Click here to listen to the episode on Spotify
In the forty-fifth episode of the third season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with David I. Smith, Professor of Education and Director of the Kuyers Institute for Christian Teaching and Learning at Calvin University. Smith opens by discussing the development of the scholarship of teaching and learning. 30 years ago, Smith contends such a research focus was primarily comprised of one-off papers that failed to coalesce into a well-woven base of literature. Smith notes that such a base is now reflected in books and papers that refer to one another, seeking to refine and advance arguments as often occurs in other disciplines and sub-disciplines. Smith then shifts to discuss his own interest in the scholarship of teaching and learning and how its origins reside in his interest in language pedagogy. His interest in German language pedagogy, in particular, was what brought him to Calvin, led to a teaching appointment in education, and service as the director of the Kuyers Institute for Christian Teaching and Learning. As the institute’s director, Smith explains he has sought to support Christian contributions to that base of literature as well as programs that help educators apply those insights in pedagogical practice. Smith than closes by discussing the roles teachers play in the life of the Church and how teachers and the Church can increase their service to one another in the years to come.
- David I. Smith’s Everyday Christian Teaching: A Guide to Practicing Faith in the Classroom (Eerdmans, 2025)
- David I. Smith’s On Christian Teaching: Practicing Faith in the Classroom (Eerdmans, 2018)
- David I. Smith and Susan M. Felch’s Teaching and Christian Imagination (Eerdmans, 2016)
- David I. Smith and Brabara Carvill’s The Gift of the Stranger: Faith, Hospitality, and Foreign Language Learning (Eerdmans, 2000)
Todd Ream: Welcome to Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. My name is Todd Ream. I have the privilege of serving as the publisher for Christian Scholar’s Review and as the host for Saturdays at Seven. I also have the privilege of serving on the faculty and the administration at Indiana Wesleyan University.
—
Our guest is David I. Smith, Professor of Education and Director of the Kuyers Institute for Christian Teaching and Learning at Calvin University. Thank you for taking the time to share your insights and wisdom with us.
David I. Smith: You’re welcome. Thank you for having me on.
Todd Ream: In 1990, Ernest L. Boyer and his colleagues with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching published “Scholarship Reconsidered,” what is still arguably the most influential report on the practice of scholarship in higher education. Numerous colleges and universities, including numerous Church-related colleges and universities, still utilize that work as a framework for their promotion and tenure standards and requirements.
And part of the appeal is that while scholarship of discovery is included in Boyer’s report, that report expands the practice of scholarship to include the scholarship of integration, application, and teaching. In what ways have you come to understand and perhaps even define what Boyer and his colleagues reference as the scholarship of teaching?
David I. Smith: Um, it, to me, this has been a bit of a double-edged sword. I mean, Boyer himself wasn’t, I, I think, entirely clear in the ways he described it about what the scholarship of teaching was. Other people have felt the need to try to make more specific definitions. Um, and something that’s been a little curious about it is that there’s this attempt to distinguish between the scholarship you do normally just to prepare class, right? Just, just teaching in a scholarly manner. You actually read stuff before you go teach people.
And and, and, and this attempt at a more systematic inquiry uh, into what’s going on when you teach. Uh, and usually part of the definitions are doing that in a way that’s shareable with other people. So doing that in a way that leads to publication or to conference presentations.
the thing is, the more you move in that direction, the more it becomes curious that we separate teaching off as a separate topic, because you start to find you’re actually doing the scholarship of discovery or the scholarship of integration or the scholarship of application, but you’re focusing it on teaching and learning. And, and so the whole thing feels almost a bit like an exercise in trying to come to grips with the weird fact that the modern academy has not cared very much about teaching and learning and needs an explicit reminder that this is a thing that one can actually inquire into and think about.
It’s the only possible topic of scholarly inquiry that’s kind of separated off as having its own bucket, right. The, you know, the others are all modes of inquiry, whereas the scholarship of teaching is the thing that you’re inquiring about, and, and this is somehow in its, in its own bucket. So that, that then becomes a double-edged sword because it’s, it’s, you know, on the one hand, it seems that that reminder was necessary, that, that teaching is actually a worthwhile topic.
Uh, on the, on the other hand, it makes it this, this little ghetto thing that, yeah, some people are interested in that and, and a separate thing from, from the general process of inquiry. So, you know, as I think back over projects that I’ve been involved in over the years I’ve, yeah, I’ve been in, you know, a, a, a large empirical investigation of how digital technology is being used in Christian K-12 schools that was quantitative and qualitative empirical research.
