A close friend of mine is currently teaching a course for one of the Anglican Theological Education Institutions (TEIs). She is a trained teacher with twenty years’ experience in the classroom and is drawing on her teaching skills and experience in the way she has designed and teaches the course. Her students are loving it!
When she was recruited to teach the course, the Institution was obliged to make sure that she has sufficient academic qualifications. But it was not expected to take account of whether she had the skills and experience to teach. And this is common across all TEIs. Although many look for teaching ability and, indeed, ministry experience when making appointments, they are not required to do so by the national Church. The requirements for expertise in the subject area are strict, those for teaching ability non-existent.
The Practice of Teaching
What do I mean by teaching ability? Whenever I am invited to offer a teaching session, perhaps for ordinands, lay or ordained ministers, I make a habit of checking the venue in advance. If it is a conference centre, it is almost certain that the seating will be laid out in rows facing the front in the expectation of a lecture-style presentation. Since I want my students to interact with one another, to share feelings, exchange opinions and learn from one another’s experience, I usually spend time rearranging the chairs in a semi-circle or grouping them around tables.
This is only one of a multitude of decisions that have to be made before the session begins. What do I want my students to learn? What methods will I deploy to help them to learn it? How will I discover their own goals and expectations and take these into account? What do they already know about the subject? How will I help them to connect the new information I want them to learn with all that they already know? How best can I enable them to share their existing knowledge for the benefit of others?
Each of the decisions I make will affect what takes place during the learning event. During my career as a teacher, I have used a variety of methods. I have given straightforward talks from the front, asked the students to form small groups to discuss a question and come back with their answers, and facilitated whole-group discussion. Some methods have been more adventurous. I have asked students to make a sketch to illustrate their existing concept of the subject. I have used a simulation game that explores the limitations of communication. I have asked the students to form small groups to work through a series of exercises I had already prepared and then spend some time reflecting on how well the group worked together before feeding back their responses. I have introduced a practice session less than halfway through a course and asked the students to evaluate each other’s responses.
As the learning session develops, there are further decisions to be made. How much time is it best to allow for each activity? When I divide the class for the purpose of group activity, how best will I keep the groups to time? When I facilitate group discussion or debrief a simulation game, each student response calls forth a new decision. How will I respond to a point made, how connect it with what has gone before, what is the next question I need to ask, and how will I enable as many students as possible to contribute? If I am challenged by a student, or if a student raises a topic that is irrelevant to the subject in hand, how will I respond? How will I balance the need for challenge with the right amount of support? How will I establish the kind of relationships that will enable the students to learn from one another, to risk their opinions without fear of humiliation, to make mistakes and learn from them?
These on-the-spot decisions arise from a continuous process of reflection-in-action. I am constantly monitoring what is going on in the classroom and seeking to respond in the light of my own knowledge, experience and values. My training tells me how learning takes place in a classroom context and alerts me to the signs of when it is happening – or not happening. It supplies me with generalizations about adult learners. My experience has supplied me with a repertoire of techniques and possible responses, and at any particular moment I can choose to deploy one of these or to try something new. My values influence the way I configure the seating, the way I respond to challenge, the kind of relationships I attempt to encourage.
The Way We Know Things
The point I’m making is that knowing what you are doing in a classroom makes an enormous difference to how effectively the students learn: how well they engage, the connections they make with their previous experience, their ability to learn with and from one another, and, not the least important, how much they enjoy the learning. And although many of those involved in ministerial training do bring teaching experience or seek to learn the skills of adult education, the Church of which I am a part, the Church of England, takes little or no official account of this.
Why is this? One possible reason is that classroom teaching ability is a very particular kind of knowledge, made up in very large part by ‘practical wisdom’. ‘Practical wisdom’ translates the Greek word phronesis, which plays a key role in Aristotle’s ethics. According to Aristotle, phronesis is a third kind of knowing alongside episteme, that is objective or ‘scientific’ knowledge, and techne, skill or craft knowledge. In our culture, the idea of phronesis is the least familiar of the three. In contrast to the other two ways of knowing, it has not spawned related English terms, like ‘technical’ or ‘epistemological’.
In the context of the academy, phronesis or practical wisdom has been largely peripheral. There is a gradually growing interest in different ways of knowing, but in the tradition of the academy ‘real’ knowledge is episteme: objective, abstract and theoretical. Advancing in knowledge means the ability to handle ever more refined abstract concepts. Scholarly papers explore theoretical ideas in conversation with the ideas of chosen others. Academics certainly make use of practical wisdom in such activities as interpreting texts, but this is easy to overlook when the goal of the activity is to engage with the ideas found in the text and the currency of the discipline is episteme rather than phronesis.
