Community, Communion, Classrooms DAVID I. SMITH
Missing Community Years ago, when I first began teaching at a Christian university, I asked a student at the start of a class to help me distribute a pile of quizzes that I needed to return. She passed out several before pausing and then resorting to standing and calling out names to identify the remaining recipients. I was a little taken aback. It was a beginner-level language class with lots of speaking practice, and I had been calling on students by name multiple times each day. It was several weeks into the semester. Yet this student appeared not to know the names of many of the other class participants. Apparently, knowing who else was there was not considered necessary to successful participation. There was no doubt a larger culture at work here, but I had to acknowledge that it also said something about the culture created in the class that I was teaching. I did this. The following semester, a student who had been in that class asked me to mentor him. We began to meet weekly to discuss a range of topics. One day I allowed myself a little rant. “I had not taught full-time at a Christian institution before coming here,” I told him, “so I did not know exactly what to expect. But I am getting the impression that the general ethos among students is that each is here to get their learning and their grade from the instructor, and whether the person sitting two seats away from them lives or dies is none of their business. Other people are the teacher’s job. And I am wondering how that can possibly be Christian. Am I my brother’s keeper? Love your neighbor as yourself? All of the ‘one another’ stuff? It seems wrong.” What stayed with me from that conversation was the student’s response. He was a deeply thoughtful person with an articulate and passionate commitment to his faith. He had been through Christian elementary, middle, and secondary school and had spent time at two prominent Christian universities. Yet the idea that part of his discipleship included taking some personal responsibility for the academic wellbeing of the people sitting around him in class was an exciting new vista. He was animated with possibilities. I thought: how could he get through that much Christian education and this still seem new? Of course, a deeply individualistic surrounding culture is in play, but it also helps if seating arrangements in his classrooms were rows of individual, forward-facing chairs; if assignments were always solo; if grading was always individual; if attending only to the teacher’s words was rewarded; if his considerable academic success never actually depended on anyone but the teacher. We did this. This was one of several experiences that started me thinking about the nature of the temporary community that is built during a course of Christian Educators Journal
October 2022
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