Reimagining Educational Excellence

Thursday, October 11
3:00 PM	Registration
5:30 PM	Dinner
7:30 PM	Introduction and Welcome Plenary 1: David Purpel "What Matters-a Riff on Micah" Followed by Reception
	Room A	Room B	Room C
Friday, October 12
8:30– 10:30 AM*	A Wesleyan Perspective on Educational Excellence	Reimagining K-12 Pedagogy I	Comenius and Christian Higher Education
	LaCelle-Peterson	Rooks	Sanders
	Freytag	Boerema	Trapp
	Bressler	Vander Kam	Walton et al.
10:30 AM	Coffee Break
11:00 AM– 12:15 PM*	Models of Christian Higher Education	Reimagining K-12 Pedagogy II	Creation Care, Justice, and Education
	Corcoran	Van Brummelen	Curry, Heffner, Joldersma
	Peterson, Snell	Marsh	Halteman
12:30 PM	Lunch
2:00– 3:15 PM*	Reimagining Liberal Arts Education	K-12 Education: International Perspectives I	Special needs and Educational Excellence
	Heffner, Beversluis	Justins	Glimps
	Koeller	King	Konyndyk
3:15 AM	Coffee Break
3:45– 5:00 PM*	Identifying Excellence Among Higher Education Faculty	K-12 Education: International Perspectives II	Identity and Learning
	Joeckel, Chesnes, Firestone	DeGroot	Sampson Edgell
	Matthias	Kuyvenhoven	Isom
5:30 PM	Dinner
7:30 PM	Plenary 2: Herma Williams "Developing Lives that Matter: Revaluing the Educational Enterprise, Internally and Externally" Followed by Reception
Saturday, October 13
8:30– 10:30 AM*	Justice, Humility, and Reading Practices	Reimagining Seminary Pedagogy	Reimagining College Pedagogy I
	Sweetman	Latini	Koetje, Bonnema, DeHeer
	Lee	Hulst	Kristjánsson
	Smith	O'Dowd
10:30 AM	Coffee
11:00 AM	Plenary 3: Chris Smit “The Spectacle of Difference: Pedagogical Dilemmas”
12:30 AM	Lunch
2:00– 3:15 PM*	Justice, Mercy, and Writing	Educational Excellence in International Contexts	Reimagining College Pedagogy II
	Call	Abdool, Rens, Hasseler	Buursma
	Du Mez	Fonseca	McDonald
3:15 PM	Coffee
3:45– 5:00 PM*	Interdisciplinary Approaches to Teaching Excellence	Humility and the Academy	Renewing Disciplines
	Reitz, Discher, Elliott	Bowen	Scott
	Wessner	Badley, Gallagher	Pisciotta
5:30 PM	Dinner

*Presenters who have indicated AV needs must meet in the room 30 minutes before their session for an equipment/materials check.
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David Purpel grew up in the Boston area and received his training at Tufts College and the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in foundations of education, curriculum, supervision, and moral education. Among his publications are The Moral and Spiritual Crisis in Education; Moral Outrage and Education; and Reflections on the Moral and Spiritual Crisis in Education. He is currently Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro

"What Matters-a Riff on Micah"

In this paper I deal with 'what' questions, i.e., those that ask for substantive responses to basic issues of meaning and purpose.  I contrast Micah's views on what matters with the implicit moral orientation of the excellence in education movement. Whereas Micah calls for justice, humility, and compassion, in the current cultural and social context, the rhetoric of educational excellence serves as a mask for a justifying and legitimating an educational system concerned primarily with the pursuit of privilege and material success.

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Herma Williams Ph.D., joined Fresno Pacific University as provost and academic vice president August 1, 2006.   Williams came to FPU from Gordon College, Wenham, Massachusetts.  The author of one book and numerous articles and papers, Williams is committed to faculty scholarship and student research.  As a Fulbright Scholar, she directed a program to strengthen academic excellence at two universities in South Africa. Williams earned her B.A. and M.A. from Southern Illinois University and her Ph.D. from Iowa State University.  She also completed post-doctoral studies at Harvard University and was named a Kellogg Foundation and Ford Foundation fellow.  

