Newsletters Words of EnCOURAGEment #6 As My Two Eyes Make One in Sight
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!