So, although practical wisdom is fundamental to any practice, including that of scholarship, it goes largely unnoticed. In the 1980s and 1990s, Donald Schön made an extensive study of the way professionals gain the practical wisdom they need through reflective practice. He writes, ‘I have become convinced that universities are not devoted to the production and distribution of fundamental knowledge in general. They are institutions committed, for the most part, to a particular epistemology, a view of knowledge that fosters selective inattention to competence and professional artistry’ (The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action, Farnham: Ashgate, 1991, p. vii).
There are some striking examples of this inattention in the literature on Christian learning and theological education. One is the book What Prevents Christian Adults from Learning by John Hull, formerly Professor of Religious Education at Birmingham University (SCM, 1985). Hull’s thesis was that Christian adult education was proving remarkably ineffective, and he explored several theoretical explanations for this, including modernity, ideology, depth psychology and cognitive dissonance. Nowhere in the book, however, does he consider what takes place in churches, church halls and living rooms where people come together to learn their faith. The idea that the problem might arise from the limitations of the teaching methods used entirely escapes him.
Another example is Eve Parker’s Trust in Theological Education (SCM, 2022). Parker begins from the premise that in a typical academic classroom only the teacher is trusted. The teacher is the repository not only of subject knowledge but of the expert power that goes with it. Theological education thereby embodies an elitism which contradicts the values that it should aim to convey. She then proceeds to deconstruct the elitist nature of much theological education using a variety of theoretical viewpoints, including embodiment, class, race and gender, in search of what she calls a ‘pedagogy of liberation.’ But at no point does she pay attention to the teaching methods used in a typical academic classroom or attempt to describe what such a pedagogy might look like.
Theology in Practice
There is a double irony here. In the first place, the practical skills involved in providing a hospitable space in which students are enabled to share their experience, learn from one another, express their own interests and learning goals and challenge their teachers, are precisely those that extend trust to the whole class, and yet they remain outside the scope of the book.
Secondly, and even more significantly, ministry is a relationally complex field in which practical wisdom is essential, and yet the academically orientated curriculum of theological education approaches theology as episteme rather than phronesis. The Programme Specification for the Durham University Common Awards, in use in most Anglican TEIs, specifies that the initial level of study should consist in a broad overview of the subject area. The result is a concentration on content, for which most students have no existing context and is therefore quickly forgotten.
In a curriculum orientated to practical wisdom, the goal of this foundational level of study would be to enable students to connect their understanding of the Bible and the Church’s tradition of theology with everyday experience, thus equipping them with the tools they need to become reliable guides to their congregations and interpreters of Christian faith to the wider community. But to achieve this would require an approach to teaching of which most teachers in academic institutions have little experience or understanding.
In the United States, a project currently in its second decade, which aims to study how ministers acquire the practical wisdom they need, concludes that the practice for which ministers are being prepared needs to be kept in view at every stage of formation. A focus on abstract, decontextualised knowledge does not equip ministers to draw on Scripture and theology to resource their practice. And secondly, students and ministers are most helped by teachers and mentors who encourage them to integrate their understanding of Scripture and theology with real-life situations. Most of these will be experienced practitioners with skills of teaching or supervision. If students are to be taught by academic specialists, academic learning must be related to practice. They are not helped when the horizon in view is the purely scholarly pursuit of learning (Christian Scharen and Eileen Campbell-Reed, Learning Pastoral Imagination: a five-year report on how new ministers learn in practice, Auburn Theological Seminary, 2016).
Research from the Diocese of Oxford reported in Practical Theology in 2022, demonstrates that students are well aware that their courses are failing to equip them for the task ahead. Discussion in focus groups includes comments such as:
It’s a kind of mode of discourse, basically … a mode of communication … that might be very helpful for us in a certain situation, but perhaps in everyday parish life it’s not the way we should communicate with the people around us …
I think one of the things that really came out of our lay ministry training was actually, that theology is just … making a relationship between our faith and whatever it is we’re doing … And it’s something that I think, within the Church of England, possibly we’re not very good at doing …
And yet, the response of at least one theological college principal was to dismiss insights such as these as ‘anti-intellectualism’.
The Way Forward
My friend is currently bringing the techniques of a skilled teacher to help her students learn: sharing with them the intended outcomes of each session; asking them regularly to gauge their level of confidence in what they have learned; using a ‘KWL grid’ with the questions, ‘What do I know?’ and ‘What do I want to know?’ before a piece of reading; employing an interactive approach in the classroom; and above all, in the students’ words, ‘being real’: sharing her own journey with them so that her relationship with them is that of a fellow-learner.
In 2022, a report went out to all TEIs recommending that, ‘TEI staff be encouraged and, over an appropriate timescale, expected to become competent in the pedagogy of adult education’ (Formation for Enabling Ministry, 2022). I am told that some TEIs are responding to this, and I am hoping that it soon becomes the accepted position of the Church nationally.