"Developing Lives that Matter: Revaluing the Educational Enterprise,
Internally and Externally"

As educators our task is to assist in the process of developing lives that matter.  In our rapidly changing technological and global environments, students on all levels are exposed to multiple voices and many choices, both on and off campus.  Recently, western societies have struggled with the issues of - Why do they hate us?  How should students respond?  To whom and where will they go to get the appropriate information?  What values, spiritual convictions and commitments to serving others inform their decision-making?  How will they develop lives of substance and significance?  How should they think, talk and manage their lives?  Within the college or university campus, what opportunities are we providing for risk-taking, soul-searching and reflection?  What have we learned from a history of exclusion and recent attempts of inclusion?  Are we ready and able to share with students the complete fabric of our history, passion for learning, and exploration of other cultures as they develop lives that matter?  Are we as educators doing all we can to facilitate this process?

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Chris Smit
Dr. Christopher R. Smit is an assistant professor for the Communication Arts and Sciences Department at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan.  His edited collection Screening Disability: Essays on Cinema and Disability was published in 2001 by the University Press of America.  Smit’s essays on disability, media, popular music, and culture can be found in Disability Studies Quarterly, Studies in Popular Culture, Journal of Popular Culture, and several edited collections. When not professing or writing, Smit is a singer/songwriter.  His latest CD The New Midwest (2007) was nominated for record of the year by local radio station WYCE.

“The Spectacle of Difference: Pedagogical Dilemmas”

Among the challenges facing contemporary teachers, perhaps none is as complicated as the need to put students in dialogue with that thing, thought, or person which is different—those elements of life that shock them into new realities and perspectives.  It has been the unfortunate case that these moments of introduction mirror 19th century freak show events, the teacher hailing the crowd with spectacles of difference, the students consuming without authentic digestion, and the freak left at a distance.  In his presentation Smit will address the ways in which difference makes its way into lessons and lectures, and how studies of difference (those of disability in particular) have been treated in the academy more generally.   Presenting the idea of dialogue as a potential model for teaching difference, the presentation will explore the limits and promises of trying to bring students to the Other.

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Mark Lacelle-Peterson
Sacramental Learning and Sacrificial Service in the Global Parish: A Wesleyan Perspective on Excellence in Education for Life
This paper establishes an historically and theologically grounded rationale for a perspective on excellence in education for the 21st century. It argues that in a Wesleyan theological perspective, the question of whether or not "excellence" has been achieved in education must be asked of the system and its social outcomes rather than of individual students' performance in the system. John Wesley's views of the role and limits of human knowledge, the nature and necessity of learning, and Christian perfection as the end toward which each believer should strive, with God's help, are analyzed and used to develop an account of educational aims which can form the basis for a discussion of excellence.
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James Rooks
Science-Based Educational Reform
One of the dominant issues in K-12 U.S. education today is the debate over the role of science and research in shaping teaching. Science-based educational reformers believe that evidence-based practice shows great promise for improving schooling and meeting the needs of all students, and for establishing teaching as a profession similar to medicine where there are no longer teachers who believe that anything goes and that there is no such thing as best practice. This paper will explore some of the concerns about the role of the teacher and the conception of excellence in teaching that arise from science-based educational reform and its focus on the technical to the exclusion of the practical, situated knowledge of teachers.
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Glenn Sanders
Conversations with Comenius and Tocqueville: On Excellence in American Christian Colleges
John Amos Comenius's seventeenth-century vision of the universal reform of education, politics, and the Church, a vision that grew from his understanding of individual education as based on piety, virtue, and learning, suggests ways of teaching and learning enacted in close communities and based on intense personal piety, conscious service, and intentional understanding. Alexis de Tocqueville's insights in Democracy in America on the American "social state" (race, gender, etc.), and his notion of "social capital" (i.e., the networks and practices of cooperation that form American social life) suggest how such Comenian communities might function within the broad contexts of national life.
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Cathy Freytag
Sacramental Learning and Sacrificial Service in the Global Parish: A Wesleyan Perspective on Excellence in Education for Life
This paper extends the framework with a consideration of what excellence in educational service provision might mean for students with disabilities. Beginning from the observation that Wesley sought to expand the reach of education to strata in society that had typically not had access to formal schooling, this paper considers the implications of a "love and service" imperative for the education of students with disabilities. The paper critiques both the fundamental ideological framework that informs current special education practice and the practical implications of the most recent reauthorization of federal legislation that guides special education practices.
