The Challenge to Reduce the Gap Between School and the World

Life as we Inhabit many communities

As I have written before on this blog, our children learn much more in the day-to-day life of the school than just curriculum content. Education is more than reception of knowledge. The life of the school in and outside the classroom has an influence in shaping them as people and citizens. Hence, all schools and their teachers have some responsibility to keep in mind a focus on transformation of students as learning and life are enacted together in a school 'community'.

A key agenda for teachers and leaders in our schools, should be to narrow the gap between our students experience of school and life (Cairney p19). Students like all people, inhabit multiple communities. How do their actions, values and priorities and so on, vary as they move from one community to another? It is critical for all teachers and parents to understand the interrelationship of home, school and community. It's easy to adopt such priorities as a goal, but it needs to be more than words. It needs to be a deeply held beliefs and values founded on a rich understanding of the complexity and differences between the communities students inhabit. 

In 'Pedagogy and Education for Life', I offer vignettes of students I taught. For one student, I could identify at least 8 key and influential communities she experienced simultaneously. Including her 'group' of school friends, members of her art class, her extended family (especially her grandparents), a dance group, staff she worked with part-time at a pizza parlour, her netball team, other students in a technical college food service class, and her 2,500 Facebook friends.

Why is this Important?

Every one of the varied communities that students inhabit require them to take on specific roles, values, forms of engagement, priorities and their view of what the 'good life' looks like (Cairney, pp 20-21).

And here's the rub! Each of our students varied communities has an influence on shaping values, desires and priorities in life. These of course, reflect the type of person the world seems to value, and hence who they 'should' seek to become. Sadly, there is often great inconsistency between these diverse communities. As a result, sometimes we will give a kind of tacit agreement to some things, but not challenge other positions which we might not accept. In this way, over time our students are shaped in word and action as they negotiate their complex lives. All our students' diverse communities of practice have an impact and begin to shape the things they love, desire and value.

James Smith helpfully suggests that we need to understand that our Christian education efforts need to influence our students' loves and desires that "...in turn govern and generate action both individual and collective" (James Smith, "Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview and Cultural Formation", 2009). The role of school must always be seen as more than teaching knowledge and skills; it is also a key vehicle and context for student formation as people.

Smith helpfully reminds us that the 'heart' not simply the mind, should be our primary target. Why? Because it is from here that our students' loves and desires are shaped. As he puts it, "our doing bubbles up from our loves, whether we realize it or not." As teachers and parents, it is critical that we seek to influence such loves and desires, for it is these that will generate the things they value most and hence priorities and actions.  

What are some of the means to achieving this goal?

In the rest of the post, let me suggest three tests or questions we should regularly apply to our schools, as well as our teachers and leaders within them. You could use a variety of ways to assess these simple questions, including discussing your observations with a few other parents, as well as with your students as their teacher. And as parent you should discuss this with your children. You might also look carefully at the school website to see how it promotes itself. Here are three simple questions or 'lenses' to get started.

First, try to take a 'step back, and identify the things your children's school seems to value most in its actions, priorities and promotion of itself. The website will be helpful here as well as your children's reflections on their experiences. List the top three.

Second, how easy is it to see how the school understands its position within the world? Does it make explicit how the priorities of a faith-based school are different from secular schools?

Third, sit down with your children and ask them to share what they believe the school values most. Try to drill down to the level of the teacher and ask what various teachers seem to value most.  

Fourth, now consider whether the above observations are similar or different to those of the faith-based school. What is special and distinctive about your school? What is the same?

There is nothing startling about these four questions, but I suspect if you consider them carefully, and perhaps discuss them with other parents as well as your children, you might have some useful conversations about the things that matter most to the school and your children and you as parents.

