Abstract
This work by a senior cross-cultural educator begins and ends with metaphor. Indeed, as Jim Plueddemann strikes an avuncular tone and accompanies his reader across the landscape of cross-cultural teaching, he imagines himself a fellow pilgrim awarded by long experience the slight veteran’s advantage of having been this way numerous times before.
While Teaching across Cultures does not strain for the passion of, say, Parker Palmer’s The Courage to Teach (1998, 2007, 2017) or the case-study particularity of Perry Shaw’s Transforming Theological Education (2014), it brings similar value to the alone-ness that the practitioner of teaching across cultures sometimes feels as he or she seeks to make progress amid the inevitable crosswinds.
In this reader’s view, Plueddemann’s most prevalent and most fecund metaphors are those of “pilgrim teaching” and “the rail fence model.” The author comes to his pilgrim teaching by way of review and light critique of his erstwhile mentor, the late Ted Ward. With characteristic generosity, Plueddemann detects virtues in each of Ward’s three models of education: production (the teacher as technician), growth (the teacher as gardener), and travel (the teacher as tour guide).
Yet, recognizing his debt to Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Plueddemann opts for an alternative, that of a pilgrim teaching pilgrims. The metaphor allows Plueddemann to cast the teacher as a fellow traveler, one who shares a destiny with his or her classroom charges. By consistently deploying the pilgrim image, Plueddemann endeavors to harvest the value that resides in each of Ward’s three models while at the same time recognizing both the virtue and the liability that are common to education as practiced by, respectively, individualistic and collectivistic cultures.
His second dominant model, the rail fence, allows the author to recognize the top-rail value of the subject (i.e., Scripture, the academic disciplines, or other bodies of knowledge), as well as the bottom-rail value of the needs, interests, culture, and struggles of the learner. Vertical fence posts erected at short intervals hold these two together and, via the metaphor, allow and even insist upon frequent interaction between one set of reality and the other.
In and around these two dominant metaphors, Plueddemann reviews and comments upon matters of theology, anthropology, the history of educational theory, humility as pedagogical posture, and intercultural dynamics. Yet this running commentary never strays far from the book’s principal metaphors, which lend coherence to the work. In addition, each chapter ends with a first-person anecdote from a cross-cultural educator whom Plueddemann has come to know along his own pilgrim journey.
Teaching across Culture is not a ground-breaking book, nor does it claim to be. To his credit, Plueddemann eschews both technical and ideological answers to the dilemmas of cross-cultural educators. Unlike some of his peers in the field, the author avoids demonizing or condescending to teaching specialists who lack formal instruction in the field of education itself.
By adopting conversation as both his formal tone and the spirit of his work, Plueddemann has placed in pilgrim hands an accessible and discerning record of another pilgrim’s journey. It is likely to find itself consulted time and again as one finds one’s way to increasing effectiveness as a cross-cultural teacher.