For the second installment of this “Tribute to Teachers”, let me offer an idea that has become one of persistent “legos” that form the building blocks of my mind: and that is the notion of community.

I’m sure that’s partly because I experienced and was nourished by a supportive community of colleagues for all my professional life,

partly because teaching and learning does not/should not happen in isolation,

and partly because I never had the confidence that I could do it alone.

In other words, I never knew how to function without a community of teaching and learning.  All of the questions we ask about this sacred enterprise require a meeting of the boundaries represented by an individual and a community that, in Parker Palmer’s words, “creates a space in which conversations of respect and consequence can occur.”

The “what” question—about the subjects we teach—is deeply personal but exists only in the context of history, culture, and a community of scholars.  The answers to the “how” questions about techniques and methods are, in the end, highly individualistic but are largely poverty-stricken without conversations with colleagues.”  At a deeper and even more personal level, even the “why” question—to what purpose and ends do we teach—and the less-often asked “who” question—what is the quality of my selfhood and how does that shape the way I relate to my students, my subject, my colleagues, and my world (cf Palmer, 4)—can only truly be explored in community, since, as we all know, there is and can be no “self” except as that is developed in relationship with other selves.

Given that undeniable and fundamental paradoxical truth about us, why would we ever think that the community of teaching and learning is not a primary reality and why would we ever fail to give our energies to the nurture of such community?

And yet, as important as we acknowledge it to be, community, however it is defined, is not easy.  Like all living things, it changes and struggles and must constantly revise and revive itself.  All of that requires effort and you have no shortage of other things demanding your time and energy.

But for all of that, good teachers, at least in my experience, possess a capacity for the “connectedness” that such community requires—for joining self and subject and students and colleagues into the fabric of their world.  And as Parker Palmer is fond of saying in all his writings, good teaching never boils down merely to method and technique.  The connections are “not in their methods, but in their hearts—meaning heart in its ancient sense, as the place where intellect and emotion and spirit and will converge in the human self. . . . the heart is the loom on which the threads are tied, the tension is held, the shuttle flies, and the fabric is stretched tight” (Palmer, 11).  Even more reason, then, to affirm and cultivate that supportive community available to each and to all in those moments “when the heart is asked to hold more than it is able.”

Palmer also notes, meaningfully, that our “equal and opposite needs for solitude and community constitutes a great paradox (Palmer, 65).  Without community, solitude degenerates from rich inwardness to loneliness and isolation, while community without solitude is reduced from a fabric of relationships into a mere “buzzing” crowd.

Therefore, relationships in a community of teaching and learning involve patterns of communication

where we share what worked and what didn’t,

where we correct, compliment, and complement one another,

where we are in conflict here and in consensus there.

It’s never hierarchical but always interactive.  The individual and the community, the “subject” and the “discipline”—the boundaries that inform the paradox, the ceaseless tension of opposites—continue to inform what we do.

And yet, it is not a natural thing to do in the world of teaching.  Palmer talks about “the privatization of teaching”—the victory of “solitude” over “community”—and argues that we pay a high price for it. He notes our tendency to go into our workplace, our classroom and close the door on colleagues and anyone else who would intrude there: “my classroom is my castle, and the sovereigns of other fiefdoms are not welcome here” (Palmer, 142).

Now if that attitude seems foreign to you, then I’m happy for you, but I confess that I do recognize it, shamefully at times in my own history and in the professional lives of some of my colleagues.  The price of it is isolation, professional loneliness, and a lack of firsthand information about each other’s work.

The plain truth is that such isolation is not necessary.  We can and should “connect”–

through opportunities provided by administration,

through ad hoc groups that meet felt needs,

and through informal collegial relationships which you may choose to manage on your own.

I suspect that individually and as a community that you are doing some of those things and, therefore, you know that conversations in such “communities within community” are not necessarily about technique.  They may be about “critical moments” in teaching, about what didn’t work as well as what did—it’s not all about successes.  “Even the best teachers have bad days” (Bain, 19).

I recall so vividly even now a class during my second year of teaching.  It was one of two sections of the same general education course I was teaching.  I was preparing, substantively and procedurally, the best I could—despite the fact that graduate school had taught me all about content and virtually nothing about process and pedagogy, except what I could absorb from my own teachers—and I was doing well to stay a week ahead of the students.

The morning section was going pretty well, by my lights, but the afternoon section totally sucked!

Almost everyone sat there like stumps on logs,

body language full of passive aggression,

unresponsive to every attempt to elicit conversation.

The one or two exceptions in the group were soon smothered by the pall of apathy that settled over the class.

About mid-semester I confessed to the class my frustration—that I knew it wasn’t working and was willing to accept my part of the responsibility, make some changes—what suggestions could they give me to make this better?

It was like waiting for an echo in a closet—nothing came back.

So I plodded through the rest of the semester, imparted information, gave the tests, reported the grades and walked away feeling like a failure.

How I could have profited then from the kind of supportive community of colleagues that I have been talking about here and which I later sought out and found!

Several of the faculty groups I belonged to over the years were by-products of a general education program in which faculty from virtually every discipline in the college taught multiple sections of truly interdisciplinary courses.  It was a curriculum that required faculty members to get out of their comfort zone and was one of the most valuable vehicles for faculty development in all my experience.  To make that work, faculty groups met on a weekly basis to learn from one another, sharing everything from coaching in subject matter, to methods and techniques, to learning styles, to “critical moments”—whether they were “Eureka” moments or “crash-and-burn” moments.

I don’t think I ever would have survived without such collegial gatherings; at the least, I would have been a far less effective teacher and a more impoverished self.  And while that curriculum was an effective vehicle for those rich conversations, their possibility and reality are amenable to any programmatic structure in any institution.

So I commend to you the enrichment and sustenance you can find in your own community of teaching and learning and urge you to seek it.

And as you do, I leave you with a quotation for those days when the task seems daunting and overwhelming.  Years ago, while doing background reading in preparation for playing the role of King Arthur in a production of Camelot, I discovered a famous passage from T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, where  Merlyn speaks in his role as mentor to Arthur, but they are words for all of us— administrators, teachers, and students alike—in the community of teaching and learning:

“The best thing . . . is to learn something.  That is the only thing that never fails.  You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, . . . you may see the world around you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled into the sewers of baser minds.  There is only one thing for it, then—to learn.  Learn why the world wags and what wags it.  That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.  Learning is the thing for you.”

May it ever be so for you and me.

(These observations are drawn, with revisions and additions, from a couple of my earlier papers/presentations on teaching and learning.)

Sources cited:

Bain, Ken.  What the Best College Teachers Do.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Palmer, Parker J.  The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life.  San

Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1998.