Teaching Amid A Community of Teachers

Part-way through teaching a new course on faith and pedagogy last year I noticed an emerging pattern that had not been a fully conscious part of my plan. An unanticipated trend slowly turned into a conscious strategy that threaded its way through several major topics.

It started a few weeks into the semester as we explored the implications for classrooms of a Christian vision of a community in which, as the Westminster Confession puts it, we have “communion in each other’s gifts and graces” and are “obligated to seek the mutual good.”¹ We discussed some of the implicit and explicit nudges toward individualism in the way education is organized. We considered the practical implications of acknowledging an immediate obligation to seek the good of those seated around us rather than focusing only on our own learning and success. As I chose readings to accompany this part of the semester, a recent project by several colleagues in the natural sciences seemed an easy choice. Rachael Baker, Amy Wilstermann, and Julie Yonker had been exploring the possible connections between the practices of intentional Christian communities and the Science of Team Science.² They identified virtues and practices that undergird intentional community and designed ways to help students try out those virtues and practices during collaborative work in science courses. In my own class, I assigned my students to work in groups with a few shared readings (to make sure the essentials were directly available to everyone) and further resources from Baker, Wilstermann, and Yonker to be divided among the group. Different group members read articles, listened to a podcast, or read examples of student feedback from the science courses, and then reported back to their team on how their understanding had been extended by the additional resources. This led to a collaboratively structured class discussion of how this project was conceptualizing and enacting the connection between community and learning.

A few weeks later we had shifted our focus and were reflecting together on the relationship between teaching and our inner life, particularly our capacity for gratitude, wonder, patience, and humility. As a way into the topic, I introduced students to the notions of studiositas and curiositas, contrasting forms of the appetite for knowledge rooted in grateful, communal reception or in proud, acquisitive appropriation.^[3] This led us into a discussion of which of our classroom behaviors were rooted in fear or vainglory, whether that could change, and how the ratio could be influenced by teachers. I had mentioned earlier in the semester that teaching a class about teaching Christianly seemed like an endless opportunity for hypocrisy on my part. Discussing humility and vainglory made me especially conscious of the risks of implying more expertise than I had. Fortunately, I was able to point students to my colleague Rebecca De Young’s writing on vainglory and the vices in general and assure them that Rebecca’s expertise on those topics far outstripped my own.³ I suggested they seek out a conversation or a class with her if they wanted to dig deeper.

Toward the end of the semester, we were thinking about faith as a driver of seeking good in the world and the idea that we were “created in Christ Jesus for good works” (Ephesians 2:10, NET). I had spent a few weeks gathering readings in which educators described ways of teaching that were part of a conscious pursuit of doing good in connection with some notable fracture in the world. One week at church I talked with Matthew Heun, a colleague in our engineering department, and mentioned my slow quest for articles that were neither just about teaching nor just about an issue needing attention but were about how the way we teach might be affected by our pursuit of some significant good. He offered a piece he had written about how a focus on shalom and creation care affected his teaching of engineering, and I ended up including it in my class resources.⁴ My students worked in groups with this and other readings to examine how a desire to ameliorate problems such as environmental degradation, racism, exclusion of those with disabilities, or political polarization might be informed by faith and inform approaches to teaching and learning.

Perhaps you’ve noticed the thread that emerged connecting these various episodes, or perhaps, like me, you’ve been so focused on the specific ideas and teaching strategies that it requires a moment of stepping back to see another kind of connection. The connection I finally noticed was this: as the course progressed, I gradually realized how often I had been explicitly and substantively pointing to the expertise and service of my colleagues in other disciplines. Something that might have happened at other times as an incidental mention in passing or a footnote had become an overt and recurring motif. That started me reflecting on what the motif might mean.

My first thought was that here was another opportunity for hypocrisy or integrity, a topic that had been heavy on my mind throughout the course. If we were going to take seriously ideas such as “communion in each other’s gifts and graces,” or discuss an appetite for learning rooted in humility and shared gratitude, then a mode of teaching that foregrounded what I was learning from my colleagues and how their work might add to our understanding seemed fitting.

I next wondered whether what we had done was any different from the standard practice of readings from other scholars and footnoted sources. There is a clear sense in which most of what we do gestures to the work of others. But I began to wonder how students might benefit from an increased awareness of the range of work going on at their own institution. Student comments suggested that my students were not necessarily aware of the significant work being done by professors at their university who were not their immediate instructors. Might they benefit from an increased awareness of how the Christian scholars immediately around them, not just names in a footnote but human beings they see around campus, are thinking and serving? Might they gain from an increasingly informed awareness of how their own educational community is engaged with the wider world? How might such an awareness inform their image of their chosen university, of higher education, of the nature and purposes of inquiry, or how their own learning fits into a larger project? Is there potential here for a more inspiring frame than getting through my own courses and pursuing my own career goals?

That in turn got me thinking about the challenges of staying aware of what colleagues are doing. Like many of us, I am regularly overwhelmed by the information I am trying to track within my own specific areas of expertise and responsibility. It is an easy response to hunker down and let everyone else get on with whatever it is they do. I would not have known about Matt Heun’s article if it were not for a conversation after church. Yet if I focus only on my own work, I am left poorly positioned to communicate to students the richness of what is underway around me. I am also likely to be left feeling isolated and over-dependent on a sense of success and purposefulness in my own little area. What patterns of engagement with my colleagues, what church chats, coffee conversations, or lecture visits might enable me to better communicate how my specific focus is part of a larger fabric of work, love, and service?

Of course, there are simpler reasons for noticing this facet of teaching. “Be devoted to one another with mutual love, showing eagerness in honoring one another.” (Romans 12:10, NET) We are well trained to cite the work of others copiously. This can be a form of honoring, though it is not always that. There are, I think, more immediate ways of honoring those around us as we engage in the act of teaching, and I am realizing that I can make those a more concrete part of my planning.

1. Westminster Confession, 26, available at https://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/westminster-confession-faith.
2. For an overview of the project, see Rachael Baker, “Building a Thriving Research Team” (March 23, 2021), “Practicing Humility in the Sciences” (May 11, 2021), “The Vocation of Science” (June 3, 2021), and “Mentoring for the Cultivation of Virtue in the Sciences” (July 17, 2001), all posted at Vocation Matters: Insights and Conversations from the Network for Vocation in Undergraduate Education (NetVUE), available at: https://vocationmatters.org/author/rachaelabaker/.
3. See e.g. Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung, Vainglory: The Forgotten Vice (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014).
4. M. K. Heun, “Engineering and Faith Commitments: A Reformed Christian’s perspective,” 47th Ghana Institution of Engineers (GhIE) Annual Conference, Accra, Ghana, March 2016.