Teaching OT in faraway places

The first change is unsurprising, I need to use less complex English. The students are Karen speakers, most of them know either Thai or Burmese or both, and they use English almost only for their studies - remember that they watch no television or films, they read no magazines, most of the usual ways in which people around the world practice and improve their English are not available to students here. So, I need to choose simpler ways of saying things. Actually, like most teachers, I have loved reading since childhood, enjoy words and wordplay, and so even when I am teaching a University class of native-born English speakers I need to simplify the language I use. All classes need technical terms explained - that’s part of what teaching is about, not a new skill.

The paragraph above already introduced one of the changes that we had not really expected - at least not at the level deeper than “thoughts”. These students have far less experience of world than most. Quite a few of the class were born in the camps, even more first entered a camp while they were of primary school age. Few radios, almost no TVs, and very few print publications enter the camp. Most people here do not get holidays, but may unofficially visit a Thai-Karen village (along the border strip, but inhabited by Karen who have Thai nationality and so are free to move). There are two PCs which share the Internet connection that I am using, but few students get time enough to use these for long enough to really learn how to discover the world electronically. Those who can, print out pages with news from the Free Burma Rangers, and other Karen/Burma related news items, and post them up on the school notice board. Shopping means either a visit to one of the little “shops” that several of the neighbouring families run - tea, coffee, washing powder, water in bottles, even luxuries like banana chips, or Fanta. For larger or more complex shopping - like when we needed pens to write on the whiteboards - there is the small unofficial market nearer the middle of the camp. Their experience is limited to the few thousand people in this part of the camp, with occasional glimpses of the wider world beyond the wire.

A third change is again no surprise, though it might have the biggest impact on teaching. Students here have a greater and deeper spirituality than “Western” students. The Bible lives for them, and it governs their lives to an extent that few Western Fundamentalists can really imagine, yet they are not Fundamentalists. They are quite ready to read the Bible flexibly, and are open to notions that the people whose lives are recorded in the Bible grew and developed in their understanding of God. They are even open to the idea that different parts of the Bible can express God, and God’s purposes for humanity, more or less well, fully and clearly… nevertheless (or precisely because of this?) they read, pray and meditate on the Bible from morning to night, to an extent that even my uncle (a longstanding Brethren Elder, who tried to be as “biblical” as he could in every aspect of his life) could not manage in a “normal” Western context.

How this difference can/should modify my teaching I am very unsure at present, to some extent it was similar in Africa, but it was also very different. Congo celebrated the centenary of the first Protestant missionaries just before our arrival there, and the Old Testament was only translated into even the main trade languages as recently as the 1970s. Christian faith and the Bible both had shallow roots in Congo. Karen contact with the gospel and the Bible goes back to William Carey, and then the American Baptist missionaries Adoniram and Ann Judson in 1812. There has been a Sgaw Karen translation of the Bible available since 1853. This means that Christian spirituality and the Bible are far more deeply integrated into Karen life and people, so a simplistic approach that merely teaches about the contents of the Bible is less appropriate.

Then there is the specialist knowledge that teachers always hope students will bring to the class, and which we assume has grown from year to year as a student progresses. With this class, while knowledge of the contents of the Bible and of basic theology are really good, their understanding of scholarship is low or even non-existent. Basic skills like analysing - breaking a problem down into simpler parts, imaginative reconstruction of the way things “must have been”, looking things up in a reference works (except the universal Karen-English dictionaries for unknown English words), organising thought to lead towards a conclusion… such skills that in a Western context we assume were learned (or at least first begun) in school, here seem strange.

A basic study-skills course, and an improved library with a small stock of good Bible dictionaries, concordance, commentaries etc. could make real changes. But that is to look at things from a Western Academic perspective, the sort of things that spring to mind as necessary changes are conditioned by my usual setting. One of my frustrations is that a combination of Karen introversion (and this must rate as a highly introverted culture by any standards!); cultural respect for teachers, foreigners and elders and the busyness of the coming jubilee - which is literally the biggest event in decades, all make it difficult to meet, talk with and learn from the Karen teachers who are probably the people with the best chance of telling me how my teaching should change to be appropriate here. Maybe next time?

