The Heart of Learning asks teachers and students to recommit themselves to what they love most in education. The renown contributors outline a map for enabling us to connect with the very reasons why we teach and learn thus to achieve greater fulfillment in both. Incisive essays by Parker Palmer, Rachel Naomi Remen, and the Tibetan lama Dozgchen Ponlop Rinpoche examine how our unique, individual experiences of the sacred can profoundly enrich how we learn and teach. Writings by bell hooks and the Dalai Lama show how we simultaneously can cultivate both individual beliefs and openness to the diversity of the contemporary classroom. Works by Huston Smith and Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi explore our need to balance our past histories and traditions with the needs of present and future generations. This extraordinary collection of original work provides a unified, inspiring, and immensely practical new paradigm for how teaching and learning can mean more, accomplish more, and inspire the best in each of us. This book is a must for every teacher, student, parent, and anyone who loves to learn.

Agnès Varda, one of the major French filmmakers for the last forty years is here celebrated and situated by Alison Smith, by examining both the early films and the later successes, such as Sans Toit ni Loi (1985), Jane B. par Agnès V. (1987) and Jacquot de Nantes (1991). Smith considers Varda's films in the light of her constant attention to film form, and proposes an integrated analysis of several major themes in her work, through a detailed study of her best-known or most significant films, which are then set in context against her lesser-known, but very extensive, oeuvre. The themes cover such issues as representation of place and community, representation of women and the use of memory, and are linked by a common concern with the process by which Varda transforms reality into constructed films. They owe their form to the combined subjectivity's of the filmmaker, the subjects filmed, and the audience.