Thoughts on Pedagogy for Biblical Studies

Jamie Smith:  1999

Of course, however, the living voice and the intimacy of common life will help you more than the written word.  You must go to the scene of action, first, because people put more faith in their eyes than in their ears, and second, because the way is long if one follows precepts, but short and helpful, if one follows patterns.  Cleanthes could not have been the express image of Zeno, if he had merely heard his lectures; he shared in his life, saw into his hidden purposes, and watched him to see whether he lived according to his own rules.  Plato, Aristotle, and the whole throng of sages who were destined to go each his different way, derived more benefit from the character than from the words of Socrates.  It was not the class-room of Epicurus, but the living together under the same roof, that made great men of Metrodorus, Hermarchus, and Polyaenus.

Seneca to the young philosopher Lucilius:  Epistle 6.5-6

For among them are those who enter into households and captivate the weak weighed down with sins, led on by various impulses, always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth . . . these people oppose the truth . . . but they will not make further progress, for their folly will be obvious to all . . . .  But you followed my teaching, conduct, purpose, faith, patience, love perseverance, persecutions, sufferings . . . .  Evil people and impostors will proceed to the worst, deceiving and being deceived.  You, however, continue in the things you have learned (from my life).

Paul to the young preacher Timothy: 2 Timothy 3.6ff

Biblical studies is essentially a combination of classical history, philology, and philosophy.  It is important to note that theology (i.e., “biblical theology”) is actually a product of biblical studies and thus is not considered as integral to the process of generating knowledge within the discipline of biblical studies.  I believe that teaching biblical studies is a matter of providing what is necessary for a student to advance to the stage where he or she can produce information from the relevant primary sources.  This means providing students with necessary foundational knowledge about the subject in question and then helping them to see what they then do with that knowledge.  Thus the ultimate goal of teaching biblical studies is to enable students to do biblical studies. 

    This difference between process and product is one I have been considering for a relatively long period of time.  When I first entered college, I really did not have a clear-cut distinction in my mind as to the difference between process and product in academic activity, but I was deeply interested in gaining expertise with respect to the Bible and its content.  Soon after entering college, I  discovered that while I may have been given a certain “fact”, I had no way of really knowing how that fact was generated and thus no way of substantiating the fact other than to recite it.  This became enormously bothersome to me and at that point I began to wonder just what that problem was.  I eventually came to understand the difference between process and product and felt at that point that my own teaching needed to reflect the difference in a  balanced way so that my teaching would enable students with respect to their interaction with the biblical texts and not confer upon them the status of “automaton”.  As I presently conduct my classes, the focus is generally on process.

    In biblical studies there is a necessary educational foundation upon which any dynamic procedure must take place.  This foundation is typically understood to be knowledge and that knowledge is generally historical.  This is somewhat wanting in that the foundation should include the development of fundamental theory of how language, the medium of history, works.  It is important to add this hermeneutical element to the foundation because it means that in each class, especially on a college level, in which we attempt to lay a “foundation,” the challenge is to provide the students with more than simply data.  Furthermore there must be the challenge to lay down a sense of coherence regarding the data in order for the student to perceive the interconnectedness of the data so as to be able to contextualise any one datum with respect to the whole.  In many ways, my own approach to a biblical studies education is a reaction to a long tradition of bombarding students with facts without providing a sense of how these facts are constituted as such (the language issue)  and without enabling those facts to be used in terms of each other (their organic nature).

    The hegemony of data in traditional biblical studies education has no place in my own approach to educating people in biblical studies.  This is largely due to the fact that I contextualise a biblical studies education, and find its significance with respect to an overall mission, such as the one employed here at CCU.  That is, I have a personal interest in my students becoming dynamic users of the biblical text  All this amounts to saying that I believe an education in biblical studies should produce people who are able to sustain proper, productive, relevant thinking about the biblical text.  The question, of course, is how does one achieve this goal.

    A starting point is the assumption that the thing I am teaching now is a part of something else.  Here at CCU teaching biblical studies is a part of an overall curriculum, yet it is important to move the boundary lines out further and see that what I am teaching now is a part of the developmental process through which a person is going in order to function as a Christian leader within the church.  That is, it is important to see how the future life and role of the student is touched by the present.  If as a teacher I can appreciate the variety of people, churches, countries to which my students will go, then I can appreciate the flexibility the student needs to have embodied in his/her understanding of how the Bible works in real life. 

    The goal of building flexibility and strength into the student’s use of the biblical text, I believe, is largely achieved through giving the student occasion to be the locus from which a given idea arises.  That is, the teacher’s dialectic should be of such a nature that it evokes the right ideas in the minds of the students; so that the student is the one who makes the cognitive leap and thus becomes the possessor and originator of the idea and not merely the recipient.  (Of course, this development is predicated upon the laying down of a coherent, organic foundation.)  The fact is that, traditionally, ideas generated in the classroom were set up as ideals with ontological status, and thus were constructed as static.  The appropriate use of such ideas was understood to be their acontextual transplanting into any given context.  The result is a rigid system which does not reflect the ontological significance of ideas at all, rather a static means of doing biblical studies at a particular point in time.  (This is like Paul preaching to the Athenians the same sermon Peter preached to the Jews in the Temple.)  However, if the student can become the owner of ideas and principles, then the ideas and principles that the student takes with him/her at the end of the semester are not fixed in an ideological construct other than the student’s; thus they are not susceptible to irrelevance as the student becomes someone else (teacher, preacher, leader, mother, etc.) and moves to new contexts. 

