When signature pedagogies clash: Making way for the oral majority with connected learning

Introduction

“You don’t have to be creative,” my Southeast Asian friends advised during our Bible study. “Just lecture.” I could not believe my ears. I had studied learner-centered education with a plethora of ways to engage adults, but my well-trained Singaporean friends had long been schooled via lecture and rote. Our preferred pedagogies clashed, so I adapted.

Then I moved to another Southeast Asian nation—Cambodia. Our team attempted to train local pastors. We encountered a different dilemma. According to research at the time, the average grade level attained by those shepherds fell at the fourth-grade mark. Unlike Singapore, Cambodia had faced war and genocide. Older adults fought for their lives rather than studying in school. So, when we attempted to use simple fill-in-the-blank booklets for Bible study, we encountered resistance. When preferred pedagogies clashed again, I pivoted to learn more about orality, biblical storying, and the needs of adults with limited formal education (ALFE).

My experiences are not isolated instances of pedagogical clashes. The signature pedagogies used in training cross-cultural workers tend to be a mismatch with the pedagogies preferred by a majority of the world’s population, non-readers and oral learners. Judith Lingenfelter (2001: 449) lamented:

Mission literature has addressed the issues of contextualization in planting churches, but has largely overlooked the impact of expatriate teaching in both formal and nonformal contexts. Missionaries teaching cross-culturally encounter classroom differences that they are ill-prepared to cope with because they often teach as they were taught.

What are the ways the oral majority prefers to learn, and how do we make way for their educational needs? This article explores the signature pedagogies of oral learners and best practices needed for educating missionaries sent to the oral majority.

The oral majority and connected learning

Worldwide statistics are difficult to garner, but experts among the International Orality Network (ION, 2004) and the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization (LCWE) maintain over 80% of adults do not prefer to learn by reading (Lovejoy, 2012: 21). UNESCO (2017) also reports that “more than one-half of children and adolescents are not learning.” In the United States, nearly 53% of adults, 108 million people, function below basic literacy levels, according to the latest Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) report (US Department of Education, 2019). This significant population lacks “proficiency in literacy, reading below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level” (Nietzel, 2020). Of that 108 million, nearly one-third cannot function above the third-grade level (Resilient Educator, n.d.). Unfortunately, this huge swath of people tends to be ignored by literates and scholars. Mission executive Avery Willis lamented overlooking this oral majority: “For forty years, I did it wrong” (Leatherwood, 2013: 18). How do we do it right and understand their learning needs?

When I researched ALFE in Cambodia, I had already conducted Bible storying for over a decade. When I finally asked my friends, “How do you learn?” the oft-repeated answer was, “Ree-un pee gay,” or “I learned from them/him/her.” I discovered my oral Khmer friends learned from people, from observing intently, not merely by auditory means. I named this “connected learning,” which I found to be a “relational or social process, with a preference for observing and learning from known, trusted, and/or successful people” (Thigpen, 2020: 100). When offered the choice between learning from print or learning from people, these adults made the relational choice to learn from people, thus I call them “connected learners.” Even Einstein (2011: 439) affirmed this choice: “Knowledge exists in two forms—lifeless, stored in books, and alive in the consciousness of men. The second form of existence is after all the essential one: the first, indispensable as it may be, occupies only an inferior position.”

Whether one learns from people or print, who then can be trusted? Highly literate adults may value research and expertise, but my oral/connected learning friends did not seem to value textual experts, rather they chose to trust only select individuals, usually family or close friends. Education was not a factor. Plotting a horizontal axis of learning from people versus learning from print and a vertical axis based on the source of one’s trust, the diagram in Figure 1 results (Thigpen, 2020: 111). In the top right, we find the primary orality of people who are decided non-readers, those who learn from people and trust select relationships. This learning preference stands diametrically opposed to academia and the preference of those trusting in research and expertise. The bottom right quadrant represents modern secondary orality with an emphasis on learning from people through technology. Finally, the top left quadrant displays respect for text conveyed through trusted relationships, such as in liturgical or scribal literacy (Arrington 2014: 5). Thus, the supposed dichotomy between orality and literacy is exposed in all its complexity, with many options emerging across these learning quadrants. Most importantly, my Cambodian friends lived in the upper right quadrant while I occupied the lower left.

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Figure 1.

Learning quadrants (Thigpen, 2020: 111).

The signature pedagogies of global workers

Occupying space in the lower left quadrant like myself, many global workers usually attend higher education or seminary required by their mission organizations. When we were sent to the field by the International Mission Board in 1999, my husband was required to have a Master of Divinity degree. Wives needed only a bachelor’s degree. Now career missionaries must obtain 20 hours of specific seminary-level studies. I arrived with two master’s degrees and began studying Khmer at a university. I soon discovered many Khmer friends could not read and write, and I was not prepared to work with multitudes in the upper right quadrant, a generation whose whole educational experience had been interrupted. My signature pedagogies relied on text and analysis, so I often failed at accommodating their learning needs even after studying Christian education.

