1. Teaching & Spirituality We teach who we are. Parker Palmer, Courage to Teach, 1998 Good teaching cannot be reduced to technique; Good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher. p 10 In our rush to reform education, we have forgotten a simple truth: reform will never be achieved by ….rewriting curriculum and revising texts if we continue to demean and dishearten the human resource called the teacher on whom so much depends. p 3 …the human heart is the source of all good teaching. p 3 Intellect, emotion, and spirit depend on one another for wholeness. They are interwoven in the human self and in education at its best…p 4 …the flatness of the desacralizied landscape… creates a specific spiritual pathology that diminishes our ability to know, to teach, to learn. p 112 …if we want to grow as teachers, we need to do something alien to academic culture: we must talk to each other about out inner lives – risky stuff in a profession that fears the personal and seeks safety in the technical, the distant, the abstract. p 12 Preskill, “Narratives of Teaching and the Quest for the Second Self,” J of Teacher Ed, 1998 “The narrative of hope…is a reminder of the paradox that what we do can make a difference…, and that these efforts can never be satisfactorily assessed or encompassed.” p 346 The affective domain, whatever its particular definition is still grounded in the spiritual nature of both the student and the teacher. As educators, especially science educators we need to get over our fear of addressing the affective needs of our students and teachers in the broader context of spirituality. Science Teaching & Spirituality We teach what we know. Successful instruction in evolutionary theory relies on the disengagement of the concepts “creation and evolution” and “belief and understanding.” Creationism is bad theology and cannot be argued in the science arena because it is not science. Pounding away at the science in the classroom (and on the stage) has not helped. To teach evolution we need to teach on both fronts; science and theology. Hauslein, NSF Proceedings of the 1992 Evolution Education Research Conference, Baton Rouge., 1992 Both the literature of science and of theology are clear that the teaching of evolution need not threaten nor conflict with the religious convictions of either the students, teachers or the community (e.g. see Gilkey, 1986). The misconceptions attributed to Creationism are not like misconceptions identified in other areas of science, in either substance or structure. Evidence will be presented to suggest that the misconceptions of special creation are a cognitive framework of concepts and beliefs not subject to logical scientific arguments. In addition, students and teachers alike need to recognize the difference between cognitive structures based on belief and those based on comprehension. Hauslein, Creationism glorifies man not God, Saint Cloud Times, 1991  The center of religion is man - ever changing with time and tradition. It is precisely because man struggles to maintain a central place for himself as a priority which has brought us to this confusion of faith and theology called creation science.  Creationism is an attempt to scientifically prove the existence of the creator. If creationism is accepted as the alternative to evolution, my relationship with God would change, because he is now provable by the laws of science and falsifiable by definition.  The argument is not evolution vs. creationism, but creationism vs. faith. To struggle for the legitimacy of creationism is to struggle for the centrality of man over the sovereignty of God. Patricia Hauslein, Assoc. Prof. Biological Sciences, Saint Cloud State University, Saint Cloud, MN