When Teachers Become “Co-learners”

　　In the past six years, I have co-taught two electives: “Ecclesiology” (Spring, 2015-16) and “William Willimon on Worship, Ethics and Preaching” (Spring, 2017-18). I also hope that I will have the opportunity to offer a course on “Praying (as) Theology” with Professor Andres Tang in the future. These special topics courses mostly originated from my newly kindled interest in the related areas. I wish to deepen my learning by means of teaching on them. However, since I am incapable of shouldering the teaching load all by myself, I went to seek advice from Professor Tang; he then invited other faculty members to join and finalized the syllabus according to each one’s field of expertise.

　　As these subjects obviously involve inter-disciplinary integration, it takes a multi-disciplinary teaching team to tackle the task. Practically speaking, this is a demonstration of cross-disciplinary integration by the various teachers together. HKBTS has always encouraged students to adopt analogous thinking and holistic learning. We also seek to cultivate their intellectual competencies so that they can continue in self-study after graduation. We hope that they will be able to integrate various areas of biblical, theological, and ethical/practical studies, and to avoid compartmentalization into mutually-unrelated specialized disciplines. That is also the aim of the “Senior Integrative Colloquium” in our M.Div. program. I suppose the entire curriculum design of our theological and pastoral training here is to equip students with the skills and habits to listen better to the gospel story holistically, in order that they can better proclaim the salvation of Jesus Christ holistically as well as better embody the Gospel.

　　For me, the experience of team teaching each time is like completing a “Senior Integrative Colloquium” paper by group collaboration. On the one hand, each teacher has to do their own research, preparations, and teach the classes; while, on the other hand, everyone has to learn from and with other teachers, complementing one another, and overcoming together any difficulties encountered in teaching. For example, when there were too few (or too many) students enrolled, it was not suitable to use group oral presentations for assessment and learning as usual. We came up with the idea of using a kind of viva voce. We assigned readings to students, provided them with questions to consider in organizing their reading notes, and conducted an open forum discussion in class to deepen their understanding of the texts in an interactive manner. This method is proven in practice to result in very good experience of learning together.