My pedagogical creed is grounded in theological reflection and informed by the needs of adult learners to explore the connection between their everyday lives and their faith lives. This need was expressed in many ways in this Christian Education class and echoed in one of the opening questions in Jack Seymour’s book Mapping Christian Education. A longtime Sunday school teacher asks: “Why aren’t we able to communicate faith?” (p. 9). The language of faith is often segregated into churches, Sunday school classrooms, and academic studies of theology. Popular portrayals of faith are either extreme examples or sentimentalized portrayals. How do real people wrestle with their everyday, messy lives, and bring theological language and meaning to these experiences? And how do culture, contexts, history, and social systems impact these conversations? My pedagogical creed, grounded in theological reflection, seeks to explore our everyday experiences in conversation with our faith traditions and to critically reflect on this conversation in light of culture and context.

According to Jack Seymour, the four dimensions necessary for faith education are religious instruction, socialization, personal growth, and a process of liberation. I have to admit that I favor personal growth in my pedagogy. My pedagogy values personal story, experience, and narrative as sites of education and transformation. In my own education, I have noticed that listening to the stories of others and sharing my story helps in learning. I have experienced the power of listening, even in this class. I was nervous about the group project and how we would balance the content, the class’ needs, and the group members’ perspectives, needs, and values. In this group process, I discovered that by slowing down, seeing the other, and listening, the gifts and needs that each person brought emerged more clearly.

Yet Seymour, in Mapping Christian Education, says that all four of these aspects must be present in faith education to occur. This class gave me the opportunity to consider other aspects of education beyond personal growth by giving me the chance to name my own pedagogical style and to see what it includes and excludes. The dimension I feel I can work on the most on is the process of liberation, perhaps because it is the aspect I am least familiar with in my own education.

As I looked through other models of faith education and curriculum, I noticed that I favor other approaches that privilege the particulars of individuals’ experiences and personal growth. In Dr. Wenh-In Ng’s three paradigms of biblical interpretation, I favor the Liberal Paradigm. This paradigm puts an emphasis on the individual through personal, psychological, and intra and interpersonal emphases. The results of this model are knowledge, feelings, and personal commitment. Models that emphasis social transformation are newer to me. Dr. Wenh-In Ng’s Liberation/Radical paradigm focuses on community, specifically the poor within communities. This model favors the process of liberation in Seymour’s model.

Similarly, in curriculum theory, I resonated with the Revisionist school of thought, also called “The Learner Experience.” This curriculum style emphasizes the current experiences, interests, and practices of learners as sources of education. This also reflects my preference for narrative pedagogy and dialogue. In learning about the value of dialogue from bell hooks, the importance of story-linking in Christian education in black communities, and the elements of dialogue in education from Jane Vella, I was again reminded of the power of telling our stories and listening to the stories of others. Yet how we listen to these stories and how they are imbedded in larger social systems is also important. In contrast to the Revisionist curriculum model, the Reconceptionalist model of curriculum emphasizes social transformation with a focus on the common good. This model says that the goal of education is to liberate, humanize, and build awareness of social and culture realities.

My preference for practices which foster personal growth and meaning-making make sense on several levels. First, I have developed my perspectives in the highly individualistic western cultural. Personal spiritual practices are not bad; in fact, they have been a part of the Christian spiritual tradition for centuries. But over emphasis on personal spirituality leads to a narrow focus. Second, as Jack Seymour writes, “personal suffering and the brokenness of the world are two of the issues that draw us into reflection on our responsibilities as Christians” (p. 16). There must be a personal connection to any education. In fact, personal connection and investment is one of the keys to Paulo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. His teaching method starts with words and situations that are relevant and important to the communities he worked in. With this basis in the communities lived experience, he was able to teach and cultivate transformation. And, three, I am skeptical of absolute dogma and truth claims. I ask myself how to remain grounded in the truths of the Christian story (which is my ground and tradition) while remaining open to the fluidity and mystery of faith. Trusting my own knowledge and experiences often feels safer, if more incomplete, than relying on the complicated history of the Christian narrative.

