Teaching Theology

Pastoral Academics

There are three fundamental objectives of theological education – ministerial formation, spiritual/personal formation and academic formation, the hands, heart and head. In the first and second objective, we apply Christian standards. In the third, we follow the standards of the world.

In ministerial and spiritual areas, we apply compassion, mercy, forgiveness, and second chances. In the academic area we do not. In ministerial and spiritual areas we are pastors. In the academic area we are policemen. In ministerial and spiritual areas, following the example of Christ, the individual is paramount. In the academic area, we create mechanisms to force us to ignore the individual such as anonymous marking.

We do this under a number of pressures, some legitimate. If we have decided on secular or external accreditation, we have no choice except to adopt what in secular academics is “good academic practice” – competitive grading, rigid rules, penalties, success for 41% and failure for 39%. If not accredited, we are still under pressure to demonstrate that we are as rigorous as the others in this area and so still apply the secular standards.

There are no easy answers to this, it is the age old question of how far we contextualise into the prevailing culture which, in this case is higher education’s “quality assurance” patterns. Yet, maybe we have, in doing this, made ourselves inconsistent and negated the integration for which we strive. How can we alleviate this schizophrenia at the heart of theological education?

1. Apply the rules pastorally. If a student has a rich daddy and so can spend all his time on study, and he asks for a time extension for his essay submission, regard that as a different case to the young mother with two children who has to work to make ends meet when she asks for an extension. Some higher education systems write up those circumstances where an extension can be granted which deliberately exclude such compassion, on the basis of “fairness”!
2. Teach pastorally. If a student finds essay writing or exams easy, the tutor will only need a few sessions to help her to a good result. If a student is struggling to make the grade, invest much more time with him to get him to the level. Once again, there are higher education systems which ban this good teaching practice.
3. Mark pastorally. Now this is dangerous but not impossible. Marking is not an exact science except for multiple choice questions. Different people mark essays differently, we mark the same essay differently if we have just had a cup of coffee (or not). No-one can justify the difference between 49 and 50 for an essay. So there is always an acceptable band containing a number of marks which we could stand over academically.  For a student to need 50% to continue and for us to give 49% may be an act devoid of Christian compassion. Conceptual marking makes this more difficult, of course.

Christian theological educators need to act like Christians in every area of their work. To paraphrase a liberation theology slogan, don’t academics also have to love?

I would be grateful for your views.

This entry was posted on November 1, 2015 at 2:22 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.