Copyright (c) 1997 by Parker J. Palmer
Excerpted from The Courage to Teach (Jossey-Bass Publishers, San Francisco: 1997 -- forthcoming)

The principle of paradox is not only a guide to the complexities and potentials of selfhood. It can also guide us in thinking about classroom dynamics and in designing the kind of teaching and learning space that can hold a classroom session.

By "space," I mean a complex of factors: the physical arrangement and feeling of the room, the conceptual framework that I build around the topic my students and I are exploring, the emotional ethos I hope to facilitate, and the ground rules that will guide our inquiry. The space that works best for me is one shaped by a series of paradoxes, and I think I understand why.

Teaching and learning require a higher degree of awareness than we ordinarily possess--and awareness is always heightened when we are caught in a creative tension. Paradox is another name for that tension, a way of holding "opposites" together that creates an electricity that keeps us awake. Not all good teachers use the same technique, but whatever technique they use, good teachers always find ways to induce this creative tension.

When I design a classroom session, I am aware of six paradoxical tensions that I want to build into the teaching and learning space. These six are neither prescriptive nor exhaustive. They are simply mine, offered to illustrate how the principle of paradox might contribute to pedagogical design:

• The space should be bounded and open.
• The space should be hospitable and "charged."
• The space should invite the voice of the individual and the voice of the group.
• The space should honor the "little" stories of the students and the "big" stories of the disciplines and tradition.
• The space should support solitude and surround it with the resources of community.
• The space should welcome both silence and speech.

I want to say a few words about what each of these paradoxes means. Then, to rescue the paradoxes and the reader from death by abstraction, I want to explore some practical ways for classroom teachers to bring these idea to life.

(1) The space should be bounded and open.

The boundaries around a teaching and learning space are created by using a question, or a text, or a body of data that keeps us focused on the subject at hand. Within those boundaries, students are free to speak, but their speaking is always guided toward the topic, guided not only by the teacher but by the materials at hand. Those materials must be so clear and compelling that students will find it hard to wander from the subject--even when it confuses or frightens them and they would prefer to evade its demands. Space without boundaries is not space, it is a chaotic void, and in such a place no learning is likely to occur.

But for a space to be a space, it must be open as well as bounded--open to the many paths down which discovery may take us, to the surprises that always come with real learning. If boundaries remind us that our journey has a destination, openness reminds us that there are many ways to reach that end. Deeper still, the openness of a learning space reminds us that the destination we plotted at the outset of the journey may not be the one we will gathered and amplified, so the group can affirm, question, challenge, and correct the voice of the individual. The teacher's task is to listen for what the group voice is saying, and to play that voice back from time to time so the group can hear and even change its own collective mind.

The paradox of individual and collective voices is most clearly illustrated by an example from outside the classroom: making decisions by consensus. Here, no decision can be made as long as even one voice dissents, so the group must learn to listen to individuals with care. But as a corporate voice emerges through honest dialogue, the group makes a claim on each person, compelling us neither to

roll over nor be defiant, but to seek, and speak, our truth more thoughtfully. In a learning space shaped by this paradox, students learn not only about a subject--they learn to speak their own thoughts about that subject, and to listen for an emergent collective wisdom that may influence their ideas and beliefs.

(4) The space should honor the "little" stories of the individual and the big stories of the disciplines and tradition.

A learning space should not be filled with abstractions so bloated that no room remains for the small but soulful realities that grow in our students' lives. In this space there must be ample room for the "little" stories of individuals, stories of personal experience in which the student's inner teacher is at work.

But when my "little" story, or yours, is our only point of reference, we easily become lost in narcissism. So the big stories of the disciplines must also be told in the learning space stories that are universal in scope and archetypal in depth, that frame our personal tales and help us understand what they mean. We must help students learn to listen to the big stories with the same respect we accord individuals when they tell us the tales of their lives.

(5) The space should support solitude and surround it with the resources of community.

Learning demands solitude--not only in the sense that students need time alone to reflect and absorb, but in the deeper sense that the integrity of the student's inner self must be respected, not violated, if we expect him or her to learn. Learning also demands community--a dialogical exchange in which our ignorance can be aired, our ideas tested, our biases challenged, and our knowledge expanded, an exchange in which we are not simply left alone to think our own thoughts.

