Life-Breathed Curriculum: Reconceptualizing Christian Education Through Autobiography

Team Members/Contributors

Charlene Jin Lee Union Presbyterian Seminary Contact Me

About this dissertation fellowship

Christian Education in North America has long been concerned with the subject of doctrinal teachings, and its curriculum methods have been developed within the framework of objectives, sequence and evaluation. The “objective” of the educational enterprise has been to effectively teach through a systematic approach as to generate learning that can be measured. This paradigm, largely informed by denominational theology and traditional pedagogical practices, has delineated an arbitrary separation between religious learning that takes place in the public domain and faith narratives woven in the texture of one’s private world. The curriculum theory and pedagogy proposed in this dissertation project seeks to bridge these disparities by applying an autobiographical curriculum theory constructed by post-structural education theorists whose aim is to identify and to reconcile the gap between disciplines-based knowledge taught in schools and the learners’ actual lives and personal pursuits. In this pedagogical approach, the forgotten individual is reclaimed and attention to particularity replaces quantifiable generalizations. A Christian Education reconceptualized through autobiography not only creates space for new voices to participate in theological inquiry but also reorients the understanding of curriculum as a complex dialogue between sacred text and lived context, transcendence and worldliness, doctrines and experience.