 

 

 

Helping students to take responsibility for their learning – Principle 8

In ‘Pedagogy and Education for Life’ I suggest that while teachers must exercise authority over students, and their students in turn must learn to respect the authority of their teachers, self-responsibility should be nurtured. This requires more than simply seeking to instill the right community values, virtues, or even a Christian worldview. The challenge for teachers and parents is how to keep the two seemingly equal and opposite forces of teacher authority and student self-responsibility in healthy tension. In my book, I argue that this requires a pedagogy that gives considerable attention to how “… teachers orchestrate and sustain classroom life… driven by an intent and telos.” The 'telos' of course is an ancient Greek word referring to an ‘end’ or goal. Alisdair MacIntyre in his book ‘After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory’, draws on the work of Aristotle to suggest that “every activity, every inquiry, every practice aims at some good”. Within the school and classroom, there is a purpose in all that we do and each and every event, activity or practice points to an ‘end’.
 

As a principal, teacher or parent, we might well seek to instill Christian values, virtues, and a Christian view of the world in our students. We might even manage to obtain ascent within the controlled world of the classroom or school to some of these things. But, if these are in conflict for our students’ inner purposes, goals, hopes and desires, then little ‘real’ long term change will occur. Unless, of course, God disrupts these internal goals by his Spirit, through the teaching of his word and the influence a Christ-centred community life within our classrooms and schools.

Craig Dykstra offers us a helpful insight into the challenge for every Christian teacher when discussing the work of Thomas Chalmers (a leader of the Free Church of Scotland) in the nineteenth century. Chalmers argued that: 

Beneath the level of norms, roles, institutional structures, rituals, stories, and symbols lies the level of our fundamental communal intentions toward one another and the world, which govern how we live in our roles and rituals and by means of which we apprehend the mystery of our existence.

Above: Thomas Chalmers

Chalmer’s famous sermon “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection” offers some wonderful insights into the human condition. In his sermon he suggested that: 

"Such is the grasping tendency of the human heart, that it must have a something to lay hold of and which, if wrested away without the substitution of another something in its place, would leave a void and a vacancy as painful to the mind, as hunger is to the natural system."

If you wish to change student behavior, and help them to rid themselves of a specific behaviour or sin, you don’t replace it with a vacuum. Nor do you achieve this simply with a religious program, the teaching of a virtue ethic and so on. You replace it with an even stronger passion for something good. The teacher must seek to orchestrate and influence the whole of life of the classroom and school, with the hope that all that is done in structuring this school ‘life’, might impact on the rest of our students’ lives. Such a school and classroom life will be focussed on clear teaching from God’s word centred on Christ.

James Smith has also reminded us in his book ‘Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview andCultural Formation’, that our desires are aimed at specific ends or goals, and set the trajectory for our lives. “A vision of the good life captures our hearts and imaginations.”

The Christian teacher’s key role extends well beyond structuring curriculum, and teaching well. It requires him or her to structure and influence the whole life of the classroom, to disrupt entrenched views of life’s purpose, and instead embed a ‘telos’ that shifts our students’ attention away from the values of the world towards a view of humanity's purpose centred on faith in Jesus Christ. This requires us to place at the centre of all we do and say, the Gospel of Christ, and God’s promise of redemption in and through him, to those who believe and accept him as their saviour. I will say much more about the practical implications that such a view of the world has for pedagogy in future posts.

Made to be Meaning Makers: Principle 5

In the next 10 posts, I turn my attention to what teachers typically want to talk about first - teaching and learning. But a warning, this blog isn't a 'how to' resource (I've written other books about teaching and learning as well as another practice-based blog). Pedagogy was never meant to be a word that describes what content the teacher will offer on Monday, nor simply how they might do it!

In my book  'Pedagogy and Education for Life: A Christian Reframing of Teaching, Learning, and Formation', I suggest that good pedagogy doesn't start with our choice of curriculum content, nor the adoption of particular teaching methods. Rather, pedagogy is concerned with our purpose for doing the things we do, and how we focus the hearts and minds of our students on ends and goals that are much more important than success at school and test results. 

Much of what I have to say about pedagogy and more basic things such as learning and teaching, are shaped by a concern for 'Why?' Why do we do the things we do as teachers? And of course, 'what' is our ultimate purpose for education? My pedagogical framework reflects my biblical theology of personhood. We are unique among God's creatures for we commune with the God of the Universe. God made us for communion and for learning. About him, but also about the world he has given us and his plans for us.

