Understanding Bible by Design

Create Courses with Purpose

G. Brooke Lester, Christopher M. Jones

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781451488791
• eBook ISBN: 9781451489620
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Todays seminary and religious-education instructors are expected to design and redesign their courses more nimbly than in the past. We have to adapt our courses to novel learning environments, for more diverse learners, toward more diverse vocations. At the same time, institutional rewards for time invested in course design are fewer than ever. Understanding Bible by Design introduces the reader to Understanding by Design: an approach to course design that is proven time-efficient and grounded in the instructors most closely-held convictions about her subject matters big ideas and essential questions. This books contributors (one in Old Testament, one in New Testament, and one in Jewish Studies) demonstrate the value of Understanding Bible by Design for the Biblical Studies instructor, whether at seminary or university, face-to-face or online, from the intimate seminar to the massive MOOC.

Lesters synopsis of course design and suggested action is followed by a collaborative dialogue with Jane S. Webster and Christopher M. Jones. Webster and Jones provide practical commentary regarding the successful implementation of Lesters proposed approaches. As a group, Lester, Webster, and Jones create a text that extends pedagogical innovation in inspiring but practical ways.

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Understanding by Design: Old Testament in Seminary

G. Brooke Lester

A favorite mind-game that I like to play on my students (what, you don’t?) is to tell them that there is one Forbidden Question in my classes: “But Prof, how does this preach?” The “this” is some new learning or other (JEDP, 722 bce, ideological criticism, suzerainty treaty). The motivation for the question varies; sometimes, for example, it implies, “This seems irrelevant to me, why should I have to learn it?”; other times, it implies, “I am so lost, can we distill this down to something I can grasp?” Of course, the reason I “forbid” the question is precisely in order to raise it, and the reason I raise it is to generate further questions (not, naturally, to answer the question; why on earth would I disgrace a genuine question with a straight answer?). Among the questions that arise from forbidding “How does this preach?” is the question of context: “Why do you assume that ‘How does this preach’ has one answer? Why should the text say the same thing to all hearers, in all circumstances, as interpreted by all speakers?” Something only means what it means in a context.

Just as preaching represents the intersection of a particular proclaimer, particular hearers, and particular circumstances, so it is with teaching and learning. In order to uncover some ideal uses of UbD, you’ll want to consider (1) where the learning is happening, (2) who is learning, and (3) who is facilitating the learning. Jane Webster and Christopher Jones, the other two contributors to this volume, each begin the story of their journey with UbD by describing their context. Here, I emulate their example, describing my teaching environment, my learners, and what I bring to the process as an educator.

The School

Outside my office window is Dearborn Telescope Observatory, one of the last working astronomical telescopes using a traditional glass lens. On Friday evenings, it’s open to visitors, and graduate students offer demonstrations and answer questions. To me, it serves as a visual icon for a spirit of inquiry, a love of exploration. My own institution’s mission statement speaks of our desire to form “bold leaders,” and it’s a phrase we use often, parsing out what we mean by it, individually and collectively. Working at my hipster standing desk, looking over the top of my laptop screen at the Dearborn Observatory, I allow “bold leaders” to assume synonymy with “fearless researchers” and “intrepid explorers.”

My teaching context is a midsized, stand-alone seminary, Garrett-Evangelical, associated with the United Methodist Church (UMC) and sitting amidst the campus of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Our degree programs are at the master’s and PhD level, though only a minority of students enter with substantive undergraduate background in religious studies. By “midsized,” I mean we have about four hundred students, of whom around three-quarters are enrolled full-time, the rest being part-timers, nondegree students, and special students taking only a few classes (often as part of a degree program at a non-Methodist seminary). We are “stand-alone” in the sense that we are not part of a university or college. Although we have a historic relationship with Northwestern University going back 160 years, we are not administratively affiliated. We are one of thirteen United Methodist seminaries approved as such by the UMC’s General Board of Higher Education and Ministry (GBHEM).^[1] At the same time, the UMC does not share in governance of the seminary. Garrett-Evangelical is governed by a board of trustees, its administration, and its faculty. Our ratio of students to faculty is 8:1, and our seminars reflect this ratio, though a popular seminar might draw twelve or more students. A large “Intro” class can expect twenty-five to thirty students, taught by an instructor and a teaching assistant.

Some readers will wonder how education and religious formation relate to one another at a seminary; others will know that the answer depends on the nature of the denomination and of its relationship to the school. At Garrett-Evangelical, there is no requirement (as at some seminaries) that students and faculty sign a “faith statement” reflecting denominational convictions.^[2] As of this writing, and to my knowledge, none of the thirteen GBHEM-approved seminaries require such a statement. While there are courses that teach United Methodist doctrine and polity (naturally, for the formation of UMC pastors), there is no institutional or academic requirement that students profess or demonstrate faith in UMC doctrine or, indeed, any particular faith commitments at all. Teaching and learning biblical studies at Garrett-Evangelical is not different from teaching it at (to draw on my own experience) a Presbyterian seminary (PCUSA), an Episcopal seminary (ECUSA), or a Roman Catholic school for pastoral studies. It’s true that most of our learners anticipate some ordained or unordained ministry within the United Methodist Church, and are encouraged to integrate their learnings into their self-understandings as people of faith and into their vocational plans (just as are our non-Methodist learners). But the subject matter itself is not different from what you would find in a secular, university course in biblical studies: a corpus-centered Venn diagram incorporating historical inquiry, literary criticism, and cultural studies. Student work is assessed, not in reference to some catechism or statement of belief, but according to its writing mechanics, critical thinking, and control of relevant material. No “faith statement” prejudges the results of faculty scholarship. Like Galileo discovering the moons of Jupiter and thereby showing that not everything in the cosmos revolves around the Earth, we make our inquiries and let the chips (or the walls of Jericho) fall where they may.

