Sally Z. Hare (KNFP 11), Director, Center for Education and Community, Surfside Beach, South Carolina.
This article was originally published in the September 2004 issue of the KFLA Newsletter.
Ask Dr. Sally Hare her thoughts on public education, and she’ll come right to the point: ”I care passionately about public education in the United States. I think it’s the foundation of our democracy, the foundation for living in peace on our planet.”
Dr. Hare knew from a young age that she wanted to be a teacher and to make her mark in public education. ”I’ve taken many side roads on my professional path, but I’ve never veered from wanting to positively affect public education.” As the director of the Center for Education and Community, and the Singleton Professor of Education at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, South Carolina, she is living her dream.
In her Kellogg learning plan, Sally investigated the concept of community. Her focus was all encompassing: ”Across cultures, across countries, in classrooms and towns and nations.” Her approach was to follow the advice of the poet, Rilke. ”I lived my questions, not searching for answers, but truly loving the questions, and I landed at the intersection of education and community.”
In 1993, at the end of the fellowship, Sally resigned her position as Dean of the Graduate School and Continuing Education at Coastal Carolina University, and she created the Center for Education and Community on the campus. The center’s mission is similarly all encompassing: To strengthen the community through education, and to strengthen education through the community.
She explains, ”The fellowship affirmed for me that hierarchy was in direct conflict with community. I knew that a seat at the top of the hierarchy, whether as a dean or a college president, was not where I wanted to sit.”
Among the major milestones in her work, Sally counts her own learning, and she credits the many wonderful teachers she has had along the way. One of these teachers is Parker J. Palmer, who she met during her Kellogg Fellowship. Describing the lessons Palmer taught her, Sally says, ”He affirmed for me that each of us has our own inner teacher, and that often we become disconnected from our own inner wisdom in the hurry and noise of our outer world, we literally can’t hear ourselves. I’ve come to see teaching as creating a space for others to reconnect with that inner teacher.”
She has worked with Dr. Palmer for the past decade in a movement called the Courage to Teach. At the Center for Education and Community, she applies the tenets of the movement to teacher formation, teacher renewal, and ”the development of teachers as reflective practitioners.”
Says Sally, ”The major issue for me is care of the teacher’s soul: retaining and renewing our teachers. I see us facing a major crisis of a very real teacher shortage. And I see my work as creating a space for teachers in which they can remember who they are and why they were called to teach.”
Currently, she serves as a senior adviser to the National Center for Teacher Formation, and mentors new facilitators. Her work, along with that of a growing community of others, has spread to hundreds of teachers across the country. Sally enthuses, ”I have watched teachers reclaim their gifts and their calling.”