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Albert Boerema
Private School Mission Differences and Academic Achievement
The educational world has embarked on a pathway of assessing school performance with greater intensity than ever before. This assessment has focused in public policy and practice on performance on standardized test results. This raises the question whether standardized test results show a differences between schools with different visions of the human task and how life is to be lived. This paper will report on research investigating differences in academic achievement results in private, independent schools in British Columbia. One of the implications of this research is that attempts to maximize for academic achievement and Micah's call for justice, mercy, and walking humbly before God and may be mutually exclusive.
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Joonna Smitherman Trapp
John Amos Comenius's Rhetorical and Christian Refashioning of Education
Freely using classical rhetoric alongside the Bible, Comenius fuses classical rhetorical principles with Christian doctrine to create a vision of "Universal Education" that would set forth the worth of the individual and the "divinity" within each person. He urged a new way of envisioning education to "remedy" his age, which was in his words, rife with "defects." He includes in his educational plan an emphasis on ethics, dialectic, and rhetoric. This paper seeks to highlight Comenius' ideas and investigate how his work considered anew can benefit our current notions of what constitutes educational excellence.
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Darlene Bressler
Sacramental Learning and Sacrificial Service in the Global Parish: A Wesleyan Perspective on Excellence in Education for Life
This paper considers what might be regarded as the missional aspect of the educational profession with a focus on the development of the professional self-understanding of teacher candidates and new teachers. Teaching tends to be a conservative profession: those who enter the profession tend to select programs near their homes and to desire jobs near their home district. Yet the teaching profession generally attracts individuals who desire to serve broadly and effectively. This paper expands upon the imperative of service to "the least" in a global society for the preparation of teachers.
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Rick Vander Kam
Christian Education as Guide from the Simple
The core quality that makes Christian education Christian is its power to guide followers of the Christ through a life-long journey of transformation: the transforming of the mind, the movement away from simple thought-forms and symbols of truth to the knowledge of Truth that makes one free. To the degree Christian education has succumbed to the behaviorist methods of public schools, it has become lethal to the spiritual life of the Christian. This paper will examine transformational processes implicit in the teaching methods of Jesus as described in the Gospels and explore pedagogy consistent with or complimentary to those processes.
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Julie Walton, Brian Bolt, James Timmer Jr., Don DeGraaf
True Excellence in Sport: Playing and Delighting in God's Company
God plays with us in this world and provides for us a capacity and desire to play and delight in His company. Sport, in turn, is rooted in play. Because Christian liberal education bids students to become more fully human in God's image, a Christian perspective should promote sport as an experience, the primary goal of which is the joy and delight of embracing our image-laden humanity. This paper will argue that even the most well-meaning Christian institutions often forget this primary purpose of sport by bowing to the more secondary cultural pressures to develop leadership, virtue, alumni support, and campus recognition through sport.
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Henry A. Corcoran
Re-envisioning a World of Excellence for Christian Higher Education: A Look Back
In what context the debate on excellence in Christian higher education is located sets the agenda for the discussion. In this essay, I contend that Bruce Kimball's treatment of the two major definitions of liberal education throughout Western civilization (Orators and Philosophers) may be the most fruitful intellectual milieu in which to consider the question. I demonstrate its theoretical robustness by using it to reframe three historical perspectives on religion and higher education. I argue that its presentation on the oratorical tradition grants improved vision for viewing excellence in Christian academe.
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Harro Van Brummelen
Using Student Assessment to Nurture Justice, Mercy, and Excellence
This presentation will consider how looking at student assessment as a gift and a blessing will change our classroom assessment strategies. It will ask in what ways Biblical views of persons and of knowledge affect how we use assessment of, for, and as learning. Can assessment promote a Biblically justifiable notion of excellence while concurrently upholding both justice and mercy? The presentation will also reflect on the Biblical notion of calling and how assessment can contribute to nurturing students as responsive disciples. The presentation consists of a draft of a chapter in a forthcoming book on Christian approaches to learning and teaching.
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Janel Curry, Gail Heffner, Clarence Joldersma
Seeking Justice Through Campus Sustainability: An Example
One way to reimagine educational excellence through the lens of seeking justice means including environmental sustainability. We argue that this requires networks of particular, multiple, overlapping identities to provide the resources for successful institutional change. Our example is Calvin College, whose institutional identity for such change can draw from the culture of sustainability of our city, the liberal arts curriculum, valuing pedagogical practices and student learning, a strong institutional commitment to research, an effective faculty-run organizational structure, and a Reformed (Calvinist) faith tradition of seeking justice. Our premise is that educational excellence requires institutional change towards sustainability, which occurs when the new practices resonate with deep identities. We suggest that when such identities are rooted in seeking justice, institution's current structures and practices can envision excellence to include campus sustainability.