In my last post, I considered the 4th principle within my framework under the first of three truths that have shaped this book. That is, we are 'Unique Creatures' made by God. In that post, I considered what the Bible teaches about a right view of work. Now, I shift to the second of three theological truths that shape my pedagogy: "God made us as creatures who learn". And of course, this involves lifelong learning. This is a key part of our distinctiveness as humans. In all, ten of the twenty principles in my framework, concern learning.

So, if God did make us to be creatures who learn, what are the implications for us as Christian teachers?  First, our task as teachers is to develop students who are meaning-makers not meaning-regurgitators. We seek to shape students "... who interpret language and knowledge to know 'truth'." Second, the task of the teacher is not to 'deliver' knowledge for young 'sponges' to soak it up. Children are not empty vessels to be filled with our ideas, nor simply passive recipients of our knowledge, wisdom and worldview as teachers. Rather, we are to encourage our students to be well-informed meaning-makers who have a desire to seek and know God. Third, our classrooms and schools are to be shaped as learning communities where ideas are shared and tested against truth. For the truths that shape life, are not simply taught through knowledge transfer, they are taught and understood within communities of practice, as members seek to make sense of the world and their place within it.
 

The Christian classroom is a place where ideas are exchanged, where hard questions are asked, and where wisdom and truth can be shared. This sharing is not just by teachers, it also includes our students. The didactic teaching of content and the absorption of knowledge are not what matters most in the formation of our students. While the quest for knowledge should be at the centre of the Christian classroom, they are to be places where we gain, share, and test biblical knowledge and truth. This must be the transformational heart and focus of our Christian classrooms.

A key characteristic of such classrooms is 'negotiation'. David Fernie, Bronwyn Davies, Paula McMurray, and Rebecca Kantor suggest that classroom life involves students negotiating roles, rights, obligations, norms, and expectations from different standpoints. This of course, is true of life in general. The teacher and students contribute to the context in which they learn, while they also negotiate roles and relationships, and what counts as knowledge, culture, and belief. The application of a Christian pedagogy will hopefully show evidence of different responses, actions, and communications that seek to change behavior and attitudes to the world, as well as forming character. 

However, the life of the school has added complexity due to students’ concurrent membership of many diverse communities, in and outside school. Some are 'real' and others virtual. Our students don't simply engage with embodied communities, many are virtual and invisible to teachers and parents. Life is shared in meaningful ways as students exchange ideas, loves, and desires inside and outside the precincts of the school. As Kevin Vanhoozer reminds us, our everyday world includes “the moral, intellectual, and spiritual atmosphere in which we live.” But while we share a similar context with others at school, “we inhabit it differently.”

As we share common practices, concerns, and desires with others, we might also enter into their cultural worlds as well and begin to take on shared ideas. Our students make, share, and communicate meaning with others and are in part formed by these transactions, as they interact and exchange values and views of the world. Meaning itself is actually being tested in such exchanges, as students share ideas and views and 'negotiate' truth with others! What is right or wrong, appropriate or inappropriate, false or true and so on, are subject to negotiation, consensus or even disagreement. How our students make sense of the world requires them to reconcile the views of one's teacher and other students alongside those of parents and a myriad of other people outside the school. And of course, the word of God is set against this life complexity and is to be our foundation as Christian teachers.

My final point is this, while as teachers we might seek to shape the way our students see the world, if our students are to come to share such views of the world shaped by God's teaching, it will require them to engage with these ideas. They will need to discuss them with others and assent to them as an act of will, not because they want to please us or their parents, but because they come to see that this reflects the truth of God taught in his word.

1. David Fernie, Bronwyn Davies, Paula McMurray, and Rebecca Kantor,
'Becoming a Person in the Preschool,' Meaning, Learning, and Formation, 67 
2. Kevin Vanhoozer, 'What is Everyday Theology', in Everyday Theology, 19.

