Abstract
I started writing a book in the 1980s titled ‘Other Worlds: The Endless Possibilities of Literature’ (Cairney, 1990). I didn’t complete the work until 1990 some 8 years after I had become a Christian. My conversion was rather miraculous as a former atheist, but my new faith became a lens to consider many things afresh. How might my faith even change my perspective on literature’s relationship to my life and that of my students?
In the 1970s as a young teacher in my early 20s, I was appointed to a school in a disadvantaged community in Western Sydney. With a class of 36 reluctant readers, I discovered that literature could ‘take’ my students on ‘journeys’ to other places, times, and experiences that challenged and expanded their imagination, worldview, and hopes for the future. I observed my classes over several years after this as they moved from being poor readers largely disinterested in books to engaged readers who devoured books. This was not just to succeed at school, but they were exploring worlds beyond their experiences. My students were all living in poor, disadvantaged communities that constrained their hopes, dreams, and goals for the futures.
What I observed in my students from mostly working-class families was that literature helped to expand their worlds. As they grew in reading ability, my observations confirmed a transformation within many of them, as stories became a critical ‘… intellectual activity of the mind connecting prior and new knowledge and experiences with their grasping after the unknown’ (Cairney, 2017: 122).
In parallel with my studies in literature and education, rather unexpectedly at the age of 31, I was converted from atheism to Christianity. In the decade that followed, I began further university studies and encountered the early work of Anthony Esolen, who wrote ‘… imagination, memory and knowledge are not incompatible but related’ (Esolen, 2013). For my students, in those first years of my teaching, books had become a key catalyst for the expansion and union of these key activities of mind. These personal insights, helped me to understand more clearly the power of story and literature to grow our knowledge, widen our worlds, and make sense of life and culture.
A decade later, Charles Taylor was one of many scholars who helped me gain a deeper understanding, of how and why my students were affected by literature. His work introduced me to the concept of ‘social imaginaries’ (Taylor, 2004). Taylor suggested that as we ponder and reflect on life experiences, literature has the power to help explain them. Imagination can create frameworks, helping us to engage, understand, and imagine our world through the stories, myths, and dreams we encounter. Such experiences create contexts that shape our lives, hopes, goals, and actions.
More recently, I have been reading Christopher Watkin’s work Biblical Critical Theory (2022) and have found echoes and connections with my work in the last 20 years. My research of course has addressed the more restricted spheres of story and the construction of meaning. Watkin reminds us that the ‘…Bible sheds light on the whole of life, how we can read and understand our society, our culture, and ourselves through the lens of the Bible’s storyline. It does not try to explain and defend the Bible to culture; it seeks to analyse and critique the culture through the Bible’ (Watkin, 2022: 2). The work covers much ground and resonates with my lived experience as a Christian educator and researcher.
Watkins in this seminal work invites Christians to consider the biblical framework as a critical theory through which to apply a lens to all forms of Christian practice. Like Watkins, I’ve always liked asking the question ‘So what’? As teachers and leaders within Christian educational institutions, we need to ask ourselves such questions; our students certainly will! As teachers, we should reflect upon how our Christianity is making a difference to our teaching, or how different education is in my class and school to that offered by a public, Steiner, or Islamic school.
My book Pedagogy and Education for Life: A Christian Reframing of Teaching, Learning, and Formation (Cairney, 2018) was my first serious attempt to push back on the many narrowly defined approaches to Christian education I observed being enacted and taught in some Christian schools. I wanted to challenge teachers and schools to consider how educational pedagogy, founded on Christian belief, faith, and hope, might be reflected not only in the content taught but also in school and classroom pedagogy and practices. This has led to two questions I use to challenge myself, which others might well find useful in looking afresh at what Christian education looks like in their schools.
First, as Watkin maintains, the Bible ‘…sheds light on the whole of life’. If so, how can Christian teachers help students to read and understand society and culture, and their place within them? School administrators, teachers, and students need to challenge one another to consider what it is they privilege and value most, and why? A quick audit of the prizes awarded each year to students, and the things that led to their success, might shine a light on what is seen as of greatest value to them, and teachers, students, and families.
