Teaching Across Cultures

Contextualizing Education for Global Mission

James E. Plueddemann

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780830852215
• eBook ISBN: 9780830873722
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

• 2020 Outreach Magazine Resource of the Year ("Also Recommended," Cross-Cultural and Missional)

In our globalized world, ideas are constantly being exchanged between people of different cultural backgrounds. But educators often struggle to adapt to the contexts of diverse learners. Some focus so much on content delivery that they overlook crosscultural barriers to effective teaching.Educator and missiologist James Plueddemann offers field-tested insights for teaching across cultural differences. He unpacks how different cultural dynamics may inhibit learning and offers a framework for integrating conceptual ideas into practical experience. He provides a model of teaching as pilgrimage, where the aim is not merely the mastery of information but the use of knowledge to foster the development of the pilgrim learner.Plueddemann's crosscultural experience shows how teachers can make connections between content and context, bridging truth and life. Those who teach in educational institutions, mission organizations, churches, and other ministries will find insights here for transformational crosscultural learning.

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METAPHORS OF TEACHING

Anyone who listens to my teaching and follows it is wise,
like a person who builds a house on solid rock.

MATTHEW 7:24 NLT

If you are planning for a year, sow rice: if you are planning for
a decade, plant trees; if you are planning for a lifetime, teach people.

CHINESE PROVERB

TED WARD WAS A POPULAR and successful classroom teacher at Michigan State University, but his most significant teaching probably took place outside the classroom. He often invited his doctoral students to his home for integrative discussions. On one occasion he invited me to travel with him, where I observed him teaching a faculty workshop at another university. On the long drive home, we debriefed what happened at the workshop. Ted taught me important concepts formally and informally, always concerned about my personal and intellectual development.

What makes a teacher effective? What kind of teaching promotes human development? In this chapter we’ll look at metaphors for understanding our subconscious cultural expectations about teaching. Ted Ward often spoke of the power of metaphors in our teaching. He complained that the most common metaphors in teaching were those of filling a container or education as a manufacturing process.1 He argued that learners are neither blank slates nor raw material. He observes,

Teachers who think of education in terms of filling a container are rarely concerned with individual differences of the background, interest or aspiration. The content is the thing. Most learning can be reduced to questions and answers; recall of information is the evidence of becoming educated; tests are good indicators of “success” or “failure”; grading can be objective. The more the teacher knows, the better the teacher is. Learning is essentially painful, but it is such good discipline! Such thinking leads to teaching that is little more than cognitive dumping.2

Ted Ward also built on the metaphors of Herbert M. Kliebard, the distinguished professor of education at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who developed the educational metaphors of production, growth, and travel.3 His metaphors have become classic examples of a mindset regarding what we value in teaching. As I’ve written previously, “Metaphors are often unconscious, or at least not clearly defined in our minds. Yet these hidden pictures predispose us to be attracted to certain methods of Christian education and to be suspicious of others. Metaphors are an indication of inner values.”4 Metaphors about teaching are often below the level of our awareness and are sometimes accepted uncritically as the normal way to teach.

Production: The teacher as technician. In this metaphor, “the curriculum is the means of production, and the student is the raw material which will be transformed into a finished and useful product under the control of a highly skilled technician.”5 The educational objective for teachers who see themselves as highly skilled technicians is uniformity, efficiency, and predictability.

Growth: The teacher as gardener. In the growth metaphor, “the curriculum is the greenhouse where students will grow and develop to their fullest potential under the care of a wise and patient gardener. The plants that grow in the greenhouse are of every variety, but the gardener treats each according to its needs so that each plant comes to flower.”6 The educational aim of the gardener is opposite to that of the highly skilled technician. The goal of the gardener is for students to blossom in whatever way their nature inclines them to grow. This process is not uniform, efficient, or predictable.

Travel: The teacher as tour guide. In this metaphor, “the curriculum is a route over which students will travel under the leadership of an experienced guide and companion. Each traveler will be affected differently by the journey since its effect is at least as much a function of the predilections, intelligence, interests and intent of the traveler as it is of the contours of the route.”7 The aim of the tour guide is to provide “a journey as rich, as fascinating, and as memorable as possible”8 for student travelers.

All three metaphors have an educational following, and all three have strengths and weaknesses. The metaphor of production ignores the context of the learner. The growth metaphor focuses almost exclusively on the context of the learner. The travel metaphor considers both the information to be learned and the context of the learner, but lacks a clear sense of destination.

In his classic book The Third Wave, Alvin Toffler argues that during the Industrial Revolution the production model was dominant. The purpose of school was to prepare children to work in factories.9 The explicit curriculum was reading, writing, and arithmetic, but the hidden curriculum was to prepare children for the assembly line by teaching them to be punctual, obedient, and able to do repetitive work.10 Schooling was seen as an assembly line. Factory workers needed to come to work on time and take orders from management without questioning. The school became an ideal means for preparing humans to do repetitious operations, much like robots.

