Learning as Reconciliation, Learning for Reconciliation: New Dimensions for Christian Secondary Schools

THE AUTHORS INVESTIGATE secondary Christian schooling in light of a biblical calling to reconciliation. This vision involves learning that transforms, inviting students and teachers into vulnerable, yet exhilarating, positions, with visions of increasing interdependency and reciprocity. Responsible freedom to search for truth in community is touted as a necessary ingredient of transformative learning and teaching in secondary schools. This approach advocates curriculum that investigate issues or problems in an integrative manner rather than teaching everything in separate disciplines. The authors also maintain that assessment is crucial since it is here that we communicate what we truly value. Assessment for reconciliation unfolds as transformative learning happens and includes the articulation of further questions and investigations.

THIS PAPER ARGUES that, in preparing people for leadership in faith schools, attention should be paid to the differences in their purpose, nature and ethos as well as to what they have in common with all other schools. First, I suggest that leadership is essentially connected to purposes. Then I bring out some of the ways that leadership of faith schools, and more particularly, leadership of church schools, requires priorities and capacities additional to and different from those required in mainstream schools. Third, as an example of the type of separate and specific provision for church school leadership that is needed, there is a brief description of an MA programme which I directed between 1997-2002. Fourth, there is an analysis of some of the tensions and conflicts brought about by the desire of churches to have separate provision of leadership preparation opportunities. Finally, it is suggested that, although there are difficulties that arise when faith schools emphasise their distinctiveness too much, so too there are dangers when insufficient attention is paid to this distinctiveness and when other professional and educational orthodoxies are imposed.

THIS PAPER ARGUES that the call to teach ought to be conceptualized not so much in terms of subject matter (‘what’) or teaching method (‘how’) but with respect to the subjectivity of the people involved - that is, of the one who teaches and of the one who is taught. Building explicitly on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, the essay develops the idea of a responsible subject as the condition that makes visible the distinctiveness about the call to teach, suggesting that God’s call to teach manifests itself through the face of the student, in the asymmetric relation between the teacher and the student as the other. In doing so, the teacher becomes a responsible subject for and to the student, instead of merely for the subject matter and the methods of teaching. Familiar tensions in teaching illustrate this call to responsibility.

© This article is reprinted from the Journal of Christian Education, Papers 56, pp. 8-16, 1976. The article is covered by copyright and is reproduced by permission of the author and the Australian Christian Forum on Education (publisher of the Journal of Christian Education). Further information may be found in the Journal's website jec.acfe.org.au.

THIS ARTICLE WAS first published thirty years ago and is republished here both in recognition of its seminal use of a biblical concept as a metaphor for the role of the teacher and for the way in which it forms an instructive whole together with the other articles in this issue, adding a further perspective on the use of reconciliation language to describe education. It uses the writing style of the time in which it was written rather than that of the present day but, to maintain the integrity of the article as originally written and published, no alterations have been made.

The article proposes that the biblical concept of reconciliation provides a helpful metaphor for teaching. Three points are identified at which the concept can be specially helpful: first, in bringing the child to terms with society, with the hopes and enmities in himself and others, so that he may develop with a realistic view of his options; second, in achieving a better balance between thinking and feeling in the curriculum; and third, in being involved with, and mediating between, the various groups interested in making educational policy. In these ways, the appropriate professional stance of the teacher is that of a reconciler.