Christian Teachers Journal 21.2

the christian teachers journal May 2013 volume 21.2

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reshaping your practice Christian Perspectives on curriculum

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Managing Editor: Suzanne Mitchell Editorial Committee: David Lepileo Brian Cox Fiona Partridge Narelle Sketcher Tim White Judy Linossier editorial correspondence: Suzanne Mitchell Ph: 02 4773 5800 E: suzanne.mitchell@cen.edu.au Printer: Signs Publishing Victoria Publisher: Christian Education National on behalf of CEPA

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STATEMENT OF PURPOSE The vision of the journal is to affirm the lordship of Christ in education.

It aims to serve Christian educators, challenging them to a fuller understanding of their task and responsibilities; raising issues critical to the development of teaching and learning in a distinctively Christian way.

The Christian Teachers Journal is published by teachers as a forum for the exchange of ideas and practices for teachers to advance the cause of Christ in education.

I was first introduced to the thought-provoking teaching of Dr David Smith at the Transforming Education conference held in beautiful Hobart in 2008.

David’s use of life-stories, powerful visual images, and thoughtful unpacking of metaphors from the scriptures, deeply impacted my own thoughts about what it is to teach ‘christianly’.

In July 2012, Torrens Valley Christian School (Adelaide), in partnership with the National Institute for Christian Education, was privileged to host a five-day ‘intensive’ class taught by David. 18 teachers from schools across Australia participated in this unique opportunity.

Throughout the week, participants (myself included) were led to examine what it is to view ‘teaching as Christian practice’, and consider how we, as human beings, become who we are through participation in shared activities, sustained by traditioned communities, orientated towards specific goals. David challenged us to explore what it might mean for our schools to truly create social spaces ‘graced by regard for human beings as embodied, imaginative members of God’s beloved creation’ (Smith). This edition of the Christian Teachers Journal presents a number of articles related to the work of David Smith.

In the opening article, Smith himself encourages us to ‘see anew’, considering not only how worldview and godly teachers are important elements in Christian education, but also how pedagogical practices can also be ‘Christian’.

Alison Wheldon describes the development of the What if Learning site, an online resource aimed at helping teachers explore how they can ‘see anew’ in their teaching. Three participants from the SA Smith intensive class, Judy Linnossier, David Lepileo and Lynda Pierce, each share examples of how their own thinking and teaching practice has been challenged and shaped

by David’s work.

David and Marybeth Baggett share their experience of purposely working to promote, promulgate, and inculcate a Christian worldview into curriculum, particularly in a tertiary setting.

Fiona Partridge Fiona.partridge@tvcs.sa.edu.au Coordinator of Studies, Torrens Valley Christian School Senior Adjunct Lecturer, National Institute for Christian Education and member of the editorial committee

4 Seeing anew, choosing engagement, reshaping practice Dr David Smith 9 Window on CEPA 10 What if we could develop resources to transform teaching?

Alison Wheldon 14 How does teaching as a Christian practice impact the classroom?

Judy Linossier 18 Tribute to Harry Burggraaf Harry the teacher Duncan Caillard

Harry Burggraaf; always learning, constantly serving Michelle Dempsey

20 Reflections: A week with David Smith at Torrens Valley Christian School

David Lepileo

24 The ancient paths: what might it mean to approach teaching as a Christian practice?

Linda Pierce 28 Epistemic humility: engaging a Christian worldview David and Marybeth Baggett

JULY 2013 Creative and performing arts Due date: 9 April, 2013 October 2013 Professional development Due date: 1 July 2013 Articles will be considered for publication by the editorial committee. Email to suzanne.mitchell@cen.edu.au

future issues

Finally, in this special edition, we include a tribute to our dear colleague, Harry Burggraaf, who God called to be with him earlier this year. Harry served on the very first Christian Teachers Journal editorial committee from 1992, up until 2009. That’s an amazing 17 years! Harry’s thoughtful contribution to Christian education will continue to be an inspiration for many years to come.

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In what follows I want to make a single, simple point (though I’ll need more than this paragraph to unpack it).

Here it is: Christian teachers and Christian schools need to attend carefully to practices and what is Christian about them if they are to make better headway with developing Christian pedagogy, rather than just adding Christian information to the curriculum or talking about Christian beliefs.

Many of the most common approaches to thinking about our role as Christian teachers are valuable but insufficient for renewing our pedagogy. Christian character, for instance, is important for Christian teachers – but character is not yet pedagogy; I can be virtuous and yet teach badly. A Christian worldview is also a fine and necessary thing – but a worldview is not yet pedagogy; I can know the truth and yet teach it ineffectually or coercively. Christian spirituality has clear connections to Christian education – but prayers and chapels are not yet pedagogy; I can pray and cite scripture and then immediately teach oppressively. It does not take anything away from the importance of Christian character, Christian thinking, or Christian praying to note that if what we are about is Christian education, there is something else that needs attention: our pedagogy, how we structure the processes of teaching and learning. And pedagogy is something we practise, with our bodies, together, in space and time. It involves seeing the world in certain ways, but also engaging with one another and harnessing material resources in particular ways.

That’s why we need to think about whether there are such things as Christian practices.

Notice that I said ‘practices’, plural. I’m not just getting at practice in general here, like the practice we mean when we talk about ‘putting things into practice’ or about ‘theory and practice’. I’m not just concerned with being more practical or with familiar clichés about rubbery things hitting roads. By practices I mean something a little more specific, something with a particular meaning sketched out in a variety of recent work in philosophy, theology, sociology, and education theory. That’s why I need a little more than a paragraph. We are not about to embark on the full tour, but it

will help to briefly sketch in some basic landmarks before stepping back and seeing how they might help us think about teaching. So what is at stake in talk of ‘practices’?

Defining Practices Some human behaviours are, well, just behaviours. Scratching my nose.

Kicking a stone. Stroking the cat.

Others become more complex, woven together, and sustained and so rise to the level of practices. Fixed hour prayer.

Architecture. Teaching. Various scholars have slightly different definitions, but broadly speaking to count as a practice something has to be: • sustained over time (not just done once); • developed and engaged in by a community (not just an individual); • pursued intentionally in order to achieve some desired good (not just toyed with or fallen into by accident); and • sustained by a shared narrative that makes sense of it (not just done mindlessly or randomly).

By submitting ourselves to the rhythms of such a practice, we find ourselves being formed at the level of character.

Suppose I want to grow in my faith, and I decide to engage in daily Bible study. Whether I keep it up for months or years matters more than whether I miss one particular day. Even if I read alone, this is a practice that a community has handed to me - I did not invent it, it is clearly recognisable by others as their practice too, and is engaged in by the community as a whole, even if in different ways and at different times.

I’m not reading just so that I can check off days on the calendar - I am seeking to grow. I do not just go through the motions - I remind myself that this is

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God’s word, I ask God to speak to me; I can tell the story that makes this practice hang together as a meaningful thing to do. Suddenly deciding at half past three on a given Wednesday to read a book on beekeeping is not the same kind of thing, even though it also involves reading. Practices are things we do over time, in community, in pursuit of shared visions of the good.

Schools are made not only of ideas and curriculum plans, but of practices, the ongoing rhythms of what we do together.

In the secondary school that I attended, scores for quizzes were regularly read out from the front of the room, with names, in ascending order. I learned that learning was a competition, and that another student’s failure contributed to my success. Another school relies heavily on multiple choice and word-matching tests. Students soon figure out that they do not have to think that much about the material because they will likely only be asked to recall it in order to gain high scores. A third school generally arranges the furniture in straight rows facing the front. Teachers and students come to take it for granted that teaching and learning has to be directed from the front of the classroom. What drives our choices is often less our philosophical reflections, and more the unexamined network of practices in which we are embedded.

Practices and Christian education What does that have to do with Christian education?2 Well, imagine a teacher who becomes exercised about the degree to which her students are caught up in the frantic pace of modern life. It seems they are always rushing from one activity to the next, never taking time to reflect, to rest. They need to take greater heed of the importance of Sabbath to the Christian life, the importance of having a time when we lay down our frenetic efforts to secure our own existence and allow God to be the one holding the world together. (If this question has never arisen in our school, perhaps that too is a symptom of allowing a good and proper focus on beliefs to eclipse needed attention to practices.) What is our teacher to do?

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…practices are not quite the same thing as behaviours. A behaviour might be a mindless one-off incident. A practice is at some level intentional…

Well, she could plan a series of classroom devotions about Sabbath in scripture, or perhaps (lest it seem like merely a pious add-on) she could develop a whole unit to be taught in class exploring the theology of Sabbath in relation to modern culture. We can picture her choosing biblical texts to display, collecting examples to reinforce her argument, designing handouts that lay out the theological arguments for the role of Sabbath in a Christian view of the world, composing questions for class discussion about how we use our discretionary time. Perhaps we can hear her carefully explaining, then passionately exhorting her students to live more intentionally, more christianly.

All of this might be a good thing, a very good thing even. Notice, however, that so far it is all focussed on conveying information and on exhortation.

