a feeling of connection and closeness with the world beyond the academy.
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Thich Nhat Hanh teaches: In a true dialogue, both sides are willing to change.
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Parker Palmer believes that enlightened teaching evolves and invites community.
"This community connects us with the .. 'great things' of the world and with 'the grace of great things'... We are in community with all of these great things, and great teaching is about knowing that community, feeling that community, sensing that community, and then drawing your students into it."
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"Teaching tugs at the heart, opens the heart, even breaks the heart - and the more one loves teaching the more heartbreaking it can be. The courage to teach is the courage to keep one's heart open in those very moments when the heart is asked to hold more than it is able so that teacher and students and subject can be woven into the fabric of community that learning, and living, require." (Palmer)
It takes courage for any teacher who teaches with gladness to accept and respond to periods of burnout, to embrace the heartache of loss and separation.
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If disillusionment is one of life's natural forms of contemplation, the experience of dislocation is another. This happens when we are forced by circumstance to occupy a very different standpoint from our normal one, and our angle of vision suddenly changes to reveal a strange and threatening landscape.... The value of dislocation like the value of disillusionment is the way that it moves us beyond illusion, so we can see reality in the round - since what we are able to see depends entirely on where we stand." (Palmer)
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In Pedagogy of the Heart, Paulo Freire contends that democratic educators "must do everything to ensure an atmosphere in the classroom where teaching, learning, and studying are serious acts, but also ones that generate happiness."
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(why mentor at nua looks like hanging out)
Whereas vernacular speech may seldom be used in the classroom by teachers it may be the preferred way to share knowledge in other settings... the democratic educator values diversity in language.
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(why our bookclub is so important:)
In our society the academic world remains the primary place where teaching and learning are valued, where reading and thinking are deemed meaningful and necessary work.
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a false assumption that book based learning has little relevance in their new lives as workers. ... And if they read, they no longer study.
(our bookclub doesn't just read, we study)
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My leaving a high-ranking tenured position opened up new spaces for teaching and learning that renewed and restored my spirit and enabled me to hold onto the joy in teaching that makes my heart glad.
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He identified the 'click' between us as a combination of personal resonance and professional admiration.
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(nua) A COMPELLING PLACE FOR LEARNING
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We can be together, critique whiteness, dismantle structures of privilege and let love that is rooted in partnership be the tie that binds us.
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(values to approach mentorship)
mutuality, partnership and community
generosity of spirit
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As democratic educators we have to work to find ways to teach and share knowledge in a manner that does not reinforce existing structures of domination.
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Committed acts of caring let all students know that the purpose of education is not to dominate, or prepare them to be dominators, but rather to create the conditions for freedom. Caring educators open the mind, allowing students to embrace a world of knowing that is always subject to change and challenge.
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Where there is domination, there is no place for love.
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When as teachers we teach with love, combining care, commitment, responsibility, respect, and trust, we are often able to enter the classroom and go straight to the heart of the matter. That means having the clarity to know what to do on any given day to create the best climate for learning. Teachers who are wedded to using the same teaching style everyday, who fear any digression from the concrete lesson plan, miss the opportunity for full engagement in the learning process. They are far more likely to have an orderly classroom where students obey authority. They are far more likely to feel satisfied because they have presented all the information that they wanted to cover. And yet they are missing the most powerful experience we can offer students, which is the opportunity to be fully and compassionately engaged with learning.
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Through their work at making community, at creating love in the classroom, they could hear more intimately James Baldwin's declaration of love's power: "Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word 'love' here not merely in the personal sense but as a state if being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth."
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Love will always challenge and change us.
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When we practice interbeing in the classroom we are transformed not just by one individiual's presence but by our collective presence.
Find details here.
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