Newsletters Words of EnCOURAGEment Summer 2008
Words of EnCOURAGEment #6
Summertime, and the Living is ??
Last week, listening to the radio, I was briefly and very pleasantly transported by a recording of the incomparable Ella Fitzgerald singing “Summertime.” In that moment I heard the beauty and the promise of these words: “Summertime and the livin’ is easy…” Ahhhh, summer! The song ended too soon, and staring at my lifeless computer screen I felt suddenly bereft, brought back to the demands of my workaday world.
The lyrics of ”Summertime” are full of rich meanings, but I’d like to focus for a while on that troubling first line. I say troubling because time and again I come to the stark reality that in summertime or any other season, the livin’ feels anything but easy. We don’t have to look farther than the local gas pump, the grocery store, the headlines in today’s newspaper to know that things are troubling indeed, both at home and abroad. But it’s also troubling to me that every year, right about now, I find myself holding the memory and promise of an era of my life when summer really was “a time apart,” a time to find a different rhythm—more connected to nature, recreation, and long evenings of light and warmth.
As My Two Eyes Make One in Sight
by Parker J. Palmer
But yield who will to their separation,My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
—Robert Frost
I love this stanza from Robert Frost’s famous poem, “Two Tramps in Mud Time.” I love it because the idea of paradox—the idea that some apparent contradictions are both-and rather than either-or—has long been key to my thinking. With uncommon simplicity, Frost names the essence of paradoxical thinking: “As my two eyes make one in sight.”
We live in a one-eyed culture, a culture of either-or, that leads us to break apart things that belong together. Replace Frost’s words “avocation” and “vocation” with pairs like “head” and “heart,” or “facts” and “feelings,” or “theory” and “practice,” and you name a few of the broken paradoxes we need to put back together, especially in education. As I wrote in The Courage to Teach:
The world of education is filled with broken paradoxes—and with the lifeless results:
• We separate head from heart. Result: minds that do not know how to feel and hearts that do not know how to think.
• We separate facts from feelings. Result: bloodless facts that make the world distant and remote, and ignorant emotions that reduce truth to how one feels today.
• We separate theory from practice. Result: theories that have little to do with life, and practice that is uninformed by understanding.
• We separate teaching from learning. Result: teachers who talk but do not listen, and students who listen but do not talk.
Paradoxical thinking requires that we embrace a view of the world in which opposites are joined, so that we can see the world clearly and see it whole. Such a view is characterized neither by flinty-eyed realism nor dewy-eyed romanticism, but by a creative synthesis of the two.
Over the past decade, some readers have embraced The Courage to Teach as a defense of the heart (the affective domain) over against the head (the cognitive domain), while other readers have rejected it for the same reason! Of course there are passages in the book that advocate the affective, but the book as a whole advocates holding together the many paradoxes of knowing, teaching and learning. If that were not the case, I don’t think that the book—or the work of the Center for Courage & Renewal, which reflects the book in part—would have made inroads into “flinty-eyed” fields like medicine, business, philanthropy and the law.
Change is published by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching which, for the past decade or so, has been fueling a powerful movement called “The Scholarship of Teaching” (SoT). Across the country, college and university faculty who care about teaching and learning have rallied under the SoT banner, creating transformative effects. While the SoT movement majors in scholarship at its best, and the Courage movement majors in soul-work at its best, I’ve always felt a deep connection between the two. But until now, I’ve never seen that connection articulated in print.
In 2007, Kathleen McKinney, a professor at Illinois State University, wrote an excellent book summarizing the SoT movement called Enhancing Learning Through the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (published, not surprisingly, by our friends at Jossey-Bass). Now, in the review article in Change, Mary Taylor Huber, a senior scholar at The Carnegie Foundation, has lifted up the connections between McKinney’s book and mine, affirming the paradoxical relation between the scholar’s work and soul-work.
As Huber writes, there are still people for whom “spiritual discourse” can seem to discount the intellect, and others for whom “the language of scholarship” can seem “too distant to inform the teacher’s heart.” And yet, she concludes, “perhaps plenty of faculty engaged with both discourses will see significant intersection and complementarity between them.” The success of the Center’s work proves, I think, that professionals in other arenas are seeing the same thing.
As the programs of the Center for Courage & Renewal have taken us into more and more “flinty-eyed” fields, I’ve been in on many discussions about how we can translate our language of the heart into their language of the mind. Not for a moment do I discount the importance of that question. But I’d ask another question as well: How do we learn how to speak the language of the heart in such clear, competent and compelling ways (rooted in logic and evidence) that people who major in the language of the mind can embrace the paradox—helping us as well as them hold that paradox faithfully and well?
