How to Practice REAC

Tory Jeremiah D'Anna, Untitled

Any shift to interdisciplinary educations is likely to raise some understandable concerns among teachers. Those who are trained in a discipline may not feel comfortable with their content knowledge. Teachers who are overworked to begin with may face an additional amount of time lesson planning because of the necessary amount of collaborative planning. Teachers who are set on doing things their way may find a loss of some autonomy in planning and scheduling curriculums. Some teachers caught in the trap of teaching to the test may take issue with the spontanaiety that occurs as students make conceptual connections while developing higher level thinking skills, but my experience is that the interdisciplinary teacher finds rising test scores because their pupils learn how to process all sorts of information and solve problems creatively.

The added religious dimension in REAC brings on fears of being unworthy, unqualified, perhaps even non-practicing and unbelieving. How can you give such an inspired view of creation that you have not cultivated for yourself.

None of these are unworkable problems, provided a school does not rush into REAC. Perhaps more time at staff meetings and professional development days ought be taken away from those trendy reviews of methodology and given to spiritual guidance and intellectual interdisciplinary study. Teachers are lifelong learners, but what happens when all they study is education. They may gain new tricks, but they cut off from the source and destination of their vocation. Principals should guide the way to the common good for a whole staff and student body prudently, yet allow those capable of rising to the occasion do so.

Parents will be the easier buy-in. Show them the studies, and then show them their children engaged in their studies. Invite them to teacher reading groups to discuss the kind of learning they haven't experienced since college. They are your students' primary educators. Integrate them into the learning community.

Finally, I would add the five tenets of Luigi Giussani's educational method. The educators must encounter Christ, their Creator who loves them. In response to this love, they develop a fidelity to the tradition of the church. Those who would teach then become authorities to whom people are attracted because they are authentically living the life they are proposing, which in this context is necessarily finding the needs of the human heart met through an encounter with Christ in all of creation. From there, the authority educates with respect for criticism and personal verification rather than memorization of stock answers. Finally, the educator, out of respect for the students' freedom, takes risk and encourages them to do likewise by considering ideas other than their teachers'. While the first two or three of these is consistent with Catholic tradition for centuries, the latter two are incredibly progressive and reflective of Giussani's Catholic existentialism which honors the person's freedom to come to know the Creator and creation as they really are rather than only as the teacher has proclaimed.