Considering pedagogies or “any conscious activity by one person designed to enhance learning in another” (Watkins and Mortimore, 1999: 3), Shulman (2005: 52) introduced the concept of signature pedagogies or “characteristic forms of teaching and learning” for various professions. The Carnegie Foundation researched clergy education and found four signature classroom pedagogies: pedagogies of interpretation, formation, contextualization, and performance. Pedagogies for “interpretive practice” included “interpreting as continuous dialogue (with a text), interpreting as appropriating tradition, and interpreting by choosing ‘right methods’” (Foster et al., 2005: 207–11). They also discovered that “clergy educators widely share the view that practices of interpretation require that students develop the ability to think critically” (Foster et al., 2006: 88).

The emphasis on text and critical thinking works well in western settings but can be problematic when exported overseas. Contrary to the way Jesus taught, “church leadership formation has morphed from oral, eventful, life-on-life leadership formation modes to the intensive, class-based, pen-to-paper theological professionalization mode” (West, 2014: 11). DeCapua and Marshall (2010a: 51–52), researchers in the area of teaching English as a second language also observed:

Participation in a Western-style model of education, with its emphasis on critical thinking skills and the primacy of literacy, develops an academic way of understanding and interpreting the world based on abstract, scientific models of thinking . . . Those who have not participated in such an educational model have cognitively different ways of understanding and interpreting the world, ways that rely on practical and functional frames of reference.

The western focus on critical examination of texts and performance of eloquent sermons is quite the opposite of connected learning.

The clash of pedagogies: “Your culture, my classroom, whose pedagogy?”

Teaching English in Brazil, Crabtree and Sapp (2004) wrote an article with the insightful title above. Crossing cultures, we bring our own signature pedagogies; and repeatedly, I witnessed literate, critical-thinking culture engulf classrooms of church leaders in Cambodia. Seldom did I meet global workers investigating how the audience preferred to learn and subsequently adapt. Western pedagogies usually won. This difference between textual and non-reading or oral/connected learning has been called a “cultural mismatch” (Li, 2006: 196), an “emic–etic conflict” (Cutz and Chandler, 2000: 64), an “abyss” (Watson, 2010: 1), or “cultural dissonance” (DeCapua and Marshall, 2010b: 159); however, the latter urge us to view “this as a mismatch and not a deficit” (DeCapua and Marshall, 2010b: 163).

Steffen (2010: 142) discovered his oral audience, the Ifugao people, did not learn by dissecting a text, but preferred first to explore the whole, the big picture, such as the metanarrative of Scripture, and then the various parts or stories, rather than propositions. After failing at western-style training in that setting, Steffen (2010: 148) learned: “The Ifugao wanted stories, I gave them systematic theology. They wanted relationships, I gave them reasons. They wanted a cast of characters, I gave them categories of convenience. They wanted events, I gave them explanations.” However, he recognized his training bias and adapted to the Ifugao ways of learning.

Examining a more practical course of study, vocational education, we find a similar contrast. Lucas (2014) and Lucas et al. (2012) contrasted formal and non-formal education and an adaptation with their 10 dimensions differences is listed in Table 1.

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Table 1.

Lucas’ (2012, 2014) 10 dimensions of pedagogy.

Dimensions ofpedagogy (Lucas)	Western-stylehigher education	Oral/connectedlearning
Role of teacher	Facilitative	Didactic
Nature of activities	Contrived	Authentic
Means of knowing	Theory	Practice
Attitude to knowledge	Questioning	Certain
Organization of time	Bell-bound	Extended
Organization of space	Classroom	Workshop
Approach to tasks	Individual	Group
Visibility of processes	Hidden	High
Proximity to teacher	Virtual	Face-to-face
Role of learner	Self-managing	Directed

Practical education and the kind of connected learning experiences most adults across the globe prefer stand in stark contrast to the signature pedagogies of western higher education. In addition to Lucas’ list, Lingenfelter and Lingenfelter (2003) compared the “relational/traditional learning style” with an “analytical/formal learning style,” illustrated in Table 2.

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Table 2.

Learning styles contrasted (Lingenfelter and Lingenfelter, 2003).

Relational/traditional learning style	Analytical/formal learning style
Visual	Verbal
Global (Holistic)	Dichotomous
Example	Question
Narrative	Proposition

The Majority World does not prefer to learn in the same ways as the West. In fact, rote learning can be quite favored (Senanayake, 2018: 111), just as my Singaporean friends explained.

