136 - To Set One's Heart: Belief and Teaching in the Church

To Set One's Heart:
Belief and Teaching in the Church
By Sara Little
Atlanta, John Knox, 1983. 102 pp. $7.50.

Beset by demands for de-schooling and for emphasis on the affective at the expense of the cognitive, Christian education has needed this book of Sara Little's, which gets things back in balance by stressing the importance of belief. Her thesis is: "Beliefs which engage the thinking powers of the person as they emerge out of and inform faith, sustained, reformed, and embodied by the faith community, can be an important factor in bringing integration and integrity to life. Teaching that contributes to the formation of this kind of belief necessitates the selective use of a variety of models with clear purposes, and presupposes the existence of a context that supports and intereacts with intentional teaching."

To implement the formation of belief, five models of teaching are examined: information-processing (Dewey, Ausubel, Taba, programmed instruction), group interaction (Dewey, Furnish, simulations, depth Bible study), indirect communication (Kierkegaard, Brunner), personal development (Sherrill, Edinger), and action/ reflection (Freire, Groome).

Readers arc left to figure out how they will actually teach, using such models functionally and selectively. The book is weakened by somewhat rococo scholarship, by too muted advocacy of its own thesis, and by a ponderous style.

D. Campbell Wyckoff
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, N.J.