Perhaps she takes a different approach.3 Instead of preparing talks and handouts, she decides to restructure her course so that is it not feasible for her students to work for her on Sundays. She plans her homework assignments so that they are always due to be handed in on Friday, or electronically by Saturday evening. She makes sure that no new assignment is known to the students before Monday morning. She insists on strict deadlines, with serious penalties for letting the task run past Saturday evening. As the semester progresses, her students discover that for this class at least there is no way to work for class credit on Sundays. Notice that we have shifted the emphasis here from information and exhortation to behaviour. Rather than just telling the students that they should each live more faithfully, the teacher

has created a shared learning structure within which there is a built-in bent towards obedience that operates at the level of the whole group. This is a simple, small instance of how one might begin to build shared practices.

Let’s pull it apart a little further, though.

As we saw above, practices are not quite the same thing as behaviours. A behaviour might be a mindless oneoff incident. A practice is at some level intentional - it involves a shared story, a shared imagination that helps make it a coherent, meaningful practice rather than just a collection of movements that happen to take place one after the other. Our imaginary teacher’s second plan might count as a practice at some level - she has a narrative about Sabbath that makes sense of it, and the learners are being caught up in a communal set of moves that will help shape their sensibilities. But it risks falling short of being fully-flowering shared practice as long as the students are not invited into the narrative. Left at the level of homework instructions, it might end up as little more than behaviour modification, with little investment from the students in the practice of Sabbathkeeping (which is about more than avoiding maths homework).

Suppose, then, that our teacher decides to combine her first and second approaches. She decides to invite the students with all the winsomeness and creativity she can muster into an account of life in which God calls us to Sabbath - AND she implements a homework policy that supports this way of living through shared behaviour patterns by refusing to claim a right to students’ time on a Sunday. She is careful, moreover,

not to settle for an inspiring talk in the first week and rely on memory for the rest of the semester. She understands that building a shared imagination in a group is a gradual process of alignment, and so she adopts a strategy of taking frequent opportunities to graciously remind her students that part of the agenda for the semester is to learn to live Sabbath, and that that is why the homework is once again due Saturday.

Sometimes on Fridays she mentions big questions about life before God that she plans to spend some time thinking about on Sunday, and suggests that others join her. Sometimes on Mondays she shares something that came from spending time the day before meditating on a text or praying over a situation, and invites students to do the same.

Sometimes during the week she draws students’ attention briefly to how the practice of Sabbath might make us view some other aspect of our culture differently. While doing her best to avoid becoming drearily moralistic, and certainly seeking to avoid a tone of ‘I-know-how-to-do-this-and-you-youthof-today-need-to-shape-up’, she works to weave a consistent story through the semester - and she polices the deadlines to support it. What she is doing now is building shared practice.4 A shared practice is a structure over time that we live in together and narrate to one another until we have become different people from when we started. It creates a space into which we invite God’s work in us.

Practices across the curriculum The Sabbath theme is, of course, just an example. We could explore others across the curriculum. Suppose, for instance, we decide that learning a foreign language in a Christian school should be thought of in terms of loving strangers (Leviticus 19:34-35, Matthew 25:35).5 We could – and should – talk to students about this, but we would also need to look at things like whether most of the utterances practised in class begin with ‘I’, whether the activities have students talking about themselves most of the time, or whether the interactions with others that are practised are mostly to do with buying consumer goods. We might want to consider whether the pictures of foreigners in the textbook are capable of evoking empathic connection, or whether they are mostly cartoons and stock photos. We might want to consider how the balance between learning to say what I want to say and learning to listen

to others is playing out. Here again, if we want to move towards a Christian pedagogy then our shared practices are important, not just the words that we layer over the top of them.

Where will we place the chairs, which pictures will we use, which question should we ask first, how will we manage time – patterns of practice are built up out of these small choices.

Steps towards a Christian practice of teaching

Building Christian educational practices is unlikely to happen by each of us sitting staring at blank sheets of paper trying to reinvent our courses out of our own individual creativity. Shared practices grow in community. This means that school communities need to find ways of enabling teachers to renew their practice together. There are also resources beyond the individual school.

In a recent project a group of Christian educators and curriculum developers built an extensive online resource based on the approach described above. If you visit www.whatiflearning.co.uk/ you will find not only some more reflections on teaching as a Christian practice, but also more than a hundred examples from across the curriculum and the age range of teachers connecting their Christian faith to classroom practices.

These are accompanied by an extensive strategy bank and a collection of training resources, all freely accessible.

Addressing teaching and learning in this way involves at least three basis steps.

First, there is the question of seeing anew – whether it’s Sabbath or loving strangers or seeking justice or celebrating the natural world as belonging to God, there needs to be some reflection on what the basic story is around which we are looking to build shared imagination. How do we want ourselves and our learners to see things differently as a result of our practices together?

Second, there is the question of choosing engagement, choosing to engage together around the core vision and choosing how to engage.

This involves not just talking about the beliefs and values that concern us, but figuring out the ways in which we and our students will actually engage with them, and engage with one another around them. Will this involve sitting and listening, talking to one another, engaging with people outside the school, changing habits…how will we live into this learning together?

Third, there is the question of reshaping practice, harnessing all of the practical details of the learning environment in ways that support the vision and engagement that we are trying to choose.

My original, simple, point was this: Christian teachers and Christian schools need to attend carefully to practices and what is Christian about them if they are to make better headway with developing Christian pedagogy, rather than just adding Christian information to the curriculum or talking about Christian beliefs. I have tried to unpack some of what that might imply, and to point to some practical resources and ways of making headway. The next steps can only happen in your, and my, school community.

…practices are not quite the same thing as behaviours. A behaviour might be a mindless one-off incident. A practice is at some level intentional…

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David Smith

Endnotes

dsmith@calvin.edu

1 For those with an appreciation for the precision of philosophical prose, here’s perhaps the most often cited definition of practices, from Alasdair MacIntyre’s book After Virtue:

David I. Smith is Director of the Kuyers Institute for Christian Teaching and Learning and Director of Graduate Studies in Education at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA. He has taught in both secondary and higher education contexts, and has published numerous books and articles on language education and on Christian education more generally. He serves as Senior Editor of the Journal of Education and Christian Belief. His recent books include Learning from the Stranger: Christian faith and Cultural Diversity (Eerdmans, 2009) and (with James K. A. Smith) Teaching and Christian Practices: Reshaping faith and Learning (Eerdmans, 2011).

By a ‘practice’ I am going to mean any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realised in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended.

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 187.

2 For a much more detailed version of this argument (in a more academic register), see David I. Smith & James K. A. Smith, Teaching and Christian Practices: Reshaping Faith and Learning (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011).

3 I owe this example to my colleague Kurt Schaefer.

4 For a detailed account of this process of building shared imagination and shared practice in a group setting, see Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

5 See David I. Smith and Barbara Carvill. The Gift of the Stranger: Faith, Hospitality, and Foreign Language Learning. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000.

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Window on CEPA An example of a recent discussion on the CEPA general discussion forum Hi everyone, Sitting here in a coordinators’ meeting at the moment and we are looking at whether or not it is helpful for students to be listening to music during class on their iPods or other personal devices.

I would be interested to hear what policies other schools have in place regarding this issue. What problems have you faced? Do you have a policy you could share with us? Do you have any advice?

Thanks in advance, Pete Hi Pete At the last couple of schools I’ve been at we’ve allowed senior students to listen to music in study periods in the library. Whilst some would consider this distracting it actually helps other students to not be distracted by their peers. After an initial phase it tends to settle into a pattern of those who like it use it and those who don’t work without their music.

Will be working through this question and a number of others as we aim to roll out iPads more throughout the school and technology becomes more prevalent in every room. For some students it may aid their learning again to have distractions put aside and listen to music.

What about recording the instruction part of the lesson to view / review at home? The challenge will be training our students for the world they are living / going to live in rather than the world that we grew up in. How will we train students to moderate technology, utilise its benefits, avoid its excesses, use it as part of their worship filled response to God rather than worshipping it…

An interesting discussion in the light of catering for multiple learning needs and styles in the classroom as well.

I don’t know how many of you have read any of Todd Whittaker’s books but he consistently asks how the decisions we make are looking after our ‘superstars’ - best teachers, best students .... and have we got the policies that allow them to fly rather than trying make rules to contain those at the other end of the spectrum. An interesting filter to use on policy decisions I’ve found.

Would love a developed policy if another school has one!

Geoff

We allow our year 11 and 12 students to listen to music, with ear phones, in study periods in the library. They need to sign an acceptable use form first. Like Geoff, we have found that some students listen and others don’t.

Margaret Really helpful beginnings. A few of the issues we are working through include: • Students bringing inappropriate content on their iPods etc - we lose a certain level of control. Is this our problem, or an issue that their parents should be worrying more about (especially in regard to students only listening to their own music - that is the intention).

• Should students only be using them in study periods, and should they be banned from the playground? Is there a place for students going on with quiet work in class, being allowed to listen to music if they will be less distracted than being a distraction to others in class?

• Is it an easy behaviour dissipater for teachers?

Are we letting them off the hook?

• If we allow students to use iPods from time to time in class, what impact will it have on students then asking mum and dad to buy them one? It could potentially become something that becomes a burden for parents if we don’t handle the issue carefully?

• Should we be training students to sit and work without assistance? Is there some “preparation for life after school” lesson to be learned here?

Thanks in advance for lending your wisdom.

