Writing about teaching

In the preface to his recent book Transforming Fire: Imagining Christian Teaching, Mark Jordan recalls his experiences as a young teacher who “found many books about teaching beside the point” and asserts that “we don’t need books about teaching so much as books that teach” (vii). Stated in such bald terms, I am not sure the distinction quite works. There are books that teach but teach the wrong thing, or have no bearing on teaching at all, and presumably these are not the items desired. It seems that the desire might be for books that teach that also teach us something about teaching. While Jordan’s book clearly aims to teach through a particular rhetorical mode and the inclusion of imaginative exercises and invitations to reflection, it still seems appropriate to call it a book about teaching. Yet I am not sure that the intention was a clean philosophical distinction so much as a provocation to consider whether the ways in which we write and read about teaching actually help us to teach, let alone to teach in a manner wisely informed by theological reflection. Read in that way, the comment resonated with some of my own longstanding dissatisfactions. It names a problem that seems worth probing further. Jordan explains his own antipathy toward many of the books he encountered early in his career as being rooted in the sense that “either they offered small, tidy solutions to incidental problems or they deduced a satisfied system from assumptions about what ideal Christian teaching should be.” Again, this rings true to my experience. There have been plenty of books offering collections of tips and tricks for the classroom. A current wave of books offering guides to applying the minutiae of current cognitive science may be added to the list. They can be a helpful source of small fixes, some of which are a significant help, yet many of them offer little reflection on what, why, whom, or even exactly how we are teaching. Many model an atomized way of thinking about what teaching is, accumulating the fixes one by one and presenting them in lists of increasing size. The apparently unlikely search combination of “hundred” and “teaching” yields plenty of hits in major online bookstores, reflecting the same preoccupation with numerical accumulation of quick solutions to life problems accompanied by minimal demand for commitment or joined up reflection that adorns the front covers of lifestyle magazines at the supermarket checkout. Neither a rich sense of context (social, ethical, economic, cultural, spiritual, interpersonal, etc.) nor a strong investment in cohesion of underlying educational vision are typically strong points in such texts. At the other end of the scale are books that are big