I taught the first class in the Old Testament Narrative course today, to third year students. We are still very tired, we did not allow enough jet-lag recovery time into our schedule, nor did we remember clearly enough how tiring it is to live and work somewhere where you are like a new born in your understanding of how things work - well not quite, wash places with a water scoop we had encountered in Congo, so some things are not quite new!

However, perhaps because Narrative is a really good choice for intercultural teaching, the class seemed to go well despite my tiredness and headache, and the huge gap in culture and my ignorance of Karen life, thought and ways. It also went well despite our rather different English accents and their having to work in a foreign tongue!

I hope they learned some ideas about narrative:

• narration implies a narrator
• narrative is more than chronicle
  • it links the facts or events it describes
  • and so gives them meaning
• narrative is widespread in the Bible - which contains little “instruction manual” material but lots of stories!

We also talked about stories, they told me several Karen stories. (One of which the Rabbit [Hare?] and the Tortoise I had already met! Some stories are surprisingly international.)

Another was told with an interesting variation, the famous (at least in Baptist circles) story of the Golden Book the telling went (allowing for simplification and memory lapse due to tiredness) like this:

A father once had three sons, Karen the oldest, Burmese and English (the youngest brother). One day he gave each son a book. To Karen he gave a golden book, to Burmese a leather book, and I can’t [That is the teller could not.] remember what the book he gave to the youngest son was made from. The youngest son stole the golden book, and the Karen who was left with the other book ignored it and it was walked on by chickens. The Karen to this day use writing that looks like chicken scratches, but one day the youngest brother will return the stolen Golden Book.

The version I had heard before was much like this from Keyes, Charles F. The Golden Peninsula: Culture and Adaptation in Mainland Southeast Asia. University of HawaiiPress, 1995, 52.

In a related myth, Y’wa is said to have given books to his various children, sometimes said to number seven, who are the ancestors of the major ethnic groups in the world known to the Karen. This gift of a book was, of course, the gift of literacy. The Karen, however, are negligent with the book given to them and it is eaten by animals or, in some versions, consumed in the fires built by the Karen in the course of tilling their fields. Y’wa offers the Karen the consolation that at some future date, “foreign brothers” will bring the gift of literacy—in the form of a golden book—back to them.

Interesting differences! I wonder what readers of this blog make of them!!?

[Quotation thanks to Google Books, the library here is not rich enough for that sort of research!]

Since I started back after New Year I’ve been finishing off the reader for the students, I posted the CD yesterday, and making interactive notes on the textbook for the introductory sessions to get students started thinking on narrative lines. However, the closer we get to departing the more the troubled political situation (the long-running war between the Tamil Tigers and the government) is a concern, first there was a bomb quite close to the college, now more recently an official reopening of hostilities. We’d be glad of your prayers for the places we’ll be teaching, both are troubled and in need of lasting and just peace.

At CTS I’ll be teaching “Biblical Narrative” so for the last few days I have been busy copying articles to supplement their library, and to enable students to readfrom home. The new photocopier with the “scan to PDF” feature makes preparing and distributing an anthology so much easier than the days when everything had to be copied, collated and bound with plastic. Here is the list so far:

General: Narrative and literary reading

David M. Gunn. “Narrative Criticism.” In To Each Its Own Meaning: An Introduction to Biblical Criticisms and Their Application, edited by Steven L. McKenzie and Stephen R. Haynes. (Westminster John Knox Press, 1999), 171-195.

Tremper Longman. “Biblical Narrative.” In A Complete Literary Guide to the Bible, edited by Leland Ryken, 592. Zondervan, 1993, 69-113.

ibid. “The Analysis of Prose Passages”, Foundations 3 Literary Approaches to Biblical Interpretation. Zondervan, 1987. [Alternative to
the above.]

M.A. Powell, What is Narrative Criticism? (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), 1-34.

S. Prickett, Words and the Word: Language, Poetics, and Biblical Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 4-36.

S. Walton, ‘Rhetorical Criticism: An Introduction’, Them 21/2 (1996): 4-9. [Provides context for the emergence of narrative criticism in biblical studies.]

Characterisation

A. Bach, ‘Signs of the Flesh: Observations on Characterization in the Bible’, Semeia 63 (1993): 61-80.

D. McCracken, ‘Character in the Boundary: Bakhtin’s Interdividuality in Biblical Narratives’, Semeia 63 (1993): 29-42.

Composite Artistry

R. Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1981), 131-154.