Some global workers serving in oral environments have come to appreciate a more relational paradigm. Klem (1978: 479), working in Africa, confided:

I did not question that requiring literacy of Christians as their first step to Bible study could be unbiblical in any circumstance until I spent several years among people who did most of their learning and teaching without writing. Many of them did not want a religion that would require them to learn to read, because they valued personal, memorized, oral communication.

This clash of pedagogies operates at a foundational level. Connected learners gain knowledge through more organic means, in a process akin to secondary socialization (Berger and Luckmann, 1991; Jarvis, 1987). Loewen (2016: 343, 358–59) urged Christian workers to strongly consider these ways of learning in order to “support lasting change,” as:

this face-to-face local focus emphasizes application over acquiring knowledge by being practical (rather than theoretical), applied (rather than philosophical), non-academic (rather than academic), informal (rather than formal), inductive (rather than deductive), discovery-oriented (rather than instruction oriented), participative (rather than passive), and community-based (rather than individual-based).

Literacy holds a valued position worldwide. However, it tends to overshadow and dethrone other types of learning to the point of being hegemonic, excluding or producing obstacles for those who do not or cannot embrace it. Sadly, connected learners can tend to feel deep shame as a result and come to view the educated as the norm and themselves as inferior. Because of this, in some of my courses, I require students to experience orality phenomenologically. They fast print—including their phones—for at least half a working day, then debrief the experience. An additional assignment involves researching local literacy statistics and the reading preferences of those in the students’ oikos. Many have been surprised by the experience of being thrust into the non-reading world and by the number of non-readers surrounding them.

Books or people—which is most important in training? Gupta and Lingenfelter (2006: 23) “concluded that formal education is ill-suited and cannot effectively equip evangelists, church planters, and apostolic leaders for ministry,” maintaining that “the skills and the work of the evangelist, church planter, and apostolic foundation-layer can be understood and mastered only through practice, through experiential learning.” The solution to this clash, then, directly affects mission strategy.

Exploring connected learning pedagogies

What are appropriate pedagogies for oral/connected learners and how might these be organized for implementation? Traditionally, the cognitive, affective, and psychomotor dimensions comprise the learning enterprise. Illeris (in Merriam et al., 2007: 97) created an educational model that delineated the aspects of cognition, emotion, and society. However, he neglected spirituality and religiosity. Vella (1995: 21), famous for dialogical learning, maintained, “Effective learning will affect the learner’s cognitive structures, attitudes, values, perceptions, and behavioral patterns.” Beard and Wilson (2002: 119) maintained, “The affective domain can be seen to provide the underlying foundation for all learning,” so this dimension cannot be ignored. Merriam et al. (2007: 231) found four themes characterizing non-western or indigenous learning: interdependence, and a communal, holistic, and informal nature. Social elements, connection, spirituality/religiosity, the affective, the physical/concrete, and the practical figure prominently in the learning of the oral majority.

Our first religions are typically learned through socialization and not necessarily through cognitive means. The majority of folk Buddhists I met in Cambodia could not recite the tenets of their religion. Their adherence to Buddhism was social and practical. After conversion, they expected to learn Christianity the same way—by observation and participation. I was often accosted with the question, “What do I do?” when thinking of converting to Christianity. As Bird and Dale (2022: 274) found in Nepal: “Correct performance is more important than comprehension, communication, interpretation, or conveying information,” and they discovered traditional teaching styles, with rote and recitation, apprenticeships, and concrete and relational learning transferred to discipleship methods, emphasizing successful performance after modeling and observation.

Thus, we know the cultural and educational preferences of oral/connected learners require more than a cognitive emphasis. Richards (1975: 64), a Christian educator, praised modeling and mentoring, describing the necessity of “frequent, long-term contact; warm, loving relationship; exposure to the inner state of the model; observing the model in a variety of settings; having a consistent model; a correspondence of behavior and beliefs; and an explanation of lifestyle.” This relational element was a definite component in the signature pedagogies of Jesus but not always part of the usual modern discipleship and training strategies.

Organizing possible pedagogies for a connected learning strategy, I considered all this information and found two additional resources—one from Jesus’ signature pedagogies and those of the early church and another from research into religiosity and cross-cultural psychology. According to West (2014: 12, emphases in the original), Jesus invited His disciples “to unlearn their conventional modalities of leadership . . . A highly relational transfer process similar to that of mentoring, coaching, and sponsoring characterizes the formative trend of this era.” The early church learned through similar means. During that period, according to Webber (2003: 23), “Justin’s writings reveal the cycle of believing, belonging, and behaving.” Johnson-Miller (2018: 163) states, “Christian formation in the early Church stood in stark contrast to the didactic intellectualized proposition-centered practices so prevalent in the post-Enlightenment Protestant world.” Instruction was oral, visual, experiential, communal, and often involving catechesis.