I’ve been part of a team looking at the history of how Christians have used metaphors drawn from theological and biblical sources to talk about teaching and learning that draw on literary theory and metaphor theory and so on. I’ve been part of a project on social practices and how they relate to how we think about teaching and learning. So it’s been very interdisciplinary. It’s involved a bunch of different kinds of inquiry that also happen in relation to other topics. It’s just been focused on teaching and learning.
So, so to me actually, the, the, the more fundamental question underlying this whole discussion that I’m, I’m still not sure uh, whoever we is that, you know, the, the collective, the collective mind has quite come to grips with is, is, is teaching genuinely interesting as a, as a, as a focus of scholarly inquiry or or is it just the, the tips, the tricks, the how to, the, the stuff we get done when we have to in between having conferences on our great and profound topics? Um, or, or is teaching itself sufficiently complex, sufficiently fascinating, sufficiently humanly important to be itself the focus of sustained and rigorous inquiry that draws across a range of disciplines, that uses a range of different research methods that involves discovery and integration and application and, and is just as intricate, complex, long-term, fascinating as any other kind of scholarly inquiry.
Um, so you know, that, that’s, I, I think things have progressed in, in, in that respect. I remember when I first came to Calvin, someone leaning over at a, at a, at a faculty development event at the start of a day, a senior faculty member and saying, “Well, if it’s about teaching and learning, we know it’s not important.” And I, I, I don’t think that’s, I don’t run into that anymore much. I, I, I run into a lot of willingness to have the conversation, but I do still run into the sense that we feel that the teaching and learning bit is something we can fix in a faculty development day at the start of the year.
Whereas the disciplinary scholarship is the thing you need to, need to do a PhD to even be at starter level for. Uh, so, so there’s still a big discrepancy into whether we think it’s serious joined up thinking or whether we think it’s the topic for a quick workshop.
Todd Ream: Yeah. You just mentioned that on the campus where you serve, that the scholarship of teaching and learning, you don’t hear the derisive comments that you may have heard at one point in time. What are some of the characteristics, characteristics of the maturation of the conversations then that have been having, not only perhaps, say, on the Calvin campus, but on other campuses where you’ve lectured and served as a consultant?
David I. Smith: Yeah. I mean, you know, campuses are all different from each other, so I hesitate to generalize, and I’ve not been on all of them. But I have just noticed something that’s pleased me is seeing more articles come out that refer to other articles. Uh, it seems like a simple little thing, but when I first started being interested in, specifically in the area of Christian teaching and learning teaching and learning in Christian contexts and motivated and framed by Christian concerns it seemed like even the good articles that I read were, were single shots and, and they didn’t refer to each other. There wasn’t a conversation. And more I’m seeing in the relevant journals articles coming out that refer to other articles. That, that to me is just a sign of a conversation emerging rather than everybody having their unique set of blessed thoughts that occasionally get sent to a journal. Uh, so that’s, that’s been a good thing.
I, I also think on at least some campuses, there’s been an attempt to try to find better learning modes than the speaker at the start of the year. Um, it, it, it sometimes seems with, with faculty development, we instantly forget everything we know about learning in, in other contexts. And, you know, the idea that faculty are going to learn to teach differently from having an hour’s lecture in August is, is, has limited traction. Uh, so, so trying to find other modes of engagement and more sustained modes of engagement that continue through the year that involve, you know, reading and study and dialogue and, and, and, and so on.
Um, I’ve seen a little more of that over time and, and a few more, and at a few institutions, some more systematic investments. So those to me are signs of, of recognizing that there’s a conversation, not just a, a thing you have to tip your hat to every now and then.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you. What advantages, if any, do you believe Church-related colleges and universities may possess when considering the scholarship of teaching in comparison to, say, their so-called secular counterparts?
David I. Smith: I, I often think that in theory, one, one basic advantage is that whatever one makes of, you know, debates about how to relate various kinds of pure scholarship to loving God with the mind or whatever, that, that there is this, this anchoring of love your neighbor as yourself being fairly fundamental to to the way Christians ought to be putting the world together in their imaginations.
And teaching is a way of affecting other human beings, that everything you do in the classroom the things students learn, the things they fail to learn, the things they come to resent learning, the things they develop hostilities around or passions for become parts of their identities and have impacts on the the life courses they take, on their sense of self, their sense of viability in terms of their own path through life, there ought to be something odd if that weren’t a source of profound reflection for people who claimed that love of neighbor was a very fundamental part of how they thought about things.
