Personal vision statement and community reflection

This week invigorating and challenging from a number of perspectives: I am not a preacher so I have had to constantly seek to transfer each new input to my own community. Although I have preached in the past, currently I am a tertiary educator and my teaching contexts are either cross-cultural and cross-linguistic, or training graduates (with degrees in a range of fields) to teach adults in a variety of environments; so it is from this perspective that my vision statement and community reflection arises.

The particularities of my contexts have raised a number of questions during the week. First of all, how does post-modernity relate to my own cross-cultural mission, especially with students for whom English is not their first language? I have deeply appreciated the focus on the need to replace concept of a single narrative with multiple narratives and multiple voices participating in experience oriented events as 'community’ is the way in which many non Western cultures function. Secondly, there are obvious issues for the church with regard to the post Baby-Boomer generations, but what about those from different language backgrounds? Australia is a multi-cultural nation with a rich diversity of alternative voices; people who have been educated in countries with very different pedagogical practices from my own. In what way can the issue raised this week be applied to those who have experienced a different pedagogy? A third question is to ask if I get bogged down by the way in which I use my mind? Many in tertiary education in the West are very word oriented – it is the way in which we have been socialised – but is it wrong to be oriented this way and how can I help ‘expand’ the thinking of those I teach beyond this?

The story of the young woman from generation X deeply impacted me. Her monologue left me feeling quite distressed in many ways. Her admission her generation is cynical, jaded and lost, longing for us to listen rather than talk, longing for authenticity, longing for connectedness and to know how we know what we know and how it works; and most of all her heartfelt “[we] know what it’s like to be homesick for something [we] never had” echoed something in my own heart. Many in my own Baby Boomer generation are also disillusioned. This seems to be especially true for women in the Church; those of us who are part of the ‘sit back with arms folded and observe’ generation, who have been discipled in church traditions where the Bible is the beginning, middle and end of faith, and ‘professional theologians’ the arbiters of interpretation and application of biblical truth. For me, this week has again affirmed I do not need to ‘fit’; I am contented to live outside of the ‘arms folded’ boxes; but perhaps can help other misfits to find that “something [we] never had” expressed in the video clip.

The notion of text as visual challenges the way I think about teaching and learning. Although I am familiar with learning styles and multiple intelligences (I teach about them!) and try to be inclusive in my teaching practice, I have been challenged to think about how I can integrate imagination into my teaching practice in the way Steve has done this week. Images and pictures: I am not a picture person, yet I like to paint pictures with words, using evocative and sensual language. I look forward to experimenting.

Thinking in colours was a very rich experience. As a word oriented person - I often even dream in words – I found thinking about what colour something is for me and why, quite profound. Although I kept returning to red, the way I conceived red developed considerably between Monday and Friday; from thinking only in a nice ‘theologically correct’ way about red as the colour of blood, representing salvation and God’s grace and mercy, to still thinking about the bible as red, but now as dangerous, subversive and challenging. I feel a great deal of excitement about the possibility of expanding my teaching repertoire to include the idea of colour in what I teach.

Over and over again this week, I have been challenged to think more deeply about how I can incorporate the biblical text into my teaching context. I do not teach the bible per se. I am a teacher educator, primarily teaching mature-age students how to teach the English language. While I can, and do, incorporate biblical principles into my teaching fairly regularly, actually using the text in teaching will be a great deal more challenging!


I like the concept of the preacher/teacher as a conductor of the story allowing many different voices to be heard, facilitating not only the individual sounds (voices) but also bringing it all together as the concerto ensuring the inclusion of the small and marginal. So, the story must be a collection of stories, not a single voice. The story needs to be a collection of flesh and blood stories, not dry and dusty academic ivory tower… thus teaching and learning should always be an unfinished story with different perspectives of the text laying along side of each other and mingling in perichoresis.

One of the most powerful images for me this week has been the challenge to connect an every day story – in my case a teaching event - into the living text; I think this is called thinking theologically! This will be a serious challenge for my future teaching ministry as I work with subjects that are not specifically biblical. I look forward to the challenge of connecting my topics them with Bible, either directly with texts, or indirectly with biblical principles. Even though not all of my students have been, or will be, Christians, if I am to take the challenge seriously, I need to find ways of living the text. If I just teach ‘skills’, be it in teaching or in English language, I will miss the opportunity to connect with people. Teaching becomes an intellectual exercise rather than a living experience.

Introducing khitwaa

My name is Lesley Houston and I am a full-time staff in Humanities here at Tabor. I head up the TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) and ESL (English as a Second Language) programmes. My husband and I returned to Adelaide in July last year after 5 years in far northern Thailand where James trained pastors and leaders for an indigenous church planting ministry among an ethnic minority group, and I taught English at the regional university.

In this class, I hope to gain a broader perspective of what it means to communicate biblically in today's context, particularly being able to apply the insights into my teaching practice.

The word word 'khitwaa' means think that .... which seems to be very appropriate for this class!