apart" produces a polarizing culture that hinders
our ability to draw relationships (p. 51). Palmer
quotes the Nobel prize winning genetic biologist,
Barbara McClintock, to illustrate that the fundamental way of knowing in the world is relational
and communal in character. "Over and over again
she tells us one must have the time to look, the
patience to hear 'what the material has to say to
you', the openness to 'let it come to you'. Above
all, one must have a 'feeling for the organism' "
(Keller, 1983, cited in Palmer, 1998, p. 55).
In Chapter II, aptly titled "The Culture of Fear:
Education and the Disconnected Life," Palmer
leads his reader toward an examination of how we
as teachers and students feel as we teach and learn.
Much of that teaching-learning experience, he
believes, is tied up in our fear. "Fear is what distances us from our colleagues, our students, our
subjects, ourselves" (p. 36). Palmer opens up his
own perceived successes and failures, as well as
those experiences other teachers have shared with
him, as a way to illuminate and learn from our
common fears. Any teacher or facilitator can relate
to the paralyzing moment when, after presenting a
profound discussion question to a class of students,
dead silence befalls the room; or when a group or
individual refuses to be engaged, staying closed,
seemingly hostile or bored, and isolated from each
other and the increasingly desperate teacher.
Palmer draws on an anecdote taken from Jane
Tomkin's "Pedagogy of ihe Distressed" (1991), in
which she tells of realizing that her obsession as a
teacher was not with helping her students learn, but
rather with showing the students how smart and
knowledgeable of the subject she was. Getting over
her fear of being seen as a dolt or sap or fraud
allowed her to become a better teacher. Palmer
gives us a personal experience of fear and anger
with the "Archetypal Student from Hell," and the
epiphany that came for him when the student
opened up his own fears in an unanticipated private
conversation with Palmer. As a good social scientist, Palmer reminds us that "the way we diagnose
our students' condition will determine the kind of
remedy we offer" (p. 41). He suggests that to look
to social changes, or to blame the students themselves as the primary causes behind the litany of
complaints often heard from faculty about their
bored, unmotivated, reticent or resistant students, is
to miss a crucial reality. The students' behavior
may not be predicated so much on lack of interest,
motivation or preparation, as it is on their own fear
- fear of looking foolish in front of peers, of having their prejudices or ignorance exposed, of marginalization - and so they withdraw into the safety of silence.
Teachers and students alike hide behind the
structures of academia as protection from our deepest fear, which in Palmer's words, lies
at the heart of being human - the fear of having a live encounter with alien 'otherness...We fear encounters in which the other
is free to be itself, to speak its own truth, to tell
us what we may not wish to hear. We want
those encounters on our own terms, so that we
can control their outcomes, so that they will
not threaten our world and self. (p. 37)
As long as we surround ourselves with a homogeneous personal universe, there is no "other" to challenge us. If we avoid conflict, confrontation, and
engagement with controversial issues, we won't be
compelled to change our world views and views of
self.
Palmer devotes a very helpful early chapter to
understanding and using the paradoxes which confront us in teaching and learning. He shows us that
embracing paradox can help us counter the polarizing effect of binary thought which separates fact
from feeling, head from heart, theory from practice, and teaching from learning. Palmer relates the
poles of a paradox to the poles of a battery: "hold
them together and they generate life, pull them
apart and the energy stops flowing" (p. 65). The
embracing of paradox is particularly appropriate
for service-learning, where the abstract concepts
and more deductive process of the classroom are
brought together with the real world transactions
and more inductive nature of the personal experience at the service setting.
In discussing paradox in the context of pedagogical design, Palmer offers examples of holding the
creative tension of paradox in the "space" of learning. By "space" he means the complex factors that
are created in the classroom, such as the conceptual framework built around the subject at hand and
the emotional ethos and collective ground rules for
inquiry created by the teacher and the students. He
outlines six prescriptive pedagogical paradoxes
that speak insightfully to all group learning experiences. The limits of this review do not allow a discussion of each, but there are two that have particular relevance to service-learning.
First, "space should support solitude and surround it with the resources of the community" (p.
73). Students need solitude to absorb and reflect on
not only their classroom experience but also and
particularly on their service experience. To support
the solitude we must develop the sensibility to tolerate the awkwardness of silence. At the same time,
within the community of learners, students need to
test their ideas and check their biases through dis
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