Reflecting back on my own career in education, first as a secondary music teacher, then as principal of an elementary school, I recall my expressed desire to “make a difference in the world” as the reason for my vocation. Idealistic and naive words, coming from a hopeful young lover of music and art and poetry, newly minted from teacher’s college with grand plans to ignite love of learning and self-expression in my lucky students. Of course, the realities of the demands of the role quickly took their toll on my romantic idealism and I found myself struggling to impart curriculum, manage behaviors, meet administrator expectations, and find my way in a landscape that challenged my assumptions about teaching and learning.

What became a pivotal experience for me was securing a teaching position at Syl Apps Campus, in Oakville, Ontario, the school found within a maximum security detention centre for young offenders. It was here that all of my assumptions about teaching and learning were tempered and I embarked on what would be the formative work of discovering how I could truly “make a difference in the world.”

My young students were largely representative of a very marginalized, very impoverished—in all senses of that word—segment of the population. Most were victims before they were offenders. Their educational backgrounds were fragmented, interrupted by trauma and loss, and wholly inadequate to the task of preparing them for success academically. Many of my students had attended upwards of twenty different schools in their short academic histories. Teachers and schools were not friendly people or places for this population of learners.

Mine was the task of teaching English and instrumental music to groups of often young, transient, (students were frequently moved to other facilities or abruptly released), and disenchanted learners. Early on I realized that mastering music notation was secondary to guiding my students “on an inner journey toward more truthful ways of seeing and being in the world” (Palmer, “Teaching with Heart and Soul” 54).

Like many well-trained teachers, I set out to deliver strong, curriculum-based lessons at grade and ability level, only to discover, usually dramatically, through eruptions of rage and frustration untempered by typical behavioral constraints, that I was singularly missing the mark.

As I struggled to find my way, I began to realize that the most important thing I could do for my students was to honor their voices, their stories, and their humanness. Paradoxically, as I abandoned my own preconceived notions as to how to proceed, I entered into that “hospitality of teaching,” where I could create a trusting space to welcome “alien and different thoughts and ideas” (Palmer, The Courage to Teach 94). As Palmer asserts, “Good teaching is always an act of hospitality toward the young, and hospitality is always an act that benefits the host even more than the guest” (The Courage to Teach 95). I found this to be true as I turned my teaching practice inside and out in order to gain the trust and the right to speak into my students’ fractured lives.

I recall sheepishly approaching my administrator with the concern that I was not adequately covering curriculum. I will never forget her liberating answer: “Our students benefit more from recovering their belief in themselves than from lock-stock covering of curriculum expectations.” With her wise words to anchor me, I embarked on the task of helping my students discover wholeness, and to inspire belief in their gifts and all they were meant to be. I began to approach each newly arrived student with the question, “Who is this child, and how can I nurture his or her gifts?” and the journey of discovery began (Palmer, “Teaching with Heart and Soul” 54).

As I worked intentionally to build a respectful relationship with each student, I began to break through barriers to learning and experienced the transforming power of “relational trust . . . built on movements of the human heart such as empathy, commitment, compassion, patience and the capacity to forgive” (Palmer, The Courage to Teach xvii). A 2002 study, Trust in Schools: A Core Resource for Improvement, found that “relational trust . . . has the power to offset external factors” and that a “strong correlation between [relational] trust and student achievement remains,” even after controlling for other factors such as poverty and racial isolation (Palmer, The Courage to Teach xvi).

Mine was the joy of unlocking potential, and partnering with tentative learners as they discovered treasures of music ability—piano players just waiting to happen, natural-born guitarists, singers, and actors whose delight in their craft contributed to the transformation of their lives, rekindling a light of hope made dull by years of abuse and neglect. The program took off and the demand for the arts led us to design a music theater class, made up of fully two-thirds of the student body at one point, where students learned to dance and sing and discover the transcendence of performance. Our audiences left our productions changed, wondering at the transforming power of the work.

It is hard to say who benefitted most from the seventeen years I spent working as a teacher at Syl Apps Campus. In seeking truthful ways to interact with my students, I discovered so many more things about my chosen profession, and embraced the truth of the notion that “it is those creatures and those humans who are on the edge of what we have defined as normal, proper, or good who often have the most to teach us. They tend to reveal the shadow and the mysterious side of things” (Rohr 55). I learned that successful teaching is rooted in understanding that first and foremost, education begins with the child. It begins with, as many faith groups assert, a respect for the spark of the divine in every being.

Parker Palmer tells the story of one Mr. Porter, a mathematics teacher whose influence and ability to transcend typical educational practice allowed him to recognize and foster unique gifts in his students. Palmer describes him this way: “The key to Mr. Porter’s teacherly gift was not his technical mastery—it was his mastery of his own inner life. Mr. Porter refused to be bound by subject matter and methods, and he never lost sight of the fact that his true vocation was to teach not mathematics but a child” (Palmer, “Teaching with Heart and Soul” 55). During my years at Syl Apps, I was reminded of this over and over as I searched for ways to reach and motivate my charges.

The call of my own inner life to first recognize the deep needs of my students and to move beyond simply teaching music propelled me into a spirituality of practice, where I was present in the moment and discovered with my students the ways in which we could “discern their hearts’ longing to be connected with the largeness of life” (Palmer, “Teaching with Heart and Soul” 55). Bringing spirituality to my work allowed me to answer the invitation of soul to “find the transcendent in the mundane, the sacred in the shadow” (Benner 155). My students and I uncovered their sacred, God-given gifts by being present together in the earthy and mundane circumstances of a detention sentence in a provincial institution for young offenders.

Thus teaching became a vocation of love and joy of discovery. I ceased to be amazed at the gifts we unearthed together, but saw my calling there in that place as a privilege, which afforded me the opportunity to be part of the journey to the miracle of transformation. Like Mary Oliver, in her poem, “Logos,” I became convinced that, “If you say the right words, the wine expands. / If you say them with love / and the felt ferocity of that love, the fish explode into many” (40).

Works Cited

• Benner, David G. Spirituality and the Awakening Self. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2012.
• Oliver, Mary. Why I Wake Early. Boston: Beacon Press, 2004.
• Palmer, Parker J. “Teaching with Heart and Soul: Reflections on Spirituality in Teacher Education.” Journal of Teacher Education (January 2004): 54–65.
• Palmer, Parker J. The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007.
• Rohr, Richard. Falling Upwards. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2013.