Creating "Scenes of Instruction" in the Humanities Classroom: A Review of Mark D. Jordan's Transforming Fire: Imagining Christian Teaching

One of the most interesting lines in Mark D. Jordan’s Transforming Fire: Imagining Christian Teaching (Eerdmans, 2021) states: “We don’t need books about teaching so much as books that teach” (viii). We suspect some might think Jordan seems too dismissive of the art and science of good teaching, but he also makes a point that many literature (and humanities) teachers have been making for as long as we can remember: students learn as much or more from directly engaging primary sources as they do from listening to someone speak about them. A professor of nineteenth-century literature can explain the importance of setting in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, but an attentive reader can feel that importance radiating off the novel’s pages. And the student response to that feeling is more powerful than the realization that your teacher knows what she is speaking about. Jordan’s short book provides useful guidance on how to let our students learn directly from those who have come before them. Put more concretely, and in Jordan’s own words, “students often learn the most important things without recognizing that they have been taught” (2).

According to Jordan, students learn without knowing that they are being taught when they enter what he terms “scenes of instruction.” Using Jesus’s own teaching as a foundation, Jordan speaks about the powerful interaction of words and practices, noting that “Jesus’s teaching is transformed into a tradition when it is remembered as repeatable scenes of instruction that often involve speech” (17). There is a clear relationship between what and where here, and good teachers recognize that they need to attend not only to what they are trying to teach, but also the physical and metaphorical spaces they want their students to inhabit when they learn. We might approach this concept literally, noting that a theatre was a scene of instruction in ancient Greece. For our purposes, though, it’s more helpful to think metaphorically. When we enter a scene of instruction, according to Jordan, we reactivate and re-energize a text. He writes,

But perhaps I can say a bit more about what the metaphor of reactivation does and does not imply. I use it to name reading practices that restore the powers of persuasion to a text. Finding effective meaning in an old text, you do more than repeat its words. You gather new words to reperform its persuasion in the changed languages and historical circumstances of your present. (23)

The implication here is clear. Works are at their most persuasive—their most alive—when readers discern themselves in them. But Jordan goes deeper. It is not enough for our students to merely see themselves in an older work. Rather, “[they] must be able to speak or write Thomas [Aquinas] again, in the currently available languages and styles of embodiment. Reactivating is remaking. If it is well constructed, a scene of instruction will dispose its place, time, and characters to aid in its own recreation” (25). We might rightly ask how we recreate scenes of instruction, and Jordan spends a good deal of his book examining how we can learn directly from a wide array of teachers from the past.

Jordan works through several representative scenes of instruction texts, dividing them into the categories of Bodies, Sciences, Moving Pictures, Children, and Barriers. Many of the texts he cites are typically taught in theology courses: he draws from the works of Gregory of Nyssa, Marcella Althaus-Reid, Bonaventure, Paul Tillich, Teresa of Avila, John Bunyan, C.S. Lewis, Octavia Butler, Johannes Climacus, and Simone Weil. One of the practical ways he helps readers to form their own scenes of instruction within his chapters is by including exercises that tie to his points in each section.

Jordan reminds readers both of the limits of academic knowledge and that ideas often presented as settled conclusions are often not. He writes, “If a tradition is an anthology of open scenes of instruction, it cannot be taught as a chronology of settled positions,” turning the learning from memorizing names, dates, and positions to entering into the text (150). He identifies changes in the contents, the character, and the forms of power flowing through knowledge: “These simple reminders about the historical mutation of knowledge issue in an equally simple point: changes at any level of knowledge reconfigure the space for Christian theology. … There has never been a time when Christian theology held the whole of human knowledge in tranquil possession” (81-83). We need to be aware of our own intellectual arrogance. Although he is referring to Christian theology in particular, these same attitudes can be present in many humanities classrooms. Jordan writes:

Much of theology is not the best. It is self-contented orthodoxy or preening erudition or punishing prescription. Because theology remains an all-too-human science, it incurs its own history of power. It censors speech and punishes bodies. Theology taught seriously always risks becoming coercion—that is, tyranny. … In my students, in myself, I detect the reigning vices under a very literal knowingness—the confidence, fueled by the demand to ‘comment’ instantly on everything, that you know at once what you think, that you have polished opinions always at hand. (83-84)

Scenes of instruction help us to rein in overconfidence in our own knowledge and practice some intellectual humility.