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Kurt W. Peterson, R. J. Snell
For God's Glory and Neighbor's Good: The Pietist Option in Christian
Higher Education
When addressing a recent pastors' conference funded by a Lilly grant for "Sustaining Pastoral Excellence," William Willimon called the entire project into question, remarking that "'excellence' is a pagan virtue." North Park University encourages students to lead lives of "significance and service"; however, there is significant disagreement as to what "significance" means. This paper proposes thoroughgoingly Christian definitions of "significance" and "excellence," not only for North Park, but for Christian institutions of higher learning in general. This paper will use the Pietist tradition, from which North Park emerged, to define "excellence" to include commitments to virtue (moral formation), academic rigor (intellectual formation), and Christian maturity (spiritual formation). The foundational assumption is that a robustly Christian definition of "excellence" must challenge corporate and bureaucratic categories of "success" and rely instead on Scripture's call to "seek justice, love mercy and walk humbly before God."
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William E. Marsh
Teaching Redemptively: Is It Possible? Is It Practical?
In recent months, the faculty at the institution at which I teach, Westminster Christian School in Elgin, Illinois, has been endeavoring to implement some of the pedagogical principles set forth in Donovan L. Graham's Teaching Redemptively. Central to these principles is that teaching should be done with an eye towards justice and redemption, that is, done to promote not just academic achievement but towards cultivating a larger life context, the comprehensive spiritual well-being of the student and faculty alike. These efforts have proved highly useful in motivating faculty to rethink their approaches to teaching, discipline, and mentoring, and to consistently attempt to match, as the book says, "process with content."
For this paper, I propose one, using examples from Westminster's faculty experience, to examine the relative success of the book's pedagogical approach; and two, to assess, in this light, the deeper content and meaning of pedagogical success in the processes of secondary education. To wit, what does pedagogical success really mean?
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Matthew Halteman
Peaceable Pedagogy: Teaching Compassion for Animals as Creation Care
My purpose is to demonstrate the pedagogical value of questions concerning the just and compassionate treatment of animals for addressing (in a holistic way) the broad spectrum of issues organized under the general heading of "creation care." First, I establish the context of interrelated human, animal and environmental problems in which the issue of the just treatment of animals can be understood as a pressing concern for those interested in modeling the importance of "creation care." Second, I analyze the pedagogical fecundity of this issue in view of the skills and virtues that it may serve to cultivate. Third, I outline several strategies for successful integration of this issue into a variety of types of courses.
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Gail Heffner, Claudia Beversluis
Excellence in Place
Assumptions about the abstract quality of the liberal arts have changed in recent years as schools have moved their theorizing from "ivory towers" to local communities. This paper summarizes the findings of a Calvin college working group that has explored the concept of place and particularity in crafting an excellent education. We explore the theoretical foundations for "embracing our place" in education, describe our research on students, faculty, alumni, and city leaders that seeks to link awareness of place with the central themes of a liberal arts education, and describe "case studies" that link themes in the liberal arts to the particularities of place.
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Charles Justins
Is It Possible to Be a Christian School and Concurrently Aspire to Educational Excellence? An Australian Perspective
The language of educational excellence is prevalent in Australian education—in promotional literature for schools and universities, in award ceremonies, in school's vision and mission statements, and in policy documents. Educational excellence is ostensibly the ambition and purpose of every worthy educational program and institution. This paper will address the responses of Christian schooling in Australia, particularly Christian Parent Controlled (CPCS) schooling, to the concept of educational excellence and accompanying expectations and constraints. The vehicle for this exploration will be an examination of the core values of CPCS schools, the attitudes of a number of key CPCS educators, a case-study of a particular CPCS school, and a brief biblical critique of the notion of educational excellence.
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Blanche Jackson Glimps
Soulful Education and Students with Learning and/or Emotional/Behavioral Disabilities
Soulful education or creating positive interpersonal relationships is most conducive to assisting children with learning and emotional/behavioral disabilities. Soulful education involves educating the whole person (Miller, 2000). Such an education assists students in facing the big questions of life. It brings a deeper sense of meaning and purpose into the classroom. This session will present a model of soulful teaching that is conducive to promoting social and academic skill acquisition for students with mild disabilities. The model is based on a review of the literature and on the results of an action research project conducted with pre-service special and general education teachers.
