Pedagogy
teaching and methods
Performance Criticism as Anti-Imperial Pedagogy
Traditional pedagogy often assumes that the teacher comes with all knowledge that must then be deposited in the heads of the students. Performance Criticism offers a teaching strategy that moves power relationships in the classroom toward mutuality as it respects the “body of knowledge” that all bring to class. Based on a specific course that he taught, Ruge-Jones argues for Performance Criticism as a holistic pedagogy that embraces mutuality, embodiment, openness and multiplicity of interpretations. As such it offers an alternative to the dynamics of imperialism that so often rule in our world.
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Storytelling and the Art of Teaching Theology
I am an assistant professor of theology at a church affiliated liberal arts in the heart of Texas. Every student who earns a degree with us has taken two theology courses. Some do this willingly, some begrudgingly. As my title indicates, we have a theology department, not a religion department. What this means is that the professors do not feign objectivity when discussing beliefs and practices related to Christian faith, but teach those areas as people passionately committed to a particular faith. Yet, as part of a liberal arts education, we do examine the faith critically.
Each of these dynamics put us at odds with several of the students who enter our courses. At the extremes are two groups. In the South were fundamentalism runs deep, some students who came to Texas Lutheran University because it claims to be Christian appreciate the explicitly Christian nature of the courses, but have profound issues with the critical approach to theology, especially when this approach addresses and critiques biblical material or familiar interpretations of the same.
A second group of students enters a classroom that will deal with topics they either know little about or that they feel deeply antagonistic toward. These students have chosen TLU because of its location or its academic program in an area distinct from theology. We were left somewhere between laughter and tears a couple of years ago when 2% of our students responded to a survey saying that they would never consider attending a church related college. These students take the theology courses as part of the hoops they are required to jump through in order to graduate. Some of them are ignorant of basic Christian assumptions. They simply lack the experience of Christianity. Others, however, have been deeply burned by a church that has rejected them or treated them in a decisively ungracious manner.
Teaching these two groups in the same classroom can make for interesting educational experiences. Teaching in a way that engages all these students and the crowd in between them is a major challenge. Of all the teaching tools in my pedagogical belt, the one that has been most productive has been biblical storytelling. In the five years I have taught here without exception, this particular technique of exploring Christian faith has ranked highest on student evaluations of most helped them learn in the class. Typically, 40 to 50% of the students name the storytelling explicitly as the element they most appreciated. I would like to explore the particular kinds of resistance offered by the two groups I have highlighted and then speak of why storytelling facilitates each of their learning...
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Our assigned task is to focus either on the “role of storytelling in the formation of the Bible and/or about your experience of storytelling in your research and teaching.” As I look at the piece I have prepared, I suspect that it may, in fact, be a little of both. The roots of this essay, this effort, this try, however, are in the practice of telling actual stories.
I suspect that all of our essays will be a little of each, both origins and experience. If it is, indeed, the case that all of biblical narrative, like the trees in the story of God’s creating the fruitful world, bears “fruit in which is their seed,” then we ought to expect that any close attention to the actual practice of storytelling will reveal something also of the origins of those stories. I also expect, with Albert Schweitzer, that some of what comes to us walking out of the past will be a riddle and an enigma, that many of the moments in which our present practice releases a reminiscence of ancient practice we will simply fail to recognize, or (just as likely) actively mis-interpret. Such are the breaks.
My experience of telling stories has come in the company of the members of my troupe of actors and creators, the Provoking the Gospel Project. With this group I have, over the last seven years or so, explored, puzzled over, wrestled with, and performed biblical stories, sometimes in small workshops, sometimes in courses that I teach, sometimes in large productions, the last involving costumes, sets, and the 72-member Augustana Choir. Our aim in all of this is, and has ever been, to discover and develop provocative playings of these fascinating old stories.
