 February 4, 2007 Guest -
Parker Palmer
Program: The
Undivided Life
As a senior associate of the American
Association for Higher Education and senior advisor to the Fetzer
Institute, Parker Palmer is an educational activist who has been
called a "master teacher." He is also a writer whose books include
The Promise of Paradox, The Company of Strangers, To
Know As We Are Known, The Active Life, The Courage To
Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life (San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998), and most recently Let Your Life
Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass,
1999).
Palmer received a B.A. in philosophy and
sociology from Carleton College, where he was selected for Phi Beta
Kappa and earned a Danforth Graduate Fellowship. After a year at Union
Theological Seminary, he went to the University of California at
Berkeley, where he studied sociology and received M.A. and Ph.D. degrees
with honors. His own teaching has been primarily in universities and
adult study programs (including Beloit College, Georgetown University,
and Pendle Hill, a Quaker living-learning community). During the last
ten years, he has been an itinerant teacher, teaching and learning in
short-term classrooms called "seminars," "workshops," and "retreats."
In his preface to his latest book he writes, "I was grateful to be
appointed the Eli Lilly Visiting Professor at Berea College in Berea,
Kentucky, in 1993-94. During that year, I was rebaptized into the
realities of college teaching, and I wrote the first draft of this
book." As founder of Fetzer Institute's Teacher Formation Program for
K-12 teachers, Palmer has learned from teachers who work with children,
adolescents, and young adults in public schools in Illinois, Maryland,
Michigan, South Carolina, and Washington state; he has woven their
insights into The Courage to Teach. |
