Abstract
In A Pattern Language (Oxford, 1977) and The Timeless Way of Building (Oxford, 1979), architect Christopher Alexander’s main works on building design and town planning, he noted the importance of green spaces. These spaces could be as small as a pocket park near a busy urban intersection and as large as a sprawling national park such as Canada’s Banff National Park with its more than 6000 square kilometers of mountains, valleys, and lakes. Why green spaces? On Alexander’s account, contemporary people need places to breathe. We need them because they offer relief from the density of our cities—a psychological argument. Were he to write those books today, he would likely include a climate argument, that the trees in parks absorb carbon dioxide and produce oxygen.
At the 2019 Kuyers Institute conference, called Shaping Christian Learning, I presented my own argument that we should carry out our curriculum and unit planning tasks based on architectural and design principles. As I had done in Curriculum Planning with Design Language: Building Elegant Courses and Units (Routledge, 2018), I argued that we should design first and plan second. Along with nine other design principles I treat in that volume, I argue the necessity of green spaces. I argue that both we and our students need to breathe.
When I first began reading architecture and first encountered Alexander’s green spaces argument, I was teaching one section every semester of a senior secondary course on the 20th century and the political and economic ideologies that competed for people’s allegiances during that century. To date, that grade 12 Social Studies course remains the most massive course I have ever taught. We met for 84 minutes on 83 class days. My students’ final grades would be blended from the grade on their classroom work (50%) and their grades on two final, diploma exams of 2.5 hours each (50%). Students’ teachers did not see those exams in advance and did not supervise those exams. To use a technical phrase, “This was serious business!” With a course that big and stakes that high, I concluded that we had not a minute to waste.
But early in my 9 years of teaching that course, I discovered that students needed to breathe; they could not push the freight train every day. Under pressure from them, and eventually because of my reading about green spaces, I began to introduce ways to reduce the pressure. I began to use activities that my students considered fun, such as a fictional Kennedy-Castro meeting (with facemasks) and a stock market game (with an excess of Monopoly money leading to hyper-inflation). I began using more video, even giving two whole class sessions over to Dr. Strangelove—perhaps a strange way to introduce the cold war, but one that worked very well year by year. In short, some are born to green spaces, some achieve green spaces, and some have green spaces forced upon them… in my case by students and architects. That was then.
In the question-and-answer session at the end of my presentation at the recent Kuyers Institute conference, someone raised the question of whether building green spaces into our course and unit plans might actually connect to the Biblical principle of Sabbath. After all, God rested. We are to rest. The Hebrew Scriptures even command that the land be given rest. One reading of the principle of Jubilee is that we should even let the economy rest from time to time (unthinkable in our own day).
This idea of Sabbath is worth exploring. Think about the typical secondary semester of 5 months or the typical post-secondary semester of 13–14 weeks or quarter of 9–10 weeks. Whether our courses meet in 3-hour blocks, or twice or three or even five times a week, the truth is that we and many of our students work under pressure (and we all have met students who, somehow, feel no pressure). Most of our students sense the need to get this written and that read; they want to keep up with their work. Many of them have jobs outside school. Even elementary teaching brings its pressures. Some students will be on individual learning plans. Others, while not on such plans, still need special attention. And in many jurisdictions, teachers feel like their jobs are always on the line because of standardized testing or budget pressures.
For our part, we sense the need to keep things in our courses moving because we know what the course is supposed to include and we don’t want to be squeezing half the course contents into the last two weeks. We can lose half a class for reasons ranging from snow to fire drills. In addition to our coursework, we have administrative, advising, and research responsibilities that, though limited, often seem unlimited to us.
With such pressures on both students and educators, what warrants can one give for educational green spaces or Sabbath rest? And what might Sabbath look like?
Let me suggest two warrants, the first of which takes us back to Christopher Alexander. With reference to space, we know that most people prefer a city or region with parks than one without. We know that green spaces restore. We need them. With reference to time, we know that if we work all the time we will collapse from exhaustion. We need a break. We need to sit. Labor codes reflect our knowledge of that. If we turn to Scripture for our warrant instead of to architecture, we find the same logic. We need to rest. We need to remember who we are and whose we are.
