This book offers an energizing Christian vision for the art of teaching. The authors — experienced teachers themselves — encourage teacher-readers to reanimate their work by imagining it d
This book offers an energizing Christian vision for the art of teaching. The authors — experienced teachers themselves — encourage teacher-readers to reanimate their work by imagining it differently. David Smith and Susan Felch, along with Barbara Carvill, Kurt Schaefer, Timothy Steele, and John Witvliet, creatively use three metaphors — journeys and pilgrimages, gardens and wilderness, buildings and walls — to illuminate a fresh vision of teaching and learning. Stretching beyond familiar clichés, they infuse these metaphors with rich biblical echoes and theological resonances that will inform and inspire Christian teachers everywhere.
— Christian Scholar's Review
"Those who take the time to read Teaching and Christian Imagination may feel like they have experienced refreshment from some kind of retreat or even perhaps from a kind of spiritual pilgrimage. They will have had occasion to step back and see the vocation of teaching in new and imaginative ways."
Dorothy Bass
— Valparaiso University
"Imagine this, teachers, and experience it through reading this book: Set aside, for a moment, the fast pace and quantitative judgments that shape so much of contemporary education. Encounter biblical texts, poems, and works of art that help you to see what you do every day with new eyes. Hear down-to-earth stories from other teachers. Let your imagination of what it means to teach and to learn deepen and expand. Find renewal in the indispensable, beautiful, and difficult vocation to which God has called you."
Karen E. Eifler
— University of Portland
"Deftly unpacking their three central metaphors for teaching — pilgrimage, gardening, and building — the authors provide catalysts for teachers of any discipline in religious institutions to rethink, reignite, and recommit to their vocation. Wending my way through this text, I found myself invited and equipped to cultivate a hermeneutic of wonder as a bracing, life-giving complement to the hermeneutic of suspicion that tends to dominate so much of the landscape in higher education today."
Perry L. Glanzer
— Baylor University
"I have never read anything quite like this delightful book. The authors both nourish your soul and draw you along the path toward teaching excellence. They offer colorful meditations on the imagery of pedagogy while also rooting these ruminations in the soil of practical teaching experience. While reading these pages, I repeatedly found myself inspired to rebuild not only my classroom practices but also my own life. Every kind of Christian teacher will find this book life-giving."
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David I. Smith is director of the Kuyers Institute for Christian Teaching and Learning and Director of Graduate Studies in Education at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Susan M. Felch is director of the Calvin Center for Christian Scholarship and professor of English at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan.
