Know Your Students, Know Your Story

I am well accustomed to the challenges in discerning contemporary meaning from ancient texts, and I have found, through a few years of teaching, that my students also struggle in doing so. Teaching a traditional, in-seat, survey course on the Pentateuch to 40 students from across various academic programs serves as a case-in-point.

Exegete Your Students Before You Exegete the Text

There were several students in my class who come from strong Christian homes. They learned the stories contained with the Pentateuch over and over again in Sunday school and through sermons. Some of them were even courageous enough to engage in classroom discussion about the morality, history, mythology and literary contexts of these wonderful and winsome stories of faith.

Other students came from moderately to less-moderately religious homes. They wandered in and out of church for most of their lives. They wonder why people like me get so giddy when talking about Adam and Eve or Abraham negotiating with God or Moses striking rocks, yet they wonder if they are not missing something by not knowing the stories better than they do. They have heard of Noah and Joseph. They may have seen a Bible-based film on documentary on television. They are at our school for a variety of reasons. However, when class begins, they perked up in attention because the mysterious was being discussed. As in most religiously-affiliated schools across the country, these students have quickly become the majority.

A smaller yet growing number of students in my class were hearing these stories for the first time. Some have come to escape the violent lifestyle they have come to call common and some have come simply to escape the “real world” for a few years. Whether their expectations were too low or too high, it was clear that they wanted to do something different. Whatever their reason, they were sitting in a Bible class in eastern Kentucky and listening to a young professor ramble on about ancient stories of heroism and tragedy. Maybe they became interested like some of the students at my last university appointment who decided to give this religious stuff a chance. Maybe they didn’t.

Bridging Classroom Diversity With Commonality

The point is that they were present and they must be taught something. Most of what I have learned about teaching, I have learned while teaching, through experimentation and reimagining my approach. I teach primarily ministry courses, which are more practical in terms of their content and application. And the majority of biblical studies courses that I have taught have been online. Thus, when approaching an in-seat course, you could say that I am engaging in cross-cultural teaching.  So, with all of this in mind, here are a few tips that I picked up that semester from teaching my course on the Pentateuch.

1. Make them read from their Bibles. This one is hard to accomplish, but given the diversity of acquaintance with the text I need to get my students literally on the same page. I know it seems strange to say “make them,” yet I have found it to be true. It’s like asking for volunteers at church. You can hear the crickets already. So, how do I accomplish this? I assign a portion for them to read each week. “Sure, but are they are actually reading?” you may ask….
2. Require a reading journal. “Yes, they are,” I would respond. I know because I require the students in my Bible classes to keep a reading journal, regardless of subject. It is a simple guided journal, asking questions about the content of the passage assigned, what the learned from the assigned commentary reading and how it relates to the passage assigned, and what challenging questions, spiritual truths, or devotional practices they may have picked up from the passage assigned. “So, you’re just teaching the Bible, then?” is probably your next question….
3. Don’t get lost in mythology or history. “Well, mostly. It is a class in the Bible, after all,” would be my response. There is certainly a place for walking through the Epic of Gilgamesh when discussing the creation and flood stories, just as the story of Exodus loses some of its cultural relevance when we avoid looking at the connections between Moses and Sargon the Great. However, in my context, I think I do my students a disservice if I focus most of our attention on ancient mythology and cultural history rather than actually looking at the Old Testament text. Connections must be made to other ANE cultures, but not at the sacrifice of engaging God’s story. “So,” I hear you asking, “you just preach then, don’t you?”…
4. De-sanitize the Sunday school lessons. “Yes and no,” I would respond. Yes, I have a tendency for “preaching” in class. I am, by nature, a preacher. However, I am also a scholar. As a preacher, I tell stories knowing that shared stories create community;  yet I do not skim over the stories in the academic classroom as so often happens in Sunday School. As a scholar I want my students to notice how Abraham and Isaac’s relationship changes after the sacrifice; to notice that Jacob does not punish his sons after they slaughter an entire family. How do we rationalize the plague of the death of the firstborn? These are the critical questions that fuel the conversations and content of my course, creating commonalities that were non-existent at the beginning of the semester. “Huh,” you might say….
5. Liberally use technology. My last tip is an “Easter Egg” in that it is simply something that I would recommend for any teacher in today’s techno-friendly culture. There is a lot of really good stuff that is easy to find on the Internet. Whether it is a breakdown on the Documentary Hypothesis, a map of the various Exodus routes, a to-scale rendering of the tabernacle or stacks of high-quality classical art, the Internet really can be your friend. Also, see how you LMS can enhance your teaching outside of the traditional lecture material format. My students broke up into groups and wrote Wiki pages on each book of the Pentateuch rather than writing research papers, something they really seemed to enjoy.

The purpose for teaching biblical studies has changed. It is no longer simply about content transference; it is about theological acumen and cultural engagement. We know the stories, yet our students are less and less familiar with them. Thus it is our calling, our responsibility, to not only teach the stories but challenge our students to also retell their encounter with God’s story in technologically-creative ways.

Photo Credit: “John Steinbeck on Story telling…” by Jill Clardy— CC by 2.0

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