Learning to Fish: Part 1—Why Methods Matter!

The following excerpts of David’s upcoming book, Teaching to Learn, Learning to Teach: Reflections on Education as Transformation through Dialogue (2015), are used by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers.

Everyone has a method for interpreting scripture. Whether aware of it or not, anyone who reads has a method—however simple or fundamental. It may simply be: “When I read, I have an understanding of the words, and that’s what they mean.” We may simply read and take at face value what we read, without reflecting on the method we use to determine what “face value” means. However, the process of reading is not as simple as it appears.

This is why method is so crucial. We always have a method, but the question is: How effective is our method of reading for faithful understanding and interpretation? We need to become aware of our methods and be rigorous about them. This insight can be the beginning of one’s education and the start of thinking independently. Certainly it is the onset of critical thinking.

Reading the Bible is a Cross-cultural Experience

Ordinarily we have a decent chance of understanding a writing that originates from our own cultural or social location, although we know how fraught with perils even that is. The problem in my field is that reading the Bible is a cross-cultural experience of ancient Mediterranean societies. So, if I take the plain meaning of words, I will be taking their plain meaning from my culture rather than the biblical cultures.

If I read the word “heart,” I will assume it has to do with feeling. But in the biblical world, the bowels were the locus of feeling, while the heart was the center of imagination and thinking and willing. When we hear the word “love,” we may think in terms of affection, whereas the biblical term most often meant fidelity. If the word “guilt” occurs, we may psychologize this as “guilt feelings,” whereas the ancient cultures would have been referring to the external fact of guilt before the public (or God) or the law.

The upshot is this: I need to become aware of my present method for interpreting and ask in what ways I might gain a more sophisticated method or set of methods in order to understanding more faithfully when I read the Bible. Once we see the text as “other,” then we need a method to interpret its meaning.

Finding a Method

Too often in education we focus on what we think and not enough on how we think. We ask what we believe rather than how we have come to believe it. We talk about the meaning of what we read without being aware of how we came to determine that meaning. The challenge of education is to make us aware of our thinking process.

I have a book entitled, How to Think Like Leonardo. The book identifies the creative processes that led Leonardo Da Vinci to be so inventive and innovative. In biblical studies, the challenge of education is to make us aware of our process of reading and ask how to think like a skillful interpreter of biblical texts. So, I would say to students: Look at what you are reading, and at the same time look at yourself doing the reading! What are you doing? And how are you doing it?

In general, we teachers do not do a very good job of teaching about method. We tend to display the results of our scholarship without revealing how we got there—without laying bare the methods we used to determine the results of our thinking. I recall the lectures I attended at Oxford University where excellent scholars and teachers lectured about the interpretations they had arrived at, but they did not explain to us how they got to their conclusions. In their lectures, they sometimes shared the evidence they found or the arguments in favor of a conclusion, but they did not describe the methods for getting the evidence and for adducing the arguments. They did not reveal the steps they went through from first picking up a text to their latest thoughts about it. We need a biblical CSI (crime scene investigation) program that lays bare the steps from the gathering of evidence to the analyzing of evidence to the various conclusions we might (or might not) make based on the evidence.

A Personal Experience

I mentioned in an earlier reflection that I floundered with method at Oxford. The tutorials were meant to enable the student to discover and articulate a method for reading texts. We had tutorials each week. I would write an essay on a given subject, and the tutor would listen to the essay and then engage us in conversation. It was often excruciatingly painful for me. In retrospect, it must have been more painful for my tutor, George Caird! He must have wondered often how he could possibly find something to talk about for a whole hour on my thin essay.

Even in the tutorial context, however, he did not lay out any methods for me. I was basically left to discover a method on my own. Finally, I figured something out for myself with the beginnings of a method, and I loved it. By the time I finished at Oxford, a year and a half later, I was confident that I could read any biblical text and get something fresh out of it—or at least I could discover many of the insights I would subsequently read in secondary sources. I had a methodical set of questions that seemed to proliferate as I asked them of the text, and I was off and running.

Methods Give Independence

This is like the old saw: Give a hungry person a fish and they will get hungry again. Teach them how to fish and they can feed themselves for the rest of their lives. What happens when that analogy is applied to learning? Provide someone with knowledge, and they will not learn how to learn on their own. They will always have to go to an expert to learn. They will be dependent upon the teacher, dependent on secondary sources. However, if you teach students how to learn with a method, they will be able to be independent learners of their own.

In this way, the teacher makes herself no longer necessary for that student. Like an effective parent or counselor or mentor to an apprentice, the teacher’s role is to make herself or himself dispensable. There is exhilaration for the student who is capable of being creative and capable of independence. There is a confidence that comes from knowing what methodological steps to take in order to get fresh insights that are faithful interpretations. I was always drawn to this kind of learning, and I taught, at least partially, as a way to support my love of learning methods!

Photo Credit: “Learning to Trout Fish” by Sue Waters  – CC by 2.0

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