Teaching One Thing in the World of Value

11 December 2022

A couple of years ago I read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay The American Scholar. One line of the essay has stuck with me and informed my teaching philosophy and practice:

“The one thing in the world of value is the active soul — the soul, free, sovereign, active.”

What does it mean to have a soul that is free, sovereign, and active? When I teach, I want my classes to be more than an intellectual exercise. I bring my whole heart and mind to my classroom and I want my students to feel welcome to do the same.

This semester, I started a new practice with my PhD students in my Advanced Mixed Methods Research course. I began each 3-hour class with 5-10 minutes of reflection on “One Thing in the World of Value.” One or two students signed up each week to share a poem, song, picture, quote, or idea that brings deep meaning to their lives. I modeled this practice the first day with Mary Oliver’s poem Wild Geese — one of my favorites. I also read a passage from Parker Palmer’s book Let Your Life Speak. Throughout the semester students shared poems, holy scriptures, pictures of family, and other text and reflected on how these things informed their worldviews.

I did this because I wanted to ground our study of mixed methods research in who we are as humans. I want my students to see research not as a list of steps to follow but as a holistic process of inquiry inextricably tied to their identities, passions, and experiences.

The beginnings of our classes were so special to me.

This idea of bringing our whole selves to the classroom reminds me of David Whyte’s book Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity. In this book, Whyte uses the metaphor of the sea, boats, captains, and sailors to talk about leadership, work, and identity. He is also big on the idea of conversations. We have conversations with ourselves, others, and all the world around us. He writes:

“The core act of leadership must be the act of making conversations real. The conversations of captaincy and leadership are the conversations that forge real relationships between the inside of a human being and their outer world, or between an organization and the world it serves. All around these conversations, the world is still proceeding according to mercies other than our own. This is the ultimate context of our work. The cliff edge of mortality is very near. We must know how easy it is to forget, how easy it is to drift onto the rocks and put our lives to hazard. Everything is at stake, and everything in creation, if we are listening, is in conversation with us to tell us so.”

This has been the most rewarding semester of teaching in my academic career.

This semester I also got LASIK eye surgery. I had been wearing glasses for the last few years since contacts started hurting my eyes. There has been something strange about putting down my glasses, which has led to feeling like the real Ozzie is emerging more and more: The Ozzie of my childhood who wanted to invite everyone in the neighborhood to his birthday parties; the Ozzie of Princeton High School who read B.F. Skinner on the bus to track meets and then ran his heart out; the Ozzie of Whitworth who could be goofy one minute and serious the next; the Ozzie of Thailand who curiously learned as much as he could about Thai people and culture; the Ozzie of Harvard and George Washington who spent hours pondering interesting articles and books and then talking about them with classmates and housemates. I can’t help but feel that there’s some connection there. Even my students noticed I was different after the surgery.

As an aside, one of my old DC housemates tells the story of seeing me read a book in my chair as he left for work one morning and then coming back 8 hours later and finding me still reading in the chair. That’s also the real Ozzie: a learner, a writer, and a lover of truth, beauty, and goodness. I am so fortunate to live a life where I can continue to read, discover, and cultivate a soul that is free, sovereign, and active. And through teaching I can support others along the journey as well.

Onward.