Learning to Treat Other Ways of Being Generously Through the Biblical Studies Classroom

ABSTRACT This article outlines an approach to teaching the biblical texts that helps students develop the transferable cognitive skill of understanding the other on their own terms. It appeals to research on threshold concepts, deep and surface approaches to learning, and student centered/conceptual change approaches to teaching to combine the role of the instructor as disciplinary expert with foreign voices from the past and so facilitate student encounter, and ideally sympathy, with the other. Such an approach, it is argued, provides one necessary part of preparing students for the supercomplexity of today's world and especially for meaningful communication across differences—whether religious, cultural, or otherwise—and so enhances the flourishing of all people.