Inquiry-based Sunday School

This is going to be a tad sloppy because I’m just starting to wrestle with these ideas.

In education — before the testing tidal wave washed everything else away — some academics at Indiana University and elsewhere came  up with some interesting ideas about how children learn and how classrooms should operate. They tracked three shifts in thinking during their own careers.

It started with the notion that “the curriculum” was composed of a bunch of discrete facts and skills that a student needed to be taught in sequence. This evolved into an activities-based view of curriculum, which was marked by themes that carried over across subjects. Finally, what emerged was the notion that children are naturally curious and know how to learn if given proper support. The classroom, they argued, should become a place of inquiry where the questions of students set the agenda and teachers orchestrated systems that helped student discover interesting questions, investigate them, and form understandings that might serve as the basis for new questions.

If that is confusing to you, I apologize. I’m squeezing a lot of ideas into a small space. The central point is that students are not just the recipients of the curriculum, but co-creators of it.

As I was reading about these ideas today, I wondered about the way we do “school” in church.

In Bob Farr’s Renovate of Die, he makes a big deal about children’s ministry. But I think he makes the wrong point. He argues that since Sesame Street you can’t teach kids anything if you don’t entertain them.

I think he’s wrong about that.

You can’t teach kids anything if you don’t engage them. Or rather, they won’t learn anything if you don’t engage them. Drilling them with worksheets or having them memorize disconnected facts and verses from the Bible fails to capture kids’ imagination because it does not connect with anything they know or care about.

Making Sunday School engaging is not the same as being entertaining. Making it engaging is about giving children space to discover and explore their own questions — with the support of adults and in a social setting that includes mutual sharing and celebration.

The educational jargon for this is “inquiry-based” learning.

I’m not sure if it would work in conventional Sunday School formats. It would be uncomfortable for lots of people as control over the agenda shifted from “experts” and “teachers” to the learners. They would likely ask some questions and come up with some understandings that do not fit well within our systems. (Yes, Pam, I know what you are thinking.)

It would certainly be more engaging than canned worksheets and curriculum. We might even figure out how to do it with the adults.