Communities of Formation

 As is (hopefully!) obvious by the title of this blog, 'formation' is a key educational category for me.  I'm not as interested in what someone learns as how that learner is affected: how will the student change?  Will they learn a new skill?  Connect previous knowledge to new knowledge? Will they become uncomfortable with past lived assumptions?  Will they be energized towards a certain way of life?

In a sense, all education is towards a way of life, a practiced philosophy.  We are never just loading students up with "content" nor are we just influencing one part of their existence - education is always holistic, as humans are always whole.  What we teach the mind affects the body (no one has ever learned in a bodiless way - even Descartes was embodied while he thought); how we train the body affects the soul; and so on.  At the same time, learning is never a totally individual endeavor, as we are not just individuals: we all come from contexts, learn from others (whether humans or not) that are in contexts, and affect others in their own varied contexts.  The goal of education, as a whole and broken down by subject matter or grade-level, is to guide learners in the "way of life" that we've deemed as the path to human flourishing: it will affect their bodies, minds, and souls; it will lead to individual habits that have effects on their social situatedness and vice versa.

I can't speak to how we determine what the path to human flourishing is - that's a subject for sociologists and philosophers - but I know it has been a topic of conversation (in the West!) since at least the pre-Socratics.  In my religious tradition, some of the debates as to what that way of life looked like are preserved in our holy texts - the Epistle to the Galatians is, for the most part, an argument by one believer (St Paul) about what should not be part of the path for those who follow Jesus of Nazareth.  One of the undeniable lessons of this is that the Way is community-defined: St Paul is part of the group known as the Church who continues this way of life, amidst all sorts of internal agreements, disagreements, hyper-focusing, and neglecting of aspects.

The goal in Christian circles (I'm short-circuiting a lot of debates here) is to become like Christ, the One who shows us the Way.  So, the work of the Church - or those engaged, like myself, in educating Christians - is to guide us towards that goal, to form us after His image and likeness.  There are a lot of ways to do this (generally under the rubrics of theology and ascesis), which a pastor/priest is meant to apply skillfully like a doctor to those in their charge: some things are done as groups (worship, for example), some things as individuals (almsgiving, etc.).  In my area, I'm (first of all, not a pastor/priest!) charged with facilitating the formation of those who are becoming spiritual doctors, those who will guide others in the Way of Christ.  Forming, as it were, those who will form.

Or, at least, that's how I used to look at it.

We hear, in Christian education circles, that we are to form our students.  The word form has, at least in my mind, connotations of pottery or wood-carving, or another of the plastic arts.  Take a raw material and shape it into what you want to see.  The difficulty with that, though, is it reduces the agency of the "material."  It gets shaped, whether it wants to or not; but humans don't work that way.  Michelangelo, certainly no slouch when it came to forming things, even thought that earthen materials don't work that way!

Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it...

If we are considering our role as educators to be our actively forming students, we run the risk of indoctrination and deformation, especially as there are only a precious handful of people throughout history who can claim to have become enough like Christ during their lives to properly form others!  As St Gregory of Nazianzus said in regards to folks even teaching the faith:

Not to every one, my friends, does it belong to philosophize about God; not to every one; the Subject is not so cheap and low; and I will add, not before every audience, nor at all times, nor on all points; but on certain occasions, and before certain persons, and within certain limits.  Not to all men, because it is permitted only to those who have been examined, and are passed masters in theoria, and who have been previously purified in soul and body, or at the very least are being purified...

If the saint is to be taken as guiding us accurately, who could say that they have the qualifications to form, shape, and guide others? Not me!

But, what if we stop thinking of ourselves as the formers, but rather as co-formees?  Folks who, educationally-speaking, are farther along the path and have paid attention to the contours of the road, the potholes, the edges, the cracks, and so can guide those who are coming along behind us (with the goal to see them go farther than we ourselves have currently reached).  We are not forming students, but participating in the formation that they are receiving from Christ already.

I must admit at this point that this insight didn't come out of nowhere, but rather from a fruitful conversation with our new Director of Curacy at the school.  What it ended up reminding me of was Parker Palmer's models (from The Courage to Teach) of how education is practiced:

The first model is that of an expert (teacher) mediating the object of inquiry to the amateurs (learners), exercising a gate-keeping function as well.  One of the (well known) difficulties of this model is that it means the object of inquiry is never directly experienced by the students and since the expert's knowledge will necessarily be constricted (by their own finitude, at the very least), the students will never truly know or be known by the object of inquiry.

The second model shows all the knowers (or those hoping to know) a subject (instead of an object!) gathering around it together, with the lines of knowledge becoming not just between the expert and the amateurs, but between all knowers and the thing(s) known.  A teacher, in this scenario, is one of the learners, albeit one who has a deepened intimacy with the subject - a deepened intimacy that isn't a zero-sum: the closer we all become to the subject, the more the subject reveals to us all.

The way I had (unconsciously) been approaching formation was closer to the first model.  And it was problematic in a whole host of ways, but what I found I couldn't get around was how to measure formation.  In a top-down education structure, all learning outcomes must be quantifiable (measurable by numbers) - there need to be grades of formation.  But, what was the standard of formation?  Christ?  Certainly - but what does that mean?  How do I assign a number to someone's Christlikeness, especially in the ways that cannot be measured?  Even trying to measure intimacy becomes an exercise in legalism.  It also assumes that I can measure the spiritual progress someone has made - a dangerous game, especially since I am also on the path (and not a particularly adept walker to begin with).  The first model doesn't work for formation, just as it doesn't work well for education.  It is dangerous for the learners as well as for the teachers.

The second way, though, is far from easy.  What it relies on is relationship: relationship between knowers, whether learners or teachers, who are gathered together purposefully to know each other and the subject.  In the case of Christian formation, whether as just a disciple or as someone in ministry, the subject is always Christ, always God Himself.  Just as we come to know, to experience, to walk with and towards, Christ, we are also known by Him - not that He comes to know us, but we begin to more deeply experience His knowledge of us.

To educate in a Christian context, then, is not to engage in a "command and control" structure, but rather to be a community of formation.  In my situation, that means that the Board(s), the faculty, the staff, the students, the visitors, the friends of the school (even the enemies, if such there be!) are in the process of forming each other as we gather around Christ.  That means that we need to be intentionally setting the conditions for each group, separately and together, to gather around Christ and grow - and to be aware that this is the metaphor and model we are pursuing.