Second, as we review Christian teaching and schools, we need to ask how the hopes we see prioritised in the Bible help us to shape our priorities as Christian teachers and schools. How can we underpin the education we offer with eternal hope, not just short-term success in this life?
Gestalt psychology teaches us that when we observe something, we tend to focus on some things and ignore others. For example, we might prioritise school and life ‘success’, while paying less attention to student growth in character and the faith. I have witnessed many school awards nights and seen students being honoured for varied things. These include academic success, sporting achievements, service, the arts, and contributions to Christian activities within the school. Sadly, the latter are often just a footnote, or minor part of proceedings.
In Christian and secular schools, the greatest focus and most prestigious awards are presented at the end of proceedings. These are almost always prizes for academic and sporting success. Contributions to Christian life and service are generally little more than minor footnotes to School Awards Nights. The great challenge for Christian education is how to maintain focus (whether students, teachers, parents, or administrators), not just on school success but our students’ salvation in Christ and spiritual growth. If we are to do so, we must consider the doctrinal and cultural reforms necessary in our schools.
Watkin’s work helpfully issues a challenge to all Christian scholars, but also in my view, all Christians and Christian schools. That is, instead of trying to explain and defend the Bible to the world and its priorities, we need to place greater importance on analysing and critiquing culture through the Bible. If what Christian schools and teachers provide is genuinely shaped by a biblical framework, we will not only be fulfilling the promise of Christian education but also the apologetic goal advocated by G. K. Chesterton, ‘to present Christianity so that people can see it with new eyes’ (Chesterton, 1986: 148). Some might be tempted to avoid Biblical ‘truths’ which they see as hard to accept, but we must present a vision with its challenge to the values of the world. The allegiance of Christian educators is not, and must not be to the world.
Hence, in my work, I have sought to unpack the pedagogies of Christian schools and teachers and challenge each to identify how they demonstrate biblical truth in their leadership, practices, priorities, and teaching. Our God offers us an eternal future hope, not just short-term success in life. This should be a challenge we repeat often to one another, whether as teachers, school leaders, or school administrators. I’m thrilled that in this edition of our journal, the articles also reflect this same desire.
John Thompson opens this issue with attention to Karl Barth, commonly regarded as one of the most preeminent theologians of the 20th century. Little attention has been paid to his teaching practices. Thompson explores biographical reports of his teaching practices through the lens of Barth’s theology, suggesting that the process yields a robustly Christian philosophy of teaching that is theologically rooted and practically demonstrated.
Jill Swisher and Lori Doyle attempt to utilise Trentham’s Inverse Consistency Protocol (ICP) to appraise human development models for use within Christian educator preparation programs, with particular reference to Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) model. They propose that the ICP can be applied to any secular paradigms to discern potential areas of inconsistency with an institution’s faith tradition.
Peter van Olst addresses the need for Christian schools in an era of rapid social change to find out how to adapt their personhood and character formation to the necessities of navigating pluralism. The current context obliges schools to incorporate efforts for responsible citizenship, social cohesion, and sustainable development into their curricula. Investigating this dynamic empirically, van Olst argues that Christian schools, to be both safe and serving, need to combine a strong focus on their pedagogical mission with a holistic approach to pupils and students.
This year marks the 30th anniversary of bell hooks’ critical pedagogy classic, Teaching to Transgress. Nathan Cartagena and Danielle Corple explore the relationship between hooks’ Black feminist perspective on education as the practice of freedom and efforts to develop kingdom pedagogies. Through a collaborative Christian dialogue, they explore how Teaching to Transgress can empower Christian educators to resist domination, cultivate embodied vulnerability, and pursue teaching and learning as a healing enterprise.
Finally, Paul Youngbin Kim, Mika Govender, Katharine E. Bau, and Nicole Y. Chiangpradit address the scarcity of research on the experiences and perspectives of international students at Christian institutions around race and racism. They offer a preliminary, qualitative investigation of the experiences and perspectives of 10 international students enrolled at a Christian institution located in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. They point to promising implications for those in Christian higher education working to help international students flourish.