According to Webber (1999: 34), ancient learning majored on mystery, community, and symbol; and “the church’s approach to new converts was to take them by the hand and walk them through an intentional, life-giving process of formation.” Their training was highly symbolic and ritualistic, especially in pre- and post-baptismal training. Finn (1989: 73, 70) explained that this process of socialization involved bonding, oral instruction, and rites of passage, which had a “measurable effect on the staying-power of the community as a whole,” and he contended “that Christians survived in Rome to a large extent because they developed a dynamic ritual process for the making of Christians.”

The second additional source that has informed my organization of connected learning pedagogies was in the work of cross-cultural psychologists studying religion. Saroglou (2011) and Saroglou et al. (2020) found “the big four religious dimensions,” those which directly affect religious involvement, to be believing, bonding, behaving, and belonging. The following explores these dimensions and appropriate pedagogies for each. Considering the early church and traditional learning styles plus the “believing, bonding, behaving, and belonging” of Saroglou et al. (2020: 569), I revamped their chart displaying these four dimensions. Like their diagram, educators have been taught to focus on the head, heart, and hands. Incorporating the social element for group-oriented, collectivistic learners, I added another “h,” the herd. As sheep belonging to the good Shepherd, we also need to focus on the cohesiveness of the group, as well as bonding with the Shepherd. To reflect all these possible connected learning pedagogies in context, the center of Figure 2 focuses on teaching in order to help train and mature disciples under the direct influence of the Godhead, especially the prominent work of the Holy Spirit as Teacher, while all these activities occur in Christian community.

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Figure 2.

Connected learning pedagogies in context.

Pedagogies of bonding (focusing on the affective) deal with attachment, allegiance, affections, and so on. Pedagogies of believing (focusing on the cognitive) deal with beliefs, knowledge, truth, and trust, but do so in ways with which the connected learner is familiar—memorization, rote learning, chanting, catechesis, communal reading, and narrative learning, for instance. Pedagogies of behaving (focusing on the conative) deal with moral, ethical, and behavioral aspects of the Christian faith. Finally, pedagogies of belonging (focusing on the social or relational) deal with tradition, ritual, identity, and so on. Most of these are not the typical focus of courses preparing global workers but reside firmly in the world of connected learners.

Associating various educational methods with each aspect of learning—with bonding, believing, behaving, and belonging—we note that some pedagogies, such as modeling or mentoring, can fill multiple needs, as exemplified in Figure 3. However, for instance, pedagogies of behaving might involve additional activities such as experiential learning, concrete learning, situated learning, observational learning, and learning in a community of practice. Pedagogies of belonging involve the use of liturgies, rituals, traditions, feasts, ceremonies, peer learning, conversational learning, apprenticeship, and the like. Finally, pedagogies of bonding might also include prayer training, problem-based learning, case-based instruction, and the aesthetic elements of dance, drama, and so on.

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Figure 3.

Connected learning pedagogies of orality.

Conclusion

Sadly, the majority (90%) of global workers rely heavily on literate means to communicate God’s Word (ION, 2004: 3), contrary to the needs of the oral majority. According to Lovejoy (2008: 132–33), literate teaching methods have often proven ineffective when taken abroad, but that “ministries who adjust their approach to the literacy level of their group, whatever that level may be, can expect improved communication, more learning, and more life-change among the hearers.” As a result, we must make way for oral/connected learners by also advocating for different strategies in training global workers and introducing them to a variety of more effective pedagogies. West (2014: 5) warned:

Unless institutions committed to the schooling model, with all its accommodations to socialization processes biased toward the literate, the cerebral, the elite, the professional and the funded primarily, are prepared to re-engineer fundamental (second order, irreversible, structural, radical) change, this form of institution will continue to by-pass the majority of the world’s Christianly receptive peoples.

Perhaps both theological education and connected learning and their identifying signature pedagogies clash because each has a different telos, different fundamental identities, and different ways of learning. The “end game” for the training of some global workers seems to involve right belief, critical thinking, and sound exegesis, while the end game for collectivistic oral learners living in the majority world seems to major on right practice.

To remedy this issue, we must understand and adapt, cease the clash, and make way for oral/connected learners. Amassing a toolkit of ancient pedagogies is a start. Simpson (2011: 1) noted that Kierkegaard in his work Fear and Trembling gave brief mention of a theologia viatorum, a “wayfarer’s theology, a theology for one on the way, for the traveller.” Oral learners are on a different sort of journey through life than those who appreciate academia. They need a theology and ways of learning that support their journey. If pedagogy is truly “the act of leading people on a journey” (Moore, 2004: 12), we would do well to implement the kind of connected learning strategies that promote believing, bonding, belonging, and behaving. The oral majority would welcome our making way for them with such a relational and practical emphasis as they traverse the Christian journey.