(Fwd) Re: Remediation

J.E.Harding BSP97JEH at sheffield.ac.uk
Fri Apr 9 06:28:17 EDT 1999


I have recently been involved in a very interesting discussion 
off-list about new methods of teaching biblical languages. Although I 
teach Hebrew, I have been using an educative strategy which may well 
be of use to those teaching Greek, Latin and Syriac. I have been 
working with problem-based learning (PBL), and I offer below a few 
reflections which I hope will be of interest to teachers on the list.

 PBL is a teaching method which was developed in the health sciences, 
and has been developed further in professional education, mainly. In
 some ways it is similar to the 'inquiry method' advocated by Neil Postman 
and Charles Weingartner (Teaching as a Subversive Activity, 1971). The method 
works by giving students tasks which are of directly practical 
benefit. Students then work in groups (usually), bringing their 
background knowledge and expertise to bear on the task at hand. 
Knowledge is developed on a need-to-know basis, and learning takes 
place on a 'deep' level, because students are motivated and have to 
use their ability to think critically to solve the problem at hand. 

This method was suggested to me by a marine biologist who is doing 
research into PBL. His article (Tony Harland, 'Moving Towards 
Problem-based Learning', Teaching in Higher Education 3.2 [1998] 
219-230) is extremely useful, not least because it includes a good 
bibliography. The course I had to teach was a Hebrew text course for 
students who had studied lessons 1-20 of Kelley's grammar. I 
therefore set up a kind of teaching experiment, asking students to 
work together for 50 minutes, using whatever grammars and lexica they 
had, to solve the problem: 'Translate and analyse the Hebrew of 
Jonah 1:1-4'. I assessed this formatively, by giving a sheet of 
responses to their attempt to solve the problem. I found they worked 
very slowly, but with very little input from me managed to work 
successfully through Jonah 1:1-2. Similar problems were set, including Exodus 
20:1-3, Esther 3:1ff and Amos 7:10ff. Invariably, students made 
outstanding progress with the language, and were able to learn from 
each other and introduce creative interpretations of the texts.

 The problem has been that the whole process is not time-efficient and 
does not fit in well with an examination system because it does not 
work within a rigid curriculum. It is an inductive approach, but 
faces the problem that one reviewer noted with respect to Kittel's 
Hebrew grammar-it is not a graded introduction to the language, and 
thus creates problems for those who need to learn by using paradigms 
and vocab. lists. The main advantages are that students are highly 
motivated, think deeply and critically, have the opportunity to 
relate their work to other courses, work in a 'research atmosphere 
and acquire interpersonal skills which are of use in 'real life'.

I am writing a paper on this at the moment, which I intend to give in
the Academic Teaching and Biblical Studies group at SBL in November. 
The most significant volume dealing with this educative strategy is 
D. Boud and G.I. Feletti (eds.), 'The Challenge of Problem-based 
Learning' (2nd ed.; London and Stirling [USA]: Kogan Page, 1997; 1st 
ed. 1991; ISBN 0-7494-2291-2). This is a collection of papers by 
those concerned with this method.

It would be interesting if several people could develop this method 
in Biblical Studies. There is the whole issue of how this method 
*could* work in this field, and what the implications are for 
assessment procedures and the definition of the roles 'teacher' and 
'learner'.

I hope this is useful.
With very best wishes,

James Edward Harding
University of Sheffield
>bsp97jeh at sheffield.ac.uk<




More information about the B-Greek mailing list