Integral Life, Integral Teacher by Sarah Ruth van Gelder
How can an inner decision to live and work with integrity spark a social movement? Parker J. Palmer is a writer, teacher, and activist who speaks and
leads workshops on education, community, leadership, spirituality, and
social change. He is a senior associate of the American Association of
Higher Education, and senior advisor to the Fetzer Institute and
designer of their Teacher Formation Program. His prolific writing
includes The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teachers Life, To Know as we are Known, andThe Active Life.
Sarah: What is it that's not working for teachers right now?
Parker Palmer: There's
so much. In public education, one of the things that's not working is
the fact that education is such a convenient political whipping post
for lots of other frustrations. We can blame on the schools and
ultimately on the teachers all the problems that we don't know how to
solve in any other arena: family, government, civic associations,
church and so forth.
That's an example of an external pressure
that makes the teacher's work difficult. But there are internal
pressures within the profession itself. These include the tendency in
education to try to reduce every problem that teachers face to a matter
of technique or curriculum reform – or anything but the basic questions
of the teacher's inner life and the lack of a community of teachers
that can help them sustain each other in difficult times.
This
isolation is a complaint that I hear from teachers everywhere I go.
It's especially pronounced in higher education where closing your
office door and being alone with your “work,” or closing your classroom
door and teaching out of sight of colleagues – these forms of isolation
are regarded as high virtues, rather than as a pathology that
undermines community. It also makes college faculty very powerless, I
might add.
Sarah: One of the things that I found very
striking about your work is the idea that the simple choice to live
with integrity can have far-reaching effects. What experiences brought
you to believe that this was such a central issue?
Parker: What
I know about living a divided life starts with my training as an
academic. I was taught to keep things in airtight compartments: to keep
my ideas apart from my feelings, because ideas were reliable but
feelings were not; to keep my theories apart from my actions, because
the theory can be pure, but the action is always sullied.
For
the teachers I meet around the country, the decision to live
divided-no-more means teaching in a way that corresponds to the truth
that they know, rather than according to the latest pedagogical fad or
to whatever pressures the institution may be putting on them.
These
are teachers, for example, who are integrating emotional work with
cognitive work in the classroom. Certainly in higher education, there's
a real taboo against doing that. These teachers are choosing to take
the significant risks that come with going against the taboo because
they know from their own experience that the mind and the heart can't
be separated.
An example of that is the work of Sheila Tobias
and others who have helped young women learn mathematics by dealing not
just with the intellect, but with the emotional paralysis that many
young women have felt about math. By addressing that message at the
emotional level, Sheila Tobias and others have helped women achieve in
mathematics at rates equal to, and surpassing, those of men.
But
the divided life is not just an academic dilemma, it's a human dilemma.
We work within institutions like schools, businesses, and civic
society, because they provide us with opportunities that we value. But
the claims those institutions make on us are sometimes at odds with our
hearts – for example, the demand for loyalty to the corporation, right
or wrong, can conflict with the inward imperative to speak truth. That
tension can be creative, up to a point. But it becomes pathological
when the heart becomes a wholly owned subsidiary of the organization,
when we internalize organizational logic and allow it to overwhelm the
logic of our own lives.
At a certain juncture, some people find
they must choose between allowing selfhood to die or claiming their
identity and integrity. What I mean by divided-no-more is living on the
outside the truth you know on the inside.
Sarah: What happens to peoples lives when they make that choice, to live “divided-no-more”?
Parker: Let me tell you a story about two teachers, a story I tell in The Courage to Teach. Alan
and Eric were born into different families of skilled rural
craftspeople. Each grew skilled in working with his hands and developed
a sense of pride in their respective crafts. Both also excelled in
school and became the first in their families to go to college,
eventually earning doctorates and choosing academic careers.
Here
their paths diverged. Eric, who attended an elite private college,
suffered culture shock and was always insecure with fellow students and
later with academic colleagues. He learned to speak and act like an
intellectual, but he always felt fraudulent. This insecurity didn't
draw Eric into self-reflection; instead, he bullied his way through his
professional life, made pronouncements rather than probes, listened for
weaknesses rather than strengths in what other people said. In his
classroom, Eric was critical and judgmental, quick to put down “stupid
questions,” adept at using trick questions of his own, and merciless in
mocking wrong answers.
Alan's is a different story. He
attended a land-grant university where many students had backgrounds
much like his own. He was not driven to hide his gift, but was able to
honor and transform it by turning it toward his work in academia.
Watching Alan teach, you felt that you were watching a craftsman at
work. In his lectures, every move Alan made was informed by attention
to detail and respect for the materials at hand.
Beyond the
classroom, students knew that Alan would extend himself with great
generosity to any of them who wanted to become his apprentice.
Alan
taught from an undivided self – an integral state of being in which
every major thread of one's life experience is honored, creating a
weave of coherence and strength. Such a self is able to make the
outward connections on which good teaching depends.
Sarah:
There's another dimension implicit here. I gather that you support
teachers bringing their learnings from their spiritual life into the
classroom.
Parker: Yes, in fact, I'd put it even
more strongly than that. I don't see how a teacher or any human being
can fail to bring their spirituality into whatever it is they're doing.
And by that I don't mean the content of one's religious belief. I mean
the way we deal with fundamental questions like, “What am I doing
here?” and “Does my life have a meaning?” and “Does that meaning depend
on how successful I am in whatever I'm doing?” and “What about the fact
that I'm going to die one day?”