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David Koeller
Re-imagining General Education: The North Park Dialogue.
The North Park Dialogue is the core of North Park University's General Education Program. North Park's mission is to train students for "lives of significance and service." In our general education program, this means helping our students develop the skills and habits of mind of a liberally educated individual and applying those skills and habits to real world problems, both globally and locally. This paper will outline the philosophy and pedagogy of the program; describe some of the significant aspects of the course sequence and analyze some of the difficulties encountered in implementing the course.
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Terry King
Educational Excellence: A Transaction of the Currency of Grace
In Christian education, excellence is either embraced as a validating factor or shunned as an elitist divergence from gospel values. Many define excellence as levels of achievement and the quality of end products. Personal stress is associated in its pursuit with conflicting demands of imposed regulations and individual perceptions. Excellence is discussed as a process and expression of God's grace, rather than a product. A conceptual framework is introduced that differentiates between the impositions of an educational economy and the personal currency transactions by educators and institutions. Excellence is considered as a currency of grace. The pedagogical, axiological, and epistemological implications for institutions are also discussed.
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Irene Konyndyk
Reimagining Educational Excellence in a Beginning Foreign Language Classroom for Students with Learning Disabilities
This paper will present my ideas of how the call of Micah 6:8, "to seek justice, love mercy, and walk humbly before God," can be carried out in a beginning French classroom for students who struggle to learn a foreign language. What do foreign language teaching and learning practices informed by this call look like? In my classroom, educational excellence is more than my teaching French well and my students learning French to a given level of proficiency, but also includes spiritual formation, growth in the virtues (such as humility, diligence, courage, empathy, and hope), and development in metacognition.
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Samuel Joeckel, Thomas C. Chesnes, Joshua Firestone
Educational Excellence Inside the Trenches: Results from a 2007 Survey of CCCU Faculty
In March 2007, we conducted a survey of professors who teach at institutions belonging to the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU). Over 1,900 professors from across the United States and Canada participated in the survey. Our paper will make public (for the first time) some of the survey's results—particularly results related to the conference theme, "Reimagining Educational Excellence." The paper will focus on survey results organized around four topics integral to educational excellence within the context of Christian higher education: faith commitment, scholarly rigor, justice and mercy, and collegiality.
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Dennis DeGroot
From Dreams and Nightmares to Bricks and Mortar: Building a Global Christian School Partnership
Irish rock legend Bono said at the President's Prayer Breakfast that "Africa makes a fool of our idea of justice; it makes a farce of our idea of equality. It mocks our pieties, it doubts our concern, it questions our commitment." How does one take these incriminating words of a social activist-musician and take them to heart in a Christian school? Those words and others like them keep me awake as a Christian high school principal. Our school community was on the verge of spending some 7 million dollars to build and renovate a school building that by developing world standards was more than adequate; by western standards, worn out and tired. A new partnership in Sierra Leone has led to the funding and construction of a new Christian Primary School which will open its doors in September. I believe that educational excellence means drawing our students into the complex questions surrounding partnerships, globalization, poverty, charity and justice and allowing students to learn and experience their way into a new way living. This model could be duplicated for the benefit of communities in North America and in the developing world.
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Margaret Sampson Edgell
Reimagining Student Spiritual Development: Three Models
I propose to present my work as a Lilly Faculty Scholar on new ways to conceptualize student development in the area of spiritual formation. This work tests three distinct models of spiritual formation against students' own understanding of how they grow spiritually during the college experience. The models include: classic cognitive developmental models by Fowler, updated by Parks; a new model based in a current movement that considers how key decisions concerning life's dilemmas form student spiritual identity; and a third, Kuyperian, model, that considers the links between cognition, in terms of worldview, and behavior.
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Laurie Matthias
Professors Who Walk Humbly with Their God: Exemplars in the Integration of Faith and Learning at Wheaton College
Desiring to fulfill their institution's mission to integrate faith and learning, faculty members at Christian colleges and universities often face an inevitable tension. While they attempt to jettison the anti-intellectual label often associated with evangelicals through their scholarship, they are also pursuing excellence in their roles as spiritual models for their students. Research conducted among seven professors who exemplify the integration of faith and learning at Wheaton College revealed a common characteristic: humility. In spite of their considerable professional accomplishments, all participants demonstrate a humble admission that they do not have all of the answers doctrinally, philosophically, or academically.