The three metaphors reflect cultural values. According to the highly regarded anthropologist Edward T. Hall, most cultures of the world are more attuned to the environment or the context, whereas words carry more meaning than the context in my northern European cultural heritage.11 We often assume that schooling is made up of decontextualized ideas and abstract theories. We may assume context is extraneous, but for most cultures the context communicates even more than verbal content. In these cultures, nonverbal signals embedded in the environment—the expressiveness of the teacher, the body language of students, and classroom seating arrangement are loaded with meaning and can communicate even more information than mere words.

It’s ironic that because of globalization, schooling around the world now frequently follows the production or factory model even in cultures that traditionally emphasized the context of the learners or the growth metaphor. The combination of the production model of teaching carried out in cultures with a value of high power distance between the teacher and the student is a challenge for real learning.

It’s interesting to note that much educational research assumes a factory model and seeks to improve efficiency of the transfer of content rather than exploring the implications of education in the context of the student. No wonder the clash of global cultural values puts schooling in high demand while devaluing the importance of actual learning.

Understanding one’s own teaching metaphor as well as that of the learner is imperative for the crosscultural teacher. Otherwise, disappointment and maybe even chaos will take place. One of my American friends taught for many years at a theological seminary in Africa. When students asked him a question, he gave them ideas for how they could look up the information for themselves. He wanted to help them learn how to learn, while the students assumed his role was to give them answers. The teacher decided that the students were immature, and the students thought the teacher was not very competent. This is a classic case of the conflict of expectations. The students expected a production professor, and the professor taught from a gardener metaphor.

A PILGRIM TEACHING PILGRIMS

As I’ve taught around the world, I’ve struggled to find a metaphor that would be somewhat familiar in a variety of cultures and yet incorporate my convictions about the importance of integrating God-given bodies of knowledge with the existential needs of learners. The metaphor I’ve come to develop over several decades, inspired by Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan, is that of pilgrimage.

Every culture of the world has stories of journeys and treks, sojourns and voyages. The narrative of pilgrimage is embedded in our human psyche and finds expression in the libraries and folklore of almost all cultures.

In this metaphor, both students and teacher are pilgrims together in the learning journey. The pilgrim teacher may have more experience on the path and greater knowledge of map reading, but teacher and students are fellow travelers, and pilgrim students have much to contribute to the journey.

My hunch is that different cultures prefer certain metaphors of teaching. The strength of the pilgrim metaphor is that it is flexible enough to fit into a wide variety of cultures. It builds on the strengths of the three Kliebard metaphors while it seeks to overcome the weakness of each. The strength of the teacher as technician is that it takes seriously the subject matter to be taught. Unfortunately, it tends to downplay the context of the learner. The strength of the teacher as gardener is that it takes seriously the needs and interests of individual learners, but places little emphasis on subject matter. The teacher as tour guide may seem similar to the pilgrim metaphor, emphasizing the richness of the journey. But the travel metaphor assumes that a tourist’s primary need is experiences, not development.

The metaphor of pilgrimage incorporates all three elements of Kliebard’s metaphors. Because pilgrims need information, there are aspects of production. Parts of the gardener metaphor are also helpful as pilgrim teachers focus on the development of uniquely gifted pilgrims, equipping and strengthening them for the journey. My best teachers were tour guides who taught with a pilgrim mindset both in and out of the classroom.

All of us are on a journey with an eternal destination. As Bunyan describes it, our ultimate objective is the celestial city, and our secondary goal is to make progress in the journey. From a biblical perspective, the ultimate outcome of teaching is to help the learner to love the Lord with all one’s heart, soul, and strength (Deut 6:5). The secondary aim is to promote the development of the pilgrim until we all attain “the whole measure of the fullness of Christ” (Eph 4:13). In this eternal perspective, the most important educational objectives will not be completely fulfilled in this lifetime. So the pilgrim metaphor runs counter to the factory metaphor. Pilgrim teachers don’t see students as raw material to be molded into identical products in the most efficient and time-effective manner.

In the pilgrim metaphor, the mastery of knowledge is important, yet it is not the ultimate outcome. The task of mastering bodies of information is a necessary means not an end. Pilgrims should diligently learn the art of the compass and conscientiously study the map. But they don’t master these skills merely to gain multiple map certificates that will lead to high-paying jobs. Advanced studies in the field of map reading and research into new compass design are valued because they enrich the journey of pilgrims. Such studies lead to the development of pilgrims when connected to the experiences of the road.

Near the beginning of the journey described by Bunyan, the main character, Christian, spends time in Interpreter’s house, where he learns lessons of theology to h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Duane H. Elmer
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Metaphors of Teaching
• 2 The Rail Fence as a Crosscultural Model for Teaching
• 3 Adapting Our Colored Glasses
• 4 Teaching Complex Creatures
• 5 Teaching and Context
• 6 Teaching and Cultural Values
• 7 Teaching Aims Across Cultures
• 8 Cultural Influences on Teaching Aims
• 9 Teaching Through Struggle
• 10 Harmony Through the Rail-Fence Model
• 11 Examples of Pilgrim Teaching
• 12 Improving Teaching Through Evaluation
• Epilogue
• Recommended Reading
• Scripture Index
• Notes
• Praise for Teaching Across Cultures
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright