released 1/28/2019

Language professor and pedagogue David I. Smith discusses in detail how practices in the classroom reinforce or contradict the goals of Christian teaching. The phrase “integration of faith and learning” has stimulated an abundance of scholarship on why faith and reason are compatible. It has also provoked extensive and various accounts of a “Christian worldview,” a phrase that often conveys a set of doctrines which, when applied to the goal of Christian teaching, places an emphasis on Christian belief over Christian practices. In this Conversation, David Smith argues that more attention needs to be given to the meaning conveyed in our methods and assumptions about teaching. Smith considers factors like body language and position; pictures and scenarios in textbooks; time, space, and sound in classroom interaction; and the cultural power of homework.

Smith’s book On Christian Teaching: Practicing Faith in the Classroom extends the ideas discussed in our earlier Conversation, The Practice of Christian Pedagogy, Volume I. In this interview, Smith describes his process of pursuing a Christian vocation through teaching as well as the philosophical and biblical motivations for Christian pedagogy that are explored in the book Teaching and Christian Practices: Reshaping Faith and Learning, co-edited by Smith and his colleague James K. A. Smith.

(63 minutes)

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A related Conversation

In recent years, Christian educators have rediscovered ancient ideas about how the head and heart interact. There is a relationship between the cultivation of affections, dispositions, and virtues, and the acquisition of knowledge. What we believe is inextricably linked to what we love and what we worship. What we love, in turn, is encouraged by practices: by the ways our bodies and imaginations engage the world of the senses. Christian educators are coming to question the idea that teaching is merely the transmission of ideas and are giving more attention to the formative power of classroom practices and the culture of schools. In Volume I of The Practice of Christian Pedagogy, David I. Smith, director of the Kuyers Institute for Christian Teaching and Learning at Calvin College, discusses new insights on the practice of Christian pedagogy.

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