excellent source for guidance in difficult matters as well as to professors and students for classroom study.
Teaching Across Cultures: Contextualizing Education for Global Mission. By James E. Plueddemann. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2018. Review by John William Trout, PhD Dr. John Trout serves with the International Mission Board of the SBC at the Sekolah Tinggi Teologi Baptis Indonesia seminary in Semarang, Central Java, Indonesia. In his second installment on cross-cultural ministry, Plueddemann writes from a wellspring of experience, having served in Nigeria with ECWA and SIM as a missionary educator, curriculum developer and consultant, and an international field director. He also speaks from years of graduate school teaching, gaining his experience from a significant variety of educational platforms in formal institutions, churches, and grassroots venues across continents. Plueddemann takes as axiomatic that culture influences expectations regarding the way people transmit and receive information. His central thesis on teaching cross-culturally recommends the Rail-Fence Model and the PilgrimJourney metaphor. Together these harmonize an essential balance between learnercentered and subject-centered teaching to promote holistic human development. Chapters 1–2 introduce the metaphor and the model. The Pilgrim metaphor presents a paradigm shift in which the teacher forges a trail for a mutually transformative relationship with students. In the Rail-Fence model, the top rail represents abstractions of truth, ideas, concepts, and content within a subject or discipline. The bottom rail represents the daily life, personal experience, and identifiable needs of students. Periodic “fence posts” or “dialectical tension” punctuate these parallel rails of knowledge as a result of a process of discovery catalyzed by the teacher in order to show the relationship between ideas and reality, or simply “content and practical needs” (8). Culture, or colored lenses, that inform peoples’ “behaviors, assumptions, beliefs, and values,” (38) comprises the discourse of chapters 3–6. Cultivating selfawareness and empathy, effective cross-cultural teachers must become adept at connecting subject matter with the “life and cultural values of the learner” (31). Recognizing that “culture hides more than it reveals,” (42) the author reminds readers that it shapes “our assumptions about the time and place of teaching, The Journal of Mid-America Baptist Theological Seminary
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