Newsletters Words of EnCOURAGEment #1
Words of EnCOURAGEment #1
Welcome to our new newsletter!
Welcome to the first edition of the e-newsletter of the Center for Courage & Renewal. We’ve called this newsletter Words of EnCOURAGEment for good reason, as that is exactly what we hope it will be for you—encouraging!. The definition of the word encourage speaks to our hopes for this newsletter.
A Wild Patience Has Taken Us This Far 1
Where We’ve Come From & Where We’re Going with “Courage Work”
By Parker J. Palmer
It’s hard for me to believe that it was fifteen years ago that Rob Lehman, then president of the Fetzer Institute, invited me to join him and his colleagues in dreaming up a program for K-12 public school educators that has now morphed into the Center for Courage & Renewal. Fifteen years! That’s half my life… 2
Courage & Renewal for School Leaders
By Terry Chadsey, Program Director
“New leadership is needed for new times,” Parker Palmer wrote. “But it will not come from finding more wily ways to manipulate the external world. It will come as we who serve and teach and lead find the courage to take an inner journey toward both our shadows and our light—a journey that, faithfully pursued, will take us beyond ourselves to become healers of a wounded world.”
Teaching from the Inside Out
From an interview with first-grade teacher Maura McNiff
By Lisa Sankowski
It’s a Monday morning in Maura McNiff’s first-grade classroom. As her students come in and take off their coats and boots, they greet each other and quickly find a place in the circle on the rug. Maura welcomes everyone back, and they go around and share something from the weekend or something they are looking forward to. Then it’s time for Quiet Circle. Today one of the children, Matti, begins the circle by turning over the rain stick and asking everyone to think about “helping.” Children are invited to think about the idea of helping and what that means to them. Matti picks up the special stone, holds it, and then passes it along to the next person. The stone is held uniquely by each child. One boy holds it briefly to his head then passes it on. Each child takes a defined moment with the stone to think. The circle continues in silence until everyone has had a chance to hold the stone. Then Matti turns over the rain stick to signal that Quiet Circle is over.
CTT Tenth Anniversary
Fall 2007 will mark ten years since Jossey-Bass published Parker J. Palmer’s The Courage to Teach, a ground-breaking book that has encouraged hundreds of thousands of teachers (and people from a wide range of other professions such as business, law, and medicine) to explore the “inner landscape” of their lives and work. Jossey-Bass is celebrating his ten-year milestone with a revised edition of The Courage to Teach, which will include three additional elements: (1) a foreword by Parker reflecting on the book and the movement it started; (2) a new chapter-length afterword that extends the original ideas of how education can equip us to challenge and help change the institutional conditions that make it difficult for us to live by our deepest values; and (3) an audio CD featuring an interview with Parker in which he talks about the Center for Courage & Renewal, which he helped found, and the “courage work” the Center is doing around the country.
The Person in The Profession
Renewing Teacher Vitality through Professional Development
By Sam M. Intrator and Robert Kunzman
This article appeared in a recent issue of The Educational Forum.
A teacher's vocational vitality, or capacity to be vital, present, and deeply connected to hir or her students, is not a fixed, indelible condition, but a state that ebbs and flows with the context and challenges of teaching life. In light of this, an emerging form of professional development programming explicitly devoted to nourishing the inner life or core dimensions of teachers in increasingly important for today's educators.
Courage & Renewal at Work in Medicine: Retreat series for Harvard Medical Students
By Hanna Sherman, MD
Courage & Renewal Facilitators Bill Clark, MD and Hanna Sherman, MD were invited to develop and lead a retreat series for 36 Harvard medical students addressing how reflective practice, mindfulness, and relationship-building could impact their development as medical professionals and influence their experience of the stress of medical education. Designed as a research project, the program was funded by the Arnold P. Gold Foundation for Humanism in Medicine.