the teacher

A teacher’s self-knowledge is a starting point for creating community with one’s teaching self. However, there are issues in education that can prevent one form gaining self-knowledge. These include vulnerability, disconnection, and fear. Having taught for over thirty years, Palmer (1998) described his feeling as he started with each new class that he taught, no matter the arsenal of teaching methods he possessed. Instead, he saw his ability to connect with students as paramount. He wrote:

In every class I teach, my ability to connect with my students, and to connect them with the subject, depends less on the methods I use than on the degree to which I know and trust my selfhood—and am willing to make it available and vulnerable in the service of learning. (p. 10)

Palmer pointed out that good teachers not only have the capacity for connectedness, but that they also actively participate in self-discovery and find interesting and valid ways of joining their inward self with the subject that they are teaching.