Humility, the keystone of the virtues in the Christian spiritual tradition, has been dismissed by modern philosophers, critiqued by feminist theologians, and overpowered by our industrial and technological culture. The incorporation of agricultural experience in Christian higher education presents the opportunity to cultivate anew the virtue of humility, properly understood not as a practice of self-abnegation but as a relation of the creature to the God who has gifted us with nourishing soil and deified us in Christ.
This article raises a number of theological reservations about one contemporary Christian approach to teaching and learning. For many years David Smith and Trevor Cooling have played a leading role in demonstrating how Christian beliefs and theological themes might be integrated into classroom practice across the curriculum. But despite the good fruits in their work, there are some theological reservations that need to be raised. There is something deficient about the perceived relationship between theology and education that grounds this contemporary example of a Christian approach to teaching and learning. To illustrate this concern, an embryonic proposal that draws inspiration from the systematic theologian Karl Rahner is presented. This is done in order to describe how theology could provide the guiding framework for educational theory in general and for teaching and learning across the curriculum.*
In the UK, inspectors are asked to judge how far schools support children's spiritual development. Church schools are subject to the differing expectations of a dual inspection system which introduces a tension between the Ofsted (Office for Standards in Education) prioritization of control and performativity and the SIAMS (Statutory Inspection of Anglican and Methodist Schools) prioritization of creativity and spirituality. This paper derives from a year-long study in a Church of England Primary School where meeting the requirements of these inspection systems to maintain high academic standards and provide space for children to explore spirituality created tensions and complexities. The paper presents a Bernsteinian analysis of the school's learning environment which elucidates the tensions within which headteachers and their staff operate and indicates the kind of support that church school leaders require if they are to respond to the demands of this ‘double tension’.