Isn’t it wonderful to be part of a wider Christian community together. Blessings all :-) Pete

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What if we could develop resources

to transform

teaching?

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If you pick up any secondary languages textbook and flick through it, you will soon discover that it’s all about ‘me’. How can I get about in the country I’m visiting? Where can I find a decent restaurant to fill my tummy? What time can I catch the next bus to the museum? But what if this notion was turned on its head and the emphasis became the other person? In the balmy Swiss summer of 2009, a group of Christian educators gathered to hear Dr David Smith give his keynote address in a small town near Vevey, on the shores of Lake Geneva. The occasion was the EurECA conference (European Educational Christian Association) and I was honoured and privileged to have my thinking and pedagogy challenged by David’s teaching.

Why and how was ‘What if Learning’ developed?

The Bible has much to say about welcoming the stranger among us (Deuteronomy 10:19; Romans 12:13) and David shared how this truth had niggled away at his thinking for some time.

As a teacher of secondary languages, he found it difficult to reconcile the approach taken by text book authors with his understanding of the Bible’s teachings. A similar situation exists with maths text books which emphasise using mathematics for our own gains. In fact, take practically any area of the primary school curriculum and often the same is true. We teach students how to satisfy their own needs and wants; we show them how to use modes of transport to get themselves around; they are taught about the people in the community who are there to help them, and so on.

For many of us the conference was a watershed, as we were all challenged right down to the very core of what drives our individual pedagogies.

At the conclusion of the conference, a small group of us stayed on for a few more days at the invitation of Dr Smith and Dr Trevor Cooling, to toss around the question: What if we could develop a resource to help teachers transform their teaching? What would the resource look like? Who would be its main audience?

What scope might it have? What if it could challenge teachers to see their subject areas through a different lens?

What if the subject was the learner and not the content? And so David’s and Trevor’s shared vision was embraced by the group, but as we left for our respective home countries, we were none

the wiser for how to take the concept from vision to venture!

Around twelve months later, I was part of a small international writing team that met for an intensive three weeks at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Together we represented the Anglican Education Commission in Australia, Transforming Lives from the Stapleford Centre in the UK and the Kuyers Institute in the US. Our brief was to make the vision a reality and it was decided that a website would give the resource the widest access. But as you would appreciate, “Let’s develop an online resource!” rolls off the tongue much more easily than in practice. It took a dedicated team many, many hours of labour to make it a reality.

In its early stages, we had been asking, “What if …?” and so it seemed fitting that the website be named What if Learning.

The website was launched in early 2012 and many schools in Sydney, in the UK and the US are well underway in embracing it as part of their school’s culture. It is a free resource, available to all in any way involved in Christian education. There are two versions of the website, one tailored for US schools, and the other for the UK and Australian contexts.

What If Learning arises out of the Charis Project on spiritual and moral development in schools which was based at the UK Stapleford Centre in the 1990s and out of more recent work on teaching and Christian practices based at the Kuyers Institute in Michigan.

It has been developed to support schools that aspire to offer a distinctively Christian teaching and learning experience.

What are the basic tenets of What if Learning?

What if Learning assumes that, as Christian educators, we know that a Christian understanding of life should make a difference to what happens in classrooms. The sad reality is that in many schools which align themselves with the Christian faith, teachers are unsure about what this should look like.

The What if Learning approach consists of three broad steps: 1. Seeing anew This first step encourages teachers to look at the material or activity as if looking through a different lens or pair of glasses. It may be that the teacher considers how the lesson or topic fits within the big picture of God’s people in God’s world, under God’s rule. It could be that the teacher seeks to take the emphasis of self and shift it onto others. It could be that the teacher wishes to take the students through a new ‘doorway’ to the unit, introducing it in such a way that the student is in no doubt about how this topic area is part of God’s world.

2. Choosing engagement In this step we consider how we help students to engage with what is being learned. It describes the ways in which they participate.

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The What if Learning website is intentionally built around concrete examples of teachers connecting Christian faith with their teaching There are many possible ways of engaging, such as listening quietly, vigorous discussion, answering questions, writing prose or poetry, responding through pictures or music, taking part in role-play, doing independent research, collaborating with others, helping fellow learners, praying for one another, looking for life applications, and so on. For any given lesson, teachers choose the ways of engaging that best fit the purpose.

3. Reshaping practice At this point the focus is on what teachers do in order to reflect their new way of seeing in their teaching. It is changing existing habits and practice to work with a new perspective. Ways of reshaping practice might include changing the layout of the classroom, altering an approach, attending to the atmosphere and ethos of a lesson, changing an emphasis, selecting different resources, adjusting student interaction, encouraging questions and making connections. For any given lesson teachers need to examine their own teaching habits and reshape their practice in ways that best suit their new way of seeing that lesson.

On the website, the above steps are shown through concrete examples at both primary and secondary levels.

Each of the more than one hundred examples is framed around the question “What if…?” The examples have been

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selected not as recipes or lesson plans, but to inspire and motivate teachers to try something differently. At the heart of each example is a story of how teaching can be designed to be distinctively Christian in a particular topic or lesson.

In addition, teachers can see how it fits within a framework of Christian faith, hope and love. It is possible to browse deeper into each example to have terminology explained, to find out more about the topic, and to explore ways of further developing the concept.

Who can use the resource?

The What if Learning website is intentionally built around concrete examples of teachers connecting Christian faith with their teaching.

However, the examples were not chosen at random. Informing the examples, as well as the broader approach and its suggested strategies, is a coherent way of thinking about the relationship of faith to education that emerges from existing work in educational theory and curriculum development. While this site does not attempt to be a theoretical resource, you can explore summaries of some of the key ideas underpinning the approach and some key questions that are raised by it.

The website’s layout is user-friendly and navigation around it is very straightforward. It has been written with busy teachers in mind. It is widely cross-referenced to other parts of the

website and to relevant, helpful aspects.

Containing hyperlinks to associated websites and resources, it has been designed for dipping into and out of, but do be warned that once you enter it, you quickly become consumed with all it has to offer!

One very useful feature of the resource is the training packages. If you are a leader and wishing to lead a training session with your staff, or involved in in-service training or teacher education, you will find resources for presenting the ideas on this site and suggestions for group activities to help groups of teachers engage with the material.

Handouts, activities and PowerPoint presentations are all included and are free to reproduce and use.

How has What if Learning been implemented in schools?

Several Australian schools have adopted the What if Learning approach schoolwide. Much of its appeal is its ease of use and compatibility with teachers new to Christian teaching. Some schools have opted to have outside assistance to get the concept rolling and gathering momentum, through the Anglican Education Commission. My role as Curriculum Consultant K-6 has seen me meeting with whole schools, stage groups and even individuals who would like some mentoring through the process. Here is one school’s experience:

…. the process of seeing anew was thought provoking, engaging and an eye opener. It is abundantly clear that to reflect a distinctly Christian worldview we have to do curriculum differently, reshaping language, purpose and teaching methods. We found the What if Learning website an excellent resource on this journey and will keep coming back to it for inspiration and practical direction for lessons and programs.

– Garry Brown OAM, Headmaster, Mosman Preparatory School Rather than having a one-off session of input, schools have opted to ‘spend a year in What if Land’ (please note that this not an ‘official’ term but one created by me!) so as to gain the greatest benefits. This prolonged approach has enabled teachers to take time to engage in reflective thinking about their own pedagogy and to receive assistance and support. It would typically involve a gathering of staff once or twice a term and encourages frequent ideas exchanges or ‘showcase’.

When would be a good time to get started on What if Learning?

The timing is ideal for Christian teachers and schools to explore all that What if Learning has to offer. As the implementation of the Australian Curriculum bears down upon us, there will be a great flurry of unit development over the next few years.

There is no better time than now to ensure you lay the biblical foundations and show your students how “… in Him all things hold together.” (Colossians 1:17).

Consider for a moment: • What if maths created a community in which all could achieve?

• What if students learnt about serving through studying transport?

• What if learning about the environment led to a sense of awe and wonder?

Alison Wheldon alison.wheldon@youthworks.net www.whatiflearning.net.au Alison has worked for many years as a teacher in the public and Christian sectors and most recently as Head of Primary at Richard Johnson Anglican School in Sydney’s west. She holds a Master’s degree from the National Institute for Christian Education. In recent years, as well as working as the Primary Curriculum Consultant for the Anglican Education Commission, she has been one of the lead writers of the revised CEP Connect materials used by teachers in Anglican, Christian and government schools throughout Australia and New Zealand.

She is one of the co-developers of the What if Learning website which is being accessed worldwide. She enjoys working with teachers in and across schools on projects designed to authentically embed their Christian faith within the students’ learning.

• What if your everyday classroom practices pointed students to Christ?

• What if you embraced What if Learning?

Through fervent prayer and commitment to a process of change, these teachers have become ‘fire-lighters’ in their school, sharing their journey with colleagues and in turn being mentors for others to transform their teaching

I was recently approached by two teachers from one school that had felt dissatisfied with their current HSIE curriculum focus and sought guidance on how their faith could be embedded into it. Over a cuppa, we considered how they could see things anew, what practices they would like to see change, and how they could engage themselves and their students in the

change. Through fervent prayer and commitment to a process of change, these teachers have become ‘fire-lighters’ in their school, sharing their journey with colleagues and in turn being mentors for others to transform their teaching.

