Seminarium

The Elements of Great Teaching

Hospitality in the Classroom—Part II: A Legacy of Hospitality

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The following excerpts of David’s upcoming book, Teaching to Learn, Learning to Teach: Reflections on Education as Transformation through Dialogue (Summer, 2014), are used by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers.

At its simplest level, the image of hospitality relates to our homes. If I imagine the classroom to be my home, how would I act if I had guests?

Actually, hospitality is a lost art in our society. Where I grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania in the 50’s, people who came to the door were invited in, workers were offered a drink and a snack, door-to-door salesmen were listened to politely. Now we are reluctant to let anyone into our homes at all. Or we call out threateningly from inside the door: “Who is it?” There may be a difference to hospitality when we have taken the initiative to invite guests to our homes.

Hospitality is Sacramental

My wife is a wonderful person to welcome people. She sees hospitality as sacramental. From the time she begins preparing for their arrival until after they leave, her attention is wholly devoted to our friends and the experience they are having at our house—the orderliness of the house, the welcome, the food, the attention to meaningful conversation, the goodbyes.

Absolutely none of this has anything to do with making an impression. It has everything to do with being natural and making people feel at home. She has her mind off of herself and onto our guests. To her, hospitality is a sacred art designed to give the guest—friend, acquaintance, or stranger—the most meaningful and welcoming experience we can offer. Similarly, I want my students to feel at ease, to be glad they came.

Not just for “People Like Us”

In ancient Israel, hospitality was a sacred trust whereby Israel cared for and protected the strangers and aliens in their midst. Hospitality is not just for “people like us,” but for people different from ourselves. There was a solidarity with the guest that required their needs be met and that they be treated with kindness.

Israelites would offer a great deal and risk a great deal to treat their guests well. Israelites were told to recall that, at one time, they too had been strangers in Egypt and that they should learn from their experience. So too, we teachers were students once. Can we imagine back to what it was like for us? Can we not treat those student-strangers who have been entrusted to us with kindness and thoughtfulness?

A Means of Solidarity

Hospitality was also central to the early Christian movement. Proclaimers and healers went from place to place depending on the hospitality of strangers. It was a means of solidarity, a sign of those with whom you have made a covenant of peace and protection. To give and to receive hospitality was to gain “brothers” and “sisters.” In fact, some New Testament writers portrayed hospitality as a metaphor for all Christian relationships.

Paul writes the admonition to “Welcome one another.” This places hospitality as a holy act that imitates the way God has welcomed us, as Paul so aptly adds: “just as Christ has welcomed you.” Can we as hosts in the classroom not commit ourselves to give such unconditional hospitality to those who come under our pedagogical roof?

Modeling Hospitality in the Classroom

I do not know if Dudley Riggle thought about such ideas as he modeled hospitality in the classroom, but I suspect that he did. In any case, I have tried to learn from him and to improvise my own version of such welcoming hospitality. How could I make students feel welcome? How could I make them feel at ease? How could I create an atmosphere where people were free to speak and learn without being anxious or fearful? How could I provide an experience that made them glad they came to class on any given day? How could I provide the kind of hospitality that would facilitate for them the most meaningful classroom experience? These are questions that have occupied me in my teaching vocation.

In my next post I will provide a number of the specific ways I have tried to answer these questions in regard to my expression of hospitality toward students.

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David Rhoads is Emeritus Professor of New Testament at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago (1988 to 2010), previously professor of religion at Carthage College, Kenosha, WI (1973 to 1988). He has published Mark as Story (co-author, third edition, 2012), The Challenge of Diversity (2004), Reading Mark, Engaging the Gospel (2005), From Every People and Nation: The Book of Revelation in Intercultural Perspective (editor, 2005), and “Performance Criticism: An Emerging Discipline in Second Testament Studies” (BTB, 2006). He edits the Biblical Performance Criticism series for Wipf and Stock Press. He edited Earth and Word: Classic Sermons on Saving the Planet (2008), co-edited The Season of Creation (2011), and directs Lutherans Restoring Creation. Rhoads was Carthage Teacher of the Year in 1974-75. In 2004, he received the first Fortress Press Award for outstanding teaching in a graduate/seminary institution. Rhoads lives in Racine, WI with his wife the Rev. Sandra Roberts.