Fall 2003

Book Review: The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life
Parker Palmer. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998.
Reviewed by Jacqueline A. Bussie, former TRC Graduate Student Associate, Department of Religious Studies

Parker Palmer relocates the key to good teaching in the selfhood of the teacher rather than in pedagogy. Palmer argues that good teaching cannot be reduced to technique and instead derives primarily from the integrity and identity of the teacher. His overarching purpose is to revitalize education through a redefinition of teaching goals and a renewal of the teacher's sense of vocation and selfhood.

Initially, the book elicits the knee-jerk criticism that Palmer is too imprecise, subjective, and sentimental in his discernment of the teacher's "inner landscape" as the crux of teaching excellence. Palmer, however, successfully anticipates this critique, and sustains an interesting polemic against both the desirability and the possibility of the "objectivist mode of knowing" that our education system posits as the acceptable learning model. He argues that the objectivist mode of knowing tacitly portrays learning as occurring only when we disconnect ourselves from that which we desire to know. Yet he notes that good teachers encourage us to engage with our subject; they encourage us to bring our own smaller narratives into dialogue with the larger narratives of tradition and discipline.

Palmer, therefore, urges us to reevaluate the objectivist style of learning, and to ask ourselves if disconnection is really what happens in the classroom when learning happens. For Palmer, community and connectedness are the principles behind both superior learning and superior teaching. Reality is a web of communal relationships and we must be a part of this relationality in order to guide our students into this web. Palmer adds that good teaching is a paradox with seemingly contradictory goals; good teachers, for example, strive for subjective engagement and objectivity, structure in addition to flexibility, asking and listening, silence as well as speech, community and individuality.

Palmer believes teachers should help students discover "truth," a term Palmer defines as an eternal, passionate and disciplined conversation about things that matter. He advocates a subject-centered classroom, rather than student- or teacher-centered, for he argues that teachers fulfill their purpose when their passion for the subject matter makes the subject itself, and not merely themselves, the center of attention. Palmer urges us out of the all-too-commonplace isolation from our colleagues, and encourages us instead to observe and discuss one another's teaching in order to create a community of pedagogical discourse. When, he asks poignantly, was the last time you sat in on a colleague's class?

In conclusion, Palmer's book asks the omnipresent question that concerns all of us who claim to be teachers: What makes a teacher successful to her students? The question is a slippery, even subjective, one. It merits our attention all the more because the inconclusiveness of our answers leads to dialogue, and creates a community of pedagogical discourse many of us, like Palmer, desire. For anyone who has ever had a successful teacher knows that Palmer's conclusion is difficult to deny-superior teachers do more than just practice good pedagogy. The best ones, we may well want to assert along with Palmer, bring their identity, along with their narrative, relationality, and passion, into the classroom.