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Jo Kuyvenhoven
Reimagining the Teaching of Reading in Sierra Leone
Sierra Leonean schools were historically developed from educators' imaginaries rooted in colonialist notions and missionary purposes. (Re)imagination is urgently needed to breach old ideas. If formal education better included existent oral traditions, constituents' highly developed social skills and diverse community resources, wouldn't it be excellent? For five years now, I've studied this question with Sierra Leonean college faculties, teachers, volunteers, and agencies.  In this seminar I’d like to take time to think about the questions taking shape.  What do we mean by “literacy” and "teaching children to read" in a small school in Sierra Leone?  What does it mean to be a Christian educator in a place of so much material need and rich social ability?  How can we better integrate rich oral narrative and knowledge traditions in a school that prepares children for national and global leadership?  This demands opening school doors wide to the place of its location.

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Denise A. Isom
Seeking the Unseen: The Distortions of Race and Gender Constructs—Black Children and Identity
This presentation draws on two ethnographic studies, one on 5th-7th grade children in an after-school program and the other on 4th-12th graders in a church youth program. The work captured Black boy's articulations and manifestations of their definitions of maleness, masculinity, and "Blackness." Their words and lives revealed an externally derived maleness centered on performance that appeared to mask a view of masculinity oriented around relationships and caring. Similarly, the girls of each study reflected the classic idea of the "strong Black woman," while revealing signs of a vulnerability and absence of voice often not seen or understood.
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Robert Sweetman
Micah 6:8 as Spiritual Exercise in the Search for a Christian Excellence
This paper explores spiritual exercise as scholarly act and its proper deployment in order to illustrate some ways in which Micah 6:8 might guide our search for an integrally Christian scholarly excellence. In the process, it examines the notion of scholarly excellence in one of its primary cultural roots and in some of its present forms. It concludes by making a suggestion or two about how Micah 6:8 might be used to transform some of the present forms that seem most at odds with the spirit of that verse.
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Theresa F. Latini
Teaching Nonviolent Communication and Teaching as Nonviolent Communication
This paper will present nonviolent communication (NVC) as a "just, merciful, and humble" ecclesial and educational practice. Constructed by psychologist Marshall Rosenberg, NVC is a four-step process of communication designed to facilitate empathy, honesty and connection between individuals and groups. Through an interdisciplinary dialogue with Reformed theology, this paper will argue that NVC is one concrete means of living as those made in the image of God in ecclesial and educational organizations too often marked by entrenched power struggles and vitriolic discourse. The paper will include illustrations from seminary courses that focus on NVC, and it will suggest general guidelines for teaching nonviolently.
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David S. Koetje, Joy D. Bonnema, David H. DeHeer
Learner-Centered Teaching of a Cell Biology Course for First-Year College Students
We have adopted a learner-centered pedagogy for teaching Cell Biology and Genetics, a large lecture course for first-year bioscience and health professions students. Our approach employs collaborative learning, formative and summative assessments, out-of-class reading and writing assignments, lectures focusing on problem areas, and classroom clicker technology. We also attend to strategies and habits that improve students' learning skills. While student reaction is mixed due largely to their unfamiliarity with this pedagogy, they are more actively engaged in the learning process. We conclude that learner-centered teaching promotes the spirit of Micah 6:8 in ways that less communal forms of learning cannot.
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Heidi Oberholtzer Lee
Critical Thinking or Just Critical?: Reintroducing Humility to the Literature Classroom
Scholars and teachers of literature often include on their syllabi and in their discussions of pedagogy the phrases "critical thinking" and "critical reading." Critical thinking and reading skills are generally assumed to be hallmarks of academic excellence. This paper interrogates the notion that "critical thinking" and excellence in the literature classroom must be inherently wedded to what Paul Ricoeur would call a "hermeneutic of suspicion." Christian literary scholars might better serve their students and their profession by decoupling the notion of critical thinking from that of suspicion and by replacing it with a hermeneutic of humility and deeply analytical dialogue.
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Mary S. Hulst
Teaching Preaching or Shaping Preachers? A New Paradigm for Homiletical Education
The "classic" way of teaching preaching is to present the students with a particular sermon form and then require that students imitate that form—think of the oft-maligned "three points and a poem." But even more recent attempts which seek to liberate students from that form do so by presenting alternative forms (e.g., Robinson's "big idea" or Wilson's "Four Pages"). This paper will suggest that a student-centered pedagogy that is seeking most to serve the student in mercy and humility may well begin with the presentation of one or another form, but then will also draw from other models and ideas in an attempt to allow students to discover their own voices as preachers.