Uh, every time I walk into class, I’ve got a whole bunch of my neighbors right in front of me who are directly affected by my actions, my words my preparation, the choices I’m making. Um, and they’re immediately affected in very concrete ways. I mean, the, the, an example I often use talking to teachers is if, if I walk into class and the chairs are in straight rows facing the front, and I, and I know that you don’t always get freedom to change things, but but if the chairs are in straight rows facing the front especially if it’s an early morning class, I walk in and, and, and half the students will be on their phones and they won’t, and they won’t have turned the light on and, and I’ll walk into this, this morgue.
And if I come a little bit early and I put the chairs in little clusters facing each other in groups of three or four, I walk in and students are talking to each other and there are no phones out. So, so even something as basic as my choice of what to do with the furniture before students walk into the classroom has an immediate impact on the kind of relationships that are constructed, on the way their time is invested on what they think is about to happen in the classroom. And of course, that’s the first of a thousand small choices that make up teaching a class.
So just this basic recognition that the things that I do impact the people I work with, that ought to be an easy thought for Christians to work with in terms of realizing that this is a that this might actually be important, that this might be a dignified topic, right. Not a thing that you occasionally descend to from the heady heights of the really important things, but, but something that, that, that is actually worth deeply careful reflection and investment.
Todd Ream: Thank you. What disadvantages then, if any, might Church-related colleges and universities possess when we talk about the scholarship of teaching and learning?
David I. Smith: One of them is a, um you know, the inferiority complex, right. This, this sort of the keeping up with the Joneses, the sense that, that oh, we, we, we might be Christians, but we want to be scholars too. I think that that can very easily suck conversations into a desire to be manifesting whatever the priorities are of the wider scholarly discussion right now. And given that we have a substantial history in the modern academy of not caring about teaching and learning very much, that, that can suck energy away from teaching and learning conversations because there’s a sense that we’re not really keeping up with the the big boys and girls if we’re, if we’re not putting our energy in certain kinds of directions.
Uh, you know, you, you’re going to get more splash by starting a medical school than by starting a major teaching and learning initiative. So so, so there’s, there’s that kind of sort of sociology of the academy stuff that I think, I think Christian institutions are quite vulnerable to inasmuch as they feel a need to prove themselves in a wider marketplace of ideas.
The other thing that I’ve just, the other just institutional structure thing I’ve noticed is that teaching at a, you know, a smaller liberal arts college you often end up in an environment where there aren’t many people to go round to perform the functions of the institution, so everybody ends up stretched kind of thin. Like, I know quite a few people who are running some office that on a large university campus would be an office of 15 people, and it’s like this one person who’s responsible for that topic who’s, who’s holding all of that together. So I think sometimes the attempt at smaller institutions to still kind of cover everything, is one of the contributing factors into leaving everybody stretched very thin just trying to keep the whole show going, and, and not having enough leisure to, to talk about other things, to reflect on other things.
Todd Ream: Thank you. I want to transition now to asking you about your own formation uh, as a teacher and as a scholar. You were an undergraduate student at the University of Oxford’s Merton, Merton College, studying modern languages, and then you did graduate work in education at the University of Nottingham. Additional graduate work in educational philosophy and philosophical theology at Toronto’s Institute for Christian Studies, and then earned a PhD in language pedagogy from the University of London.
At what point did you discern initially that language education, and in particular the teaching of German as a second language, would prove central to how you were called to exercise your vocation?
David I. Smith: I, I really didn’t have a plan for a couple of reasons. I, I came from a working class family, career planning and projecting wasn’t a topic of conversation. Uh, and I, I, I went to a boys grammar school in, in the UK and, yeah, I did okay academically and so it was my teachers who talked me into going to university. And again, that wasn’t really a home conversation much at all. Uh, in fact, you know, everything since, since what you would call K-12 school has been, I think, a mystery to my parents.
Uh, but I did discover when I was about 13 or 14 that I was doing really well at all the subjects that had words in them, and I was doing slightly less well in the subjects that had numbers in them and, and really didn’t like the numbers subjects as much. And so I went through the British school system at a time when you could specialize a bit earlier than you can now. So when I was 14, I was allowed to ditch most of my number subjects and replace them with language subjects. So, I did. I just went all in on the language side.
So by the time I finished again, what, what North Americans would call high school, I had seven years of French, six years of German, five years of Latin, two years of Russian, and a semester of Spanish and a little bit of biology. So so, so by the time I got to thinking about going to university, it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that I was going to study languages. So I went to university because it meant people would let me learn languages for four more years. I didn’t have a plan.
I, I also wasn’t Christian at this point. I became Christian at university as an adult. Uh, that’s a long story. Um, but during my second semester at university, I became Christian. And again, initially into this kind of evangelical student ministry kind of setting where the unspoken assumption was that if you were serious about your faith, the result when you graduated would be that you would go to the mission field. And so the sense of vocation was very much tied to that.
