Learning to Teach, Teaching to Learn: Reflections on Education as Transformation Through Dialogue

With insights gleaned from thirty-two years of teaching college students, seminarians, and graduate students, David Rhoads shares how he sought to create the classroom as a community of learners ripe for transformation through dialogue. He charts his personal journey struggling to generate discussion, evoke questions, deepen conversations, and strengthen writing and oral skills. Reflections include such innovative topics as radical hospitality, the physical environment of the classroom, overcoming blocks to learning, and the power of silence, as well as issues of a liberative pedagogy, the importance of method, the role of social location, experiments in intercultural dialogue, the use of case studies and slogans, and performing Scripture. This approach to education fosters openness, respect for difference, tolerance for ambiguity, and creative collaboration. In addition to university, seminary, and graduate students and teachers, schoolteachers, pastors, and parish educators will also benefit from these reflections.