John Shortt’s name is well-known in circles concerned with Christian education. He combines his classroom experience with wisdom and a heart to see more made of Christ as we teach. Passing just in 2022, I suspect his legacy will be far-reaching.
Bible-Shaped Teaching is not a long to `me, the chapters are easily read and get to the point, but those points can be momentous! Shortt calls us to remember that God’s story that we live in and through as Christians is not the same as the narratives our non-Christian colleagues and students view the world through. And, because of this, Jesus has a chance to shine through us as we step into schools.
Not only that but Shortt gives speedy overviews of a whole host of approaches to viewing the classroom, responding to children and integrating the Bible into our teaching. Check out this comment,
‘Paulo Friere , the Brazilian Christian educator, in his classic work Pedagogy of the Oppressed, argues against what he terms the banking idea of teaching whereby we see ourselves as depositors and our students as depositories who receive, file and share what we deposit within their memory banks. Seeing education as an assembly line process is also, many would argue, degenerative and indeed dehumanizing.’
Several times upon reading, I had to pause to consider my own use of words, assumptions or values that are portrayed through the way I think and act as a teacher. This writer doesn’t hold back the challenge that we need to think through every aspect of our teaching lives. For example, consider this comment from the concluding chapter,
‘Shaping by the Bible is…a shaping of the whole person in a process that is both life-long and life-wide. In addition, in the case of a calling as relational as that of teaching, it is in turn concerned with the whole person of every student and their life-long and life-wide learning and development.’
In the safe hands of an experienced educator and thought-through, passionate Christian, these challenges are worth considering. And for that, this book is well-worth a couple of ours of our time.