Another way that Jordan’s scenes of instruction concept can be useful in a humanities classroom is that it allows for learning to be multi-directional. Rather than seeing the professor as the holder of knowledge and the students as receivers, it allows professors to come alongside students and engage a text together, learning from each other’s insights. This requires students to engage their own thinking skills more deeply, as they are not merely relying on the professor to do the intellectual work for them; rather, student voices are valued along with the professor’s. This can be especially helpful in foundation or core-level courses, as students in such classes often come from diverse academic, disciplinary, and personal backgrounds. A business student connects with a text in a manner different from a history student, and a first-year student understands things differently from a student about to complete a degree. A student offers us insights into texts we’ve read many times because they approach it from their own perspective, and they have eyes to see different things that would be missed if the class merely relied on the professor’s expertise.

Scenes of instruction also allow teachers to present material in a different way, perhaps without the trappings of traditional teaching. Jordan cites how Gregory of Nyssa would usually be introduced in an academic setting—by listing his birth and death dates, his influential writings, and identifying the other theologians he is often grouped with. Although that is important information that should be included at some point, Jordan writes, “Inserting distancing dates after the names of great theologians can distract from reading them as theologians…[biographical information] may suggest that everything important in his varied books can be summarized by an intellectual label that he shares with two other writers. That sort of summary is grossly unfair—both to writers and to readers” (33-34). Instead, he says, to enter into the scene of instruction, we need to actually read Gregory’s writings (34). When we allow the text to guide us, the learning comes from many directions, not just the lectern. It is not an anarchistic free-for-all, as the professor is still there to place guardrails on each side of the discussion, but such an approach naturally leads to new insights and connections. We can see evidence of the power of entering scenes of instruction in our own classrooms, and it is some proof of the truth of Jordan’s claims that both of us have had some success in producing the kind of learning for which he advocates.

In Kristin’s sections of the Foundations course Literature and Society, students often read the first chapter of The Things They Carried and look at how Tim O’Brien brings readers into the soldiers’ world by describing the things soldiers in Vietnam carried with them. They specifically look at the long litany of physical items the soldiers carried while marching and then also make a list of the emotional and spiritual burdens they bore. After looking at the weight of all these things, the class often notices that the intangible loads are heaviest because the soldiers cannot set them down. In the final step for creating this “scene of instruction,” students consider their own load. In pairs or small groups, they compile lists of both the concrete and abstract things that Trinity students carry. The tangible items lists are usually very similar from year to year and group to group, including backpacks, Student IDs, books, and phones. However, the intangible lists always show what students are grappling with on a deeper level, as those lists often include a wider variety of ideas along certain themes. They carry things such as anxiety about financial aid, stress over assignments, joy with roommates, pressure to get married, and a lack of sureness about their majors, just to name a few. By inhabiting that scene of instruction, students not only look at their own lives, but they also can then have a greater understanding of what soldiers went through 50 years ago in Vietnam. Kristin could tell them about life in Vietnam, but by studying the text with them and having them “write [O’Brien]” themselves, as Jordan says, the students engage at a deeper level and draw parallels to their own lives.

Tim’s sections of Literature and Society almost always read a Shakespeare play. And, as might be expected, many students confess at the beginning of the process that they are nervous about reading something in “old English.” The challenge is to “reactivate and re-energize” a work that many students assume has nothing to do with them. One of the ways the students are asked to address this concern is through works of adaptation. To complete an adaptation assignment, students must first work to understand what is happening in a particular scene, why characters act the way they do in the scene, and how the complex relationship dynamics of characters in the scene affect their actions. Once students have a clear sense of what happens in a scene and why, they are required to re-imagine and write a new one, a scene that takes place in a different place and different time, that contains different characters, and that maintains the meaning of the original while following a new set of circumstances. For example, one former student re-wrote Act I, scene I of King Lear so that a music mogul was retiring and looking to identify which of his subordinates was most worthy of taking over the company. By re-imagining Shakespeare’s story in her own time and with her own words, the student was able to learn directly from Shakespeare in ways she would not have been able to before.

Reimaging and reactivating texts bring new life into the classroom each semester, for both the teachers and the students. Jordan is correct that we do need texts that teach. Transforming Fire is a book directed at theology instructors, and the authors he references and exercises he provides are most useful for that audience. However, his ideas can have broader applications across the humanities, and using “scenes of instruction” can develop multi-directional learning, intellectual humility, and deeper student engagement and understanding.