TEACHERS TALKING
Talk 5 – The Scent of Another World
Sister Act was a comedy released in 1992. It told the story of Deloris, a lounge singer from Reno in Nevada. After she witnesses her gangland boyfriend, Vince LaRoca, who owns the casino, execute a man, she is placed in witness protection. The place is Saint Katherine’s Convent in the parish of a rundown neighbourhood in San Francisco. The Convent has a choir led for many years by Sister Mary Lazarus. Each Sunday they struggled to sing the hymns and the results were less than impressive. The small congregation felt sympathy for them as their hearts were in the right place. Even though they put in the hard work to practise, they never seemed to improve. They were just reinforcing their inability to harmonise together. When Deloris is caught by the Reverend Mother for going outside the Convent to visit a bar, she appoints her as the new choir director. Firstly, Deloris seeks to find out what they can and can’t do and in that sense, it is an act of grace. She didn’t tell them how bad they were or shout at them to sing in tune. She accepts them as they are and begins to work with them. Not to leave them as they were, but so they could learn to sing together. Then, remarkably, after training together, their heavenly music which they sang in harmony, began to revitalise the church. The choir was transformed. Same singers, new sound.
In the same way, out of our desire to become those who love God and our neighbours more deeply in our school, we begin to practise and learn with our students the habits of loving one another in the context of a loving community and so help our students to find their place in God’s ongoing story of love. Re-shaping practice focuses the attention on the habits of the classroom that shape and reinforce the way students are to relate and act with the teacher and one another.
But that is not all. For the core function of the school is teaching and learning. If our goal is to raise disciples of Jesus who build culture that reflects love for God and love for one’s neighbour, enacting out His truth and wisdom, then we must ask the question, ‘In what ways can we frame teaching and learning that embodies the Christian ethos of our school? Loving your neighbour is to be evident in the way teachers design the teaching and learning. How can we do this? Here are some examples. As part of the integration of technology into the curriculum, students were asked to design an advertisement for the non‑profit sector. Whereas advertising is usually on behalf of a company who is seeking to influence or manipulate a consumer to buy their product, the teacher reframed the task which focused on sharing stories, giving information designed to inform and equip people to share resources charitably. “This reframing moved from the imagination of consumerism to one of charity.” [1] Students were discovering through their learning what it means to see a new context that refocussed students from a person’s self‑interest to love of neighbour.
A Year 8 Maths teacher led the students in a project after completing a unit on Finance, where they learnt to calculate profit and loss. The teacher designed a whole class project where they would work out how to raise money for Open Doors, a Christian organisation who minister to persecuted Christians and refugees. They chose to prepare wraps and sell drinks, using their knowledge of profit and loss to calculate the selling prices of the food and how much profit they would make by their fund-raising. Their learning and participation in working together in unity to achieve a common purpose was a great blessing to Open Doors, who was using the money to provide food packages for persecuted Christians and Muslim refugees fleeing Iraq. Students testified how they learnt that all people in need, no matter what their religion, are those whom they can serve as neighbours. They discovered that their learning could be used to show compassion to those in need and make a difference.
As the Apostle Paul says, “… through us spreads everywhere the fragrance of the knowledge of Him.” (2 Corinthians 2: 14). The way of Jesus is love and if we are to design teaching and learning shaped by the love of God, then we need the Spirit of God, the contributions of our colleagues and a deep immersion in Scripture. As we draw this series to a close, Parker Palmer reminds us of the privileged place we have in the lives of our students … “The teacher is a mediator between learner and the subject to be learned … I must take my responsibility for my mediator role, for the way my mode of teaching exerts a slow but steady formative pressure on my students’ sense of self and the world. I teach more than a body of knowledge and a set of skills. I teach a mode of relationship between the knower and the known, a way of being in the world. This then is reinforced course after course and will remain with my students long after the facts have faded from their minds.” [2]
May the Lord richly bless you as you unfold the greatest love story ever told.
“Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave Himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.” (Ephesians 5: 1).
Grace and Peace
The Excellence Centre Team
[1] Ed David I. Smith, International Journal of Christianity & Education Vol 19, London: Sage Publications, 2015), 99
[2] Parker J Palmer, Education as Spiritual Formation-Education Horizons, Vol. 82, No , (Virginia: Phi Delta Koppa International, 2003), 55 – 67