Genre

G.W. Coats, Genesis with an Introduction to Narrative Literature (FOTL; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984), 1-10 [see also the glossary, p. 317]

Humour and Irony

Edwin M. Good. Irony in the Old Testament. (London: S.P.C.K., 1965), 13-38.

John R. Miles “Laughing at the Bible: Jonah as Parody.” In On Humour and the Comic in the Hebrew Bible, edited by Yehuda T. Radday and Atalya Brenner. (Sheffield Academic Press, 1991), 203-215.

Imagery and Metaphor

I. Paul, ‘Metaphor and Exegesis,’ in After Pentecost, Language and Biblical Interpretation (eds C. Bartholomew, C. Greene and K. Möller; Grand Rapids:
Zondervan, 2001), 387-402.

Intertextuality

E. van Wolde, ‘Intertextuality: Ruth in Dialogue with Tamar,’ In A Feminist Companion to Reading the Bible: Approaches, Methods and Strategies, edited
by A. Brenner and C. Fontaine, (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), 426-51.

Jonah

T.D. Alexander, ‘Jonah and Genre’, TynB 36 (1985): 35-59.

R. W. L. Moberly “Preaching for a Response? Jonah’s Message to the Ninevites Reconsidered.” Vetus Testamentum 53, no. 2 (April 2003): 156-168.

Narration

S. Bar-Efrat, Narrative Art in the Bible (Sheffield: Almond, 1989), 13-45.

Omission and ambiguity:

G.C. Nicol, ‘The Alleged Rape of Bathsheba: Some Observations on Ambiguity in Biblical Narrative’, JSOT 73 (1997): 43-54.

Meir Sternberg. “Gaps, Ambiguity, and the Reading Process”, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative. (Indiana University Press, 1985), 186-229.

Preaching Narrative

G.B. Caird, The Language and Imagery of the Bible (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 109-22.

Point of View

Erich Auerbach. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. (Princeton University Press, 1974), 3-23.

A. Berlin, Poetics and Interpretation of Biblical Narrative (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1994), 43-82.

R.B. Chisholm, ‘A Rhetorical Use of Point of View in Old Testament Narrative,’ BibSac 159 (2002): 404-14.

David Gunn, “Reading Right” in Bible in Three Dimensions: Essays in Celebration of Forty Years of Biblical Study, edited by David J. A. Clines, Stanley
E. Porter, and Stephen E. Fowl. (Sheffield Academic Press, 1990), 53-64.

Prose and poetry

J. P. Fokkelman. “The collaboration of prose and poetry”, Reading Biblical Narrative: An Introductory Guide. Westminster John Knox Press, 2000, 171-187.

Repetition and Quotation

Jacob Licht. “Repetitions”, Storytelling in the Bible. (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1986), 51-74.

George W Savran. Telling and Retelling: Quotation in Biblical Narrative. (Indiana Univ Press, 1988), 37-76.

Ruth

Nancy J. Thomas, ‘Weaving the Words: The Book of Ruth as Missiologically Effective Communication,’ Missiology 30 (2002): 155-69.

Theology

Craig C. Bartholemew and Michael W. Goheen. “Story and Biblical Theology.” In Out of Egypt: Biblical Theology and Biblical Interpretation, edited
by Craig Bartholomew, Mary Healy, Karl Moller, Robin Parry. (Zondervan, 2004), 144-171.

G. Fackre, ‘Narrative Theology, An Overview’, Interpretation 37 (1983): 340-52.

H.W. Frei, ‘The “Literal Reading” of Biblical Narrative in the Christian Tradition: Does it Stretch or Will it Break?’, in F. McConnell
(ed.), The Bible and the Narrative Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 36-77.

J. Goldingay, Models for Scripture (Grand Rapids/Carlisle: Eerdmans/Paternoster, 1994), 99-119.

F. Watson, ‘Literary Approaches to the Gospels, A Theological Assessement,’ Theology 99 (1996): 125-33.

Time

Yairah Amit. “The Biblical Story and the Use of Time”, Reading Biblical Narratives. (Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 2001), 103-125.