And in my final year, I spent significant time praying fasting, talking to pastors, talking to friends, trying to figure out what God was calling me to for the rest of my life in the expectation that that would mean, you know, going to the mission field, preferably in a country that didn’t have electricity so that I could prove that I was serious. And again, long story short, heard a very clear call in the end into teaching, and my initial reaction was disappointment, and puzzlement because this, it, it felt like I’d applied for the important position and, you know, been offered one down the tree.
Um, And especially given that I’d been studying languages for, for so long now that pretty much the only thing I could be was a language teacher, and I was going to, I was going to spend my time teaching French grammar to 12-year-olds, and what did that have to do with the Kingdom of God? So I kind of, I, I, I was dragged into it backwards in a sense through a series of choices based purely on what I enjoyed studying and, and then when I did start thinking about vocation within a Christian frame finding the results of that very puzzling.
That really has shaped my whole scholarly trajectory because my life question ever since then has been, I, I became a Christian and three years later I became a teacher, been what do those two major identity shaping events have to do with each other? Like, how do they intersect? Because it was clear to me very quickly when I actually started teaching that the things I was being asked to do in the classroom were value-laden in all kinds of interesting ways. And yet I could find no writing about Christianity and language teaching at all.
I even picked up Christian books on education that claimed to go through the curriculum chapter by chapter and just skipped language education, right. Because it was the, the, again, tacitly there was nothing to say there. So that then shaped my graduate work and it’s been the question I’ve been gnawing away at ever since.
Todd Ream: In 2000, you accepted an appointment to join the faculty at what is now Calvin University, where you’ve served as a modern languages faculty member and an education faculty member. Can you describe the discernment process that brought you, you’d been in North America at, at, in Toronto, but then brought you back across the Atlantic, this time to Grand Rapids and Calvin.
David I. Smith: Yeah, I really wasn’t looking to cross the Atlantic again. You know, moving across the Atlantic with small children every three years is, is, is tiring. Uh, so I was not looking out for a job in North America. Again, it was the culmination of a series of things.
I’d, I’d taught secondary school for a number of years. Um, I’d become very interested in how meaning was made in my classroom. Uh, really simple example that struck me very early, was that it was standard practice in our language department that, you know, students would have to practice saying things like what their parents did for a living and what their hobbies were and what pets they had and so on.
This was part of like first-year French, first-year German. And it was just standard practice among my colleagues that if the student had a strange pet or their father had a really unusual profession to say, “Well, you know, just say you have a dog,” because it’s harder to remember the French word for chinchilla when, when you’re in the exam. And and, and we just accepted this because it was just an exercise to get them to say French sentences.
And then one day in one of my classes a 12-year-old put his hand up while wrestling with a task and said, “Sir, it, it’s okay to lie in French, isn’t it?” Uh, and I thought this, this, this, this little teaching practice that we have, how is this affecting my students’ understanding of the status of different languages, how they relate to ethics, how they relate to communication? Like what meanings are being made here in the students’ imagination as they wrestle with this new system?
That turned into one of the first journal articles I published in the Language Learning Journal. Um, and that kind of question was what I took with me into my graduate study. I was considered weird in my PhD program. I remember going into my first seminar and being asked, “Are you a psycholinguist or a sociolinguist?” Because those were the two, those were the two things you could be if you were interested in language learning.
And, and I said, “Well, I’m mostly using theology and philosophy and thinking about, like anthropological theories and, and what kind of model of personhood underlies the way we teach languages.” And, and I, I would, I would get these sort “Okay then,” silences. And we would go back to discussing linguistics.
So at the end of that, I, I, I went into graduate work trying to figure my classroom out rather than trying to get somewhere. So I was quite open to just going back into my classroom. Um, the downside was I’d become more and more interested in these questions. I’d started writing about them. I was already writing a book with someone at Calvin and another book with somebody in Nottingham. And so going back into the school classroom was probably going to give me pretty limited time for research and writing.
And, and yet I was also very wary of going into an education department at that point, even though my PhD was in curriculum, because I’d been doing grad work for five years by that point and, and I thought, in another five years I’m going to be teaching people how to teach in K-12, and I won’t have done it for a decade. And I didn’t want to be the armchair theorist. I wanted to test everything I was theorizing against actual students.
And then this opportunity came up at Calvin that was in a German department and involved because of the deficiencies of language education in North America, it involved teaching beginners at the age of 18, which was quite astonishing. And it, it seemed like it would give me a chance to be at a place that, that, that, that actually valued Christian research and also would let me teach students who didn’t want to be in my class and, and have like a, a real environment to, to try things out in.