Perhaps an example of an educational event I created will reveal some more of my pedagogy, even though the piece was created several years ago. I created the performance piece, Sides of A Wall, with an American-Jewish friend I met at the Graduate Theological Union. I am an American-German who spent much of my childhood and early adulthood in Germany. We realized what a huge and difficult piece of history was part of our relationship and cultural identities. We decided to create a performance piece to explore the wounds of the Holocaust and the possibility of reconciliation. In the piece we used music, dance/movement, and storytelling (personal and historical). We created the piece collaboratively using journaling, research, and improvisation. The process was educational and, at times, challenging. For me, some of the challenge included being identified with, and portraying, evil.

Our activity reminds me of some of bell hooks’ features of a multicultural classroom in Teaching to Transgress. These features include: sharing personal stories; allowing discomfort and allowing joy; using experience as a source of knowledge; acknowledging the body in the classroom (learning space); and acknowledging that education is not politically neutral. Using multiple modes of learning – kinesthetic, music, language, self, and social – also allowed us greater nuance in this “classroom.” Through movement we explored issues of hierarchy and power as well as suffering and healing. Through story we explored multiple truths: my love and identification with Germany and the genocide that Germany perpetrated in the first half of the century. Through the social mode of learning we created a conversation with our audiences and between one another about history, responsibility, loss, and reconciliation.

This synopsis of Sides of A Wall, leads me to amend my previous statement that personal growth is my focus in education. I think personal growth is the aspect of faith education that I am most drawn towards and invigorated by. And this is important information. It doesn’t mean that this is the most valuable kind of learning; it means that this is the aspect of learning that I identify with most. Which means that I have to be more conscious of the other three areas – religious education, socialization, and a process of liberation – and balance them in my teaching and leadership.

I think the best approach I can take to my pedagogy is to lean on the skills that I resonate with most – dialogue, narrative, sharing of stories, and personal reflection – while, at the same time, learning practices and skills that incorporate other aspects into my teaching. One helpful tool is to explore what questions I am asking in my teaching and what I am teaching for. How does my teaching express explicit, implicit, and null curriculum? Am I teaching to the real needs of the learner? Am I privileging one aspect of history, one learning style, one perspective, or one cultural value over another?

Holland and Henriot’s book Social Analysis (p. 28) gives me three helpful questions for critical reflection that can be incorporated in many learning situations: Who makes the decisions? Who benefits from the decisions? Who bears the cost of the decisions? I have learned that critical pedagogy and social analysis – that is, being aware of and questioning the larger social systems we are part of – are essential to any education. I have also noticed that this is not a popular aspect of education. To incorporate critical reflection and social analysis takes tenacity, courage, humility, thoughtfulness, and the willingness to be unpopular. But it cannot be left to those who must, by default, raise these issues – such as those who occupy places on the margins. I learned this most in my work on African-American Religious Education. For this community, social analysis is deeply engrained in their religious education because of their history and social situation in the United States.

I have always believed that the particulars of people’s lives as living and breathing, culturally shaped, and divinely imbued creatures, are the places of theology. Theology is in family relationships and in our jobs as well as the minutiae of life. There is no theology in the abstract. In fact, like the action-reflection model, actions impact theology, which impacts actions, which impacts theology. In the same way, education is not separate from everyday life and concerns. Many of the authors we read, especially Maria Harris, argued that curriculum is not just Sunday school. Curriculum and church education is everything that a church does and is. Likewise, education is not present only in books, classrooms, and designated learning experiences. Education is present in our drive to the grocery store or our meeting at work.

As I move into education ministries, I imagine the things I will take with me and the things I will leave behind. In the metaphor of a travel guide, I will take along: dialogue; exploring the margins; implicit, explicit, and null curriculum; comfort with uncertainty; needs assessment; and a broad-based view of what is education. What I will leave behind is: the need to have all the answers; relying on a set curriculum; being defensive about what I don’t know and what I still have to learn; and, perhaps most importantly, I am leaving behind the assumption that I am not a teacher. The world of educational ministry has opened up to me thanks to this class.