The Threefold Gaze
A Spiritual Lens for a Flourishing Life
Education as a Spiritual Journey
In his book To Know as we are Known, Parker Palmer lays out a vision for education as a deeply spiritual practice. He argues that as teachers, we have a responsibility and an opportunity to offer our students a truly formative experience. Our classes can become truth-seeking communities where students are free to explore the Big Questions of life -- such as who and what are we, as human beings? What is our purpose? How can we know truth? What is our relationship to everything around us? How should we live our lives?
I summarize Parker Palmer's model for education this way. The teacher's job is to
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create space
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build capacity
We create space by clearing away falsehood and misconception. We create space by decluttering the mind and removing distractions that obscure truth and hinder learning. We create space by knocking down walls and expanding the borders of what it is possible for our students to think and to understand.
We build capacity by making it safe for our students to feel what they feel as they learn. We build capacity by enlarging their tolerance for discomfort and ambiguity. We build capacity by equipping them with methodologies and skills.
All About Me
Whether one has the terminology for it or not, we all have a conception of what we are, what reality is, what knowledge is, and how to make decisions about right and wrong actions. However, the ideas we form about these things when we are young are often a bit too flimsy to hold up to the strain of life as we get older.
Many of our students do not have anyone to offer them guidance in addressing these weighty matters in a more sophisticated way as they enter adulthood.
That is where the teacher as mentor becomes so important.
These concepts are not abstractions. They are significant building blocks of a worldview that dictate how we live. These need to be examined and challenged if our society is ever to heal and change. For example:
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Ontology - the nature of reality - Our culture is built to reinforce individualism and competition over interdependence and cooperation. Yet, the very building block of matter, the atom, is essentially a small community of bonded relationships, seeking to form more bonds (relationships).
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Epistemology - the nature of knowledge - Our culture polarizes around its certainties. Belief in "objective reality" and "absolute truth" divides groups into categories of right vs. wrong and us vs. them. However, science has known that objective knowledge is a myth for over a century. Disciplines from chemistry and physics to psychology have demonstrated that observation is subjective, and the very act of observing changes what is being observed.
What of our pedagogy?
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Do our classrooms foster community or competition?
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Do our assessment methods reflect an objective view of reality, or do they allow for the co-construction of meaning that gets closer to the truth of how complex most things truly are?
