These communities of the heart, to which Le Guin has been leading us through her rhetorical use of myth, are not newly discovered territories. As Robert Coles points out, both in The Call of Stories and in his 6 April 1995 address at UNC Greensboro, the potential for such communities already exists and can begin in a classroom. Such classrooms, Coles argues, would have a teacher who ‘is willing to reach out to students in a moral way, that mixes head and heart’. Such classrooms, he insists, will have rigorous intellectual standards and acknowledge the value of the cognitive and of the affective. In this way classrooms become a part of a greater community – the school, the neighbourhood, the city – and teaching becomes integrated into how people live and work. That such communities can and do exist in the classroom is particularly appropriate for Le Guin as her protagonists quite often are anthropological observers, such as Genly Ai in The Left Hand of Darkness and Havzhiva in Four Ways to Forgiveness. Karen Sinclair, in her essay ‘Solitary Being: The Hero as Anthropologist’, describes these protagonists as ‘social anthropologists who [operate] as both cultural translator and social commentator. [Their] main purpose is to gather knowledge, and by standing in the threshold between two different cultures, to try (and usually fail) to explain each culture to the other.’ Even when, as with Shevek in The Dispossessed, the protagonist isn't a trained cultural observer, he or she is still attempting to explain one culture to another. Thus, many of Le Guin's protagonists are teachers, with classrooms of varying sizes.

As Hephzibah Roskelly and Eleanor Kutz point out in An Unquiet Pedagogy: Transforming Practice in the English Classroom, there is a ‘common school culture’, with its own rituals and structures, such as ‘IQ and achievement tests, homogenous “ability” groupings, [and] academic and vocational tracks’. Individual schools have their own cultures, Roskelly and Kutz argue, with their own ways of knowing and using language, and their particular codes of behaviour, which both teachers and students must know. Like their classroom counterparts, Le Guin's teacher-heroes are attempting to teach one culture and community the ways and mores of another.