To Teach Is to Create a Space: Parker Palmer on Openness, Boundaries and Hospitality

"To teach is to create a space in which obedience to truth is practiced."

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BY REBECCA SANDBERG

“The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled,” so said Plutarch. When we are in the presence of true illumination and learning, it is not possible but to be kindled - stirred to a fresh perspective – a new version of reality defined by hope. Such illumination is the goal of education.

But, there is often a remarkable disconnect that happens in modern classrooms where the student/teacher relationship is absent or broken – where the classroom is an obligatory invitation to mush rather than a voluntary RSVP to a community feast.

When we are out of what longtime educator and author Parker Palmer (February 28, 1939 – ) refers to as our “community of troth”, classrooms are then characterized by a deep severing. By "troth" we mean to say, "pledged faith and loyalty".

How to honor the classroom space as a community is what Palmer addresses in his 1983 treatise, To Know as We Are Known, in which he offers a salient call to what, in the name of education, could be, or perhaps should be the feast offered to students and teachers alike. By way of defining space, he writes:

Space may sound like a vague, poetic metaphor until we realize that it describes experiences of everyday life. We know what it means to be in a green and open field; we know what it means to be on a crowded rush-hour bus. On the crowded bus, we lack space to breathe, think, and be ourselves. But in an open field, we open up to ideas and feelings that arise within us; our knowledge comes out of hiding.

Regarding the implications of crowded, closed spaces, Palmer adds:

To sit in a classroom where the teacher stuffs our minds with information, organizes it with finality, insists on having the answers while being utterly uninterested in our views, and forces us into a grim competition for grades – to sit in such a class is to experience a lack of space for learning.

Palmer’s presupposition that we are all born seekers of knowledge is an echo of British education reformer Charlotte Mason in her seminal text, A Philosophy of Education, where she asserts that the love of knowledge is natural to every person.

Palmer states that a "living" learning environment should be defined by three essential characteristics: openness, boundaries, and an air of hospitality.

Openness

Palmer gives shape to the “commonsense meaning of space” when he writes:

To create space is to remove the impediments to learning…to set aside the barriers behind which we hide…to resist our own tendency to clutter up our consciousness and our classrooms.

Boundaries

But openness must have boundaries. Palmer adds:

A learning space cannot go on forever; if it did, it would not be a structure for learning but an invitation to confusion and chaos. A space has edges, perimeters, and limits. The teacher who wants to create an open learning space must define and defend its boundaries with care.

Hospitality

Learning is hard and also painful at times requiring what scholar and teacher, Maryanne Wolf refers to as “cognitive patience” in her marvelous book, Reader, Come Home. Learning spaces must then be characterized by hospitality or our tendency to run toward distraction prevails. Palmers writes:

Hospitality means receiving each other, our struggles, and our newborn ideas with openness and care. It means creating an ethos in which the community of troth can form.

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A learning space needs to be hospitable not to make learning painless but to make the painful things possible, things without which learning is not possible, things without which no learning can occur.

To be sure, Palmer is not suggesting a classroom that lacks rigor or a place where truth is somehow subordinate to making sure “everyone has a nice day.”

Palmer's advocation of elevated and intentional space might be a welcome balm to the modern-day educational crisis. Such an open space of learning should create a sense of wonder and awe for both students and teachers alike.