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David I. Smith
Reading Practices, Virtues, and the Excellences of the Literature Course
This paper describes a series of changes made in an upper level literature course that were designed to intentionally address the reading practices engaged in by students, attending to the how as well as the what of reading. The practices targeted were intended to foster a consistent focus on reading with charity and humility, and involved redefinition of excellent work and of assessment practices. Evidence of student responses will be presented.
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Ryan O'Dowd
Reimagining Biblical Hebrew Instruction in Light of the Classic Understanding of the Trivium
This paper challenges contemporary practices in biblical Hebrew instruction, learning, and publishing by way of a linguistic and theological evaluation of their underlying theories. Using the balance of rhetoric, grammar, and dialectic in the Classical Trivium, I evaluate what appear as imbalances or blatant disregard for linguistics in these modern practices. I then argue that a return to a classical understanding of grammar and rhetoric provide not only a more holistic view of language and appreciation for interdisciplinary learning, but also a foundation for seeing language study as a springboard into more sensitive and humble human participation in the world.
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Carolyn Kristjánsson
Constructing Online Collaborative Work as Christian Practice
What might a call to social responsibility characterized by justice, mercy, and humility look like in a virtual learning community comprised of individuals from different parts of the globe?   This paper explores some of the dynamics and dilemmas that have emerged in an online graduate program offered by a Christian university in Canada. In this context learning is facilitated through collaborative assignments built around having a teachable point of view.  These assignments are designed to require a high degree of student interdependence where learning and helping others to learn is viewed as a form of service or ministry.

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Carolyne Call
Fostering Justice, Mercy, and Humility Through the Use of Narrative in the Classroom
Students who analyze themselves through psychological writing have more astute understandings of themselves in terms of their own motives, actions, faith, morality, relationships, and emotions. Through this process of critical reflections of the self, one can approach the experience of humility and mercy toward the self and to the larger world. How this is done via writing assignments in a Lifespan Psychology class is examined in detail. This presentation will have three areas of focus: the theological and pedagogical justifications for this type of assessment/evaluation, some specific examples of students' own work, and the comments and evaluations of students who have participated in the class.
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Andrew Abdool, Julialet Rens, Susan Hasseler
Excellence and Justice: New Visions for Teacher Education in South Africa and the United States
Calls for increased excellence in education are being heard around the world, not just in North America. Because of its connection with primary and secondary education, teacher education is particularly subject to the "strident calls for greater excellence, proposed programs for achieving it, and standards for measuring it" described in the conference proposal. This symposium will feature a comparative study of the relation between teacher education, national standards, and accountability measures and our call as Christians to "seek justice, love mercy, and walk humbly before God" in two countries, the United States and South Africa. The presenters will discuss ways in which the policies, missions and histories of their particular institutions promote and inhibit the goals of equity and justice articulated in their respective national standards.
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Randall Buursma
Micah and Educational Excellence: Pedagogical Considerations
Suppose colleges took seriously Micah's vision for educational excellence: developing alumni who seek justice, love mercy, and walk humbly before God. What are the educational implications for spiritual outcomes in a world driven by accreditation standards? Micah provides pedagogical clues that may assist educators in reimagining excellence in the process of learning. The following paper explores three specific strategies that connect the political reality of teaching with the spiritual living that Micah advocates.
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Jack Du Mez
Getting It Write: How Basic Writing Programs Critique Academic Discourse and Promote Equitable Access to Higher Education
In popular and academic circles, critics ask rhetorical compositionists "Why Can't Johnny Write?" The answer often lies in debates concerning basic writing programs. This paper will explore the intersection between basic writing programs and demands for higher standards in academic writing. It will examine the ways in which basic writers challenge often unexamined definitions of "academic discourse," and how basic writing programs mitigate unjust admission standards. The paper will identify some of the political and moral implications of basic writing programs, and will examine how Christian institutions can use basic writing programs to promote justice for underprepared students.
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Alexandre Brasil Fonseca
Justice and Patience: An Education for the People
Poverty, violence, injustice. The questions that the prophet Habakkuk made to God could be made by anyone of us today. The prophet demonstrates that Christian indignation demands action. He demands an answer from God that today we would recognize as a claim of advocacy. In God's response we notice important messages for our walk in education: look out for another; fight in the defense for rights; direct your actions toward faith; act with patience in a position of service that is essential in the consolidation and construction of the citizen in our countries and in the world.