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How does teaching as a Christian practice impact the classroom?

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The ideas that follow outline a plan to introduce, implement and sustain some of the key ideas presented in this course to enhance teaching as a Christian practice at Maranatha Christian School, a two campus school, across 3 locations in the south eastern suburbs of Melbourne, Australia, with over 1100 students from Early Learning (Pre-Prep) to Year 12.

In the past, as I have reflected on what it means to be a Christian educator, much of my thinking has centred on the development of a biblical worldview and the modelling of Christian character. I have given very little thought to what might be Christian about pedagogy or how teaching and learning are supposed to work in a Christian school and how this is connected to what happens in the classroom. Recently I have been challenged to consider the difference a commitment to Christian practices might make to the practices of a classroom and therefore to students’ learning.

In July, 2012, a group of Australian Christian educators participated in a professional development intensive course at Torrens Valley Christian School in Adelaide. The course, usually delivered at the Kuyers Institute, Calvin College, USA, led by Dr David Smith, explored what it might mean to approach teaching as a Christian practice.

In preparation for exploring how we might approach teaching as a Christian practice at Maranatha, we shared with our curriculum and faculty team leaders some of the ideas David Smith presented to us, such as the importance of building up a shared imagination through the use of metaphors, using the examples of gardens and bread. We also explored the idea of how language students could see learning language as being ‘hospitable to foreign people’. We discussed Carolyne Call’s article The Rough Trail to Authentic Pedagogy: Incorporating Hospitality, Fellowship, and Testimony into the Classroom and considered what would be different about our teaching if we thought of ourselves as a host and of our students as guests.

One of the four staff members from Maranatha Christian School who participated in the David Smith Intensive, read Teaching and Christian Practices: Reshaping Faith and Learning

by James K.A. Smith and David I. Smith and he trialled some principles from the book in his classroom teaching. He shared at a whole staff gathering how the challenge was in the reflective process of his own practices as it stretched him to think about his pedagogy. This included the way he spoke, sat, stood, greeted, moved, presented, managed, approached his students and so on. He shared that he discovered that it placed his movements as an educator as the source of formation; that he found

himself observing his own teaching as he taught and that it helped him to actively think about his teaching practice and the messages he is giving outside the cognitive. Our Principal was challenged by this presentation and responded by purchasing a copy of Teaching and Christian Practices: Reshaping Faith and Learning for every staff member to read.

During 2013 we will introduce a whole school professional learning focus of Christian practices. Professional Learning Teams will be formed and some possible Professional Learning Plans may include teams: • Reading and discussing texts such as Finding our way again by Brian McLaren or Teaching and Christian Practices: Reshaping Faith and Learning by James K.A. Smith and David I. Smith.

• Exploring websites that focus on a Christian way of teaching such as www.whatiflearning.co.uk, www.whatiflearning.com or www.johnshortt.org.

• Revising a documented unit of work, focussing on practices. For example, adding in a column called ‘repertoire’ and building a list of the way we do things such as handing in homework on Fridays.

• Choosing one class where the teacher imagines themselves as being the host and their students as being guests.

• Reading The Peacemaker, by Ken Sande or using the Resolving Everyday Conflict resource materials, focussing on the Christian practice of peacemaking.

• Focussing on spiritual reading.

Readings will also be set from Teaching and Christian Practices: Reshaping Faith and Learning for Faculty Team Leaders and Primary Curriculum Leaders to discuss when they meet with our Head of Teaching and Learning three times each term. The discussion of each chapter will be led by a different person and these leaders will be encouraged to share the chapters they read with their faculty or primary teams and encourage them to try some of the ideas presented.

I plan to begin exploring the Christian practice of hospitality with the 13 people on my primary staff team and to a lesser extent the primary students, parents and the wider staff team. In preparation for focussing on hospitality it will be necessary for me to ask myself some specific questions.

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How would my leadership be different if I thought of myself as a host and my primary staff as guests? What would hospitality look like when I engage with my primary staff both individually and as a group? Do I ask them questions about their lives outside of school and then remember to ask them how they are going with these things when I see them next? How am I intentional about encouraging each one of them in their work as teachers? How will I respond when I start to experience the cost associated with being hospitable?

Carolyne Call in her article, The Rough Trail to Authentic Pedagogy: Incorporating Hospitality, Fellowship, and Testimony into the Classroom, defines hospitality as “the physical manifestation of welcome” (Call, 2011, p. 64). As a manifestation is a demonstration, it follows that hospitality can only be shown through doing specific things that are welcoming. One of the things that I could do is to provide food at staff meetings. A photo could be taken of our primary team and a framed copy given to each person. Primary staff could be invited to put the photo on their desk to serve as a visual reminder for them that they are part of a team, prompting them to pray for the team or to send a note of encouragement to one of their team members.

Brian McLaren says, “The most important things I’ve learned have come through a person who modelled a practice and then explained it to me, encouraged me to try it, and sometimes checked in later to see how I was doing” (McLaren, 2008, p.64). As the practice of hospitality is modelled to members of the staff team, and ideas are shared with them as to what hospitality might look like in their classrooms and amongst their colleagues and families of the children they teach, they may be encouraged to try it. This could include suggestions as simple as teachers being intentional about making eye contact with each student and greeting them when they mark the roll to welcome them into their classroom.

Carolyne Call says that it was her commitment to Christian practices that enabled her to continue to be hospitable with her students. She says, “that genuine hospitality requires an orientation of the heart, and that this orientation requires practice and prayer to maintain” (Call, 2011, p76). I anticipate that a key factor that will influence my ability to practise

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I will continue the practice of giving thanks or gratitude by counting my blessings and being intentional about not turning blessings into entitlements or taking blessings for granted hospitality will be the development of my own set of Christian practices. I expect that my commitment to these Christian practices will be crucial in order for me to sustain being hospitable.

I will start by praying for each of the primary staff by name each week. I will also commit to reading 1Corinthians 13 each day until I ‘learn it by heart’ and begin to see my spiritual life as a ‘way of love’. If my practices don’t help me to become loving then according to Paul in 1 Corinthians 13 they are worthless. In addition to this I will continue to read through the entire Bible but at a much slower pace than suggested by Wayne Cordeiro in his book The Divine Mentor.

Wayne’s program is designed to take you through the entire Bible in a year but I have found over the past year, reading the amount of scripture suggested has not allowed me enough time for reflection. I will follow each day’s Bible reading by journalling using the SOAP (Scripture, Observation, Application, Prayer) method of Bible study but will not do this on a daily basis. I will however read the daily devotional Jesus Calling by Sarah Young which focusses on enjoying peace in God’s presence.

I will continue the practice of giving thanks or gratitude by counting my blessings and being intentional about not turning blessings into entitlements or taking blessings for granted. I aim to sustain the practice of gratitude by continuing to keep a gift journal in which I list the gifts I already have. I was inspired to do this after reading Ann Voskamp’s book One thousand Gifts. I have chosen to commit to these practices as spiritual reading and studying, prayer journalling and gratitude come under the category of contemplative practices

as these practices help those who commit themselves to them to “improve or sustain the health and well-being of their souls” (McLaren, 2008, p.91).

Palmer (1983) wrote hospitality involves “receiving each other, our struggles, our newborn ideas with openness and care” (p.65). To encourage staff to “receive each other” more we will hold primary staff meetings in a different primary teacher’s classroom each week. We will start the meeting by asking the teacher whose classroom it is to share a bit about how they are going and how their class is going and ask them to share their struggles as well as their successes.

Everyone will then have an opportunity to pray for this teacher and to thank God specifically for the contribution that they make to the team.

I will practise hospitality with primary students in various ways. I will invite one primary student from each of the nine primary classes to have morning tea with me at the end of each week. During morning tea we will sit in a circle and each student will introduce themselves to the other students and tell them a bit about themselves. We will then chat about some of the things we have found out about each other. I will also continue my practice of hand delivering a birthday card to each primary student on their birthday. Before school started I visited each of our Prep students for 2013 in their homes. I sent out a letter addressed to each Prep child in early January telling them how excited we are that they will be joining us at Maranatha this year and asking if I could visit them at home. I then phoned home in midJanuary and made a time to visit.

Although I have visited Prep children in their homes during the summer holidays for the past three years, this year I approached these visits specifically as an act of hospitality as I welcomed the children starting Prep, and their families, into our school community.

I plan to extend hospitality to parents in three main ways. I will learn the names of any primary parents and siblings I don’t know so I am able to use their name when I greet them. I will be more intentional about being out in the school yard at the start and end of the day so I can greet parents and students as they come to and from school. During the year I plan to phone each primary parent to ask them if there’s anything I can do for them to serve them better.

At a campus level, the Christian practice of spiritual reading will be introduced.

The Cardinia Campus staff team at Maranatha will begin a devotional program that will take us through the Bible in two years. Staff will form prayer triplets, ideally made up of a primary team member, a secondary team member and a support staff team member. At the beginning of the year, prayer triplets will nominate a book of the Bible, or section of scripture to lead the rest of the staff in devotions.

