Education
Jenny Gordon
When people think of Catholic education, nine times out of ten, their first thought is of Catholic school education. This is certainly true and we can be justifiably proud of our Catholic schools.
Our schools embody both an authentic Catholic faith encounter for all, within the provision of holistic education with academic excellence.
‘The Catholic School is embedded in the Church: it is the Church in action, an authentic expression of the Church’s mission.’ (NZCBC: The Catholic Education of School Aged Children).
Archbishop John articulates this in his vision for schools, ‘…that each student is enabled to: “Walk the way of Jesus Christ, Live the life of Jesus Christ, and tell the Truth of Jesus Christ”.’
Our Catholic schools are held in high esteem by the wider education field and deliver well above national expectations. At the core of this success are the people. It is through their passion, enduring commitment, generosity of spirit, giving of their ‘time, talent and treasure’ way beyond the call of duty that these gospel witnesses inspire and enable students to realise their God-given talents.
This passion and commitment is embedded in our belief of the innate goodness, dignity and gift of each person, created in the image and likeness of God, called to realise our full potential.
Catholic schools are a jewel in the crown of Catholic education but, to mix metaphors, there are many jewels embedded in the rich tapestry of Catholic education.
‘The Church has in a special way the duty and the right of educating, for it has a divine mission of helping all arrive at the fullness of Christian life.’ (Canon: 794.1)
This is about ‘Education and Life-long growth in Faith’ for both children and adults, (Synod 2006). It includes adult-faith formation, faith knowledge and understanding, support of our teachers, parish-based education and courses, formal tertiary study opportunities, Religious Education Curriculum development, and much more. All this is supported by many education bodies and programmes providing Catholic Faith Education.
This issue of Wel-Com provides a general view of Catholic Faith Education, including reference on these and other pages to the NZCBC document and its unfolding and contributions from The Catholic Institute’s educators. Future Wel-Com editions will explore the many other facets of our body of Catholic Faith Education.
Wel-Com, through its comprehensive coverage and articles, is in itself a rich jewel in the provision of ‘Education and Life-long growth in Faith’ for us all. We are many parts of the one body; each part integral to the Church’s mission of bringing and being GOOD NEWS to all.
Jenny Gordon is Vicar for Education, Archdiocese of Wellington.
October 2014
Education
Chris Duthie-Jung
Have you ever had that feeling things are starting to come together in some area or other? A sense even seemingly unrelated parts of a diverse whole are somehow falling into sync. There’s more than a little of this sense going on for me at the moment around things Catholic and education!
A first sign is the New Zealand Bishops’ ground-breaking document being addressed by various voices in this issue of Wel-Com. The Catholic Education of School Age Children answers a need for renewed clarity around what we’re trying to do by operating a system of Catholic schools. Educational excellence is always a key aim, but the Catholic school’s very ground for existence is its Catholic Special Character – pure and simple. We are about encounter with Jesus Christ.
The bishops also point toward the sensible expectation that those who teach Religious Education need to reflect on their faith; to study and know it to a much greater depth than they are asked to teach. But teachers are busy! So, creative learning modes and other opportunities need to be found to enable this study to happen before and alongside classroom teaching. And if faith in the classroom is important – and it certainly is! – even more so is parental faith understanding.
After over a decade of ongoing research, the US National Study of Youth and Religion reports, ‘…committed and practicing Catholic emerging adults are people who were well formed in Catholic faith and practice as children, whose faith became personally meaningful and practiced as teenagers, and whose parents – reinforced by other supportive Catholic adults– were the primary agents cultivating that lifelong formation.’ Christian Smith et al (Young Catholic America: Emerging Adults In, Out Of, And Gone From the Church, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
It’s our job as adults to pass on faith. Parents need it, teachers need it, children need it… actually, every Catholic Christian needs it! Which brings us to developments in how we deliver and access faith-learning. So what’s new?
Things are going digital in the classroom and beyond. We are working hard to modernise the Religious Education curriculum at both primary and secondary level. As you can imagine that is a fair bit of content and it is currently all going to the web. Once there, the opportunities to expand its availability to children not in Catholic schools are promising. Watch this space!
But faith isn’t passed nor taught well when the tutor’s name is Cyber Catholic. Content is vital but it is witness and a willingness to explore faith with another that is critical. Enter parents and teachers. Courses are increasingly available that offer the chance to deepen faith. What is grace? What does sacrament have to do with my everyday life? ‘Kingdom of God’ – bit dated isn’t it? The Catholic Institute is offering online, distance and taught courses that get you thinking about what you believe and why! There are more opportunities ahead so if your faith is struggling at times; if children are asking faith questions that you are dodging… it’s time to do something about it.
