Selfhood,Truth and Paradoxes

 

Dear Readers, this article comes to you during a difficult time when we need each other more than before. I wanted to avoid writing anything about the current situation because newspapers and TV channels are having the same in abundance and sufficient enough to give dose of depression. So I thought of avoiding the same but we cannot afford not to follow the COVID protocol. Please follow the protocol and remind the people around you to do the same.

 What is life if not an amalgamation of experiences and learnings, resulting from our communion with the rest of the world? And the more diverse this omnium gatherum, the more colourful and wholesome life seems. Fortunately for me, my profession helps me interact, quite frequently with a variety of minds from different walks of life. But seldom, do we come across people whose thoughts and words stay etched in our minds and souls for the rest of our lives. The book that I am currently reading has introduced me to one such person. Though I’ve never met him ‘in person’, his writings have opened up horizons of new perspectives for me. I am referring to the author of the book, ‘The Courage to Teach’ – Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life, Mr Parker J Palmer, a highly respected writer, lecturer, teacher, activist, speaker and author of nine books on teaching, education and spirituality.

Talking more about ‘The Courage to Teach’, it is a book for teachers; an insight, may be even a guide to unconventionally deep and less spoken about challenges, problems and characteristics of this ‘occult art’ of good teaching. It opens on a very strong note, I quote, “If you are a teacher who never has bad days or who has them but does not care, this book is not for you. This book is for teachers who have good days and bad, and whose bad days bring the suffering that comes only from something one loves. When you love your work that much – and many teachers do – the only way to get out of trouble is to go deeper in. We must enter, not evade, the tangles of teaching so we can understand them better and negotiate with them with more grace, not only to guard our own spirits but also to serve our students well.“

In this  article I would try to talk about a few of my learnings from the first half of the book, with most of the  things directly quoted from it, not just because how powerfully and beautifully it has been written (and re-writing it would not be justifiable), but because it resonates a lot with my personal beliefs, as it will with all those passionate beings, who do not merely practice teaching, but live being a teacher; all those for whom teaching is not just a vocation, but a way of life.

This book has taken me, (as it probably will to all its readers) on an inner journey towards reconnecting and rediscovering our real selves; understanding ‘selfhood’ being one of the first areas of discussion. It builds up on the problem of disconnect between the three main constituents in teaching, i.e. the teacher, the student and the subject; and the only way to bridge the gap being ‘self – knowledge’. Palmer points out that when we consider taking up teaching as a profession, we often begin with the ‘what’ question – what subjects shall we teach? When we delve a little deeper, we ask the ‘how’ question – what are the methods to teach well? Next, we ask the ‘why’ question – for what purposes and ends do we teach? But, rarely, if ever, do we ask the ‘who’ question – who is the self that teaches?

But why do we need to plunge so deep and explore the characteristics of our souls to be a good teacher, as long as we have a strong grip on our subject and know the right technique to teach it? It is because ‘we teach who we are’. The quality of a teacher’s selfhood, forms – or deforms – the way they relate to students, subjects, colleagues, in fact the entire world. And educational institutions not only benefit from but also help sustain and deepen the selfhood from which good teaching comes. The book builds on a simple but unusual premise: good teaching cannot be attributed to one or a few particular techniques; rather it comes from the identity and integrity of a teacher, from their deeper inner lives.

The author talks about teachers` identity and integrity. So what exactly is identity and integrity? Identity of a person constitutes traits like one’s genetic makeup, society and community in which one is raised, the good and bad that one experiences or does to others, the love and suffering that one goes through and much, much more. Integrity on the other hand are virtues, beliefs and properties of the self, across time. One cannot have momentary virtues. And this continuity of virtues, in turn also shapes personal identity. But what needs to be understood here is that when Palmer talks about integrity, and attributes it as the core of good teaching, he does not mean only the good deeds or noble qualities, he also includes ones complexities and confusions, strengths and weaknesses, potentials and limitations. Thus, in simpler words by integrity he does not mean being perfect or goody – two – shoes. Rather he means becoming more real by acknowledging and accepting the whole of oneself, with qualities and shortfalls. So when flawlessness is not a pre requisite for becoming a good teacher, why do have such a hard time accepting and being comfortable with our real self? It is because we fear, we fear being bared, we fear being vulnerable. We try and hide behind roles that we think we as educators are supposed to play and that ultimately causes us to lose that connect with our students.

Teaching techniques that good teachers use might differ. But one common feature that they all possess is the capacity of connectedness; when they are in the classroom they are present, really present. Teaching is an intentional act of creating conditions that can help students learn a great deal – or keep them from learning much at all. What good teaching requires is that we understand the inner sources of both the intent and the act and only then would we able to weave a web of connections between ourselves, our students and the subject that we teach. In other words, a teacher’s ability to connect with students and to connect them with the subject, depends less on the methods used and more on the degree to which he / she knows and trusts their selfhood – and are willing to make it available and vulnerable in the service of learning.

 

Palmer suggests that fear is normal; fear while teaching, fear while interacting with a new group of students, it isn’t something that will go away with experience and not something that we should try to fight. All we need, is to be aware of our fears, own them and work upon them so that they do not restrict our actions and goals, or alter our identities or affect our capacities to have a relationship with our students and ultimately make us loose our hearts. Fear can be crippling, it is what limits people from teaching with their hearts. But our blindness towards our fears would be disastrous. We have to recognize the fear in our heart so that we can recognize fear in students. When we deny our own condition, we resist seeing anything in others that might remind us of who, and how, we really are. And this lack of self-confidence affects our abilities to be leaders because our self-assurance is compromised, thus the withdrawal and disconnect.