Each prayer triplet will have two five minute time slots and one 20 minute time slot per week, to ‘teach’ that part of scripture. As part of this scripture reading program we will be intentional about teaching and practising how to read christianly. We will explore the traditional Benedictine practice of scriptural reading, meditation and prayer intended to promote communion with God and to increase the knowledge of God’s word known as lectio divina.

Eugene Peterson says, “Lectio divina is not a methodical technique for reading the Bible. It is a cultivated, developed habit of living the text in Jesus’ name” (Peterson, 2008, p116). With this in mind, we will encourage staff to read in a way that is repeated and ongoing; slow and attentive; communal, contextual, charitable and humble with our goal always being to seek transformation.

Staff who would like to explore lectio divina further will be provided with the opportunity to be part of a Professional Learning Team in term 3 to explore the Christian practice of spiritual reading.

They will be encouraged to ask what our reading practices are and investigate what it means to be a Christian reader of a text.

For the past five years at Cardinia campus we have been intentional about developing a culture of peace amongst our students. In 2013, all staff at Maranatha will take part in a full day personal peacemaking training day at the beginning of term 3. This material will be presented by PeaceWise, a national Christian peacemaking organisation dedicated to helping people learn and apply biblical principles in seeking Christian solutions to the conflicts we encounter in all aspects of daily living.

Staff will be challenged to adopt their own set of Christian practices, to examine their own learning practices and to consider if their current practices need adjusting. As our students are already part of a community of practice, staff will be challenged to consider whether this community of practice is a plausible one for students to belong to.

As we continue to think through how teaching and learning are supposed to

I will continue the practice of giving thanks or gratitude by counting my blessings and being intentional about not turning blessings into entitlements or taking blessings for granted

work in a Christian school and how this is connected to what happens in the classroom my hope is that we will gain a clearer understanding of what it means to be Christian educators.

Judy Linossier JLinossier@maranatha.vic.edu.au Judy lives with her husband Andre and six children in Melbourne, Australia.

Judy began teaching as the Grade Prep/1/2 teacher at Ringwood District Christian School in 1986. She then taught Year 8 at Mount Evelyn Christian School. In 1989 she took up the role of Head Teacher in the founding year of Lighthouse Christian College.

Judy is currently Head of Primary at Maranatha Christian School – Cardinia campus.

Bibliography Call, C. (2011). The Rough Trail to Authentic Pedagogy: Incorporating Hospitality, Fellowship, and Testimony into the Classroom. In D.A. Smith & J.K.A. Smith, Teaching and Christian Practices: Reshaping Faith and Learning (pp. 61-79). U.S.A: Eerdmans.

Cordeiro, W. (2007). The Divine Mentor.

Bloomington, Minnesota: Bethany House.

McLaren, B. (2008). Finding our way again: The return of the ancient practice.

Nashville, Tennessee: Thomas Nelson.

Palmer, P. (1983). To Know as We Are Known. San Francisco: Harper.

Peterson, E. (2008). Eat This Book: The Art of Spiritual Reading. Great Britain: Hodder and Stoughton.

Sande, K. (2004). The Peacemaker: A biblical guide to resolving personal conflict. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker.

Smith, D.A. and Smith, J.K.A. (2011).

Teaching and Christian Practices: Reshaping Faith and Learning. U.S.A: Eerdmans.

Voskamp, A. (2010). One Thousand Gifts.

Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan.

Young, S. (2004). Jesus Calling. Nashville, Tennessee: Thomas Nelson.

The Christian Teachers Journal May 2013

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Harry the teacher

S

tepping into our first class of Revolutions at the end of 2011, we as students had no idea what to expect. We had heard horror stories about the phenomenal amount of reading material in the course, while the threat of having to memorise infinite dates, names, quotes and events was terrifying. To an outsider, the coursework for ‘History of Revolutions’ seemed insurmountable. Thankfully, Mr Burggraaf was not an outsider, and to him the coursework was far from the most important component of the course.

As none of us had ever had him as a teacher before, we had no idea who this man was. I pictured him as an intellectually intimidating titan: Plato, but with more muscles. Yet, when I first saw him, he was sitting at his desk, gingerly tapping away at his keyboard, with a soft smile on his face.

We took our seats, and he stood up. I expected the same speech that I had received from my other teachers that day. Setting the tone for the rest of the year, Mr Burggraaf surprised me.

“Could a revolution happen in Australia?” He asked, leaning back against his desk.

We had no idea what the definition of a revolution was. Was it a trick question?

Was this our first SAC? My mind raced, I was terrified - and then somebody said something, followed by another person, and another. Soon enough, everybody was putting in, enjoying the lively discussion until Andrew said something that killed the discussion but gave everybody in the room a good chuckle, including Mr Burggraaf. For the first

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time, we had just experienced a classic ‘impromptu Burggraaf debate’, which would develop over the year to consume every spare moment of class time.

his face, and asked whether, quote: “We could decapitate him quickly?” In the next role play Mr Potamitas was given the role of Louis XVI.

We’d discuss everything, from economics and the justification of socialism to morality and philosophy.

Suddenly, a class which was meant to inform us about events that took place over 200 years ago was examining social justice in a modern setting, while listening to covers of Lady Gaga songs and Boney M.

Mr Burggraaf was a revolutionary.

He wasn’t aiming for a proletarian uprising, and certainly didn’t advocate a secular reformation, but what he thought and taught was about change.

He was far more concerned with his students’ eternal destinations than their university allocations, but remained intently interested in our hopes and aspirations. He aimed to create a change in perspective, a broadening of understanding. He didn’t want us to learn a couple of names and then forget them in a haze of post-exam euphoria.

He wanted to leave us with something — an idea — that we would move about and think over for years to come.

We did countless role plays taking on characters from the revolutions, constructed timelines and making mind maps. Through the year, Mr Burggraaf ’s love for revolutionary images and visual learning became infectious, and one by one we all fell in love with this teacher.

Through his inviting smile and passion for discussion, history became a bastion for independent thought and creativity, in the wasteland of rote learning and memorisation that was year 12.

When I asked him whether he enjoyed our dramatic production of Pride and Prejudice, he called it, and I quote, ‘a hoot’ — the greatest compliment I received regarding the performance.

He was a man of remarkable taste and humour, up with the latest movies and astonishingly well read. Incredibly funny, from time to time he would say something that would leave the class in stitches, most prominently on a sunny day in term two, when Potta stuck his head out of the window, mid-lesson, to yell at a year seven in the locker bays below. Mr Burggraaf leaned over to the rest of the class, collected around a central table with a worried look on

He described in our first lesson his love for art house movies, and encouraged us, as the future, to “make something happy”. I think that will be his legacy to me, and I don’t think that I’ll ever be able to forget his smile.

On the day that we heard that he had passed away, I realised I didn’t say goodbye to him. I simply said, “See you around Mr Burggraaf ”, as was my custom. There wasn’t a final goodbye or affirmation in it, just a promise to see him again. The more I think about it, the more I look forward to fulfilling my promise.

We give thanks to God for the gift of teaching through Mr Burggraaf Duncan Caillard Class of 2012

Harry Burggraaf always learning, constantly serving

M

y first experience of Harry was as a youth leader at the Oasis youth camp. This bold, creative, kind of skinny, smiling bloke just captured my attention as a 16 year old. Everyone knew him and there was a bit of excitement and difference about the way he led and challenged us.

Then came the years of Christian education which Harry embraced with as much passion as the youthwork years. His desire to see teachers engage with the whole biblical story, to see them think deeply about how a Christian worldview impacted their teaching became a mission for Harry.

I had the privilege of working with him closely as he taught new teachers through an induction program how they could work with a basic framework to apply a Christian perspective to their curriculum development. It was stimulating being at the back of the room! One of his favourite quotes was by a man named Karl Bath who stated “The Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other and never one without the other”. To be culturally informed and biblically informed at the same time was so important to Harry.

Harry was involved at Donvale Christian College for over 20 years. During this time he was the Deputy Principal focussing on the development of staff and equipping them with all kinds of PD to enrich their teaching. The Donvale staff members, I know, are grieving a friend, precious colleague and most effective leader. He was a popular teacher and had the ability to build strong relationships with his precious students. I had the privilege of working

with Harry at Donvale and saw how the staff loved and respected him.

From 1992 – 2009 Harry served on the editorial committee for the Christian Teachers Journal, a publication produced

by Christian Education National. During this time he provided much critique and influence in the development of the journal. He always made time to read, reflect and ponder such well thought out responses.

Another part of Harry’s involvement in Christian education was his work at Developing Leaders conferences. Always inspiring and sometimes annoyingly provocative, Harry would lead by example and encourage leaders to celebrate life, embrace the Saviour and affirm each other.

Every second year, Christian Education National in Victoria organises an Intensive Professional Development conference for all teachers to gather together over 3 to 5 days in some serious teaching, basically exploring deeper what it means to teach christianly.

Harry was instrumental in the starting up and the continuation of these conferences. In 2011 as 500 teachers gathered together to share and learn together, someone suggested that we pay honour to the work that Harry had done in getting the intensive off the ground.

