I believe paradox is essential for educational transformation. Parker Palmer described paradox as a creative tension or “a way of holding opposites together that creates an electric charge that keeps us awake” in his book The Courage to Teach. He argued “the poles of a paradox are like the poles of a battery: hold them together, and they generate the energy of life, pull them apart, and the current stops flowing…and we become lifeless.” I elaborated on paradox in my posts Abundant Community and Paradox of Community. I propose paradox be used to revitalize the institution we call school and the conversations about this necessary enterprise.
Parker Palmer in The Courage to Teach presented six paradoxes and identified ways in which they could serve us in the classroom through pedagogical design. I believe they serve educators and their communities as foundations for conversations and a long overdue transformation.
The first paradox is “the space should be bounded and open.” School cannot be a one size fits all approach, but it cannot be a chaotic, wide-open system. There are many ways to understand school from home schooling to traditional. In between, there is diversity. Is school a building? Could it be a virtual gathering? Could it be a combination? Rigid boundaries should be replaced by flexible boundaries. If they do, then we can ask, “What serves the child?” What serves the community?”
Over the next while, I will look at each paradox, and explore how they lead conversations towards transformation.
About ivonprefontaine
In keeping with bell hooks and Noam Chomsky, I consider myself a public and dissident intellectual. Part of my work is to move beyond (transcend) institutional dogmas that bind me to defend freedom, raising my voice to be heard on behalf of those who seek equity and justice in all their forms.
I completed my PhD in Philosophy of Leadership Studies at Gonzaga University, Spokane, WA. My dissertation and research was how teachers experience becoming teachers and their role as leaders.
I focus on leading, communicating, and innovating in organizations. This includes mindfuful servant-leadership, World Cafe events, Appreciative Inquiry, and expressing one's self through creativity. I offer retreats, workshops, and presentations that can be tailored to your organzations specific needs.
I published peer reviewed articles about schools as learning organizations, currere as an ethical pursuit, and hope as an essential element of adult eductaion. I published three poems and am currently preparing my poetry to publish as an anthology of poetry.
I present on mindful leadership, servant leadership, schools as learning organizations, how teachers experience becoming teachers, assessement, and critical thinking. I facilitate mindfulness, hospitality retreats. and World Cafe Events using Appreciative Inquiry.
I am writing and researching about various forms of leadership, how teachers inform and form their identity as a particular teacher, schools as learning organizations, hope, nonviolence and its anticipatory relationship with the future, as essential elements to teaching and learning.
Academic publications can be found at Ivon Gile Prefontaine on ResearchGate
ivonprefontaine
Teacher as Transformer 
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