Hebrew Bible and Christian Scriptures

I learned from my involvement with two movies the Prince of Egypt and Gospel of John: The Movie taught me that the process of digital story telling requires the filmmaker to come to grips with the social world of the Bible in a profound way. I want to have the biblical simulations to mimic that type of experience.

My teachers Robert W. Neff , Graydon F. Snyder and Donald E. Miller wrote Using Biblical Simulations and Using Biblical Simulations 2 in 1974 and 1975  They used the idea of simulations as a learning tool.  Each of them had training in small group process that they brought to bear in structuring the simulation. More recently Reta Halteman Finger used this approach to understand the world of early Christianity in her book Paul and the House Churches: A Simulation. One resource I have not been able to get my hands on is Beginnings (Being There: The Bible Through Simulation) from Faith and Life Press published in 2001.

A simulation is a form of participatory learning. When leading a simulation maximize the class participation. This means have as many people have parts. In the birth of Isaac I wanted about ten participants. I include a director and a videographer. The theory of multiple intelligences opens a new horizon to how we utilize the biblical simulation. It is more than a linguistic exchange. It is kinesthetic learning as well as visual and auditory learning.

My goal was a greater appreciation of the social world of ancient Israel. Therefore I tried to pick an event in a life cycle rather than a famous Bible passage. The Neff, Snyder and Miller volumes strive to provide a more hermeneutical exercise than opportunities to discover the social world of the Bible. My goals are somewhat different therefore I try to avoid volatile or famous passages. For instance the birth of Isaac story is a scant seven verses.

(Gen 21:1-7)

After the simulation we take several minutes to debrief. What did we feel? Press about the mechanics of this childbirth ritual. In my preparation I found a picture of a modern day birth stool.

Last year we have a group of students and present their version of whatever historical social world tableau. Student who choose this option must find self-conscious ways to achieve participatory learning rather than learning through listening.

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Next week the next semester’s Christian Scriptures 1 class begins. I want to take some time to reflect on what worked well last semester. I remember the film the “Paper Chase”. The professor Kingsfield said to his charges “You will teach yourself the law. I will teach you how to think like a lawyer.” After experience in the Baylor Summer Institute for Teaching, the Wabash Center workshop on teaching I come back to this. It is not about a faculty centered transfer of data; it is more about mutual formation.

We continued to use a model of active learning. Students began by sharing their background and learning style through the journal function of Blackboard (a course management system used by Baylor). This positioned so that they could build personal learning contracts. This seems appropriate for professional schools such as seminaries. More than that it fits the philosophical commitments fo Truett seminary. On the whole I was very happy with the shift from faculty centered learning to a more student centered learning.

Active learning was part of the structure of the games we played. We created a FAQ (frequently asked questions) game in which the students created objective questions from the class discussion that they then needed to answer during the game. It was fun and from what I can tell pedagogically helpful. However, the focus was mostly on biblical content. I hope that historical and scholarship discussion will play a bigger part in the questions in this next semester.

We had three biblical simulations. These were the vehicles to make the resources of Benjamin and Matthews The Social World of Ancient Israel and Life in Biblical Israel by Stager and King. We experienced a funeral, wedding, and sacrifice. This semester I will take the lead on the first simulation, the birth of Isaac. Students will have the option to lead the subsequent biblical simulations.

Last semester we had students report form the Africana Bible, the Global Bible Commentary and the Women’s Bible Commentary. These reports allowed us to hear challenging interpretations of Scripture. We will want to continue this in the future. This time I will need to be more intentional about how the students report out to the class.

We used a wiki where the better note takers could post their notes for the entire class. This was an underutilized resource. Likewise the student blogs were insightful reflections but were underutilized by members of the class.

Last semester was a great experience and now I am ready for another one.

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It started with a lunch over the summer. A colleague told me that he was using learning contracts in his classes. I remembered learning contracts from Carl Roger’s book Freedom to Learn. So I was persuaded to use learning contracts in my Christian Scripture class. My colleague warned me that completely unstructured learning contracts befuddled our students. So I wrote a basic contract for minimal competence. A student who wanted a superior grade needs to develop additional learning activities and rubrics. I was surprised the like Lake Wobegon everyone wanted to be above average.
Increasingly I believe there is a circle of learning from reflection on active learning to assessment and continued active learning. Somehow I would like to improve how I give them direction on learning contracts, assessment rubrics. I continue to explore ways to improve our understanding of this circle. I had the students in this class write a beginning essay that described their learning style. That was a good idea but I read them too late in the semester for maximum effect. Nonetheless, I think I will have students write an essay that describes their learning style and challenges in reading Christian Scriptures.
I also asked the students to write a self assessment at the end of the semester. These were sometimes self aggrandized defense of their stellar performance. However, more often than not the students reflected honestly on where they accomplished what they wanted to and where they fell short. Next semester I will give them more precise instructions on how they might structure such an essay. I want them to re-read their learning style essay and their learning contract as the background for their self-assessment.
I continue to have students in Scriptures 2 have the option of creating video podcasts. I would like to find some aids to help them construct a better video podcast. They used Flip cameras as well as more expensive equipment but I think if I could get them more exposed to the good work on digital story telling that would serve them and the class better.