Uh, but really at first I heard about it through an email list and the only thing that caught my eye was that the starting date of the job was the day after my contract finished where I was working at the time, and I thought I should at least pray about it. So that was the start of the process. But it started seeming like an opportunity to maybe continue contributing to the research conversation, in a place that would value Christian research, but, but be able to, to try it out every day.
Todd Ream: Thank you. From 2001 to 2012, you served as the editor of the Journal of Christianity and Foreign Languages. And since 1997, you’ve served as the editor of what is now the International Journal of Christianity and Education. In what ways have you found serving as a journal editor vocationally satisfying?
David I. Smith: It’s a task that I feel like giving up at least once a week. Um, but somehow I’ve ended up doing it for decades now. I, I, I think, um.
Todd Ream: You’re late at making that choice then if you’ve been, had it before you several times.
David I. Smith: The thing is, as an editor, you can end up spending a lot of your time reading the articles that never, never see the light of day, and uh, so, so there is a lot of work involved and work that doesn’t always lead to public results or thanks. I mean, it’s very occasionally I think it’s diminished over the years. People have got more used to it, but very occasionally someone will take offense that you criticized their article and you’ll end up with some, some unpleasant responses.
But I, I, I do see it as a form of, of, of service to Christian scholarship because the stuff that’s already ready for publication is, is not a big problem, right. You know, you, you, you usually, people get some feedback, they get some peer review, you get it through to publication, that’s all good. Um, the pieces that are intriguing to me are the pieces that are not quite ready yet, where the person still has some skills to learn in terms of their writing, in terms of the way they present their research, in terms of the way they make an argument, in terms of the reading they’re doing.
And not every submitting author is in a situation where they’re getting good support in those areas. So something I’ve always tried to do with the journals I’ve been involved in since the beginning is to give substantive feedback, right. We, we don’t typically send out three-line rejection letters. We try to send out substantive. Occasionally, this gets taken the wrong way. It’s like, you know, “Why did you spend pages criticizing my article?” Well, I was trying to help. But um, but we try to send enough feedback that the person has, the person submitting has things to work with in terms of improving their work and potentially becoming a contributor to the conversation even if they’re not quite there yet.
I also think that again, something I’ve often said to new faculty is that my job as an editor is not just to get you into print, it’s to prevent you from publishing things you will be ashamed of will, will not get you hired when your next hiring committee looks them up. So I, I’m also there to save you from yourself and and, and tell you that, that, you know, you don’t actually want this to be published right, right now. It’s not going to do you any favors. Um, so that, that mixture of a sort of gatekeeping function but also a mentoring function, I think the way I’ve reconciled myself to the significant level of busy work involved in it is I see it as a mentoring function.
Um, and especially since, you know, our journal used to be called the “Journal of Education and Christian Belief,” and then we merged with the “Journal of Christian Education” in Australia, we became the “International Journal of Christianity and Education.” Uh, since then, gradually, we’ve seen a significant increase in international submissions. So we get papers from all over the world now which again, has really expanded that sense of mentoring, people just joining the conversation from a lot of different backgrounds and a lot of different levels of prior exposure and training. So I see it as a behind-the-scenes way of trying to nurture more Christian scholarship that’s publishable.
Todd Ream: Thank you. You’re the author or editor of 20 books, with the most recent being published by Eerdmans in 2025 being “Everyday Christian Teaching: A Guide to Practicing Faith in the Classroom.” When you look at the arc of the titles you published, what themes, if any, emerged, or what repeated questions do you seem to be drawn back to time and again?
David I. Smith: All my books are really only about one thing. Um, I, I, I had a colleague in England who once said that, you know, most scholars get to have one idea and like if you’re really, really famous like, like Wittgenstein, you get to be the earlier Wittgenstein and the later Wittgenstein, you get to have two ideas. But yeah, all my books have been about the same thing. They’ve been, they’ve been this question I started with: What does, I mean, what is my own faith? But, but what do our faith frameworks, what do our belief systems, our value systems have to do with the way that we frame teaching and learning, and what meanings does that create for the students who undergo that teaching and learning?
And I’ve spent a lot of time trying to find different ways of articulating that. I’ve tried not to write the same book twice, because, again, I’ve been fighting the notion that, that teaching and learning is a technology, that it’s just this thing we have to fix, that, that you just need to figure out how to do it efficiently, effectively, you know, do a few research studies, find the right answer, the thing that gets the most knowledge into the most brains into the shortest time.