That all said, a substantive minority of learners come to our institution with a kind of culturally infused biblical literalism. Without having particularly strong convictions about it, these students—especially those lacking lifelong habits of reading nonbiblical narrative fiction—simply have a walking-around assumption that what they read in the Bible happened. Once introduced to historical and literary criticism (and learning that “criticism” ≠ “nit picking,” but rather = “ways of asking questions”), these students tend to make a ready adjustment to academic biblical studies. We have a smaller minority of learners who are overtly scrupulous to retain various traditional dogmatic claims about the Bible about which there is social controversy, but no evidence-based controversy, even though these convictions are not encoded in UMC doctrine and polity (for example, that Moses authored the Pentateuch, or a creationist reading of Genesis 1–2). A challenge for many teachers of “Old Testament Intro” is to support learners making these kinds of adjustments, while not falling into the trap of designing the whole course around these issues, which arguably can leave the majority ill-served.

“Public Theology”: this is a new initiative at Garrett-Evangelical. In the coming years, we faculty and administrators are committed to practical experimentation in bringing our conversations and practices into the public square. This will mean different things to different participants. For my part, I tend to take scientific popularizers like Carl Sagan and Neil DeGrasse Tyson as my starting point for “public scholarship.” Also, since many of the pedagogues whom I find professionally compelling already have their students doing a lot of course work on the public Web, and since much of my country’s public discourse on the Bible is misinformed or outright deceptive, I will be looking for opportunities to engage my learners in “public biblical scholarship.”

Goals, Objectives, and Outcomes

Unlike many colleges and universities, our institution has not devised common rubrics for, say, writing mechanics or critical thinking, even within a degree program or a field of study. However, we do have a minimal set of goals articulated at the institutional level in a mission statement, and also for our various degree programs. In principle, these general goals can find more concrete expression in departmental goals, and finally (from a UbD perspective) in some of the learning objectives and outcomes embedded in our Stage-One and Stage-Two course design.

Our mission statement^[3] implies the following goals: that graduating learners be “skilled, bold and articulate leaders who share the transforming love of Jesus Christ,” and that they be “equipped to live and proclaim the Gospel and to teach in diverse congregations and educational settings.”

Our academic handbook includes goals specific to degree programs.^[4] For the ministry degrees (MDiv, MA), these goals are:

1. Personal and corporate spiritual formation: growth in knowledge of God and of faith through personal formation and covenantal communities of prayer and mission so the student lives with integrity, enhances personal and emotional health (self-care), is empowered by the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and engages in prophetic interaction and evangelical witness in a diverse society.
2. Knowing, understanding, and interpreting the theological tradition: developing as a theologian in the practice of ministry with attention to capacities for critical, reflective, faithful, and creative thinking and doing in ministry.
3. Professional ministerial practice: developing as a leader and reflective practitioner in ministry, mission, and outreach.

For the research- and teaching-related degree programs (MTS, PhD), there is no corresponding list of goals. There is only a descriptive note that these degrees “provide a specialized focus in the study of the Christian tradition and its practices.” Since an MTS student will take a large core set of courses in common with the “ministry-degree” students (while concentrating in a given field and writing a thesis), one can assume that our goals for MTS students include, but are not limited to, those for ministry students.

Ideally, each field (which is what we have instead of “departments”) would collaborate to write field-specific goals based on these institutional and degree-specific goals. Our fields are Bible (OT and NT); Church History; Theology, Ethics, and Society; Preaching, Worship, and Church Music; Pastoral Psychology; Christian Education; and Congregational Leadership (“United Methodist Studies” functions as a de facto field as well). However, the institution’s fields have not been required or encouraged to write such field-specific goals. So, I find it helpful to devise a rough-and-ready set of Bible-specific goals, as a kind of bridge toward finding course-specific goals that in some way reflect our institutional and degree-specific goals. For example, “skilled, bold, and articulate leaders” may imply:

• Skilled in the field’s major historical, literary, and cultural interpretive approaches;
• Bold researchers who follow evidence unflinchingly even where it challenges traditional or deeply felt religious doctrine or convictions;
• Articulate ability to express oneself in the venues and genres appropriate to the field: research papers, prepared presentations, exegesis, reflection, analysis of literature and of arguments, and so on;
• Leadership in terms both organizational (facilitating activities, leading teams) and ethical (challenging entrenched hierarchies, “checking privilege,” advocating for unpopular perspectives).

These could be further explored in light of the degree goals. For example, “critical, reflective, faithful, and creative thinking and doing” may imply:

• Critical thinking and doing in such terms as expressed in Susan Wolcott and Cindy Lyn...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Additional Praise for Understanding Bible by Design
• Setting the Problem
• Understanding by Design
• Understanding by Design: Old Testament in Seminary
• Understanding by Design: Putting Your Course Online
• Understanding by Design: New Testament at University
• Teaching Outside of the Bible with Understanding by Design
• Appendix