Take a look at Mary Taylor Huber’s review article and see if you find the same mix of encouragement and challenge that I did!
Noticing the Gifts of Nature in Every Moment
by Courage & Renewal Facilitator Megan LeBoutillier
This morning, while it was still cool and the humidity hadn’t settled in like a hot, wet dog, I went to the garden to pick flowers. Central Virginia in the summer can yield an explosion of growth. This year is especially lush as spring offered an abundance of rain. Wandering through the garden, I marveled at what nature sends forth, and, as always, I noticed the weeds. After cutting an armful of peonies, iris and rhododendron, I gathered my big weed bucket and hand tool while mentally delineating the area I would clear. I am a meticulous weeder and have had to limit my obsession of late so as not to cripple myself for several days. Two buckets-full have become my limit. One thing I love about weeding is that it brings my attention so close to the ground. There are few distractions and much to discover when one is focused close to the ground. I also like how slowly I move on my hands and knees.
I remember inviting a garden designer friend of mine to join a Courage to Teach spring retreat one year to take the group through the North Carolina Botanical Gardens in Chapel Hill. When the group was assembled and introductions had been made, my friend, Rebecca, said she was going to take us through the garden, and then proceeded to take off down the path at a dead run. After a few minutes she returned to the stunned group to explain her illustration of how people often approach life, nature and a walk in the garden. She explained that her actual intention for the morning was to lead us slowly, inviting us to bring a sense of wonder and discovery.
Work Done With Great Respect
A conversation with veteran teacher and Courage & Renewal Facilitator, Marianne Houston.
Tell us how you first came to know Parker Palmer.
I was one of the teachers in the very first Courage to Teach retreat that Parker offered here in southwest Michigan in 1994. We knew that that single retreat would be gone by Tuesday, and so we requested more retreats. The teachers knew that if this sort of work, this inner work, were to be something that could become habitual for us we needed more than a single retreat to do it. And that’s when Parker and Dave Sluyter and Mickey Olivanti from the Fetzer Institute, came together and fashioned the series of retreats.
I was one of the original facilitators who worked with Parker to design the program, to fashion it, to pull it together. We talked endlessly about all the things that eventually came to pass in ways that were like our vision and some that weren’t, and I’ve been facilitating ever since.
Let’s back up a few years. How did you come to be a teacher?
The very first time I thought of myself as a teacher was in second grade. We had a very large class, seventy students, and Sister Charlotte Anne called me out in the hall, seven year old me, to say, “Marianne, there are some boys in this class that can’t read. I want you to read with them every day and you can help me teach them how to read." That was my first experience as teacher. Because they read every day, I saw change and I thought “I’m teaching them to read. This is really fun.”
Fostering Relationship-Centered Care
by Courage & Renewal Facilitator Chris Love, MH, MSOD 
“As we become more obsessed with succeeding, or at least surviving, … we lose touch with our souls and disappear into our roles.”
Regardless of the quality of its formal academic curriculum, a medical school with a learning environment lacking in compassion and respect and rewarding individual competitiveness forces physicians-in-training into survival mode. In such an atmosphere, students may disconnect from soul and become immersed in role beyond recovery. The long-term consequence can be a tragic loss of doctors’ ability to relate to patients, to hear deeply their cares and concerns, and ultimately, to nurture their healing.
In the late 1990’s, the Indiana University School of Medicine (IUSM) learned from student responses to the Association of American Medical Colleges Graduate Questionnaire (GQ) that despite years of effort to enhance its academic curriculum, its learning environment generated feelings of alienation and disrespect among students.
NCLB Reflections
I recently shared this link to an opinion piece in Time Magazine by Claudia Wallis with the network of Courage & Renewal Facilitators. I posted it with some trepidation, knowing what a sensitive subject the No Child Left Behind legislation can be. I am delighted to share here the rich dialog that has begun.
Dr. Sally Z. Hare
Many of us have thought that NCLB was the Bush Administration’s effort to destroy public schools -- and open the doors for vouchers and parochial and private education. This is an interesting article from this week’s TIME that implies that, at least in part, that may have been true.
Whatever the reality, we all know that more than ever, it takes courage to teach and to lead in our public schools.
As facilitators, we do indeed stand in what our friend and teacher Parker calls a tragic gap. And I believe that, more than ever, our ability to stand there and support public education is the key to sustainability for our democratic way of being.
With love and courage,
Sally