Chris Duthie-Jung is Director, National Centre for Religious Studies, The Catholic Institute.
October 2014
Education
Professor Anne Tuohy
The Catholic Institute (TCI) was formed in 2012 by the Bishops of New Zealand to provide a national focus for the ongoing education and formation of New Zealand Catholics. In the creation of TCI, the bishops from all six dioceses brought together four key educational and research units: The Nathaniel Centre – New Zealand’s Catholic bioethics centre; NCRS – New Zeal
and’s Catholic Religious Education and curriculum development centre; CIT RE unit – the Religious Education department of Auckland’s Catholic Institute of Theology; and WCEC – the Wellington Catholic Education Centre; to create one national tertiary body. The TCI vision and commitment as a national tertiary institute is captured in Ex Corde Ecclesia, (the Apostolic Constitution for Catholic Institutions of Higher Learning). As with all Papal encyclicals, the opening phrase serves to not only name the document but also to provide readers with an insight into the nature of the document itself. Accordingly, ex corde ecclesia clearly affirms the commitment to educate and form the Catholic faithful comes ‘from the heart of the Church’.
In using this phrase to describe or benchmark tertiary education Pope John Paul II does two things. Firstly, he reminds us the Church has always been passionate about the education and formation of its members. From the teaching ministry of Paul in the small fledgling communities, which eventually became the Church, to the amazing range and number of primary, secondary and tertiary establishments we have today, it is clear the Church has always held education at its centre or heart. We can indeed be proud to be part of the rich Catholic intellectual tradition that has contributed so much to our world and our history.
Secondly, to claim that education comes from the heart of the Church reminds us authentic education is primarily about the integration of the heart and the mind; and no-where is this more evident, or more important, than in theological and religious education. To educate from the heart of our Church ensures our faith is properly supported by our thinking and that our thinking is appropriately nourished by our faith. To quote St Anselm, theology is essentially about ‘faith seeking understanding’.
So, in response to the New Zealand Bishops’ request to serve the New Zealand Church, TCI has developed a range of stimulating, flexible and ongoing educational opportunities to reach all Catholics in New Zealand. Through the provision of programmes and courses, delivered by face-to-face teaching, through print-based distance materials, or with on-line technology, our mission is to bring the heart of our faith into dialogue with the richness of our Catholic Intellectual Tradition. We invite you all to join us in this task. Visit our website www.tci.ac.nz to find out what TCI does and we look forward to meeting you in one of our courses.
Professor Anne Tuohy is the Director of The Catholic Institute.
October 2014
Education
Elizabeth Julian RSM
I’m an excellent teacher. I make connections. My experience, reflection and intuition over nearly 40 years have taught me that, primarily, teaching is about seeing, making, sustaining, and providing the conditions for connections.
These connections are between student and teacher, student and student, student and subject matter, teacher and subject matter, student and the world.
In other words, teaching is about the fostering of various relationships.
Professor Peter O’Connor wrote that research shows the biggest in-class influencing factor in student achievement is the quality of the student-teacher relationship (Dominion Post, 4 September 2014).
We all remember the teacher who cared. The New Zealand Bishops’ recent document The Catholic Education of School-Age Children is addressed first of all to parents.
It acknowledges ‘parents have the primary right and a serious obligation to educate their children’ (#10 p4).
However, the document does not discuss the faith formation needs of parents themselves.
Parents cannot teach what they do not know or cannot articulate. Catholic parents need to be theologically literate.
But, as adult learners parents are very complex. They are not big children.
They have different intellectual, spiritual and emotional needs, abilities, learning styles, values, faith commitments, experiences of Church, attitudes to learning, and prior experiences.
They come from different ethnic, cultural and socio-economic backgrounds. They need the utmost respect in all their diversity.
Working in the field of adult religious education, my task is about:
- providing information (content);
- enabling formation (bringing out that which is most God-like, and not moulding to a given pattern); and
- ultimately facilitating, transformation.
For a long time I have been captured by [American Professor of practical theology] Dr Mary C Boys’ definition of religious education as ‘the making accessible of the traditions of the religious community and the making manifest of the intrinsic connection between traditions and transformation’ (1989, p. 209).
Boys cites a host of activities to describe what she means by making accessible: to erect bridges; to make metaphors; to build highways; to provide introductions and commentaries; to translate foreign terms; to remove barriers; to make maps; to demolish blockages; to demonstrate effects; to energise and sustain participation; and to be hospitable.
At various times I am an expert, facilitator, midwife, comforter, animator, advocate, adviser, lecturer. My task is one of making connections for adults to the Christian Story in all its richness.
Teaching is an art and a craft concerned with making knowledge and wisdom accessible. It is about enabling learners to make knowledge their own, that is, to appropriate it critically.
