EurECA Conference 2009

How Should Christians Teach?

Emmaus Institut, Vevey, Switzerland

21 - 24 May, 2009 (Ascension Weekend)

Conference 2009 will take place at Emmaus Institut, Vevey, Switzerland. This is the venue - beautifully situated with views out across Lake Geneva to the French Alps - that proved to be so suitable for our 2007 conference. It is easily accessible from Geneva main Rail Station and Airport.

Theme: How should Christians teach?

Our approaches to teaching and learning play an important role in forming students. Christian reflection on pedagogy needs to go beyond a focus on the teacher’s personal morality or care for students, and consider how teaching methods intersect with questions of faith. Our view of reality and especially of human nature and development deeply affects how we teach. It is clearly possible to teach solid Christian content in less than Christian ways – how can we think more clearly about letting our faith shape how we teach and not only what we teach?

Speaker: David Smith

We are delighted to report that David Smith has agreed to be our main speaker!  No Christian educator anywhere in the world today has done as much reflection on pedagogy as David has or is as able and inspirational at communicating the results as he is. David is truly a teacher’s teacher.

David teaches German language and literature at Calvin College in the USA and is the founding director of the Kuyers Institute for Christian Teaching and Learning. He travels all over the world giving lectures, speaking at conferences and teaching. David is English and formerly worked at the Stapleford Centre near Nottingham. He was involved in EurECA in the early days as a speaker and translator before he moved to the USA, and was last with us in Berlin in 1999.

Among the many books and articles David has written are The Gift of the Stranger: Faith, Hospitality, and Foreign Language Learning (with Barbara Carvill, Eerdmans, 2000) and The Bible and the Task of Teaching (Stapleford Centre, 2002). A recent review of the latter of these books (of which David was the main author) by the professor of Christian formation and discipleship at Fuller Seminary shows how relevant this work is to our conference theme: “This is the most provocative book I've read in years on how the Bible gives us insight into teaching and learning. How can we teach in a Christian/biblical way? The authors provide both scholarly and practical insights in their varied answers ... They present scriptural visions for the task of teaching and draw practical conclusions that can affect how we educate today. Their book stimulates creativity in and awareness of what is involved in ‘teaching biblical truth in a biblical way’.”

Workshops and a New Section on the EurECA Website:

This conference will not be one in which we sit passively listening all the time!  David’s sessions will be interactive and it will also be a working conference in which we will spend time in looking together at moments of teaching and learning from our classroom experience as teachers and learners.

An anticipated outcome will be a new section on this website describing these experiences and what we work out together from them of how we should teach as Christians.

Make a note of the dates and plan to join us in 2009!