But there are forms, or perversions, of community that are inimical to deep solitude, that do not respect inferiority and are invasive of the soul. When the group norm asserts, however subtly, that everyone must speak, or must speak in a common voice, then both speech and dissent are stifled, the solitude of the individual is violated, and no learning can occur.

An authentic learning community is not only compatible with solitude; it is essential to a full realization of what the inner teacher is trying to tell us. In a community that respects the mystery of the soul, we help each other remove impediments to discernment. Given certain sensibilities and safeguards, nourished and protected by a teacher, a learning community can help us see both barriers and openings to the truth that lives within us.

(6) The space should welcome both silence and speech.

Words are not the sole medium of exchange in teaching and learning--we educate with silence as well. Silence give us a chance to reflect upon what we have said and heard, and silence itself can be a sort of speech, emerging from the deepest parts of ourselves, of others, of the world.

Psychologists say that a typical group can abide about fifteen seconds of silence before someone feels the need to "break the tension" by speaking. It is our old friend fear at work, interpreting the silence as something gone terribly wrong, certain that worthwhile things will not happen if we are not making noise. But in authentic education, silence is treated as a trustworthy matrix for the inner work students must do, a medium for learning of the deepest sort.

These six paradoxes add up to sound pedagogy--in theory. But what do they look like in practice? I will try to answer that question, with one proviso: what follows is not a "formula" for teaching, but a personal account of how I have tried to hold these paradoxes together in my own work.

The principle of paradox can help illumine selfhood of any teacher and the construction of any teaching and learning space, but the particular pedagogy I am about to describe emerges from a selfhood that may bear scant resemblance to your own. By saying yes, or no, or maybe to what follows, you may discover something about the sources of teaching that have authenticity for you.

Practicing Paradox in the Classroom

To show how these six paradoxes might be implemented in the classroom, I want to look in detail at the moment described in my first case study--in full awareness of the humility required by my second case! When I sat down to plan the session described in case one, I began with the first paradox: the learning space should be open and bounded. To implement that principle, I turned to the text we were reading at that point in the course, Habits of the Heart.

A good text embodies both openness and boundaries--the boundaries created by a clear and compelling set of issues, and the openness that comes from exploring those issues in a reflective manner. By choosing such a text and immersing myself in it, I can often get a sense of the learning space I want to create in class. So I reviewed the issues central to Habits, finally settling on what Americans believe about "freedom" as the one I wanted to pursue.

But taking pedagogical clues from a text does not imply slavish adherence to it; the most boring classes I ever took, or taught, stayed so close to the text that we might as well have stayed home. By a "good text" I mean one that is fundamentally sound and--another paradox--one with enough unexplained gaps that it cannot be followed like a cookbook.

Students do not learn to learn from a text that is without sin, that raises all the right questions and gives all the right answers. But a text with discontinuities and ambiguities demands our engagement with it, giving students space to move into its field of discourse and think their own thoughts. Taking pedagogical clues from a text means looking not only for what the text can teach us, but also for what we can teach the text.

Habits of the Heart, it seems to me, is blessed by certain gaps in its data, which are based on interviews with a narrow range of Americans from which the authors draw some wide-ranging conclusions. From my vantage point at a small Appalachian college, I was aware that Habits had little to say about the large number of Americans who live in poverty, and nothing at all to say about the unique experience of poverty in Appalachia.

To honor the first paradox--a learning space should be open and bounded--I decided to create boundaries by asking my students to focus on the picture of freedom that Habits paints, and then to open that space by asking them, "What's wrong with this picture?," based on their own experience. (Of course, the questioning approach itself honors the first paradox by creating clear boundaries around the subject while leaving students free to make their own responses.)

By inviting data from my students' lives into the conversation, I was honoring that part of the second paradox that says the learning space should be hospitable. Hospitality in the classroom requires us not only to treat students with civility and compassion, but to invite our students and their insights into the conversation. The good host is not only polite to the guest--the good host assumes that the guest has stories to tell.

This second paradox requires that a learning space be "charged" as well as hospitable, a space where students are challenged as well as welcomed. I hoped to create this charge by lifting up "freedom" as the concept I wanted my students to reflect on. I knew that freedom was a major issue in their lives: some were still rebelling against their families, and others felt that the college unduly constrained their lives.

So my focus questions--"What have you been taught in the past about freedom, especially 'freedom from...' and 'freedom to...?' And what beliefs about freedom do you now hold?"--were chosen because I thought they might be hot buttons, and so they were. They got my students' attention, emotionally and intellectually, drawing them so deeply into the learning space that they could hardly avoid the challenge to think real thoughts.

