Returning to the “obvious” in Higher Ed

This past week, I attended SOCHE’s 40th anniversary celebration and heard renowned speaker and author Parker J. Palmer. If you haven’t heard of Dr. Palmer, might I suggest that you start by reading his 1998 work The Courage to Teach.

Dr. Palmer’s main message was a call for Higher Education to “return to the obvious” of knowing teaching and learning. It was a stirring talk that focused on learning community and connectedness. Two main quotes tied his message together:

To teach is to create a space in which the community of truth is practiced. Good teaching can never be reduced to technique. The key to good teaching is a capacity for connectedness, which comes in many forms.

Dr. Palmer ended his talk by suggesting that good teachers ask the following question: How does or might my pedagogy respond to the fact that . . .

1. The brain’s weakest function is retaining isolated data bits, while its strongest function is holding and working with information in patterns of meaning: narratives, stories, systems, gestalts, etc. The more a pedagogy appeals to the brain’s strength while bypassing its weakness, the deeper the learning will go.
2. Cognition is intimately tied to feeling, which can either undermine cognitive functioning(e.g., through fear) or strengthen it (e.g., through caring about a subject). The more a pedagogy can minimize the former and maximize the latter, the deeper the learning will go.
3. Intelligence comes in many forms, so the more forms of intelligence a pedagogy can invoke – within us, between us, among us – the deeper the learning will go. And since all of us thinking together are smarter than any one of us thinking alone, given good ground rules for discourse, communities that invoke multiple intelligences can drive the learning deeper still.
4. The most engaged learning communities are those that gather around vivid, lively, and morally compelling realities, or their representations, rather than around “inert facts.” The more pedagogy can focus learners on such realities, the deeper the learning will go.
5. In every discipline, knowledge is generated through a communal process. This requires habits of mind and heart that allow us to interact openly and honestly with other knowers and with the subject to be known – such habits as a capacity to care about the process, the willingness to get involved, the humility to listen, the strength to speak our truth, the willingness to change our minds. The more closely a pedagogy cn emulate this communal process, cultivating these habits of mind and heart as it goes long, the deeper the learning will go.

What was most interesting is that Parker Palmer suggested that these ideas, these calls to connectedness, can occur even in lecture-oriented classrooms (although he was quick to mention that the “practice of lecturing in the University is far more widespread than the gift for it”). I was also left with a question, one that an audience member asked: what role does technology play in this quest for the connected classroom? Does it help or hinder what Dr. Palmer suggests? These are the types of questions we must wrestle with if we are to become reflective teachers.