These are the same questions
that our students have. We need to find ways to support our students in
asking these questions. I'm not saying we need to give them the
answers. These are questions that you wrap your life around. As the
poet Rainer Maria Rilke said, you live these questions and don't try to
get formulaic answers to them. They're too important for that.
Sarah: There
are those who feel that schools ought to make sure that young people
get “correct” answers to those questions. One of the traditions that
many people feel very strongly about is the separation of church and
schooling or church and state.
Parker: I absolutely
believe in the separation of church and state. As a Quaker, I come from
a history of people who were persecuted, imprisoned, even executed by
folks who found our religious beliefs nonconforming with the truth they
knew absolutely.
But I think that the surest way to encourage
religious fascism is to sweep questions of meaning under the rug;
pretend that either they don't exist or that they aren't important,
rather than to hold these questions in a way that illuminates them and
helps young people learn to live them more and more deeply.
Sarah: Have you seen that done successfully?
Parker: I
was teaching, not too long ago, at a college in Appalachia where the
students came from very fundamentalist religious backgrounds. In the
middle of the year, the Dalai Lama visited the college. There was a
group of students who protested this visit; from their point of view,
the Dalai Lama was the Anti-Christ.
One of these students
started talking in class about what a terrible thing it was, that the
Tibetan Buddhists hold certain beliefs about the Dalai Lama. He said he
felt it was especially ridiculous that the Tibetans went out and found
a young child, somehow magically decided that he was the one they were
seeking, and then raised him up to his current status.
I said
to him, “Like you, I'm a Christian, and what I need to do is to explore
with you the fact that our own faith tradition has a very similar
belief. In fact, we believe that we identified Jesus when he was an
infant, younger even than the boy that became the Dalai Lama.”
Well,
that opened up a dialogue about some very basic questions, such as how
people discern reality. I framed this as an open question – I didn't
put him down for putting down someone else, but simply held up as a
matter of wonder that around the world, we look at babies and young
children, and we say that they have something of truth that we need and
want to nurture into larger life. So what could have been a shoot-out
became a genuine conversation. Months later he thanked me and said that
he'd never stopped thinking about this conversation.
Sarah: Talking
to people with values so different from our own can be very scary. How
do you overcome your own fear and that of your students?
Parker:
The answer is not to avoid situations where you feel fearful; the more
you try to ignore fear or to sweep it under the rug, the stronger it
becomes. There's a curious alchemy in the spiritual life – when I
acknowledge and embrace those parts of myself that are most difficult,
I find they have less power over me or that the power somehow starts
working for me rather than against me.
Sarah: We've
been talking so far mainly about the inner work of being divided no
more – learning to be true to ourselves, and getting beyond our fears.
What about the implications for society? What happens on a larger scale
when people decide they will no longer live divided lives? Parker:
In political/social terms, I call this the Rosa Parks decision. She
essentially said, “I'm no longer going to behave on the outside as if I
were less than the full person I know myself to be on the inside.” How
do people find the courage to bring inner convictions into harmony with
outer acts, knowing the risks involved? I think in Rosa Parks' story
there's a clue: When the police came to Rosa Parks on the bus and
informed her that they would have to put her in jail if she did not
move, she replied, “You may do that.” It was a very polite way of
saying, “How could your jail begin to compare with the jail I have had
myself in all these years by collaborating with this racist system?”
When
you realize that you can no longer collaborate in something that
violates your own integrity, your understanding of punishment is
suddenly transformed.
Sarah: How does this individual act set the stage for a larger shift in society? Parker: In
the second stage of a movement, people who have chosen the undivided
life but still feel shaky about it come together in “communities of
congruence.” The first purpose of these communities is mutual
reassurance; people help each other to understand that the “normal”
behavior expected by the institutions they are part of can be crazy,
but that seeking integrity is always sane. In the movement sparked by
Rosa
Parks, the Black churches provided gathering places for
people who needed to know that they were not alone in choosing an
integral life.
These communities are also places where people
begin to develop the language to explain their vision – and that
language provides the strength they will need in the rough-and-tumble
world of the public realm, which is where a movement goes into the
third stage.
As a movement goes public, the identity and
integrity of its participants are tested against the great diversity of
values and visions at work in the public arena. Paradoxically, although
we must stay close to our own integrity in this complex field of
forces, we must also risk opening ourselves to conflicting influences,
because in that way both the movement and our integrity can grow.
In
the final stage, the movement returns to alter the logic of the
organizations from which it first sprang. Movements have this power
when people decide that the institution's punishments are irrelevant
and develop an alternative system of rewards. In the first stage, the
rewards involve learning more about one's identity. In Stage 2, the
reward comes from being in community. In Stage 3, the reward comes in
living a more expansive public life. In Stage 4, people are clear that
no reward anyone offers them could be greater than the way they reward
themselves by living their own truth. As this happens, institutions
often awaken to the need for change, lest the action go elsewhere and
they become irrelevant to people's lives. Sarah: That's a powerful analysis of social movements. I guess I don't normally think of teachers as social change activists.
Parker:
I am a teacher at heart, and I am not naturally drawn to political
activism. But I've found that there is no essential conflict between
loving to teach and working to reform education. An authentic movement
is not a play for power – it is teaching and learning writ large. Now
the world becomes our classroom, and the potential to teach and learn
is found everywhere. We need only be in the world as our true selves,
with open hearts and minds.
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