Teach from the Heart

Pedagogy as Spiritual Practice

Paris

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781498233507
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

How can a teacher remain whole and happy, able to teach well for an entire semester, an entire year, and an entire career? Teach from the Heart is about finding, rediscovering, or holding on to the heart of the teaching life, which is, quite literally, the teacher's heart. It is an encouragement to take up teaching as more than a service to provide, a profession to master, or a job to perform. It is an invitation to artisanry, teaching as a craft that we master by working with our hands over long periods of time, producing results that bear the mark of their maker.Whether you're just beginning, or in it for the long haul, sit down with Teach from the Heart and deepen your heart for the teaching life. We need not bring to class the wisdom and knowledge we gained elsewhere; we can take up teaching as a spiritual practice, with the classroom as a sacred space for our own formation as persons.With nearly forty years' experience as both student and teacher, Jenell Paris's perspective is hard-won, but still lighthearted and enthusiastic. Teachers from any context will benefit: stories and examples include preschool, K-12, community education, and college teaching.

1

The Change You Wish to See

Be the change you wish to see in the world.

—Gandhi

At a recent college commencement I sat with the faculty, each of us decked out in heavy regalia and sweating under a bright Pennsylvania sun, wondering whether the commencement speaker would keep his promise of speaking for less than twelve minutes.

“Students,” he said, “you’re beginning your adult lives in a world worthy of your fear. You’re facing economic decline, the worst job market in decades, years of ongoing wars, vitriolic political and public speech, mass shootings, and violence.”

Shouldn’t a commencement speech inspire? I wondered. Seems like a downer.

His message rang true, though, in both content and length (eleven minutes). Students are learning, and we are teaching, in a time worthy of our fear.

College students fear, and rightfully so, that:

• in the short run, there won’t be enough jobs, or enough good jobs. The financial discrepancy between college investment and earning potential in the near future may prove severe.

• in the long run, they won’t achieve a standard of living even equal to that of their parents.

• the music, sports, extra curriculars, and part-time jobs that populate their resumes won’t be enough.

• their webs of relationships will be thick and omnipresent online, but lonely and thin in everyday life.

• the political, economic, and environmental webs in which their lives are suspended are tenuous, unstable, and too often corrupt.

These aren’t only the fears of young adulthood, just dawning on new college graduates. They came up through K–12 with all this plus test anxiety, pressure to succeed, fear of violence and bullying, and exquisite awareness of natural disaster, war, and environmental threats on a global level.1

Even preschoolers show signs of stress and fear due to rapid and unexpected change in their environments, frequent changes in caregivers, and family economic conditions.2 Poverty is stressful in many ways, but wealth can also be fear inducing, when preschool admission becomes a high-stakes endeavor that threatens to derail a toddler’s life trajectory.

Teachers and institutional leaders fear, and rightfully so, that:

• the political, economic, and regulatory systems that support education are too broken, and on all levels: national, state, local, and interpersonal.

• they can only do so much work, yet the load is ever-increasing, for those who still have, or manage to get, full-time teaching jobs.

• there won’t be—there already are not—enough financial and human resources to run our schools with excellence, or even just to keep the doors open.

• there could be—there already is—violence on campus at any moment and without warning.

• the systems we use to evaluate and promote students, schools, and teachers aren’t just; in fact, they are sometimes dysfunctional to the point of counterproductivity, miseducating students and turning teachers cynical.

• we have little time to think, read, or write. We work on electronic communication constantly, with expectations for extremely rapid reply. One of my students recently complained, “It’s impossible to track you down,” after his email went unanswered for twenty minutes! We invest more time and energy learning new technology modalities and software than we spend keeping up with our disciplines.

• education is facing a crisis of unprecedented proportion, unless it isn’t, and the language of crisis is being used to sell books, redistribute resources at schools, and cow us into submission.

Personally, as a professor with nearly twenty years of teaching under my belt and at least that many more ahead of me, and as a parent with three children in public schools, I worry:

• are teachers becoming little more than educational service providers? Are we not artisans, artists, and journeymen; masters of a trade that we practice with nuance, intuition, and idiosyncrasy? Will the assessors, the regulators, and the bean counters make service workers of us all?

• can we teachers work in happiness and well-being? Can we be whole, healthy, happy, and kind, even as we, our children, and our neighbors’ children are immersed in and sustained by educational systems that are broken, sometimes to sadistic proportions?

• can the idealism that got us into teaching last an entire career? I started teaching with high hopes, bright balloons on strings I held in my hand. It seemed possible to delight in my students and they in me, to be an active and progressive participant in my college, to be one among millions of educators that are valued and respected by society. Each of those ideals has been challenged by reality, often painfully. Is it inevitable that those strings will slip from my grip, balloons floating away out of sight?

And what would become of me then, teaching anthropology—the study of the human experience—when my own humanity has been burned out or shriveled up? Parker Palmer warns, “When our fears as teachers mingle and multiply with the fears of our students, teaching and learning become mechanical, manipulative, lifeless.”3

If the titles of recent books about American education are any indication, doom is the only possible future. Teachers and students are adrift, failing, wasting, and underachieving. We are losing our minds (our closed minds). We have already lost our soul. American education is imploding, exploding, on the brink, at the end. It is a time of crisis, death. These themes spin out in various directions, depending on vantage point and ideological persuasion, arrows of blame slung at teachers, parents, administrators, politicians, unions, or larger forces such as neoliberalism.

The commencement speaker took a different turn. He turned to a phrase from the Bible, “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear” (I John 4:18, ESV). Fear goads us to be defensive, reactive, and on edge, but after we do defensive and reactive things, we still feel afraid, and we’ve likely created more reasons for others to fear. Love is gentle, generous, and kind, and it diminishes fear in very practical ways. It empowers us to act with courage at center stage, fear present but in the wings; to take on the tangled messes that diminish student learning, even to take on the difficult people in our everyday lives, from a place other than the alarm and unease that such problems tell us is inescapable.

“Go out into the world,” the speaker said, “go out into the rest of your lives, and love. Love a lot, love freely, love everybody. Try it and see if it’s true, that perfect love casts out fear.”

The social conditions that precipitate our fears need description and analysis, but naming them isn’t sufficient. Describing them in great detail and assigning blame for their origin and persistence, isn’t sufficient. Fear carries strong energy that needs direction. Directing it toward vitriolic speech, xenophobia, war, hateful political engagement, or survivalist withdrawal is short-sighted a...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Change You Wish to See
• Chapter 2: Your Attention Please
• Chapter 3: Teach Here, Now
• Chapter 4: Have Fun
• Chapter 5: Say Yes, Say No
• Chapter 6: Define the Relationship
• Chapter 7: Make It by Hand
• Chapter 8: Nurture Integrity
• Chapter 9: Survive Crisis
• Chapter 10: Be True to Your School
• Chapter 11: Fall in Love
• Epilogue: Commencing
• Bibliography