    Helping the student become the locus of ideas is achieved by moving the college and seminary classroom discourse to synthetic level of educational development as quickly and reasonably as possible.  Obviously, the ways in which this is done are numerous, however, in my own classroom activity, I employ a dialectic method which is usually based on a preliminary period at the beginning of the class session contextualising the material and presenting any new data that needs to be added to the foundation.  I have a number of goals when I employ the dialectic approach: Sometimes it is to simply to defamiliarise the text; that is, since the Bible is such a pervasive text in our cultures, students often need to read the text for the first time again.  Sometimes it is to generate a crisis, either in the student’s understanding of the confluence of biblical ideas with those that are a part of his/her social discourse (i.e., to challenge ideas brought from the culture and normalized by reading them into the biblical text), or simply in presuppositions about what is going on in the biblical text.  Whatever the specific goal at the time may be, the overarching goal is to create gaps in the student’s mind which causes him/her to pull information together and produce something new. 

   

    I hold that the primary goal of the class room experience is to help the students create something new in their own minds (which is simply another way of saying that we must help the student become the locus from which a given idea arises).  For that reason, assignments, readings, group work, presentations, and everything else the student produces throughout the course should have this end.  The capstone of this movement within the cognitive experience of the course is, for my classes, the final take home project.  I have an aversion to final exams because they “tend” not to allow me to achieve my overall goal of helping the students create something new in their own minds.  I also tend to reject the traditional final on the basis that it prevents or at least hinders true learning from taking place within the assessment event. 

    The need for assessment within education is obvious.  It assists the student in his/her own perception of whether they are “getting” the class.  It also helps those outside the classroom and outside the school to have some indication of the kind of student a given person was/is.  However, the fact that it is difficult to measure a student’s progress is also a common problem in education and ought to mitigate judgements made about the student’s abilities.  Traditionally, final exams have marginalized certain students who would otherwise be thought of as having done well in the class or in their education in general.  Furthermore, the final exam tends to set up disabling patterns for those students who predicate their self-understanding on their exam taking abilities.  This is clearly a failure within the education system.  My own attempt to rectify that problem comes in the guise of my own assessment procedures. 

    My belief is that a final assessment of the student’s interaction with a college/seminary  level biblical studies course should be a primarily synthetic one.  In addition, I also hold to the idea that a sit-down formal exam is often an insufficient format in which to generate all the benefits of the synthetic assessment process.  For this reason, I require my students to complete an open book, take home project that asks questions which require synthesis of the whole course experience.  In so doing, I make it clear to my students that what is important here is what they take with them when the course is over, and not whether they have successfully negotiated the various hurdles between the beginning and end of a semester.  It is well known that students have different learning styles and many have been conditioned not to think synthetically.  For this reason, I believe it is very important to offer assessment options and give students an opportunity to elect to be assessed by a different method.  In my classes, this option is presented to them at the beginning of the semester and the students have until within two weeks of the final exam period to elect a different option.  In spite of the difference in assessment methods, I believe it is still important to clarify that it is what a student leaves with (whatever that may be) that is paramount to the educational experience and not simply a list of completed requirements. 

    Completing requirements is unfortunately often seen as the appropriate way to “do” a class, probably because students often focus on economy and not pedagogy.  I regularly attempt to articulate to my students the very important principle that the requirements in my courses and the requirements within the curriculum at large are not there as mere tasks to be completed.  In keeping with that, I attempt to make each requirement work towards my primary goal stated earlier.  This means that as an educator focusing on synthesis, I need to understand that for the student a course is a journey and they simply cannot already be at the end of the journey when they first begin.  Each requirement must therefore be designed to fit into the general developmental flow of the course.  In keeping with that, it is also important for the educator to let the students know that it is not a problem to fail at first, because it is extremely important that the educator is able to ascertain where a student’s weaknesses are. 

    One way I deal with this issue in my own classes is to celebrate weaknesses and failures with my students when they come into my office (or in the classroom if it is a more corporate problem).  I let them know that I am so very happy to have located an area of weakness because now we can do something about it!  (I guess an easy parallel is a doctor locating the cause of the problem and not being satisfied with the fact that the patient has a problem.)  I believe that in general educators tend to forget the fact that the students are supposed to be progressing along a journey, the result is that we often reinforce the “hurdle” mentality by giving equal grade weight to similar assignments whether they are at the beginning or the end of the semester.  If the student perceives the requirements are not progressive, then the student will probably see the requirements as hurdles and fail to perceive the progression which the curriculum at large is attempting to encourage.  For this reason I always give more weight to the final take home project and I make it clear in my course syllabus that this is the case.  An example of how this has worked out in one of my classes is the occasion in an Hermeneutics course where one student was obviously trying but producing very substandard work.  I tried to articulate in each paper where she had gone wrong and it simply was not sinking in.  I met with her a few times and suddenly, towards the very end of the semester, she “got it”.  Her last two papers were excellent.  If I had given equal weight to her papers, she would have ended up in the vicinity of a low D.   The fact was, however, that she had progressed and ended up precisely where I wanted her to be (a little bit ahead actually) at the end of the semester.  I gave her an A for the course because that’s where she was when she left the course and because there was no point at all in penalizing her for being on the journey.

    Lastly, I believe it is important for the educator here at CCU to understand that now is the time for the student to get things wrong.  Now is their training period.  Now is when they spar with the biblical text and with the perception of how meaning is derived from it.  The more we create a safe environment in which students can make mistakes, the more weaknesses they will be willing to expose to us, the better we can train them, the better they will be.

    Let me summarize all this by saying that I believe that it is paramount for a student to be the owner of his/her ideas.  We enable this through a synthetic environment which is progressive in nature, yet sufficiently safe for the student to expose weaknesses along the journey, which grants us the opportunity to correct problems which may prevent the student from completing the journey.