Most of us would willingly - perhaps even passionately - tackle the question of what we should teach our students. Similarly, we are likely to engage in a conversation about how we teach and our preferences for organizing classroom time and structures. Although the question of why we teach may be raised less often (and perhaps with a hint of sarcasm), this too is a question to which most can offer a thoughtful response.

An entirely different matter, however, is the question of who is the person teaching. This who involves the inner realms of one's heart, mind, and soul. How does our identity affect the teaching and learning processes? As we teach, what paths are we following intellectually, emotionally, or even spiritually? How do these paths influence our relationship to our content and to our students? With an engaging honesty, Parker Palmer pursues these questions in The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of A Teacher's Life. At the outset he points out (p 4):

I have no quarrel with the what or how or why questions - except when they are posed as the only questions worth asking. All of them can yield important insights into teaching and learning. But none of them opens up the territory I want to explore in this book: the inner landscape of the teaching self.

One might well question why those of us teaching chemistry should be interested in examining ourselves as part of the teaching equation. Isn't scientific knowledge supposed to be as objective as we can make it? Isn't it better for us to check our emotional or intellectual baggage at the classroom door, rather than to taint the content with our biases? Or perhaps more directly stated, is it not more practical and a better use of our time to simply deal with the realities of the day-to-day classroom issues? Admittedly these are fair questions. However, to become stuck on them is to miss the opportunities for reflection and growth as teachers that Palmer's book offers. Simply put, people teach. Without putting the human factor into the teaching equation, you miss one of the key variables.

In the early chapters, Palmer offers the readers simple statements to entice them to delve more deeply into his later discussions. "Good teaching cannot be reduced to technique; good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher," or, "Bad teachers distance themselves from the subject they are teaching - and in the process, from their students," or ultimately, "Only one resource is at my immediate command: my identity, my selfhood, my sense of this 'I' who teaches - without which I have no sense of the 'Thou' who learns." Readers can expect to find both ideas and a personal honesty on Palmer's part that inspires one to accept human limitations and evokes a gentle chuckle at our good days...and at our bad ones as well.

Palmer has strong credentials to write about the self as teacher. In recent years, he has been a visiting faculty member at Beloit College, Berea College, and Georgetown University. Over past few decades, he has written extensively on the teaching and learning process, including To Know as We Are Known: Education as a Spiritual Journey (1983). He holds a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley and has lived and taught in a variety of settings and communities around the globe.

Woven through his writings is a sense of both the human and the spiritual dimensions of being a teacher. Thus, those who most might appreciate his reflections are comfortable with language drawn from spiritual traditions. Palmer spent a number of years as teacher and writer-in-residence at Pendle Hill, a Quaker community in Pennsylvania, and the respect and appreciation that he holds for silence and reflection come through in his writing. Expect to find no religious dogma or prescriptions in what he offers.

What might those of us who teach chemistry expect to gain from this book? One possibility offered at the start is his examination of fear as a part of human nature that affects our teaching. Chapter 3 is entitled "A Culture of Fear: Education and the Disconnected Life". He admits his own anxieties and their consequences (p 29):

Driven by my fear, ...I strive to make my on-stage performance slicker and smoother - and in the process make it less and less likely that my students will learn anything other than how to cover up and show off. I conceal my own fear and am unable to weave the fabric of connectedness that teaching and learning require.

He poses to the reader the question of how we can transcend fear and reconnect with reality for the sake of teaching and learning. As we train our teaching staff members and future chemistry teachers, both directly (by what we say) and indirectly (by who we are), a discussion of this fear within might set the tone for more honest dialogue about ourselves as teachers.

Another possibility is his discussion of the concept of paradox in teaching in learning. In Chapter 6, entitled "The Hidden Wholeness: Paradox in Teaching and Learning", he notes that our tendency to categorize and divide can have severe consequences. For example, we separate head from heart, facts from feelings, theory from practice, and teaching from learning. As a result, we may produce "minds that do not know how to feel and hearts that do not know how to think" or "teachers who talk but do not listen and students who listen but do not talk."

Quoting Niels Bohr, he points out "the opposite of a true statement is a false statement, but the opposite of a profound truth can be another profound truth." Palmer explains (p 66):

Paradoxical thinking requires that we embrace a view of the world in which opposites are joined, so that we can see the world clearly and see it whole. ...The result is a world more complex and confusing than the one made simplistic by either/or thought - but that simplicity is merely the dullness of death. When we think things together, we reclaim the life force in the world, in our students, in ourselves.

As we teach our courses, we might similarly reflect on the consequences of the categories we use. For example, in using the categories majors and non-majors, we may not be recognizing the strengths that both bring. In viewing science as distinct from other fields, we may lose the real-world connections of science to society. And in focusing on finding "the answer" to textbook and exam questions, we may miss the possibility of there being several (or no) possible answers.

In the final chapters, Palmer writes about community and what we can gain by both teaching in community and learning from our colleagues in community. In regard to the latter, he notes the "privatization" of what we do, that is, our tendency to teach solo and out of collegial sight. As a result, we have little or no shared experience related to our teaching and therefore don't tend to speak with our colleagues about what happened or needs to happen next. He points out (p 144) that

When any function is privatized, the most likely outcome is that people will perform it conservatively, refusing to stray far from the silent consensus on what "works"even when it clearly does not.

In Palmer's opinion, teaching at the college level has evolved slowly because of its privatization. If we were to engage in "good talk about good teaching", this would "enhance both our professional practice and the selfhood from which it comes." He views these conversations as a "professional obligation" that we should expect of ourselves and of others. In these chapters, the reader will find practical suggestions for how a more public discourse about teaching could be accomplished.

As one might guess, I have been a fan of Palmer's books over the years. His writings have withstood the test of time and continue to offer thoughtful reflections to any interested in the art of teaching in its many dimensions. As might be expected, my copy of this book has had no time to gather dust on my shelf, as it keeps making the rounds. If by now somebody hasn't loaned you a copy of The Courage to Teach, you might want to get your own. More likely than not, there will be a hole in your bookshelf where it belongs.