| The questions it poses are universal and yet personal, moving from the teacher's search for integrity to the large-scale project of educational reform. The questions could not be more urgent: How can we keep deepening our capacity to teach and to learn? How can we preserve the joy and the love of teaching? How can we grow as teachers, and as human beings, feed the yearning that we have for connectedness, nurture forms of community that support teaching and learning? |
The Courage to Teach approaches these questions along three paths, all intertwined: intellectual, emotional, and spiritual. It charts the way with a vision for education that illuminates all three. It is a profoundly satisfying feast of a book."
Diana Chapman Walsh, president, Wellesley College |
"The Courage to Teach is a profoundly moving, utterly passionate, and inspired articulation of the call to, and the pain and joy of, teaching. It is must reading for any and every teacher, at any level. It wakes us up to the enormity of the challenge and to the adequacy of our own generativity and genius, if we can but listen to and honor the calling moment by moment. Parker Palmer reminds us that teaching is nothing less than the inner work of a lifetime, a love affair with life itself, both beyond subject and intimate with subject. He shows us how authentic teaching has to be an ongoing relational process, a practice of exquisite and wide-ranging attention refining teacher and studentincluding the student in the teacher and the teacher in the studentin the flames of solitary and collective inquiry and in a courageous commitment to seeing, knowing, sharing, and belonging: in a word, to truth."
Jon Kabat-Zinn, author, Wherever You Go, There You Are, and coauthor, Everyday Blessings |
"Evokes the heart of what teachers really do, and does so in a vivid, compelling, and soulful way."
Robert Coles |
"To go on this journey with Parker Palmer into the uncharted territory of 'the self' in teaching is not only to experience the joy of viewing teaching from a thrilling new perspective. It is also to be in the presence of a great teacher who, by sharing himself so openly and honestly, engages us in the very kind of teaching he so eloquently describes."
Russ Edgerton, director of educational programs,
Pew Charitable Trusts, and past president, American
Association for Higher Education |
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