Creating Significant Learning Experiences, Revised and Updated

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE HUMAN SIGNIFICANCE OF GOOD TEACHING AND LEARNING

Good teaching can be used to foster better learning. Those of us who work in higher education need to know why better teaching and learning are important because our answer will determine how we respond to the demands and calling of our profession. In my view, we need a perspective that relates teaching and learning to the quality of human life.

In The Courage to Teach (1998), Parker Palmer uses a wonderful metaphor to describe what he tries to do in his teaching: “I [have] learned that my gift as a teacher is the ability to dance with my students, to co-create with them a context in which all of us teach and learn” (p. 72).

Teaching, Learning, and the Dance of Life

I would like ...