This study explores the relevance of beliefs, virtues, personal and cultural stories, images and metaphors and canonical genres to the ways in which we understand and carry out the task of teaching.
Why does Bible study flourish in some churches and small groups and not in others? In this updated edition of a trusted classic, two Christian education specialists provide readers with the knowledge and methods needed to effectively communicate the message of the Bible. The book offers concrete guidance for mastering a biblical text, interpreting it, and applying its relevance to life. Its methods, which have been field-tested for twenty-five years, help pastors, teachers, and ministry students improve their classroom skills. Readers will learn how to develop the "big idea" of a passage and allow the text itself to suggest creative teaching methods. This new edition has been updated throughout and explores the changed landscape of Bible study over the past two decades. Readable and interdisciplinary in approach, this book will help a new generation of Bible students teach in a purposeful and unified way.
Jonathan Kozol, National Book Award-winning author and one of America’s foremost writers on social issues, offers a passionate and provocative critique on the role of the teacher in America’s public school system. Writing as a teacher, Kozol advocates an approach to education that is infused with ethical values: fairness, truth, and integrity, and a driving compassion for the world beyond the classroom. Kozol not only sheds light on what it means to be a teacher, but gives constructive suggestions on how teachers can work conscientiously within the system to foster these values in concert with parents, students and fellow teachers.
This book shows teachers of adults how to use styles of learning to enhance the student's experience and enrich their own teaching. A chapter is devoted to each of the seven styles: verbal, independent, social, visual, physical, musical and logical. Each chapter includes: suggestions for blending the style into lessons, questions to help teachers determine their own preferences, a lesson focusing on the learning style, and a prayer demonstrating the style. A bibliography, appendices and a self-discovery sheet are included. Appropriate for group or individual study and teacher training.
This book offers an energizing Christian vision for the art of teaching. The authors — experienced teachers themselves — encourage teacher-readers to reanimate their work by imagining it differently. David Smith and Susan Felch, along with Barbara Carvill, Kurt Schaefer, Timothy Steele, and John Witvliet, creatively use three metaphors — journeys and pilgrimages, gardens and wilderness, buildings and walls — to illuminate a fresh vision of teaching and learning. Stretching beyond familiar clichés, they infuse these metaphors with rich biblical echoes and theological resonances that will inform and inspire Christian teachers everywhere.
The Bible can and should be an environment in which we live and move and have our being, an environment in which we are shaped by God in different and interrelated ways. As with aspects of our physical environment, we may have never noticed many elements of this spiritual environment before or may have only the vaguest sense of their influence. While we may be more familiar with certain elements, we may not realize the full extent of their influence or be too preoccupied to see how they relate to form the larger whole of how we are shaped. This book looks one-by-one at several ways in which the Bible's environment influences us as people and, in particular, shapes our beliefs, attitudes, and practices as teachers in the classroom. It is concerned with helping readers to be, at one and the same time, faithful to our common calling as educators and faithful to the Scriptures as Christians.
Most Christians know and understand that we are to seek to reach the lost around the world. Yet, Christ's command to us is more specific and calls us to a higher standard of involvement with the peoples of the world. He has called the church to make disciples of all people groups and to teach them to observe all He commanded us (Matthew 28:18-20). In recent years mission agencies and missionaries have increasingly shifted away from discipleship and teaching toward an emphasis upon evangelism and church planting—many to the exclusion of any other field activity. While evangelism and church planting are essential components of a biblical missions program, they are not sufficient for the complete task to which we have been called. Reaching and Teaching examines the task Christ gave in the Great Commission and redefines the task of missions from that which is currently prevalent. It surveys missions strategies and methodologies that have increasingly replaced Christ’s Great Commission instructions even as they have sought to fulfill it. It is a clarion call to return to the biblical task of reaching and teaching the nations for Christ’s sake.
Teaching the Bible Coming to terms with the interpretive revolution- Although the field of biblical studies is bursting with new methods and fresh interpretations, there has been surprisingly little discussion of what these changes mean for the actual task of teaching the Bible. Happily, this volume takes significant first steps in addressing the shifts in classroom pedagogy that the new day in biblical studies urgently demands. Norman K. Gottwald Author of The Hebrew Bible: A Brief Socio-Literary Introduction An absolutely indispensable compendium of resources for charting the changes in the discipline of biblical studies, for exposing the operations of power in past and present interpretations and uses of the Bible, and for discovering a variety of postmodernist and postcolonial pedagogies in the reading and teaching of the Bible in a radically pluralistic age. Abraham Smith Perkins School of Theology, S.M.U. A superb collection of essays on a topic centrally important to theological education and biblical studies. It is an invaluable contribution to the new emancipatory paradigm emerging in biblical studies. Highly accessible, a must reading for anyone in the field. Elisabeth Schssler Fiorenza, Krister Stendahl Professor of Divinity Harvard University Divinity School Teaching the Bible engages the problem and opportunity of theological education in the twenty-first century head on. In a tightly crafted series of provocative essays, the work clearly defines the postmodern, postcolonial, culturally enriched challenges facing the academy today. For any student or scholar who wants to engage the postmodern challenge as an innovative opportunity rather than a debilitating crisis, Teaching the Bible is required reading. Brian K. Blount President, Union Theological Seminary-PSCE Fernando F. Segovia is Oberlin Graduate Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at the Vanderbilt University Divinity School. He is author, with Ada Mara Isasi-Daz, of Hispanic Latino Theology: Challenge and Promise (Fortress Press, 1996). Mary Ann Tolbert is George H. Atkinson Professor of Biblical Studies at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California. She is author of Sowing the Gospel: Mark's World in Literary-Historical Perspective (Fortress Press, 1996). Biblical Studies / Hermeneutics Fortress Press FortressPress.com