A Teacher-Development Curriculum: Encouraging Community Discipleship through Faith and Learning Integration at Bracken Christian High School

The title of this project is “A Teacher-Development Curriculum: Encouraging Community Discipleship through Faith and Learning Integration at Bracken Christian High School.” The purpose of the project was to create a seven-part curriculum that would empower educators to form an interconnected teaching community centered upon the practice of faith and learning integration. The development team hoped our work would articulate good practices and equip teachers to engage in faith conversations with their students. We utilized Parker Palmer’s classic, The Courage to Teach, as the scaffolding for our curriculum. The development team modeled faith and learning integration by creating a curriculum that maintained a Christocentric orientation and applied biblical literacy to deepen the wisdom of Palmer’s work for our context. The theological foundations for this project dissertation are rooted in discipleship, theosis, and the fellowship that flows through a rightly ordered spiritual body. God reveals the imago Dei (God’s image) in individuals so that each person can take his or her place in the missio Dei (God’s mission). In conforming to the image of Christ, we necessarily find ourselves devoted to the collective care of one another. I suggest that a new word—tableship—should be considered as a replacement for the word fellowship because tableship better expresses the meaning of the Greek word koinonia, a word related to community, communion, and that which believers hold in common. Through theosis—participation in God’s divinity via conforming to the image of Christ—educators can discover the loving work of tableship in the context of vocational teaching.