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Joseph McDonald
Libraries and Learning: The Search for Justice, Mercy, and Humility in Information Services and Technology—A Yet More Excellent Way
There is a crisis in academic libraries and in professional preparation for library service. This paper addresses two major elements of this crisis: the totalizing and colonizing effect of information technology and the disregard for students' rights to integrated information, reading, writing—learning "support." I propose academia, especially Christian academia, abandon "librarianship" and establish a broadly educated profession that is of one mind with teachers and functions as an extension of their pedagogies by dealing justly with extra-classroom student learning needs, as an integrated whole. Finally, I propose an "open" organizational structure through which this support can be offered.
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Jennifer Reitz, Jennifer Discher, Karen Elliott
Pedagogical Excellence Through Service Learning: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Pursuit of Justice and Mercy
This paper describes the practical application of service learning in an interdisciplinary course, in an attempt to incorporate justice and mercy into the curriculum. The purpose of the course is to educate students about a social issue using a sociological framework and theological reflection. Service learning opportunities included community placements and the development of an Alternative Spring Break. Learning outcomes were found to be consistent with objectives of the course. This presentation will include a discussion of service learning as a model of educational excellence; as well as descriptions of interdisciplinary curriculum development, service trips, and design/assessment of learning outcomes.
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Deborah Bowen
"Blessed Are the Poor in Spirit": Imagining Excellence Otherwise
One explicit expectation of the Ontario Guidelines for University Undergraduate Degree Level Expectations is that students have "an appreciation of the uncertainty, ambiguity, and limits to knowledge." Jesus' blessing of the "poor in spirit" who recognize their dependence on God suggests that such an awareness of human limitation is necessary for wise living. This epistemological humility is best sought, asserts Richard Kearney, through a narrative imagination, which is both an "agency of moral empathy" and a vehicle for "mak[ing] some sense of what surpasses our limits." Such an experience of the "sublime" is a necessary component of an education that valorizes "poverty of spirit" over worldly success or intellectual mastery.
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John Thomas Scott
Educational Excellence in History: The Lost Art of Philosophical History
Once upon a time, historians not only described events and explained their causes but made philosophical judgments about those events and the people involved in them. The "professionalization" of the discipline over the last two centuries, however, has largely removed the latter practice out of the role the historian, either as author or professor. The result has been a kind of history rich in detail and explanation but very poor in terms of meaning. Efforts can be made, however, by the historian to restore Philosophical History to the classroom, as evidenced in by work done at Mercer University in the spring of 2007.
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Dan Wessner
Living Micah's Vision
Eastern Mennonite University, rooted in the historic Christian peace tradition, is living Micah's vision. Across disciplines, we imagine, craft, and pilot ideas for Micah-oriented excellence in teaching and learning. We are presenting these ideas through speeches, multi-media panels, discussions, food, music and art, and outside critiques of our dreaming. Biblical exegesis and hermeneutics meld with social capital theory to quicken our Anabaptist response to broader communities of scholars, activists, and people of faith. Living Micah's vision means a "green" campus and organic farm, a Center for the Study of Abrahamic Traditions, counseling cohorts, and deep intercultural learning.
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Ken Badley, Susan VanZanten Gallagher
Teaching Crosswise
This paper explores links between two meanings of crosswise. It examines teaching in view of Christ's sacrifice on the cross, focusing on Paul's claim that the cross symbolizes Christ's humility (Phil. 2:5-11). It explores how academic values such as prestige trump humility, noting that if one teaches crosswise in the one sense, one's behavior may be perceived in academic settings as crosswise in the other sense: mixed up and confused. The paper proposes approaches to these tensions for individuals and institutions wanting to teach crosswise.
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John Pisciotta
Does Economic Education Contribute to the Formation of Men Without Chests?
In The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis warns of a growing moral relativism sweeping education. At the personal level, Lewis claimed that we would become "men without chests." The broad societal impact would also be devastating. This paper argues that, unfortunately, the content of modern economics contributes to the moral relativism that has grown even stronger in the decades since Lewis wrote The Abolition of Man. The inclination toward moral relativism is found in the typical treatment of consumer decision making and in reliance on utilitarianism as the general foundation for the neoclassical economics.
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Last updated Tuesday, March 11, 2008