Luckily there is still next semester to work on these things and students are resilient they learn even as we are learning about learning.

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For the past year I have been thinking about how to use Second Life to help students have an immersion experience of the pre-exilic Israel and Judah and post-exilic Yehud. The New Media Consortium is doing interesting educational things in Second Life. However, as a far as I can tell no one has used this to improve instruction in biblical studies.
Here is what I am thinking about re-framing Christian Scriptures 1 class next fall. I will have a panel of experts that student groups I am looking for at least one of each of the following: Near Eastern archeologist, gamer, new media expert, Second Life expert, cinematographer and educator. The student groups will work with these guides to build a face-to-face simulation that will be recorded. The panel will view the simulation and provide feedback which will give Second Life developers information for a Second Life build for a subsequent year.
After this step it seems that one could then secure the funding necessary to build a site in Second Life.

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Last month I attended a workshop taught by Gardner Campbell director of the Academy for Teaching and Learning at Baylor University on Wikipedia and Teaching.
The big topic in the workshop turned out not to be Wikipedia but the idea of social reading. Now social reading need not be high tech. Malcolm Gladwell in his book The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference observes that the Rebecca Wells book Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood rose to best seller prominence is a slow cascading that began with a book signing in Greenwich Connecticut with seven people in the audience. From these readings at books stores Wells an actress as well as a playwright acted the book as much as she read Gladwell writes “and from the beginning. Ya-Ya was what publishers refer to as a “book group book.” (173) This is a type of social reading. Book clubs like classroom become the places where the power of context so necessary for a social movement, a tipping point.
Wells book grew from a face to face social reading but a web 2.0 world provides the opportunity to imagine a tele-presence social reading. Imagine a world of social reading that is reading a monograph together in the cloud. By the cloud I mean that the notes exist on a computer server that the participants have access. We could share our notes in fact we could annotate them.
Wikipedia is an example of social reading but probably not it’s most profound for teaching and learning. This online encyclopedia takes part of its name from the Hawaiian word wiki meaning easy. The proverb that drives this application is that it should be easy to fix a mistake and not hard to make one.” A core assumption of Wikipedia and social reading is that a learning community is invested in constructing knowledge. In this case that means that the community.
One should keep in mind that Wikipedia still keeps its feet in modernity at the same time it embraces a web 2.0 world. Hence the “neutral point of view” rule. (NPOV) However, there are aspects that betray web 2.0 perspectives such as the articles that are written as editors not authors. It is not the intellectual property of the writer. The Wikipedia contributor surrenders authorial control. What a concept?
Social reading and social writing provide an interesting sidelight on considerations about the future of the introduction to the Hebrew Bible Old Testament as a book and as a class. What if the introduction to the Hebrew Bible that we used for a text book was the course blog full of social reading of the various books, a wiki of key topics, as well as resources such a video podcast/lectures?

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1. Pray twice and teach once
2. Prepare yourself physically and psychologically.
3. Paula Deen, Lance Armstrong, and Soren Kierkegaard. It is not all about the cooking, the bicycle or the data. They came to hear a word from God not a word from you. And don’t get confused about who is who.
4. Listen, listen, and listen more, again. God has a story, the Bible. But each person in this group has a story listen for it and to it. If you listen well enough they will think you are smart enough.
5. Figure out whether the context, often that is the size of the group, mandates a sager on the stage process or a guide by the side strategy.
6. Somehow help them think through some simple rules of reading.
7. What the Bible doesn’t tell you. You don’t know.
8. A good education shows but it seldom shows off.
9. People learn more when they laugh or cry. Laughing is easier to handle.
10. If you teach what you want to learn you might be a more effective teacher. Acquiring biblical literacy and a profound understanding of biblical history is a lifelong vocation but start now.

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When I began my teaching career I spent most of my time reading and preparing lectures. My job was to transfer my knowledge, that is data, to the unsuspecting and the eager students as well. After the course of years this took less and less time. I knew the data. As a colleague of mine once said, “Anyone who has succesfully completed a good Ph.D. program has at their finger tips more data than the general undergraduate or seminary student can assimilate in a typical course.”It became easier and less time consuming.
Then I went to the Wabash Center for Teachign and Learning. I started to read the work of Knowles on adult learning and Stephen Brookfield on critical thinking and discussion as teaching learning strategies. As time went on I began to think about student centered learning. However, no one told me that it would take more time.The sage on the stage is less labor intensive than the guide on the side.
I guess student centered education is just that. It does not ask the question what is easiest for the professor or the university. Nonetheless, that is still a rather novel, if not revolutionary idea.

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