course with their peers. However, Palmer warns,
community can produce perversions, if for example, the group norm communicates that everyone
must speak, when not all individuals have something to say, or if there is an implicit common or
preferred "voice" that stifles and violates individual points of view.
Second, "the space should honor the little stories
of the individual as well as the big stories of the
discipline" (p. 76). Integrating the "little stories" of
students' experiences, particularly including those
from the service setting, with the "big stories"
taken from the abstract concepts of the related discipline, helps students develop their "capacity for
connectedness," as the "little" creates a context for
the understanding of the "big" underlying social
issues.
Palmer warns that holding the tension of the paradox is difficult work. Our academic cultural heritage
has trained us to jump in and reconcile the opposites.
If we wish to take students' learning to a deeper
level, we must be willing to suffer the tension.
Palmer also takes us down the spiritual trail into
what for some is unfamiliar territory: "the diverse
ways we answer the heart's longing to be connected with the largeness of life" (p. 5). He acknowledges that our educational system is fearful of
things spiritual. By spiritual, Palmer is not talking
about the debate over school prayer or the separation of church and state. Rather, he is talking about
the deep, fundamental questions that we as teachers and students ask, if only in our hearts, because
we are too afraid to ask them aloud: "Whom can I
trust?" "What does it mean for something to be
true?" There are no clear-cut answers to these questions - no fixes or formulas. While we are
immersed in an academic culture that perpetuates
our fear of the spiritual, how can we evoke the spiritual dimension in the teaching and learning
process? How can we cultivate our "capacity for
connectedness?" Palmer offers a number of
approaches, and several speak directly to servicelearning practitioners. All, as is typical of this
book, weave together the intellectual, emotional
and spiritual.
Palmer suggests that "knowing in community"
lies at the heart of the teaching and learning
process: "to teach is to create a space in which the
community of truth is practiced" (p. 90). He does
not pose active or student-centered learning against
traditional or teacher-centered learning, arguing
that either, if done with integrity, can work. Thus,
he does not put traditionalists on the defensive.
Instead, Palmer proposes subject-centered learning, where "the subject sits at the center of the
community of truth" (p. 102). He doesn't mean this
in the sense of covering the subject, as we are especially prone to do in these days of assessment and
accountability ("It's my job to cover all the material"), or filling the space with everything we know
about a subject, as we believe we were trained to
do. Rather, he suggests "teaching in the microcosm" (p. 120), or put more simply, teaching more
with less. For example, rather than covering an
entire historical period, Palmer suggests that every
era has a dynamic episode, that if deeply understood, captures the essence of that period. He
would have us delve deeply into the "great things"
of the discipline (p. 123). In this way the community of learners is not simply made up of students
and teacher, but the subject too, which also "participates in the dialectic of knowing" (p. 105). The
community of learners gathers around the subject
seeking to know where the mysteries lie. For service-learning the community expands to include
those beyond the classroom, and the subject
includes the service experience that is mined from
the multiple perspectives of the discipline within
which we are working.
In Chapter IV Palmer explores and critiques several current models of community - the therapeutic, the civic, and the marketing - to see what
emerges that is relevant to the goal of creating community in education. Finding each of those models
useful but somewhat wanting, he offers an alternative, driven by the (previously mentioned) central
idea of creating space in which the community of
truth is practiced. He states that
the community of truth is not psychological
intimacy or political civility or pragmatic
accountability, though it does not exclude
these virtues. This model of community reaches deeper, into ontology and epistemology -
into assumptions about the nature of reality
and how we know it - on which all education
is built. The hallmark of the community of
truth is in its claim that reality is a web of communal relationships, and we can know reality
only by being in community with it. (p. 95)
By Parker's own acknowledgment, the images of
knowing that he uses in this chapter are images or
metaphors used in connection with the sacred.
They arise for him from his own journey, in which
the sense of the sacred is strong. The use of words
like "grace," "transcendent," the "secret that sits in
the middle," as applied to teaching, learning, and
knowing processes, may raise the eyebrows of
some. They work for Palmer, however, and allow
us to explore the spiritual dimensions of the educative process with more clarity.
As mentioned in passing earlier in this review, in
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