 

Another cause for disconnectedness is our tendency to think in polarities. In the words of Palmer, “We look at the world through analytical lenses. We see everything as this or that, plus or minus, on or off, black or white; and we fragment reality into an endless series of either – ors. Without binary logic, we would neither have computers nor many gifts of modern science. But for all the power it has given us in science and technology, either – or thinking has also given us a fragmented sense of reality that destroys the wholeness and wonder of life.”

 

One means to step out of this dilemma, he suggests, is for us to think of things as paradoxes and not polarities.  He quotes Niels Bohr, the Nobel-prize-winning physicist: “The opposite of a true statement is a false statement, but the opposite of a profound truth can be another profound truth.” Light can behave simultaneously like particles and waves. Can teachers not condition children even as they un-condition themselves? Can one not speak of the confusions in one’s life while finding ways of a sane way of living? This process of holistic thinking and paradoxes should not only be acknowledged in our thoughts but must also be reflected in our classrooms

 

Palmer presents six paradoxes which he feels should be followed in classroom and pedagogical designs to provide wholeness in the learning experience:

 

1.    The space should be bounded and open.

2.    The space should be hospitable and ‘charged’.

3.    The space should invite the voice of the individual and the voice of the group.

4.    The space should honour the ‘little’ stories of the students and the ‘big’ stories of the disciplines and tradition.

5.    The space should support solitude, and surround it with the resources of the community.

6.    The space should welcome both silence and speech.

 

A third cause for disconnectedness or fractionality in teaching is our obsession with objective knowledge. Teaching is a public profession which bears the responsibility of building a community of learners. However, our system for a long time has been like a top to bottom unidirectional flow chart, with the ‘objects of knowledge’ on top and students (or as Palmer calls Amateurs) at the bottom. In such a system, the knowledge or facts about this object or topic is passed on by the experts, (i.e. people who are trained to know them in their pristine form without allowing their own subjectivity to contaminate its purity), to Amateurs or learners, who are people without training and full of biases and who depend on experts for objective or pure knowledge. In such a system, where knowing dominates, education actually creates disconnections – both physical and emotional between teachers, their subjects and their students.

 

Though, the importance of objective knowledge cannot be done away with, a paucity of subjectivity to balance it, is leading to the decivilizing of knowledge, i.e. knowledge that renders us unfit for the messiness of life. In our current system, knowledge or truth, is just a set of propositions about objects; education, a system for delivering those to students and an educated person, one who can remember and repeat those propositions.  Such a linear and hierarchical arrangement leaves little scope for the teacher or learner to fall in love; with the subject or with the process. Teaching and learning should be understood as mutually complementing, ever evolving, life - long phenomena, the core of which should be available for relationship building. And the solution to this, as the author suggests is a community where neither the teacher nor the student, but the subject is made the center of teaching. He calls this model the ‘community of truth’ signifying a space where ‘truth seekers’ and ‘truth givers’ come together.

 

Truth he says is not the objective knowledge we think we have, rather it is a passionate and disciplined process of inquiry and dialogue, a dynamic conversation that keeps testing old conclusions and coming into new ones. He thus defines truth as ‘an eternal conversation about things that matter, conducted with passion and discipline’. The conclusion drawn(known as truth at this point) is the beginning of journey which enables to new conclusion(new truth). And for such a model to be built successfully, the center of attention will have to be shifted to the subject, which will ultimately have a tremendous power to influence the student-teacher-subject dynamic and in turn, invigorate the learning environment.

 

He calls these subjects around which the circle of seekers have always gathered as ‘the great things’ and talks about how the grace of these can give the educational community its finest form. When the focus is on the subject, the seekers and givers, will put aside their egos and only try to help each other learn and grow. Palmer describes how a community of truth would invite diversity (not because it is the politically correct thing to do but because diverse viewpoints are demanded by the manifold mysteries of great things); ambiguity (not because we are confused but because we understand the inadequacy of our concepts to embrace the vastness of great things); creative conflict (not because we are angry or hostile but because conflict is required to correct our biases and prejudices about great things); honesty (not because we owe it to one another but to lie about what we have seen would be to betray the truth of great things); humility (not because we have fought and lost but because humility is the only lens through which great things can be seen – and once we have seen them, humility is the only posture possible); and freedom (not because we have privileged information but because tyranny in any form can be overcome only by invoking the grace of great things).

 

I would conclude by stating that the arguments and assertions made in this book are unfamiliar, at times difficult to comprehend but I believe it contains the answers to a few fundamental questions we ask about teaching. And we owe it to our children, for the sake of learning and those who learn, to address these issues openly and honestly, alone and together, so that we can serve our students more faithfully, enhance our own well - being, make common cause with colleagues and help education bring more light and life to the world.

PS : I will talk about the rest of the book in my next article / articles and would encourage all my readers, whether teachers or others to read and benefit. Though written primarily for those in the teaching vocation, the ideas in this book would be relevant to all, seeking balance and wholeness in their personal and professional lives.