So no, it’s much more complex than that. It, it’s, it’s this, it’s this field where students are making meaning out of things, and there’s a complex set of cues that are going on in a learning environment out of which they’re making that meaning. And so most books that I’ve worked on, I’ve tried to take another different angle into that question. So like I said earlier, you know, it’s been through social practices theory or through metaphor theory or through studying digital technology in the classroom. Right now I’m working on translations of some 17th century texts that are really important for the history of how we think about teaching and learning.
So I keep trying to find different scholarly ways into this question of what does faith have to do with teaching and learning, because I want to foster a conversation, not a result. I, I, I, I think it’s complex enough that we need more people working on it. Um, we need to attack it from more angles. But then I’ve also been on an arc towards trying to find ways, there’s a, there’s a space that I keep trying to find ways of naming, which is between, I mean, in teaching and learning, you end up sometimes with two kinds of scholarship.
Uh, like at one end is the kind of article that spends 15 pages talking about a philosophical idea, and then in the last paragraph says, “Maybe we should try group work.” Uh, and at, at the other end is the kind of thing that’s like 53 tips for improving your classroom. Um, neither of those are very interesting to me. I think there’s, there’s this interesting space in the middle, which is how do we, how do we describe embodied practices in a way that is scholarly and insightful and also related to what we do in spaces together in the real world?
And so I’ve been on an arc towards, you know, trying to find ways of articulating that, talking about what actually happens in classrooms because some literature about teaching and learning turns out not to be about teaching and learning. It’s actually about social science or, or, or, or it’s about epistemology or it’s about, you know, something else and, and there’s kind of an indirect path to teaching and learning in the end. I want to find ways of talking about teaching and learning that still have texture, that, that, that still are thoughtful. And, and that leads me just to reflecting on things that are happening in my classroom.
I mean, something I’ve been trying for the last few years started in the pandemic when I realized there was a realistic chance that a student in my class could die before the end of my online course, and we might not notice for a couple of weeks and thought, how do I, how do I undo that scenario? So I started a practice in the online course that I’ve, that I’ve since transferred into the face-to-face course, where I put my students into accountability groups of, of four and I told them, “These are the three people for whose wellbeing you’re responsible for the rest of the semester.”
And we brainstormed together small concrete ways of, of being responsible for one another’s wellbeing, checking in with each other providing class notes if somebody missed a class. Um, I assign small homeworks to meet for five, ten minutes outside of class to identify key questions that need to be raised in class out of the readings. So just trying to build a culture across a semester. I find this is, this is like pushing water uphill with students who have been deeply trained that their learning is individual, that they are there for their grade, that they don’t need to know the name of anybody else in the class to succeed. Um, but we slowly, painstakingly try to build a culture of looking out for each other.
Now that’s connected at one end to, you know, reading things like in the Heidelberg Catechism that where I’m confessionally obliged to behave in ways that, that it says to protect one another from harm as much as we can. That I’m confessionally committed to building an environment where we protect one another from harm. And at the other end, I’ve got students journaling about this and I’m studying what’s happening when we try to work together in a way that’s mutually supportive rather than focused on individual attainment.
So there’s this, there’s, there’s what to me at this point feels like a very organic through line explicit faith commitments to concrete embodied choices to then figuring out ways of studying that with IRB and, and you know, leading to articles and so on. Um, and that’s been the arc of what I’ve written as well, has been trying to find that, that way of very organically writing about actual teaching and learning in a way that still feels scholarly but doesn’t drift off into being something else.
Todd Ream: In addition to serving as a teacher, an editor, and an author, you also serve as the director of Calvin’s Kuyers Institute of Teaching and Learning. Can you offer a brief history of the institute and then describe its mission and how the institute tries to discharge that mission and share its mission with others?
David I. Smith: Yeah. I, I often say, you know, the name is very intentional. It’s the Kuyers Institute for Christian Teaching and Learning. Uh, so anything that has to do with what Christian has to do with teaching and learning is potentially in our remit. So it’s not the Institute for Christian Schooling or for Christian Higher Education. It’s Christian Teaching and Learning. So we’re not the teaching and learning center. Um, so our focus is not faculty development within Calvin. We’re a research institute. We publish a journal. We run a conference every two years. Um, we, we foster research projects. We work on grants and so on. So we’re a research institute. We’re not the teaching and learning center.
And so our core mission is to foster this conversation, this scholarly conversation around what, again, a Christian frame, a Christian identity, a Christian institutional context, any of those things have to do with the way we think about teaching and learning and the way we practice teaching and learning out of any discipline. Um, because again, I do think that research on teaching and learning can come out of a range of different disciplines. It doesn’t always have to come out of education.
