Announcing a Great Accomplishment

A friend of mine, Philip Larson, is celebrating the attainment of an advanced degree, a Doctor of Education (or Ed.D.) in Curriculum and Instruction.

It is now appropriate to refer to him as Dr. Larson.

Hooray! Congratulations!!!!!

Dr. Philip Larson is Head of Secondary Authors (Product Development) at the Bob Jones University Press in Greenville, South Carolina. He titled his dissertation in curriculum theory A Transformational Model of Biblical Integration with Curricular Applications. I started reading last night, and it’s very exciting stuff—a groundbreaking study for Christian thinkers and educators everywhere. His comments regarding the work:

Folks talk about "biblical integration" or the "integration of faith and life," but there is little definition of these expressions. In the 19 years I taught in Christian schools, I cannot recall anyone saying what it was, yet everyone agreed that it was a sine qua non.

I was coming from Richard Niebuhr's Christ and Culture, despite some claims that he is out of date. Niebuhr advocates a transformational approach to culture. Niebuhr was taken to be especially critical of Anabaptist, Lutheran, and Thomist viewpoints. However, contemporary Anabaptists have been able to tweak Niebuhr's scheme in a way that transformational folks would generally approve, and it appears that Lutherans have done the same (although Gene Veith is quite an exception).

Transformationally, I'm defining biblical integration as "the unreserved affirmation of the Bible's authority and the vigorous expansion of its influence in a given academic or cultural endeavor."

The model graphic is a very abbreviated version of what I'm trying to say. I see three components of culture (nothing novel here): stuff you can touch (tools, including virtual tools), social practices, and social ideals. Presumably everything in culture fits in one of these three categories. In this model, a Level 3 situation exists when discourse can easily switch between the three loci. Unfortunately, we don't have many situations in which people can easily move the discourse between artifacts, social practices, and social ideals. I can't tell you a school system at Level Three; perhaps I'm mistaken.

At Level 3, a metanarrative will coordinate every aspect of the discourse. As a Christian, I suggest that Creation-Fall-Redemption is the biblical metanarrative. So if we can teach our students so that they learn to see everything in terms of these three lenses, we will have done them a great service.

At Level 2, social ideals are reified and pass into the background, yet participants remain serious about social practices such as mathematics, music, literature, etc. What many regard as excellent education fits in this level.

At Level 1, social practices are reified and only artifacts/virtual artifacts remain. In such a mathematics class, the teacher and students would largely focus on algorithms and processes without attending to their purposes and bases. Musically, one would hit all the right notes and perhaps miss the point of the music. Some regard this as excellent education, but it's too focused on rote.