And what might Sabbath look like? As I discovered with my high-school students, activities can be fun and still be centrally related to the course or unit objectives. Educators can be satisfied that the class moved closer to its learning outcomes at the same time that students enjoyed themselves. When, as educators, we choose or design the right learning materials, students can end up in the state Csikszentmihalyi described in Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper & Row, 1990). In this state, they lose track of time and become completely engaged with what they are learning. The work they do becomes its own reward. Flow states can seem Sabbath-like to our students. On the Friday afternoon of the week I am writing this editorial, I will be using black-out poetry (look it up on the internet) as a way of backing away slightly from the heaviness and intense discussions of our course textbook, Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Continuum, 1970). Every time I use black-out poetry, my classroom becomes silent as my students engage. In part, this engagement roots itself in the fact that they are producing art instead of words. But black-out poetry means that we are still working with words… but we are reading in a new way. When, after about 30 or 40 minutes, we show the PowerPoint presentation of their assembled pages, the class enters what can only be called a moment—a special, reverent place.
Of course, the actual break may be the paradigm example of Sabbath. The teacher or professor halts instruction for a spontaneous time of Q&A. The student’s comment sparks a discussion which, while apparently off-topic initially, takes on great importance. Things students say in the circle-meeting (with which I begin all my classes) may not all connect to the course objectives, but they build classroom community. I have listed only a few ideas and practices of my own here, wanting only to have uncovered—not covered—the idea of Sabbath in course and unit planning. I invite others to think more about green spaces and Sabbath. In the face of the accountability juggernaut, we need to develop robust warrants—both theological and practical—for what some will inevitably consider wasted time. We need to articulate suitable practices, approaches, activities, and teaching/learning strategies for different subject areas and different educational levels, from primary through tertiary. Let us do this for our students and for ourselves because we both need to rest.
The articles in this issue reflect something of the growing range of research on Christianity and education. Mary Mihovilovic and Helen Boulton focus their attention on the under-researched experiences of Catholic teachers working in secular English schools. Through interviews, the authors explore these teachers’ experiences of vocation, the absence of metanarrative, and their own Catholic identity. The findings offer insight into the experiences and needs of Catholic teachers that can be useful to school leaders as well as to the teachers themselves.
Perry Glanzer, Theodore Cockle, Britney Graber, and Elijah Jeong shift our attention to the North American context and to student affairs professionals. They argue that student affairs theories and professional practice guidelines are shaped by nonreligious narratives, stimulating a counter-literature about what might be distinct about Christian student affairs. They focus on the theological foundations used in this literature, with the aim of moving toward a more comprehensive Christian theology of student affairs. They suggest that locating the profession of student affairs within the Christian narrative can have far-reaching implications.
Carol Paige draws us back across the Atlantic to Spain, and in particular to debates about how Spanish students should be educated about citizenship. The article provides historical background concerning citizenship education in Spain and an overview of the Education for Citizenship and Human Rights (EfC) curriculum. The article then connects this mandatory curriculum subject to the specific concerns and needs of Christian schools.
Timothy Lincoln provides a qualitative study focused on theological education, addressing the relationship between the lives of ministers serving congregations and how seminary professors imagine congregational ministry. Perspectives are gathered from seminary professors and graduates in ministry at five Protestant seminaries in the United States. While key themes overlapped, there was little agreement between professors and graduates in ministry about which themes were most influential. The findings suggest that seminaries might need to create ways to take seriously the experiences of ministers.
Finally, Michael Buchanan brings a focus on Australian schools and their relationship to higher education, continuing themes from our last issue. Buchanan argues that a focus on knowledge transfer in teacher preparation is a secularizing move that fails to meet the need of Christian schools for teachers who draw confidently upon their Christian beliefs and values in a way that informs their professional work as educators. He then explores some areas that would need to be addressed for teacher education programs to better serve the needs of the faith-based schools that make up a significant portion of the Australian school system, exploring issues related to approaches to teaching, community, and reflection on learning.