To honor the third paradox--that the learning space invite the voices of both individual and group--I began by asking students to take a few minutes to reflect on the question in silence, the silence that most students require to think

their best thoughts. Since simple silence is awkward for most people, I asked them to make notes as they reflected, giving them something to do. Then, in a subtle but shameless attempt to concentrate their minds on the task at hand, I said, "I will tell you in a minute what the notes are for."

Since my students did not know whether I would gather and grade their notes (which I would never do), or ask them to use their notes for personal reference in small groups (which I eventually did), all of them made notes, just in case things got serious. Here is a small but significant flashback to the educative value of a "charged" ethos!

Then I made a gradual movement from the voice of the individual to the voice of the group. Following the personal reflection time, I asked students to gather in self-selected groups of three, for ten minutes, to share their reflections before the large-group dialogue began. Small groups give everyone a chance to speak in a relatively safe setting, and the winnowing that they allow makes it more likely that students will have something of value to say when the large-group discussion begins.

When the large group gathers, holding the tension of the third paradox--the voice of the individual and the voice of the group--depends heavily on the teacher's ability to facilitate rather than dictate the discussion. On one hand, the teacher must invite and affirm each individual's voice. That does not mean "agreeing with everything that is said, no matter how ludicrous," as cynics sometimes suggest. It means helping each person find the best meaning in what he or she is saying by paying close attention, asking clarifying questions, and offering illustrations if the student gets lost in abstraction.

On the other hand, this paradox requires the teacher to give voice to whatever thought-pattern may be emerging from the group: the group does not have a voice until the teacher gives it one. This means listening and holding all the threads of the conversation in mind so that one can eventually lift up a fabric of thought and ask, "Does this look like what you have been saying?" I did this when I showed my students how the self-centeredness they claimed when questioned about their theory of freedom contrasted with the communal ethic they revealed when confronted with an actual dilemma.

The fourth paradox--that we must honor both the "little" stories of our lives and the "big" stories of the disciplines--is woven into all the pedagogical moves I have described. It is a hard tension to hold--not only because academia discredits the little story, but because the little stories are the ones students feel most comfortable with. Given free rein, they will hide out in their little stories and evade the big ones.

Though our little stories contain truths that can check and correct the big story (as my students' Appalachian experience corrected the big story in Habits of the Heart), the teacher must keep using the big story to reframe the little ones. I did this when I used concepts from Habits to point out that my students' resistance to suing the police for false arrest revealed a stronger communal ethic than their talk about freedom had suggested.

The key to holding this paradox is the knowledge that, though students can tell their own stories, they, like the rest of us, rarely understand the meanings of the stories they tell. How could they, when education so seldom treats their lives as sources of knowledge? The teacher who wants to teach at the intersection of all the stories, big and little, must continually make interpretations that students do not know how to make--until they have been "heard to speech" often enough to do it for themselves.

The fifth paradox--that the space should support solitude and surround it with the resources of community--is usually implemented only in metaphorical terms. In most educational settings we cannot send students off for solitary reflection in the middle of class. But what we can do, even as we are developing a collective voice around a given issue, is to honor the soul's need for solitude within the group.

For example, I tell my students that, as much as I value dialogue, I affirm their right not to participate overtly in the conversation--as long as I have the sense, and an occasional verbal reassurance, that they are participating inwardly. This permission not to speak seems to evoke speech from people who are normally silent: we are more likely to choose participation when our freedom of choice is honored.

Honoring the solitude of my students' souls also means that, as I listen to them speak, I must discern how deeply to draw them into a topic with my

questions. There are some places where the human soul does not want to go--not, at least, in full view of other people.

I came to such a moment in case one when that young man told the story of his false arrest. I knew immediately the question I wanted to ask him, a question that would raise the issue of freedom vs. accountability that had yet to surface in our discussion: "Why didn't you sue the police for false arrest? You might have gotten rich overnight."

But that question has sharp edges, especially in a context of poverty. It could easily be heard as, "What are you--stupid? You blew a chance to get rich." So before I could ask the question, I needed to ask myself: can this student handle the question? Do he and I have the kind of relationship that would keep him from being wounded? This is the metaphorical meaning of protecting--a student's solitude: inviting the whole truth while refusing to violate the vulnerability of his or her soul.