I do this in various ways by awakening new ideas, broadening horizons, examining assumptions, offering alternative points of view.
Teaching is best learned by doing it reflectively and engaging in analysis of it. It demands imagination, knowledge, extensive know-how, enthusiasm, passion, perseverance, prayer, commitment, optimism and a sense of humour.
Like adult learners themselves, the learning process is very complex. Both children and adults learn because they are taught.
This can happen formally, informally, non-formally and incidentally.
Adult learners in a formal educational setting need time to reflect and process the ideas presented in class, in the discussions and in the reading material.
Parents who have had opportunities for adult faith formation are much better equipped to share in their task of helping schools communicate Christ and form Christ in the lives of others (#11, p5).
Therefore, addressing parents’ faith-formation needs may help address the Bishops’ high priority question of ‘why young people are emerging from our Catholic schools without having formed a committed relationship with Christ’ (#38, p10).
Dr Elizabeth Julian rsm, is a Lecturer and Distance Learning Education Co-ordinator for the Catholic Institute of Aotearoa New Zealand.
October 2014
Education
Lynette Roberts-King
As Manager of the Catholic Education Office, Palmerston North Diocese, I lead a team of four to support our Catholic schools.
Most of our time is spent out on the road working with the schools and their professional development. We use the NZCBC’s The Catholic Education of School-Age Children as the basis for our work.
Last year we were challenged to open the door to the document and prepare schools to look at new ways of realising what Catholic education means, including the key concepts of encountering knowledge and virtues.
Our focus this year has been unpackaging the document and looking at the challenges and opportunities presented. We are encouraging schools to look at our special character and how people see us as the face of Christ.
Knowledge and faith teachings of scripture are also about our own life-long faith development.
Within our education structure we are called upon to evangelise and open up the Catholic school community to be more than just schools and to form broader Church communities.
While schools are not the solution to bringing families to parish they are an important part of it. Through our work, we are affecting the hearts and minds of future generations.
Hopefully, we will contribute to be a source and connection of faith and life synthesis that brings together a community of faith development through parish structure and the Eucharist.
In this job, I find more and more we are people of hope. So our work with schools is about joy, hope and another way.
If a child attends a Catholic school and experiences the joy and hope our faith brings we are succeeding in helping to lay down the foundations of early faith.
Lynette Roberts-King is Manager, Catholic Education Office, Diocese of Palmerston North.
October 2014
Education
Susan Wilson
I had missed my bus to university. Not wanting to be late, I was walking quickly to catch another bus when a young woman caught up with me and started chatting. I told her I was late for a class. She asked, ‘What are you studying?’ Theology, I replied. ‘Hmm’, she said, ‘I’m a Christian and I already know all about God. You do not need to study; the Bible has the answers’.
Some years after that incident, I was going through customs at Sydney airport. The customs officer asked why I was travelling to Australia. I said I was there for a conference. He asked what the conference was about and I said, ‘Theology’. ‘Oh no!’ he said, ‘I don’t want to hear about religion! Go straight through’.
These two reactions are not unusual. When hearing I study/teach/research theology, some people think it is pointless because they already ‘know’ all about it. Others think it meaningless because religion is not important.
The above responses are very different from students who have actually taken the time to study and learn about their faith. Rather than tell you why I think studying our faith is important, I will let some of TCI’s students tell you about their experiences.
‘All of my life, I have engaged in many activities and roles within the Church…what else could I learn? It was a shock and a delightful surprise that there was so much more to learn…’
‘These papers have taught me so much: learning about our wonderful faith, and seeing there is so much more to learn, so much I don’t know…’
‘The Certificate in Catechetical Studies challenges those who already have an understanding of their Catholic faith, while also providing a starting point for those just beginning. This course has encouraged me to delve deeper into my own faith journey.’
As theologian John Cavadini said, we need to espouse ongoing study in our Church unless we wish to find that: ‘We can no longer explain why we resist destroying the environment, why we should oppose abortion and capital punishment, why we should defend the family or workers’ rights, why we believe that evil will not triumph in the end, why the good is worth pursuing no matter what the cost… There will always be saints who cannot explain any of these things, but even saints depend for their ideals on an articulate, intellectual Catholicism that can nurture a culture that will go on generating ideals of heroic virtue.’ (Cavadini, 2004).
The Catholic Institute of Aotearoa New Zealand (TCI) is part of the 2000-year tradition which values exploration and learning about our Catholic faith founded and sustained in Jesus Christ. You too can be part of this wonderful tradition!
Susan Wilson is the eLearning Co-ordinator for The Catholic Institute of Aotearoa New Zealand.