This resulted in the development and singing of the ‘Harry Burggraaf chorus’ – not so different to the Hallelujah chorus, in fact the same tune but the words Harry-Burg-graaf replaced Hal-le-lu-jah. It was sung together by all 500 teachers. A wonderful tribute to a wonderful man.

parent partnership. Harry got me involved in working with parents in Christian education to inspire them about working in partnership with their schools and reminding them to be involved in the lives of their kids and the culture in which their kids are growing up. Often Harry would use the imagery of waterholes bringing cattle together in a land without fences in the outback as a picture of what we ought to do in our homes. Provide safe, refreshing ‘waterholes’ of comfort, familiarity, ‘welcomeness’ and love for our children.

The past year, though it brought partial retirement (which included priority time to be Grandad (Opa) to Spencer and Meeka), also included some part time teaching at Donvale, more teaching at Tabor College and some re-writing of units for the National Institute for Christian Education. Always learning, constantly serving.

The CEO of Christian Education National, Ken Dickens, reflected on Harry in a note to principals and leaders in Christian education stating that Christian education has lost a champion.

We have indeed. A champion in all respects. A champion for the cause of Christian education, a champion for the Christian walk, a champion for justice, and a hero in our minds.

Thank you Harry.

Michelle Dempsey CEN State Executive Officer, Victoria.

I guess one of the treasures for me was my collaboration with Harry around The Christian Teachers Journal May 2013

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A week with David I. Smith at Torrens Valley Christian School, South Australia

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David described the importance of reflecting on our practice… that the practice in and of itself contains the good that is desired While understanding worldview is important, Christian teaching can often be spoiled through the everyday practices of teaching and school life. So we were challenged to reflect on our sequence of teaching and assess whether our practice pushed students away from ego-centrism and toward ‘Christian’ values and virtues.

David introduced some contemporary sociologists to make clear the influence and formative power of practices. Many of us found this lesson either intellectually stimulating or intellectually numbing. Macintyre, in his work, After Virtue, outlined the importance of practices and the hidden ‘good’ within every practice. MacIntyre used the term ‘virtue’ to explain this inner good that accompanies any practice whether it be in our teaching or within a context of shared practices. Using MacIntyre, David described the importance of reflecting on our practice. He highlighted that the practice in and of itself contains the good that is desired and the importance of its transmission for the common good.

Another theorist, Wenger in Communities of Practice solidified much of what MacIntyre stated but brought a practical reflective depth to our own practice. Wenger used the following terminology that helped in this reflective process: Term

A

group of leaders and teachers from CEN schools around the country had the privilege of attending a week long intensive with Dr David Smith at Torrens Valley Christian School and the following reflection outlines some points of interest that many of us shared.

David began the intensive proposing that the current Christian education movement had ‘gaps in the wall’. He explained that for some time Christian schools have solely relied on ‘Christian worldview’ or ‘biblical knowledge’ to transform students for a life of service in the workplace.

Meaning

Community of practice:

All the people engaged in a practice.

Negotiation of meaning:

The objects around us – We negotiate what things mean (words, grades).

Regime of accountability:

Sense of feeling responsibility, accountability of social norms (not saying something).

Imagination:

Our sense of place in the world and the reason we do things. If the imagination is different then, the practice is different (story, narrative).

Shared imagination:

Shared imagination within a community.

Trajectory:

Everyone has a goal within a community- the continual movement of a person.

Shared repertoire:

The way we do things – not enforced.

Reification:

Philosophical term, ‘thing-i-fication’ – the process where you take an idea and turn it into a thing (ie, grades)

Participation:

Taking part.

Brokering:

Working out how to change within different contexts.

Figuring out the boundaries.

Identity of participation:

Who you are in different communities (church, sporting club).

Alignment:

The process by which we tune into each other.

Engagement:

Getting involved.

Multi-membership:

Belong to many different communities of practice.

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To substantiate David’s emphasis on teaching practice, he directed us to two historical sources in the hope of explaining the importance of shared imagination. The first was the father of western Christian education, John Amos Comenius. To our shame, there was some uncertainty amongst us as to who Comenius was. Born in Bohemia 1592, David explained that Comenius influenced by reformers (Luther and Calvin) advocated for a full-time compulsory system of education. In his work Pampaedia and The Great Didactic, Comenius desired that all people regardless of sex, nationality, class, age or status should be educated. His unrelenting passion for children to be educated was deeply entrenched in his sole belief that humanity was designed to ‘delight’ in God. The work of Comenius challenged our visionary passion to work toward effective Christian education and there was a sense of enjoyment watching the same passion in David.

The second source David used was the Bible. Using Scripture David challenged us with the idea of building a shared imagination in our schools and amongst colleagues. He asked, “If you were an ancient near eastern king or a Babylonian ruler, how would you explain or show the extent of your power?” Many of us replied, “Land, wealth, follower devotion, monuments” and of course someone had to say “hundreds of wives”. I wonder whether this might lead to poverty… just kidding!

As we reflected on this concept of power, David referred to Psalm 104, which states, Praise the Lord, O my soul, Oh Lord my God you are very great… v.10 He makes springs pour water into the ravines; it flows between the mountains. They give water to all the beasts of the field; the wild donkeys quench their thirst. The birds of the air nest by the waters; they sing among the branches. He waters the mountains from his upper chambers; the earth is satisfied by the fruit of his work.

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Toward the end of the week David shifted gears and focussed on our specific Christian practice. One that was memorable was built on the question, “what does it mean to read christianly?”

The Hebraic biblical image of power is found in the abundance of water and within the power to use water for the cultivation of land. Wealth and power is found in the blossoming of gardens.

Can you imagine a king showing their strength by pruning the hedges?

David explained his shared imagination by revealing a parallel in scripture between the king and the image of Adam in the Garden of Eden. God finds delight in Adam within the context of a flourishing garden. Adam is involved in the work of gardening and cultivation.

Likewise, humanity is God’s garden of delight and education is one way of imagining our practice. David used this garden imagery to ‘imagine’ how we might develop our teaching practice and suggested that perhaps this image of a garden could be used for staff development in the hope of obtaining a ‘community of shared practice’ which highlighted the values and virtues of our organisations.

Changing gears Toward the end of the week David shifted gears and focussed on our specific Christian practice. One that was memorable was built on the question, “what does it mean to read christianly?” David showed us short clips from two movies which gave a comparative analysis in the way we often approach written texts. He suggested that The Bourne Ultimatum is viewed efficiently, fast, once only and with an attitude of mastery. The second movie, Mongolian Ping Pong (what a great title) was intriguing, slow and mysterious.

Although one was entertaining, it was not long lasting. The other, Mongolian

Ping Pong lured the viewer to journey with the movie, carefully observing the scenes and approaching it with a childlike naivety. We were all challenged by the thought that schools and universities alike are pushing toward ‘consumerist’ reading rather than a reverential approach. The lesson for Christian teaching was to model ‘christianly’ reading. That is, slow and attentively; repeatedly, communally, contextually, charitably and humbly always seeking transformation.

Every book projects a way to read. Paul Griffiths wrote, Works that have been read only as a consumerist reader reads… sit inert upon the shelf, usually forgotten and remembered, if remembered at all, not for their flavour and fabric, but for their title and place of publication. The claims of such works are minimal and strictly instrumental.

The week went by quickly and the final day re-established much of what we learnt and practised. We were all given so much in this week and the words written here do not represent the depth of collegial learning that took place. Of course, some of our learning happened during our lovely trip through the Barossa Valley!

David was a gracious and personable teacher, his love for his work and contribution toward Christian education was one to be admired and respected.

Likewise, a special thanks to Fiona Partridge, the R-12 Coordinator for Torrens Valley Christian School, who went above and beyond the call of duty, organising accommodation, meals and tours. The hospitality shown was greatly appreciated by all and added value to our experience.

Some books that were recommended by David Smith were: DA Smith and JKA Smith, 2011 Teaching and Christian Practices: Reshaping Faith and Learning E Peterson 2005, Eat This Book: A Conversation on the Art of Spiritual Reading C Dykstra 2005, Growing in the Life of Faith: Education and Christian Practices JKA Smith 2009, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview and Cultural Formation A MacIntyre 1984, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory E Wenger 1999, Communities of Practice

David Lepileo DLepileo@maranatha.vic.edu.au David is married with two children and works at Maranatha Christian School as a history/ humanities teacher.

Davis is a member of the editorial committee of the Christian Teachers Journal

Expressions of Interest Journals Editor – Christian Teachers Journal and Nurture After many years of faithful service as editor of CTJ and Nurture, Suzanne Mitchell has announced she is leaving.

These publications have been significant in furthering an understanding of Christian education in Australia and internationally. We now, with God’s help, seek to find the right person to carry on the important work that Suzanne has done. The editor works with separate editorial committees for each publication and reports to the Executive Officer Communications of Christian Education National (CEN). The position is part-time and located at the National Office of CEN in Mulgoa, NSW (on the site of Nepean Christian School).

For further information or to express interest in the position, please contact: Ken Dickens (CEO) ken.dickens@cen.edu.au 02 47735800

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Ali Wilkinson commutes to INF’s Kathmandu office Photo: Matt Watson

INF is a Christian mission serving Nepali people through health and development work

The Christian Teachers Journal May 2013

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The ancient paths

What might it mean to approach teaching as a Christian practice?

Lessons learnt from the David Smith Intensive, Adelaide, July 2012

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“What are these people doing?” asked keynote speaker David Smith, as black and white images of serious European people, users of another language in an earlier time and foreign place, emerged and remained for considered examination.