The sixth paradox involves creating a space that welcomes both silence and speech. In the session I am examining there was much talk but only one clear period of silence when I asked students to collect their thoughts and make notes on the questions I had posed. That was a valuable interlude. But the silences that interest me most are the ones that occur midstream in a discussion, when a point is made, or a question posed, that evokes no immediate response.

As the seconds tick by and the silence deepens, my belief in the value of silence goes on trial. Like most people, I am conditioned to interpret silence as a symptom of something gone wrong. I am the salaried leader of this classroom enterprise, and I live by an ethic of professional responsibility, so in the silence my sense of competence and worth is at stake: I am the one who must set right what has gone wrong--by speaking. Panic catapults me to the conclusion that the point just made, or the question just raised, has left students either dumbfounded or bored, and I am duty-bound to apply conversational CPR.

But suppose that my panic has misled me, and my quick conclusion is mistaken. Suppose my students are neither dumbfounded nor dismissive but digging deep; suppose they are not ignorant or cynical but wise enough to know that this moment calls for thought; suppose they are not wasting time, but doing a more reflective form of learning. I miss all such possibilities when I assume that their silence signifies a problem, reacting to it from my own need for control rather than their need to learn.

Even if my hopeful interpretations are mistaken, it is indisputable that, the moment I break the silence, I foreclose on all chances for authentic learning: why would my students think their own thoughts in the silence when they know I will invariably fill it with thoughts of my own?

The particular way of practicing paradox I have just described may have more to do with my identity than with yours. But practicing paradox in the classroom is not unique to the kinds of subjects or students I teach.

I have been in high school science labs where the paradox of the individual and group voice is honored as students look into microscopes, one-by-one, then

gather to seek consensus on what they have seen and what it means. I know teachers of grade school mathematics who understand that the "charge" of math's mysteries must be held in paradox with an ethos of hospitality, especially if girls and minority youngsters are to overcome a culture that says they are incapable of quantitative thinking. I have visited college literature courses where the big story and the little stories are held in paradoxical tension as the teacher helps students understand the drama of the family of King Lear by relating it to family dramas that the students know first-hand.

The principle of paradox offers no cookbook fix for teaching. But if it fits who you are, it offers guidance on any level of education and with any field of study.

Holding the Tension of Opposites

Holding the tension of paradox so that our students can learn at deeper levels is among the most difficult demands of good teaching. How are we supposed to do it?

Imagine yourself in a classroom. You ask a well-framed question, and then you wait and wait as the great silence descends. You know you should wait some more, not jump, but your heart pounds, then sinks, and finally feels helpless and out of control. So you answer your own question with an emotional mix of anxiety, anger, and authoritarianism that only makes things worse. Then you watch as the opening to learning offered by the silence vanishes--and teaching becomes more and more like running headlong into walls. That scenario--which could apply to holding any of the paradoxes, not just silence and speech--suggests a simple truth: the place where paradoxes |are held together is in the teacher's heart, and our inability to hold them is less a failure of technique than a gap in our inner lives. If we want to teach and learn in the power of paradox, we must re-educate our hearts.

In particular, we must teach our hearts a new way to understand the tension we feel when we are torn between the poles. Some clues to such an understanding are found in E. F. Schumacher's classic text, Small is Beautiful:

...through all our lives we are faced with the task of reconciling opposites which, in logical thought, cannot be reconciled... How can one reconcile the demands of freedom and discipline in education? Countless mothers and teachers, in fact, do it, but no one can write down a solution. They do it by bringing into the situation a force that belongs to a higher level where opposites are transcended--the power of love... Divergent problems, as it were, force us to strain ourselves to a level above ourselves; they demand, and thus provoke the supply of, forces from a higher level, thus bringing love, beauty, goodness and truth into our lives. It is only with the help of these higher forces that the opposites can be reconciled in the living situation.

Schumacher's words help me understand that the tension that comes when I try to hold a paradox together is not hell-bent on tearing me apart. Instead, it is a power that wants to pull my heart open to something larger than myself. The tension always feels difficult, sometimes destructive. But if I can collaborate with the work it is trying to do rather than resist it, the tension will not break my heart--it will make my heart larger.

Schumacher's illustration of this point is brilliant because it is true to ordinary experience: every good teacher and every good parent has somehow l learned to negotiate the paradox of freedom and discipline. We want our children and our students to become people who think and live freely and we know that helping them become free requires us to restrict their freedom in certain situations.