Um, so we started in 2004. Uh, the original idea going back before that was actually to have a research institute that focused on Christian schooling, because there’s a very large number of Christian schools around the world and a pretty minimal amount of research on what goes on in them specifically. Uh, so that was kind of the original idea. Donors didn’t show up for that idea. Um, that was sort of just before I arrived at Calvin. And then the Kuyers family generously endowed the Kuyers Institute for Christian Teaching and Learning, and there was a pivot to, to focusing on this teaching and learning question. And I’ve been involved with the institute since the beginning.
So we’ve tried over the last 20-plus years to always keep a balance between kind of pure research projects leading to scholarly publications, and application projects where we’re generating products that are of immediate use to people engaged in teaching and learning in Christian contexts. So in addition to the journal publication, the academic conferences, the books, we’ve also developed a number of web projects, things like whatiflearning.com, teachfastly.com. Um, it has spilled over into the DeVries Institute, a more recent institute at Calvin, and the Reflecting Faith project, which is for faculty development for higher education. So just a range of online resources for educators.
Most recently, we did civichospitality.com, which is, again, the basic notion is what does Christian hospitality have to do with the way we teach civics? And we developed a whole series of, of, of lesson plans and outlines and articles around that. I think of it as Jacob’s Ladder. We want angels moving in both directions, right. So between the, the, the big idea research and the trying to turn that into actionable resources that people can use to, to change their teaching amid busy schedules.
Todd Ream: Thank you. Before we close our conversation today, I want to ask you a couple questions in, in a broad sense about the academic vocation. And to begin, how do you define it? And then what practices nurture it? What opportunities advance it? And then what threats perhaps do we need to be attentive to in the age in which we live?
David I. Smith: Yeah. I’m, I’m always a little leery of definitions, especially of really complex concepts. So I, I, I sort of, I, you know, if you traveled to a new place and entered like a beautiful ecosystem would your first impulse be to define it, right. It’s a curious practice. I get, I get that it’s important for certain specific purposes, but I’ve often been more interested in making things more complex than, than, than in trying to narrow them down.
And, and I think the academic vocation, whatever that is, has to be multiple things because what I do and what the person does who is trying to model vibrations in jet engines are, there are similarities, but there are also just significant differences in terms of how we go about what we’re doing, why we go about what we’re doing what kind of tools we use, what kind of conversations we have. And so however we think about the academic vocation, it has to be subtle enough to allow for it being a bunch of different things, to allow for it not necessarily happening at colleges and universities.
Again, I, you know, I have a, a friend from years back who has spent an entire career working. He was the example of the vibrations in jet engines, but works, you know, works for an aircraft company, right. So, but, but is very much an academic. So, so it has to be broad and subtle enough to cover a lot of different things.
Um, so if you try to define it, then you end up with something that’s abstract enough that it maybe doesn’t quite describe anything. It’s, it’s something about allowing yourself to be fascinated enough by the world, to, to try to figure out what’s going on in some part of it, and then see if understanding that can help us in some way would be sort of the broadest kind of way I would look at it.
But in terms of vocation, I, I often think back to there was a moment when I was in my last year as an undergraduate when I was trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my life and, you know, thought I was going to be a missionary. And my mom sent me a letter about my sister’s experience in high school. And her Latin teacher in high school given them all a homework, which was to think of a person they knew and write a curse on them, making it as realistic as possible, because that was what the Romans did.
And 40 minutes later, I realized I was still praying about this. It just, it just, it made me angry that this was being done to people in classrooms. And I, I realized reflecting on that experience and others afterwards, that part of how I knew what I was called to was that I was aware of a lot of things in the world that needed attention or that were wrong or that needed improvement.
But consistently over the years, the one that has motivated me to want to go and do something, to go and research something, to write an article, to write a blog piece, to, to influence it, has been things done to human beings in classrooms. Um, that, that, that’s the one that exercises me. And so sometimes when I hear these beautiful definitions of vocation around, you know, it’s, it’s where your, you know, the, the Buechner-esque of where your heart’s deepest desire meets your et cetera, I, I think sometimes vocation is, is about what makes you angry enough to go and change something. Um, like what, what’s the thing that draws you to make a difference?
So, so maybe the academic vocation is making a difference with your intellectual abilities in, in some area that you have been led to notice the need in. Um, and that can then take a lot of different forms. And so the threats to it are probably pretty varied too. Um, I would say in my own life, the biggest threats to it are things like email. Um, it’s I, I could I, I could pretty much go full time on email and, and, you know, fill up my week and and, and not get anything else done.
So the way in which our technologies in the name of saving time, having gradually shifted, more and more work onto us as individuals that used to be more distributed. So that now at this point in history, I do all of my own communicate, I do all of my of spreadsheets, you know, et cetera, while also being a teaching and learning researcher and teaching classes that more and more of this devolving.