With a shock of recognition, I knew exactly what they were doing. I, too, used their story, in the form of a German film, The White Rose, which re-enacted the Nazi resistance of these three students, who ultimately paid with their lives for their actions. Smith used the images in his undergraduate foreign language class in the USA. I used them in my year 10 English class at Torrens Valley Christian School in South Australia to expand the students’ understanding of the capacity of literature, in this case the adolescent novel The Wave, to encourage reflection about life and how to live it. These young German university students in a non-violent resistance group, The White Rose, reflected a Christ-like hope and suffering, serving the greater good in a valiant attempt to restore a fallen world in Nazi Germany. In a biblical way, their failure illuminated and heightened the spiritual resolution of their actions.

My incorporation of the film had been considered but unarticulated. It was an intuitive decision that felt right and resonated as a meaningful Christian worldview selection. Listening to David Smith explain the use of traditional Christian practices in education provided a valuable connecting link:

the terminology to articulate and apply systematically a range of Christian practices which had been found to bring believers closer to God in their faith communities over hundreds of years.

This was an ‘aha!’ moment.

However, if these practices were so effective, why were they no longer commonly practised? Many factors came into play: shifts in philosophical thinking, the increased secularisation of society, fragmentation of societies, wars, dislocation, increasing acceptance of relativism, a more consumer and production oriented society with a shift in educational outcomes from God and church centred to individual skill development, with never-ending consumption of heavily marketed goods and services. Very few randomly selected people today, in answer to the question, “What is the purpose of man/woman?” would be likely to provide the 16th century catechism response, “To glorify God and enjoy him forever.”

It was an immense relief to discover that I had instinctively approached teaching as a Christian practice and that there was a much bigger and already well explored palette of other Christian practices to apply.

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Craig Dykstra in his text, Growing in the Life of Faith (2005), identifies fourteen Christian practices: • worshipping together • telling the Christian story • interpreting scriptures • praying corporately and individually • confessing, forgiving and being reconciled • tolerating and encouraging each other in our work • acts of service • giving and receiving gifts • suffering with and for each other • providing hospitality and care • listening and talking attentively to each other • grappling to understand our context • criticising and resisting destructive powers • creating and maintaining social structures and institutions according to God’s will.

This, indeed, is the purpose of Christian spiritual practices: to draw nearer to God, to worship, to pray without ceasing in the daily round, to grow in humility and reflect the image of Christ

Others, such as Dorothy C Bass, have discussed practices such as observing the Sabbath, and if we are truly to approach teaching as a Christian practice, we need the rest, renewal, replenishment and the joy of a Sabbath lived to the specifications of our creator, who, himself, observed his work, saw that it was good and rested on the seventh day (Bass, 2010). When I was young the shops closed at midday on Saturday and did not reopen until Monday morning. This accommodated Saturday afternoon sport and ostensibly made it a lot easier to observe the Sabbath, both communally and individually. However, despite this seemingly accommodating structure, few seemed to observe the Sabbath with deliberate intent. Already a central focus on God the creator almighty had shifted for many people.

The advent of television in Australia also hastened the pace along this secular track. The internet, which offers an array of faith-based materials, also offers new temptations and often increased isolation or the lure of life in a galaxy of virtual worlds. Turning off the computer, the television, perhaps even the phone and the car for a space of time on the Sabbath may contribute to our capacity to teach as a Christian practice. Wendall Berry’s Sabbath poetry captures the synchronicity of work and rest, “When we work well, a Sabbath mood rests on our day, and finds it good.”

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This sense of shalom, of flourishing in educational ‘Gardens of Delight’ rather than suffering in the medieval “slaughterhouses of the mind” that thinkers such as Comenius (1592—1670) deplored, opened new educational possibilities which reflected man’s creator and drew students towards God. Comenius believed schools should train students to pursue pleasure that “the entire world will be a garden of delight for God, for people and for things” and this should be achieved through the “full power of development into full humanity not of one particular person, but of every single individual, young and old, rich and poor, noble and ignoble, men and women—in a word, every being born on earth, with the ultimate aim of providing education to the entire human race regardless of age, class, sex and nationality” (Comenius, 1650, cited by Smith, 2012). Comenius believed that God’s image could again be formed in humanity through education.

“He called his biblical philosophy Pansophia, integrating all wisdom, secular and sacred, into a biblical framework.” (Mangalwadi, 2011, p 214).

This pleasure is not a superficial result of entertainment but a seeking of virtue together in the Garden of Delight.

A journey such as this requires the nurturing of the teacher’s imagination, ideally within a community of practice, as well as a differentiated nurturing of the imaginations of the students, depending on the spiritual maturity of the students, an idea developed by the 12th century Abbott, Bernard of Clairvaux, who saw the students receiving sustenance from the teacher which was “trustworthy because it was from a trusted friend” (Smith, 2012).

Thus, our lessons must be intellectually digestible, so that everyone receives an appropriately sized serving. What is being served should appeal to and nourish the teacher as well.

“Taste the goodness of your Redeemer” (Anselm of Canterbury as referred to by Smith, 2012). This, indeed, is the purpose of Christian spiritual practices: to draw nearer to God, to worship, to pray without ceasing in the daily round, to grow in humility and reflect the image of Christ.

The practices are considered formative; we learn by doing and are shaped by our thoughts and actions. “‘God loveth adverbs’: it is how we do things that is

important” (Smith, 2012). Developing facility with Christian practices, like teaching itself, is a journey of incomplete mastery and ongoing, uneven development, but modelling this process of learning is valuable for the students as they learn and are formed by their own palette of Christian practices. As Smith explains, “the heart is desperately wicked” so a “part of the function of Christian practices is to reveal your failure, leading to confession of sin and our reliance on God” (Smith, 2012).

As educational practitioners, each alone as such in our classrooms, we are part of a wider Christian community which transcends time and space as we engage deeply through a suite of spiritual practices that can bring us into closer dependence upon and reverential worship of our Lord and Saviour: “Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls.” ( Jeremiah 6:16).

Lynda Pierce Lynda.pierce@tvcs.sa.edu.au Lynda is SOSE co-ordinator and senior school teacher at Torrens Valley Christian School in Adelaide.

References Bass, D.C., Ed, 2010, Practicing Our Faith, A Way of Life for a Searching People, 2nd Edition, John Wiley & Sons Inc, San Franciso, California.

Berry, W., Sabbath Poetry, www.jesusscribbles. wordpress.com/2012/09/02/sunday-poetrywendell-berry-on-the-sabbath, accessed 13 February 2013.

Dykstra, C.R., 2005, Growing in the Life of Faith, 2nd Edition: Education and Christian Practices, Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, Kentucky.

The Holy Bible, New International Version, 1984, Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

McLaren, B., 2008, Finding Our Way Again: the Return of the Ancient Practice, Thomas Nelson, Nashville, Tennessee.

Mangalwadi, V., 2011, The Book That Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilisation, Thomas Nelson, Nashville, Tennessee.

Rhue, M., 1994, The Wave, Puffin Books, London, England.

Smith, D., Speaker, Intensive Workshop, National Institute for Christian Education and CEN, Torrens Valley Christian School, Hope Valley, South Australia, July 16—20, 2012.

Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, film directed by Marc Rothemund, Germany, distributed by Zietgeist Films, USA.

Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls.

Jeremiah 6:16

The Christian Teachers Journal May 2013

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Epistemic humility:

engaging a Christian wor 28

The Christian Teachers Journal May 2013

rldview

Combined, my wife and I have taught at the collegiate level for nearly thirty years (I also taught at a Christian high school for one year). I teach philosophy, and Marybeth teaches English. Having the privilege of a wife who’s a fellow teacher and colleague is a remarkable blessing. We discuss pedagogy, classroom challenges, strategy, teaching innovations; we commiserate, we decompress, we rejoice with one another, and sometimes we mourn with one another.

One of our recurring discussions is how best to promote, promulgate, and inculcate a Christian worldview. We teach at a large evangelical university in the United States, and fostering a distinctively Christian understanding of the world is one of the school’s most important university-wide learning outcomes. Innovation is encouraged, workshops are directed toward this end, a new college within the university was formed to help make it happen, and extensive assessment is done to measure our progress. This article delves into this important matter of teaching Christian worldview. In an effort to help fellow Christian educators, what follows are some of the insights and challenges that we’ve experienced as we have attempted to teach Christian worldview both formally and informally.

A worldview features beliefs about God, reality, knowledge, human beings, and values. That’s the way Ron Nash puts it.

Or take this list of questions: • What is prime reality—the really real?

• What is the nature of external reality, that is, the world around us?

• What is a human being?

• What happens to a person at death?

• Why is it possible to know anything at all?

• How do we know what is right and wrong?

• What is the meaning of human history?

These seven questions are from The Universe Next Door by James Sire, a helpful book, chronicling, comparing

and contrasting a catalogue of worldviews.

In light of the importance of actually accomplishing this vital task of helping our students to see the world from a rich and sophisticated Christian worldview, we want to share a cross section of our experiences to make it clear some of the lessons that we as teachers have learned as we have set ourselves to this task. Although we teach at the tertiary level, this study is quite relevant to K-12, because we pick up where K-12 leaves off. We are convinced that more intentionality throughout the Christian education curriculum can help address the issues and problems we’re seeing among Christian college students.