Pedagogy, Habit, Formation & Communities

Above: Cover Image from Case Quarterly

As I explain in 'Pedagogy and Education for Life', the roots of education can be traced (in part) to ancient Greece and the work of Socrates and Plato. It is here that we can identify the foundations of educational pedagogy (expressed in the Greek word 'paideia'). Its purpose was to:

"... lead the child as they grow in body, mind, and spirit". This was an exchange between "one who acts and one who is acted upon".

However, some modern advocates for progressive approaches to education, assume that children if given freedom will find their own way in the world. In one limited sense this is true, humans are resilient, and no doubt as unique creatures will develop a particular personality and disposition as they explore and relate to their world.

But as character is reflected in the habits of body, as well as the mind and spirit, it is a word that at its base is the idea of the development and shaping of the whole person.

Martin Buber in his book 'Between Man and Man' suggests that, “Education worthy of its name is essentially education of character.” This is an education that involves the child as a whole, with education and the teacher as the vehicles. Rather than giving children the freedom to simply explore the world on their terms, the teacher in effect is to present a selection of the world to his or her students, with the formation of character as the central purpose. For the Christian teacher, the very foundation of character formation must be an understanding of one's place in the world under God's rule, and with the restorative hope we have in Christ.

While progressive educators stress freedom to make life choices, the Christian teacher needs to understand that their role is to offer a pedagogy that offers opportunities not just for learning, but for the development of good habits focused on an ultimate “good”. As Alasdair MacIntyre suggests in 'After Virtue', character is born in the crucible of daily “practices." And as Aristotle taught, such practices will always have a 'telos'. That is, a purpose or intention.

Notwithstanding the fact that we cannot control our children's lives forever, do parents and teachers really want to leave the development of character in our children to chance? The formation of our children in attitudes, beliefs, values and views of the world begins within the home. But very quickly the circle of influence widens as they encounter many other communities of interest and practice.

In my book 'Pedagogy & Education for Life: A Christian Reframing of Teaching, Learning, and Formation', I look closely at how the formation of our children takes place. The formative years of schooling are characterized by children's participation in varied communities of interest and practice. Some are framed by participation with others within the classroom, but the vast majority are formed in the playground and outside school. This can occur through social media platforms like Facebook and Snapchat, as well as friendship groups of varied kinds. Many such informal communities of practice are based on relational groups (real and virtual) that themselves can be shaped by ideas, values and practices embedded within popular culture, gaming, sport, music, fashion and so on. 

Such subtle and ongoing 'forces' for formation engage our students as they live within the multiple communities that children negotiate and inhabit every day. What place does the Christian faith have for children in the critical teenage years? In thinking about this, James Smith referencing Polanyi's work in 'Personal Knowledge' has suggested that Christian Education needs to be “... nothing less than a re-narration of our identity in Christ . . . a comprehensive project of rehabituation.” Such habit formation, he suggests, is “at the intersection of stories and bodies.” Education isn’t just about the dissemination of information; it is more fundamentally an exercise in the formation of the whole child.

The great challenge for Christian schools is that while it can promote a consistent biblical worldview in its actions, programs and practices, it must remember that it cannot do this in isolation from the world. For the 'boundaries' between the multiple 'worlds' that our children inhabit (both physical and virtual) are always permeable. Any school, and the students within them, always have relationships - some observable and some invisible - with multiple communities beyond these boundaries.

"Schools are complex social and cultural spaces where deep relationships are formed. They are not just physical places. They are social contexts where varied communities of belief and practice develop." (Cairney, Pedagogy & Education for Life, p.24).

What Christian schools require is a pedagogy that is responsive to and interwoven with the daily life of any community. Such a pedagogy seeks to shape classes, schools, and students by the Bible’s central message that ultimately our transformation must be in and through Christ.

Our students have an embodied existence, so we must be concerned with what they live, not just the content of the curriculum, the worldview the teacher holds, the exams they sit, the assignments completed, and so on. It is within the life of the school and varied communities of practice that our students' minds, lives and characters are shaped through action, thoughts, loves, learning, experience and engagement in a complex world.