Even AI, which is, you know, I keep seeing the save time with AI kind of headline. I recently spent six hours peer reviewing an article that turned out to be authored by AI. And I just spent six hours rejecting an article that a human being didn’t write. So this shifting of labor from a variety of spheres into my own laptop because the software that enables me to do it myself, I’ve just experienced that as an ongoing, as an increasing battle over time.
So sure, there are larger things we could talk about, you know, the plight of the liberal arts, social forces, certainly political polarization and the effects of that on the ability to have scholarly conversations without somebody thinking that you’re betraying their side. All of those are very real, but existentially for me, sometimes it’s just the daily trying to manage the kind of information flow that we’ve built for ourselves. We’ve given ourselves so much information to deal with, it’s quite hard to think about anything for more than three minutes.
Todd Ream: Thank you. For our last question then today, I want to ask you, in what ways, if any, do you believe educators can be of greater service to the Church in the years to come, and the Church could perhaps be of greater service to educators?
David I. Smith: Uh, the first one is something I consciously think about when I, when I plan classes. So I, I, I used to teach an upper-level German literature course, and I, I spent years restructuring the whole course around the notion of what does it mean to read charitably? Uh, so, you know, there are things I need my students to understand, to know, to be able to analyze, to be able to think critically about. But, but there’s a 2,000-year Christian conversation about how to read with charity, with patience, with justice with humility.
And that can’t be something where you just kind of try to somehow develop those virtues in the abstract and then they come out when you start reading. We have to think about how the practice of reading is constructed. If I, if I give my students 200 pages to read by tomorrow every day, they’re not going to read with patience and they’re not going to read with justice. Uh, so how do I find ways of structuring my course where we practice the skills of rereading?
Um, I’m finding right now experimenting with my students on rereading things that I reckon half my students have no idea how to do, what to do with a text when they read it for the second time they’re like, “Well, I’ve already got the, I’ve already got the notes. I know what the three main points are, right. I just go back and look at my underlinings.” Um, now there are a variety of reasons I did that, but one of the thoughts at the back of my mind is, you know, what, what kind of Church do you have in a few decades if the people being formed by their education don’t know how to read something more than once, don’t know how to read something reflectively?
Um, in fact, I have this conversation with my education students that one of the chapters I assign them is actually by Parker Palmer. And, and I say, “I’ve read this eight times and I still go back and read it again because I’m not sure if I’m obeying it yet. Like I, I could summarize it from memory.” And, and some of my students then have this moment of like, “Oh, so you don’t just do, do reading to remember the summary,” which is what they’ve learned reading is from their education, including their higher education, right. Higher education is not the solution here, it’s part of the problem. Um, and this notion that you read texts to try to obey them is, is a, is a, is a new thought for some of them.
So, so I think what kind of Bible readers would we like to have? What kinds of readers of theology would we like to have? What kinds of readers, period, do you need to have for the Church to be situated in a healthy manner in in its cultural context? So, so that is something I think consciously about when I’m planning classes is, is how am I contributing to the formation of people who, who themselves are going to contribute to the formation of the Church.
And, and my piece of that might only be a little strand of it, but it, but it’s, but it’s a real strand of it. Yeah, the Church is a big abstract entity when we talk about it as the Church. Uh, I’ve been in different churches over time. I’ve experienced different levels of support for the sheer hard work of being a teacher. Uh, sometimes it amounts to, “Oh, you’re a teacher, could you lead Sunday school as well?” Um, and occasionally it’s outright hostility because you’re letting the side down because you’re not teaching exactly what I want you to teach.
Um, and occasionally it’s prayerful support and acknowledgement that this is an important and difficult vocation that might actually need some moral support and some you know, some, some rallying around it. So just from my experience of a few congregations, I’ve experienced different levels of health in the way in which my participation in the Church has enabled me to live with the rather demanding vocation that I have. Um, and, and not just wanting to suck all of that into Church activity as if, as if the only reason I’m a teacher so that that can then contribute directly to something the Church as an institution is doing.
Um, so, so yeah, it would be nice. And that’s not just teachers. That’s, I know business people struggle with this as well. It, it’s sort of like, does the Church even know what I do or, or of it as more than a way of putting money in the plate so.
Todd Ream: Thank you very much. Our guest has been David I. Smith, Professor of Education and Director of the Kuyers Institute for Christian Teaching and Learning at Calvin University. Thank you for taking the time to share your insights and wisdom with us.
David I. Smith: You’re welcome. It was a pleasure to have the conversation.
—
Todd Ream: Thank you for joining us for Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. We invite you to join us again next week for Saturdays at Seven.