Assessing worldview outcomes At our university we have intentionally set out to cultivate a Christian worldview among our students, particularly in the introductory philosophy course, the only course at our university intentionally designed to help students develop in every area of the Christian worldview learning outcomes. These outcomes include articulating and defending a Christian worldview, a worldview consisting of historically orthodox and substantively biblical insights on the basic makeup of the world. We typically employ a pre-test and post-test to gauge our students’ ability to reflect from a Christian perspective. In the past we’ve offered the students scenarios for their consideration, such as cases involving active and passive euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. Results were often disappointing; there’s hope and there’s been improvement with new

Students often neglected articulating a rational, broadly theological set of principles, opting instead to quote a series of Bible verses or use scripture in a superficial manner The Christian Teachers Journal May 2013

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The simplistic rejection of the secular mindset seems related to a quite ungracious and uncharitable depiction of secular people themselves

teaching strategies; but the job has proven more difficult in many ways than we’d first imagined.

Some of our salient observations in years past reflect perhaps the effects on our students of the aforementioned but all-too-common trivial understanding of worldview as conspicuously devoid of much rigor of thought or reflection.

Students often neglected articulating a rational, broadly theological set of principles, opting instead to quote a series of Bible verses or use scripture in a superficial manner. Many stated conclusions with little explanation of the thought process behind those conclusions. Several made the topic entirely spiritual, neglecting to engage in much ethical reflection, but rather putting the entire focus on the state of the suffering person’s soul. Whereas many students paid lip service to the difficulty of the questions, their answers betrayed that they actually thought each was a clear-cut question with obvious answers. Many students engaged heavily in anecdotal cases rather than more rigorous ethical reflection. In general, the critical thinking skills shown were in need of improvement.

Finally, some of the students counselled following the biblical mandate without attempting to spell out what that was or acknowledging any potential difficulty in discerning it. Suffice it to say, sometimes robust assessment measures can be as sobering as they are insightful.

Based on these results, the philosophy department recommended implementing various changes into the introductory philosophy course and broader curriculum. Firstly: critical thinking skills need to be emphasised much more heavily throughout the

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curriculum—probably in every class.

Training should be provided to faculty to help students think in higher order ways; the changes may require an alteration of the culture of the school toward a more rigorously academic paradigm. Every teacher should be encouraged to find innovative ways to do this as we begin to have this necessary conversation. It’s important that we tie critical thinking and Christian worldview initiatives together so the impression isn’t conveyed that we need more indoctrination into Christian teachings; the issue instead is reflective engagement from a thoughtful Christian perspective, which requires critical thinking skills. The issue is not merely more rote memorisation of ‘party’ lines.

Secondly: biblical principles must be taught to be applied intelligently, with demonstrable hermeneutical sophistication, less mechanically, so students are more aware of the possible distinction between biblical teachings and their interpretations.

Thirdly: students must be taught and see modelled, intellectual curiosity and humility to recognise that some questions are indeed difficult ones and require careful deliberation and a willingness to be engaged by the details rather than content to speak in generalities or settle for ‘pat’ answers.

Fourthly: a worldview emphasis should play an important role in our introductory philosophy and theology classes, especially as all the most fundamental questions of worldview tend to be deeply philosophical in nature (epistemic, metaphysical, and ethical). Fifthly: chapel services should occasionally feature rigorous Christian thinkers, leading Christian scholars

who can challenge our students to cultivate the life of the mind—within the parameters of classical orthodox Christianity. Too often we are not as effective as educators as we should be in enabling students to see the connections between the spiritual and academic.

A new approach Recently we effected a change in the nature of the assessment assignment.

Still offering a pre-test and post-test, we began to ask a new series of questions for their reflection. (Examples: What is a worldview? What are salient features of a Christian worldview?) Moreover, the exercise of analysing the results for assessment purposes revealed a number of interesting and illuminating facts about the way our students tend to think about issues of worldview. Such facts, gleaned from a collection and examination of thousands of samples over the last few years, include but are not limited to the following (several of which would provide fodder for considerably more close analysis): 1. By focussing on the worldview differences between Christians and secularists, the assignment reveals, and may even lend itself to the rejection of opposing views too simplistically and hastily.

There is too often a great deal of derogatory assertion with little solid argumentation to back it up.

2. It seems as if an important aspect of a thoughtful Christian worldview that is, among other things, incarnational and missional is a serious commitment to bridgebuilding. Castigating opposing views in the manner, as is often done in this assignment is more likely to burn bridges than build them.

3. Too little of what we attempt to model a more dialogical approach seems to be sticking. The simplistic rejection of the secular mindset seems related to a quite ungracious and uncharitable depiction of secular people themselves.

4. Uncharitable, unfair depictions of secularists go hand in hand, quite often, with at least implicit and often explicit characterisations of Christians in the most glowing of terms that smack of downright hubris—as if Christians are all wonderful people whereas secularist interlocutors are all God-hating miserable ones.

5. Students seem to think much more heavily in psychological than philosophical terms when discussing the origins of worldview. They often talk about where beliefs come from in terms of upbringing, conditioning, and socialisation rather than talking about the evidence for the truth of worldviews.

6. Language of worldview seems to bolster in many of their minds the idea that it’s ‘merely’ or ‘just’ a perspective, one among others, which lends itself to a sort of troublesome perspectivalist approach with a touch of existentialist-inspired belief that we just arbitrarily choose our worldview. There were very few students indeed who spoke of a Christian making ‘knowledge’ claims; it’s almost always instead couched in terms of ‘belief ’ or ‘opinion’ claims.

Again, this showed a recurring primacy of psychological over epistemic categories.

7. When knowledge claims were made, they were usually made dogmatically, rather than in a principled sort of way that appealed to knowledge as something like ‘justified true belief.’

Convictions about ‘absolute truth’ tend to be conflated with ‘absolute knowledge.’ We could probably do a better job teaching that the truth claims of Christianity are defensible (in principle) in order to lessen some of this dogmatism without lessening principled confidence.

A greater measure of epistemic humility in these results is crucial. By ‘epistemic humility’ we mean the intellectual virtue of recognising one may be wrong and that others have insights from which to learn. The biblical call to humility is not merely a matter of the heart but of the head. Such humility is consistent with

some of the students counselled following the biblical mandate without attempting to spell out what that was or acknowledging any potential difficulty in discerning it. firm conviction, but inconsistent with arrogance. We spent time discussing it in class, but it was rarely exhibited in the analyses. Perhaps this is largely understandable as a function of their age, or the implicit strictures of a heavily confessional school, but nonetheless it’s worth noting. A concern is that rather than challenging such an attitude, we are unwittingly reinforcing it. In this connection, a key distinction here is the difference between a false sort of confidence, pride, or even bravado rooted in dogmatic assertion without evidence versus a principled confidence that is hard-earned in the crucible of diligent work and effort to back up one’s convictions with evidence and argument.

biblical thought than by the prevailing plausibility structures and reigning orthodoxies of our culture that in many ways is increasingly secular, and in light of the ease with which an emphasis on Christian worldview can be interpreted by students as just one more attempt to elicit from them the ‘right answers,’ further work and research designed to enhance an ability to understand how better to communicate and cultivate a Christian worldview in our classes is eminently worthwhile.

In the future we intend for our worldview examination to delve into additional details. Firstly: how worldview is understood by the faculty themselves here at this institution; we have the suspicion that some of the misunderstandings of worldview among the students echo parallel misunderstandings among members of the faculty. Secondly: how better to bring to bear worldview considerations into our teaching in a way that is more than marginally effective at producing quantitatively significant and measurable results. Thirdly: how better to teach the relevance of a Christian worldview to the Christian narrative of which we are a part, and vice versa.

Sire, J. (2009). The Universe Next Door.

Downers Grove: InterVarsity.

In light of the vital importance of cultivating a deeper understanding of the fundamental teachings and implications of Christian life and thought in the lives of our students, the importance of their being more influenced by orthodox Christian and

REFERENCES Plantinga, A. (1984). Advice to Christian Philosophers. Faith and Philosophy, 1(3), 253-271.

David and Marybeth Baggett dbaggett@liberty.edu

Drs. David and Marybeth Baggett have taught high school and college for a combined thirty years. They both currently teach at Liberty University in Virginia; David in ethics and philosophy of religion, Marybeth specialises in contemporary American literature.

The Christian Teachers Journal May 2013

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Thinking about

professional development?

The federal government, as part of the next funding agreement, will require all schools to have their own School Improvement Plans.

The centrepiece of School Improvement Plans will be professional development.

The National Institute for Christian Education has a wide range of courses that address national teaching and leadership standards that are also faithful to a Christian vision for classroom practice.

They include: • Teachers new to Christian schooling • Certificate of Christian Education • Certificate of Christian School Leadership • Inclusive education • Principal induction • Board training

CHRISTIAN

EDUCATION NATIONAL vision community partnership

• The Big Picture of Scripture • Strengthed-based school community • Basic finance to educational leaders

Are you thinking about professional improvement for you or your school? Why not enquire today about our professional development courses.

www.nice.edu.au

National Institute for Christian Education