As such, pedagogy will always be much more than curriculum, teaching methods, worldview and so on; it requires teachers to be concerned with the orchestration and sustaining of classroom learning and life. This orchestration of school life should always be approached with the formation of the child for the glory of God as the priority.

What are the key take-homes from this discussion

Educational formation requires more than:

• passing on knowledge;
• teaching Christian values as knowledge;
• teaching worldview as if it is incremental knowledge; or
• conforming to a set of school practices.

Instead, while all of the above are important, the Christian teacher need to participate in the lives of their students, orchestrating the life of the school community so that it is characterised by openness, receptiveness, respect, acceptance and a preparedness to listen and respond to the members of these complex communities of practice. Without these features, school will be little more than sites of values contestation, as its teachers seek conformance to worldview and ideas, without deep student personal engagement and with little discussion of a faith that is meant to be transformative.

STOP PRESS!

The book will be on sale in a few weeks!

Why Standpoint Matters: Beyond Worldview, Virtues & Values

So why does standpoint matter?

I have already suggested in my definition of pedagogy in earlier posts that one's standpoint matters. My definition of education is as follows:

Education is the whole of life of a community, and the experience of its members learning to live this life, from the standpoint of a specific end goal. 

Some readers will be saying, "At last he's got to worldview". And yes, I have to some extent, but in my book I try to challenge some inherent problems I have when Christians say things like, "Worldview is the key". Or perhaps, "Christian education needs to challenge young people about the values they hold, or display in their lives". Then  again, others might say "I think we need to train our students in basic Christian virtues". Such arguments assume that each in their own way will help us to define an education that is authentic and which we can call 'Christian'.

While I want to affirm that worldview, values and human virtues are important, and related to what we call might Christian education, none of them are in my view the defining keys to authentic Christian education. I argue throughout my book that it is within varied communities of practice that habits, views, priorities and hopes are defined. In short, what our students come to value most is largely defined by their goals, hopes - and as James Smith argues - loves. It is within these broad categories that we will find the foundation of the standpoint from which they sift and sort their lives. It is here that the priorities, views and yes, even values, of their world are shaped.

Craig Dykstra in his book 'Growing in the Life of Faith' helps us here, as he writes:

"Beneath the level of norms, roles, institutional structures, rituals, stories, and symbols lies the level of our fundamental communal intentions toward one another and the world, which govern how we live in our roles and rituals and by means of which we apprehend the mystery of our existence." 

(Dykstra, Growing in the Life of Faith, 1999)

Our children are immersed in a web of relationships and simultaneously are members of varied communities of practice. These include some that exist at school, which might cut across classes, year levels, interest groups, social and friendship groups. As well, they might be face-to-face, or virtual, being sustained by social media and constant virtual communication. Our students move in and out of these groups on almost minute to minute basis. What teachers observe and the way they engage with their students, offers access only to the veritable tip of the iceberg of the communities of practice that our students inhabit.

Against social a complex social existence, the task of the teacher in trying to influence the 'standpoint' from which our students view the world is a very difficult one. 

What I suggest in 'Pedagogy and Education for Life' is that the key in having any impact on our students world is the extent to which we are:

• aware of the varied communities of practice our students inhabit;
• able to have an impact on their views of the world through our teaching, curriculum and pedagogy;
• attentive to the conversations of our classrooms and the cultural practices evident in their words and actions;
• engaged and in some way, intersecting with their world.

As Bourdieu taught us, within all communities, over time, all members develop specific habits, dispositions, actions, preferences and beliefs. All of these become embodied in the life of a community like a classroom. 

A challenge

If you are a teacher or parent try to estimate how many networks or relationships your children are engaged in each day. Then ask yourself these questions:

1. In how many would I see myself as a member?
2. In ways, and through what avenues, do members reinforce belonging?
3. Are there specific behaviours that members demonstrate?
4. Are you aware of any views of the world that they might value, demonstrate, reinforce?
5. What are the things that sustain group coherence and purpose?

I will return to this topic in a future post.

Next Post: Formation