Teaching to Learn/Learning to Teach

This book is a collection of stories about teaching and learning in the liberal arts classroom, written by a Quaker who is a part-time professor of American literature and gender studies at a small, historically Quaker, liberal arts college for women outside of Philadelphia. The author reflects on the point and purpose of education in such a space, with a particular concern for the religious and interactive dimensions of the process. This book includes multiple accounts by students and colleagues, reflecting on their own experiences of teaching and learning and acknowledges the powers and limits of storytelling as a means of making sense of what happens in the college classroom. « Anne French Dalke's courageous investigation of her own teaching practice provides those of us who can't help questioning ourselves as teachers with the solace of companionship, the wisdom of experience, and an unexpected sense of our own dignity as pilgrims on the path. (Jane Tompkins, Author of 'A Life in School: What the Teacher Learned') « I'm moved and excited by this remarkable book. It will surely help all readers to be much braver and wiser in the pursuit of teaching that is both intellectually sophisticated and resolutely honest. I recommend it with great enthusiasm. (Peter Elbow, Author of 'Writing with Power'; 'Embracing Contraries in Learning and Teaching'; and 'Everyone Can Write') « The meditation is an ancient and supple form which Anne French Dalke retrieves to reflect upon her teaching life. I don't know anyone who has gone as far as she has in soliciting, receiving, and pondering her students' own words, incorporated here as a substantial part of the text. The tendency ofwomen students to stand back particularly confounds us. Dalke ponders their withdrawal with recourse to current scholarship, to her own formidable experience as a Quaker teacher at a prestigious women's college, and to student texts that both challenge and honor the work we are trying to do together. One of the most important and original preoccupations of this book is Dalke's concern with a kind of hermeneutics of silence, a radical, generous, and scary move. 'Quaking we enter the classroom, ' Dalke begins. Quaking, I leave this book, for it calls into question the foundations of my teaching life. (Mary Rose O'Reilley, Author of 'The Peaceable Classroom'; 'Radical Presence: Teaching as Contemplative Practice'; and 'The Barn at the End of the World')