Heartful Teaching
HEARTFUL TEACHNG
By Dr. Cynthia Vascak
Heartful Teaching
Teaching with heart and from the heart is a concept that resonates easily; one we can readily identify with. Teaching is not a career one chooses for monetary gain – teaching is a vocation that fully captures our minds, bodies, hearts, and spirits. You give 5,000% of your time, your dreams, your hopes, your knowledge, your energy, and your hearts every day. That you are here, 2 weeks after a long school year, speaks eloquently of your passionate love of teaching and learning. Teachers juggle the fullest range of student needs, parent or family involvement, curricular requirements, accountability, committees, professional development, new initiatives, not to mention your family needs and your own health and wellbeing…
They do this everyday with the deepest level of care, sensitivity, and dedication. I know how we bring all of our students home with us – they fill our dreams and our worries – they permeate our lives! Your courage, in the face of growing adversity, diminishing funding, and high stakes testing is awe-inspiring – so too your courage to face each day and make a difference in a child’s life. I thank our teachers at all levels, from the bottom of my heart for your courage. I use courage in a very special sense for “Courage” is a word- derived from the French: “ la couer” meaning heart: its oldest meaning, to speak from one’s innermost heart. This I translate into teaching from one’s innermost heart. This keeps us going and permeates our classrooms with an ineffable, in terms of testing but oh so tangible in terms of presence and difference, quality of care.
Heartful Communities
We speak of classroom community, community building, and creating safe and supportive learning environments. Let us dig further and speak of creating compassionate communities where care is a central value and learning priority.
Do we not seek to cultivate the fullest growth and development of our students? DO we not seek to cultivate their capabilities of relationship, confidence, empathy, and compassion? To develop the fullest range of human intelligences? We become teachers for reasons of the heart. We know, through our own body of experience now confirmed through brain based research, that the “heart” is an essential ingredient for learning, for cultivating internalized inspiration, for developing sustained engagement, for depth of information processing (memory storage and retrieval), for the construction of knowledge, and for the building of relationships and mutual understandings? We all share a most fundamental human need of care: being cared for and being able to care for others: the need to be understood and understanding, giving and receiving, being respected and respecting, being recognized and recognizing, of trust and trusting, of belonging and capability…
Nel Noddings is former High School Math teacher, mother of 5 and professor of education and Columbia Teachers College. She proposes that we consider 5 domains of Care and Relationship as the foundational core of our teaching and fundamental goals of education. I describe these as the Constellation of Care comprised of 5 interrelated and mutually supportive capabilities of Care.
Care of one’s Self: confidence, self –respect, well bring, and identity
Care for Intimate Others: family, close friends, classmates, and neighbors…
Care for Distant others and strangers: having empathy for the hurricane victims in New Orleans or refugees in the Sudan, homeless in our city, the children in Afghanistan or Iraq…
Care for Non-Human Life of Plants and Animals, Our Environment and the Natural World..
Care for Human Made Instruments, Ideas, Inventions, and Creations
Thus, Care extends into all aspects of our lives, our learning, and being. The most essential quality of such Care is our capability of empathy – our ability to imagine ourselves in the shoes of another – to imagine ourselves into the consciousness of another – to become more sensitive to the world around us – to put ourselves in our neighbor’s place and recognizing the needs of others in addition to our selves. The capability of empathy is essential for the most basic of interrelationships of cooperation, compassion, and social –emotional growth- the full realization of which certainly requires a lifetime. But can begin with a first step…. In our classrooms..
As an example: One spring day during my research with first graders, the children had a substitute teacher for two days in a row. During this time, an incident occurred on the playground during outdoor recess which the substitute teacher, Mrs.X, wanted to bring to our attention. She wrote the following as a detailed account of this special incident:
As a substitute teacher…I was very impressed with the caring and compassion of the children. When the kids returned from recess one afternoon, they were all upset by an incident on the playground. They proceeded to tell me of another first grader who had been teasing a classmate about her weight. Several children from Wendy’s class picked flowers and presented them to the girl. After sympathizing with them, the kids spontaneously chose to make cards for their friend, not a member of their own classroom. They each wrote a careful message, complete with a cheerful drawing. They wanted to let this classmate know that they did not care what she looked like, but that they valued her for who she is (Mrs. X May 1998).
Here was a class of first graders expressing care for a slightly distant other and manifesting their ability to respect the singular character of this girl. Their actions were independent of any adult supervision. The children, on their own volition, gave this girl their most sensitive attention. The children were able to empathize with her, be concerned for her welfare, be upset by the hurtful treatment of this girl, and to act upon these feelings in a manner designed to not only give care to the individual who had suffered, but to uphold their burgeoning capabilities of care.
As heartful teachers, we can build communities of care and compassion as we nurture the
full constellation of care capabilities within our students.