The Courage to Connect

• In Event: Pedagogies of the Interior: Building Bridges From the Inside Out

Abstract

In The Courage to Teach, Parker Palmer (1998) describes four stages that lead to educational reform (pp. 172-73). The first stage is an isolated individual decides no longer to be alone as an educator and seeks “a center for their lives” outside of their institution. Before I met the purposeful collective that I now collaborate with, I was that isolated individual. As a full professor at a small university, I lacked an on-campus community with whom to collaborate or even talk about my research and teaching. Instead, the discussion on campus was despair about the neoliberal administration and the decline of the liberal arts.
So I decided to seek elsewhere for a “center” for my life and took a poetry workshop at the Fine Arts Work Center (FAWC) in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Stepping out of my comfort zone to try a new experience led me to a community of congruence. It began with a story-telling poetry exercise.
When bell hooks (2003) interviewed Ron Scapp in her book Teaching Community, she asked him about creating bridges with stakeholders to make change. Scapp shared with her that trust was the first hurdle he has to overcome, and continued to share with her a personal story. Creating trust through sharing a personal story is exactly what happened at FAWC. My poetry partner for the assignment and I shared stories and discovered our common interest in pedagogy and mindfulness. Thus, began the second stage of Palmer’s steps to educational reform: the creating of a community of congruence.
We integrated into our classes the storytelling poetry assignment expanding its deep listening and generative literacy to include lectio divina, which promotes deep reading. Enacting stage three of Palmer’s educational reform process, we began going public with our insights and results. We presented together at national conferences and then published an article in a journal. From that we reached out to other educators who were including mindfulness techniques and expanded our community of congruence.
Following this third step, we brought attention to mindfulness, deep reading and deep listening as crucial tools for transforming the classroom into a community of students and faculty. It engages learning as a holistic adventure of body, mind and soul. Through sharing our results, we have become a purposeful collaborative that presents at international conferences and publishes articles and has published a book about the holistic learning community that we create in our classrooms. These approaches heal us as well as our students. As Pat Barker (2018) writes in The Silence of the Girls, “what isn’t shared ceases to seem quite real, perhaps even ceases to be real” (p. 246). Hope for educational reform grows as we continue to share our ideas with larger audiences. In fact, I have taken my insights to the faculty at my own university, creating a bridge to educational stakeholders. As more and more educators realize the benefits of using our approaches, we move toward larger reform, fulfilling Palmer’s fourth stage.

Author

• Catherine E Hoyser, University of Saint Joseph