Integrite Spring 2013

Book Reviews 53 style to be student-centered, and they were willing to first self-evaluate their motives for the use of Christian practices and the extent to which they themselves already engaged in the spiritual practices. A consistent theme in those essays is the willingness to take risks.

Some writers used only one primary practice in their course makeover; others chose related practices that best related to their course content. In the essay cleverly titled “Eat This Class,” Julie Walton and Matthew Walters explain the purpose, plans, and schedule for students to share meals with at least two groups of classmates during the semester. The instructor joined each group, whether the meal was breakfast, lunch, or dinner and whether it was in the dining hall, a private home, or even a soup kitchen. A majority of the students later reported that they benefited from the shared meals and, although many were more comfortable working—and receiving grades—as individuals, they agreed that the course’s collaborative learning projects were enhanced by their concurrent sharing of meals and conversation. In another essay, David Smith’s “Reading Practices and Christian Pedagogy,” the writer thoroughly discusses how class readings and discussions systematically developed students’ sense of the difference between consumerist reading (the usual way Americans try to gather information or pleasure from their reading), and charitable reading (reading through which the reader is open to spiritual change). Another essay, probably the most spiritually illuminating, is Rebecca DeYoung’s writing on encouraging students to carefully and prayerfully identify personal vices, including two whose names seem outdated but whose effects are current and ubiquitous: pusillanimity and vainglory.

Most helpful are the essays in which the writers first explain how they interpret the need for Christian practices in the classroom and then report on their spiritual self-examination in light of the practices. Carolyne Call included several pertinent questions as she surveyed her “spiritual preparation for class each week”: “Am I actually living out, in the classroom, the things I say I believe…?

How do I walk into the classroom? Do I make eye contact? Call people by name? Ask them questions about their own lives?” (67). The next two questions, if self-administered by most instructors, are particularly revealing: “How do I think about [students] when I’m not in the classroom? How do I talk about my students to colleagues?” (67). In her essay and in others —primarily those by Walton and Walters, the Smiths, DeYoung, and Ashley Woodiwiss—the authors offer comparatively more detail about practicalities of creating syllabi, scheduling and assessing assignments, and creating a fair way of requiring out-of-class meetings for students and/or the students and the instructor. James Smith, in his essay “Keeping Time in the Social Sciences,” describes his intentions to “outline the course in which the experiment was carried out, introduce and explain the practices that were performed (along with a rationale for why these practices were appropriate for this course), and then provide a critical evaluation of the experience. What worked? What didn’t? What could I do differently?” (142).

Especially appreciated are the frank discussions of the various writers’ reflections on what worked and what did not work.