Abstract
“I’ve learned that teaching has a lot to do with flexibility and moving with the wind—becoming less of an oak tree and more like a willow.” “I’ve come to think of the classroom as my Family Dinner Table, a place where everyone’s voice is welcome, and sometimes we even have multiple conversations going at the same time.” “Actually, a lot of the time, teaching high school English is like driving a bus full of chickens, backwards, down a mountain, on a winding dirt road at sixty-five miles per hour.”
Attempting to encapsulate for non-educators the lessons they have learned over fifteen weeks of practice teaching, undergraduates at the reviewer’s institution preparing for K-12 classrooms turn naturally, without prompting, to simile and metaphor. The metaphors we use to describe teaching and learning, however, are not only the product of our experience. Such images inevitably shape the way we set out to teach and learn in the first place. Moreover, as we are reminded indirectly in the volume under consideration, the way we as teachers imagine our work has clear implications for how our students, in turn, imagine their work as learners.
Picking up where Badley and Van Brummelen recently left off (Metaphors We Teach By, 2012), David Smith, Susan Felch, and selected Calvin College peers offer readers the fruit of their collective meditation on a series of images long hallowed by Scripture and church tradition. More richly and evocatively concrete than the somewhat ambiguous title might suggest, the text focuses on three specific metaphorical clusters and their implications for pedagogical practice: pilgrimage, garden, and temple. Each of these three clusters is decidedly broad-ranging. Within the category of “Journeys and Pilgrimages,” for instance, readers encounter images of, among others: immobility, force-feeding, tourism, horsemanship, forks-in-the-road, seafaring, lighthouses, and harbors; driver education, walking-in-circles, the Stations of the Cross, deserts, hospitality, hostels and monasteries; and breaking bread, choral singing, and Sabbath. At one point in the volume’s final section, the authors speak of needing to “recover [during one of their own sessions of shared reflection] from [a particularly] abrupt aesthetic shift” (p. 192). It is an apt phrase for the reader’s experience likewise, throughout the volume, of being drawn rapidly through such a loosely splashing cascade of sometimes-too-disparate imagery.
The authors explicitly disavow any intention of providing “a ‘how-to’ manual or a collection of [pedagogical] tips. This book offers lenses, not recipes, opening possibilities rather than laying out instructions” (p. 2). At the same time, the writers remain mindful of their intended audience of teacher colleagues, pausing regularly to raise penetrating questions or to consider the ramifications of (say) competing paradigms. “The difference between a pilgrim class and an Olympic sprint is that in the pilgrim class it is not a happy outcome if one student turns in a record-setting performance and hits the headlines but others are left in the dust and quickly forgotten; the journey of each learner [within this paradigm of collective pilgrimage] matters profoundly” (p. 81). “Are our classrooms crafted as spaces for patiently growing together, rather than [for] rushing from task to task?” (p. 115). “Are our own classroom choices molded by insecurity and fear of failure, or resentment of students for not sharing our passions and fulfilling our dreams, or the desire to perform, to puff ourselves up, or overweening delight in our own favorite sayings?” (p. 12).
For all of its promise and value, this is not necessarily an easy text. A reader’s energy may flag well before completing the section on Pilgrimage and arriving at the arguably even richer—but aesthetically calmer—sections on Garden and Temple. The book’s scholarly tone and register, not to mention the acknowledged looseness of the structure and shifts in authorial voice, may well discourage its use among K-12 teachers and preclude its adoption in most initial teacher-education coursework. The audience for whom it might have the most redemptive and potentially revolutionary impact—college administrators and members of our institutional boards too often captive to constricting and unholy metaphors of the market—may unfortunately not see the volume as particularly relevant to the demands of their work.
For its primary intended audience of Christian educators at the college level, however, this is a substantial gift—especially for those prepared to linger over the volume’s imagery for an extended period, and (ideally) in the company of other lingerers. It is hard to imagine a Christian teacher finishing the text without coming under serious conviction, and without sustained re-examination of our most basic assumptions about teaching—from our yardsticks of overall success to the construction of a syllabus or the physical arrangement of our classrooms. It is yet too early to testify to any demonstrated results from the reviewer’s own reading of this volume. I have no doubt, nonetheless, that long-term, my colleagues and I will somehow be qualitatively different teachers for accepting the authors’ invitation to “imagine ourselves not as the builders, let alone of the architects, of our syllabi, lesson plans, and even students, but rather as living stones who, with our students, are being built up into a spiritual house,” as we ask ourselves the extent to which we “like God in [a particular given icon] cradle our students as we mark out the span of the day’s learning” (p. 154).