Of course, neither our children nor our students share this knowledge! When my thirteen year-old announces that he will no longer attend religious services, or a student submits a paper on a topic other than the one I assigned, I am immediately drawn into the tension--and there is no formula to tell me whether this is a moment for freedom, or discipline, or some alchemy of both.

But good teachers and good parents find their way through such minefields every day by allowing the tension itself to pull them open to a larger and larger love a love that resolves these Solomonic dilemmas by looking past the tension within ourselves toward the best interests of the student or the child.

As always with profound truths, there is a paradox about this love. Schumacher says that a good parent or teacher resolves the tension of divergent problems by embodying the transcendent power of love. Yet he also says that resolving the tension requires a supply of love that comes from beyond ourselves, that is provoked by the tension itself. If we are to hold paradoxes together, our own love is absolutely necessary--and, at the same time, our own love is never enough. In a time of tension we must endure with whatever love we can muster until that very tension draws a larger love into the scene.

There is a name for the endurance we must practice until a larger love arrives: it is called suffering. We will not be able to teach in the power of paradox until we are willing to suffer the tension of opposites, until we understand that such suffering is neither to be avoided nor merely to be survived, but must be actively embraced for the way it expands our own hearts.

Without this acceptance, the pain of suffering will always lead us to resolve the tension prematurely, because we have no reason to stand the gaff. We will ask and answer our own questions in the silence of the classroom (thus creating more silence); we will ride roughshod over the dissenting voice that confounds our learning plan (even though we said we welcomed questions); we will punish the student who writes outside the assignment (no matter how creatively) to bring him or her back in line. We cannot teach our students at the deepest levels when we are unable to bear the suffering that opens into those levels. By holding the tension of opposites we hold the gateway to inquiry open, inviting students into a territory in which we all can learn.

How to do this is not a question that can be answered, for it is done in the teacher's heart: holding the tension of opposites is about being, not doing. But some words from Rilke may help. They offer no technique for embracing suffering, because one does not exist. But they offer hope for what might happen if we tried.

The words are from Letters to a Young Poet, in which Rilke writes as a teacher. He had received a series of respectful but demanding letters from a neophyte who admired Rilke's work and sought advice on how to follow in his path. Rilke not only took time to respond, he responded with astonishing generosity.

In one exchange, the young poet presses the older one with question after urgent question, and Rilke replies with this counsel:

...be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

His words could easily be paraphrased to speak to the condition of the teacher whose heart is unable to hold the tension of opposites in the classroom:

Be patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart... Try to love the contradictions themselves... Do not now seek the resolutions, which cannot be given because you would not be able to live them--and the point is to live everything. Live the contradictions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the paradox.

The hope Rilke give me lies partly in his notion that on "some distant day" I might find that I have lived my way into a more confident understanding of how to hold the tension of paradox than I have at this moment. Surely he is right about that: having lived into the tensions of teaching for some time now, I am better able to hold paradoxes together than I was ten years ago.

But my deeper hope comes with Rilke's words, "...and the point is to live everything." Of course, that is the point! If I do not fully live the tensions that

come my way, those tensions do not disappear: they go underground and multiply. I may not know how to solve them, but by wrapping my life around them and trying to live out their resolution, I open myself to new possibilities and keep the tensions from tearing me apart.

There is only one alternative: an unlived life, a life lived in denial of the tensions that teaching brings. Here, I play a masked professional role, pretending outwardly that I have no tensions at all--while inwardly all those tensions I pretend not to have are ripping the fabric of my life.

Pretending is another name for dividedness, a state that keeps us from cultivating the capacity for connectedness on which good teaching depends.

When we pretend, we fall out of community with ourselves, our students, and the world around us, out of communion with the common center that is both the root and the fruit of teaching at its best. But when we understand that "the point is to live everything," we will recover all that is lost.

I give the last word on this subject to Florida Scott-Maxwell who, writing toward the end of a long and well-lived life, speaks with authority:

Some uncomprehended law holds us at a point of contradiction where we have no choice, where we do not like that which we love, where good and bad are inseparable partners impossible to tell apart, and where we heart-broken and ecstatic, can only resolve the conflict by blindly taking it into our hearts. This used to be called being in the hands of God. Has anyone any better words to describe it?

Contact:
Parker J. Palmer
P. O. Box 55063
Madison, WI 53705
Telephone: (608) 238-9992
E-mail: pjp39@aol.com