The Teacher's Way: Teaching and the Contemplative Life

By Maria Lichtmann

Book Overview

In The Teacher's Way, award-winning scholar, educator and author Maria Lichtmann connects the monastic practice of lectio divina to the heart of the teaching experience. New teachers just beginning their careers will find deep and welcomed guidance in this book. Veteran educators who need a fresh dose of inspiration will celebrate. The Teacher's Way is an oasis for connecting education with the life of the spirit. Lectio divina is a Benedictine practice that involves four elements of "sacred reading." They are: Lectio--reading/attention Meditatio--reflection Oratio--prayer/receptivity Contemplatio--contemplation/transformation The Teacher's Way masterfully translates these practices into classroom applications that create hospitable and safe spaces for learning. Maria Lichtmann writes, "Nothing is more crucial to teaching as spiritual practice than replenishing the underground springs of a teacher's own inner life." Some of the topics the author focuses on include: the crisis in education; monks and teaching; concrete proposals for reflection and attention; hospitable teaching and transformed teaching. This book will provide food for thought for teachers just beginning their careers, those still in school, veteran educators who need refreshment, and professional development facilitators. The Teacher's Way is designed to benefit educators from kindergarten through 12th grade, as well as college and graduate school instructors. +

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0809143038
• ISBN13: 9780809143030
• Release Date: March 2005
• Publisher: Paulist Press
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 0.79 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Meaningful Teaching/ Deep Learning

The Teacher's Way: Teaching and the Contemplative Life reexamines the Christian Contemplative tradition known as Lectio Divina and applies that to the learning experience of the Millennial student. The author recognizes the pull that these students and their families have in regarding undergraduate education from the point of view of holding consumerist expectations informed by a "bottom line" value system. Nonetheless, Lichtmann brings a philosophy professor's insistent curiosity about "the self" of each of her students in her classroom with a confidant "open to risk" availability on her part as a teacher. There is a kind of "a- ha" recognition as you read through her book that you are being invited to "re-vision" one's self and one's students in light of contemplative traditions that come from Christian, Muslim, Taoist and other ancient "ways of knowing." In her hands, the classroom moves from being a place in which one applies techniques to achieve measurable outcomes to the classroom-as-verb, as a sacred place in which relationships between students, teachers, questions, modes of inquiry, traditions and contemporary forms of knowledge collide with the unexpected. Her book reads like a quiet meditation on teaching and she invites the reader to think through with her what teaching can mean. If you are familiar with the work of Parker Palmer or Richard Rohr, then I think you will find this author's book meaningful and valuable to you whether you are a teacher, a student, or someone who is simply interested in how classroom teaching can be informed by the mystical teaching traditions she writes about.