Teach from the Heart: Pedagogy as Spiritual Practice

How can a teacher remain whole and happy able to teach well for an entire semester an entire year and an entire career? Teach from the Heart is about finding rediscovering or holding on to the heart of the teaching life which is quite literally the teachers heart. It is an encouragement to take up teaching as more than a service to provide a profession to master or a job to perform. It is an invitation to artisanry teaching as a craft that we master by working with our hands over long periods of time producing results that bear the mark of their maker. Whether youre just beginning or in it for the long haul sit down with Teach from the Heart and deepen your heart for the teaching life. We need not bring to class the wisdom and knowledge we gained elsewhere; we can take up teaching as a spiritual practice with the classroom as a sacred space for our own formation as persons. With nearly forty years experience as both student and teacher Jenell Pariss perspective is hard-won but still lighthearted and enthusiastic. Teachers from any context will benefit: stories and examples include preschool K-12 community education and college teaching. Dag Hammarskjold wrote that in our era the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action. Holiness--whatever little we might know about it--is grounded in grace and spiritual practice. It pitches its tent because it wishes to and because we call it to dwell with us. But how in the distracted secular world can we give voice to our longing? We are busy. We have families to raise a home to make. If we are teachers we have to get to school by 8:30. Jenell Paris makes these distractions the point of practice. To be human present and real. Creative subversive and--with luck--joyful. Her book has many practical pointers but its great gift is promoting the conversation shifting the kaleidoscope of received information so that the teacher can open a space--each in his or her own way--to change and growth. --Mary Rose OReilley Author The Peaceable Classroom; Radical Presence: Teaching as Contemplative Practice; and The Garden at Night: Burnout and Breakdown in the Teaching Life Jenell Paris is Professor of Anthropology at Messiah College in Grantham Pennsylvania.