Learning to Fish: Part 3—Methods for Teaching Methods

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.

Eventually, in most of my classes (as well as in most of my writing), I combined the study of a given text with the study of a certain method that correlates well with the type or genre of the text under consideration. This correlation of text and method was most prominent in my upper-level electives and doctoral seminars.

In each case, the students learned a method and then engaged in applying it to the text in question as a case study, such as “Narrative Criticism and Matthew”; Galatians and Rhetorical Criticism”; or Discourse Analysis of Philippians”; or “Cultural Anthropology and Luke.” The students were responsible for showing that they understood the method, that they knew how to use it, and that it would result in a cogent outcome of interpretation or historical reconstruction. What good does it do simply to ask a student to interpret a text without direction? When we give students a text to study and interpret, why not clarify what the goal is and offer a set of methodological guidelines on the basis of which to proceed?

The fun part of all this was that the discovery of newness from a method in the classroom replicates the historical development of this method among biblical scholars.

Just as our scholarly use of new methods can open vistas of interpretation for scholars, so now the students were awakening to ways of studying the Bible that were wholly new to them. Even more delightful was when students employing a method that had never been applied to the text they were studying. In those cases, they are on the cutting edge of biblical scholarship—not just in doctoral courses but also in college electives and seminary classes, even survey courses. I have seen some absolutely innovative interpretations of texts in a ten-page paper for a class—simply because what the student was doing was something entirely fresh. What a thrill it was to share my assessment of that with the students and to encourage their further study!

Two Caveats about Teaching Method

Two cautionary notes about teaching method. First, as I have said, method is much more complex and malleable than I have depicted it here. A method is not a cookie cutter. The idea is not to get a model or a set of questions that will basically determine the outcome of what one will find. Rather, the questions are designed to explore and try things out. They are meant to open up the text to new ways of seeing. They serve as a “heuristic device”—that is, as an approach that helps one tentatively and helpfully to see things one might not otherwise have seen and to make connections one might not otherwise have made. The questions are changed and the method itself is adjusted and modified to adapt to the text as one goes along. In this way, the method is less like a straightjacket and more like jazz improvisation in which one uses imagination and freedom. Trial and error and intuition become as important as logic and rigor.

Second, method is never neutral. Just as readers and interpreters are always biased and interested in terms of what they look for, in terms of how limited they are in perspective, and in terms of how their social location and values shape their way of seeing, so methods are also not disinterested approaches to a text. Methods bear assumptions and implications, strengths and limitations, which shape what practitioners of those particular methods look for and how they “see.” For example, narrative criticism looks for the unity in a text. As a result, narrative critics tend to find connections and coherences in the discourse of a narrative and in the dynamics of its narrative world. The problem is that they may find coherences that are not really there. By contrast, deconstruction criticism appreciates the fact that texts, like life, are rife with gaps and fissures, breaks and inconsistencies, contradictions and paradoxes, suppressed ideas and suppressed voices. Both approaches are important to complement and correct each other in the analysis of a text. Like people, methods have power dynamics. They may have an impact on life for good or for ill. They may reinforce the status quo or they may work for the liberation of the oppressed. We cannot be naïve about our methods. We must use them with full awareness of their power dynamics.

Making the Teacher Dispensable

In this whole process of teaching methods in the classroom, the relationship between teacher and students is distinctive. The teacher functions mostly as a mentor. The student is like an apprentice. The student is doing the work. The teacher models the method, teaches the origins, the theory, and the practices of the method, gives students an opportunity to apply the method, gives feedback to the students’ efforts, then has the students advance in their use of the method in the interpretation of a text, and, finally, gives feedback.

Through a process of modeling and giving feedback to student practice, the teacher weans the students from dependence on the instructor so that they know “how to fish.” Now, on their own, they can use the same method to interpret other texts beyond the classroom. When it works, there is a sense that the student is launched and that the formal educational part of their learning is complete. Go fish!

Photo Credit: “30lb 4oz common carp” by Tim Creque – CC by 2.0

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