BY JOSHUA DOLEZAL

Guest blogger Joshua Dolezal is a professor of English at Central College. His scholarship has appeared in journals such as Cather Studies, Literature and Medicine, and Medical Humanities. He is also the author of a memoir, Down from the Mountaintop: From Belief to Belonging (University of Iowa Press, 2014).

During my first year at a Christian college in Tennessee, my New Testament professor began a lecture by placing his Bible on the floor, stepping on it, and proclaiming, “I am not standing on the Word of God.” I remember the surge of blood in my cheeks, a gasp from the back row, and the rapt silence that followed. He had our attention. Dr. Mac, as he insisted we call him, went on to explain that the Word of God was alive, living within us, not confined to the page. The moment was pivotal in my own faith journey. It was the kind of moment I sought to recapture with students when I took my place at the front of the classroom. And it has come back to me more recently in committee meetings when I have been tempted to turn the latest list of student learning outcomes under heel and declare that it is not the sacred text of teaching. Which I believe is alive, living within us, and not confined to the page.

Such a posture in our Age of Assessment might seem hubristic. What teacher does not want to improve? Shouldn’t every teacher have clearly stated goals? How can an institution be accredited without measuring whether educational goals are being met? Fair questions, all, and welcome. The philosophy of assessment, as I understand it, resonates with anyone who cares about personal growth. This is not what makes me want to crush the assessment binder underfoot. It is the energy devoted to standardizing a fundamentally creative act. In her article “Establishing a Culture of Assessment” in Acadame, Wendy F. Weiner characterizes faculty like me as “defiant compliant.” The implication that dissenting views are a problem is alarming (and pervasive in discussions of assessment). But my argument runs deeper. The culture of assessment suggests that my epiphany in Dr. Mac’s class was not the important thing. The important thing was whether Dr. Mac’s syllabus was clearly organized, whether his assignments accomplished what he said they would, whether his New Testament class aligned with campuswide benchmarks for student learning and development. And yet if I were asked to pick the most profound experience I ever had with a teacher, that moment would rank near the top.

I propose that the real hubris lies in presuming that the secrets to good teaching are objectively measurable or that they can be acquired by anything other than a lifelong search. Stephen King reflects on a similar elusiveness in the writing process: “The writer who is serious and committed is incapable of sizing up story material the way an investor might size up various stock offerings, picking out the ones which seem likely to provide a good return. If it could indeed be done that way, every novel published would be a best-seller.” King’s point is that the material, not the writer, controls the creative process. And there is no explanation for how to allow oneself to be controlled by the material. A novel might have all of the ingredients of good fiction and still lack resonance. The secret to good fiction is alive, living within the writer and then the reader, the way good teaching echoes in a student long after she leaves the classroom.

Perhaps I generalize. It is possible that the surge of feeling that means comprehension to me might be an obstacle to real learning in another discipline. But I believe that what happened to me in Dr. Mac’s class happens elsewhere: that good teaching creates the conditions for discovery and that the experience of discovery is both emotional and intellectual. Indigenous societies knew this long before neuroscience explained it in different language: to know is to feel, to touch, to be wholly connected. Comprehension cannot be measured only by competency. Real comprehension is unassessable because it is unknowable in its fullest sense by anyone other than the student.

I walked out of Dr. Mac’s class with a different understanding of my faith journey. From that moment on, faith was no longer the hidebound defense of a text as literally, factually, inerrantly true. It was the process of self-discovery, not the recitation of someone else’s discovery. The transformation I felt was the very difference Jonathan Edwards describes between the “rational judgment that honey is sweet” and “a sense of its sweetness.” Edwards goes on to explain that “a man may have the former, that knows not how honey tastes; but a man can’t have the latter, unless he has an idea of the taste of honey in his mind.” That’s what comprehension is: tasting the honey. And good teaching is creating the conditions that allow students to taste the honey for themselves, to form their own idea of the taste of honey in their minds.

Just as comprehension might require different degrees of emotional awakening in different classrooms, so faith communities place varying weight on the importance of feeling in profound spiritual experiences. But I suspect that most people of faith would recoil from the language and culture of assessment if it were applied to their own faith journeys. Imagine a Christian service where the congregation gathered to conduct self-evaluation of one Commandment a week, guided by a consultant who was not even a believer, himself, but had been hired by the congregation to hasten its piecemeal progress toward righteousness. If this discussion were extended to the sacred text, itself, the parables attributed to Christ would be excised for lack of clarity or housed in a rubric under the heading “critical thinking” or “ownership.” Forget about the Book of Revelation. The result of this earnest and intentional assessment of faith? Whitewashed sepulchres. You can bet on it.

Teaching is more like a faith journey than like continuous improvement in business. Competencies might be measured. Assessment procedures might reassure accreditors. But I believe that full comprehension, the moment when a student tastes the honey for herself, remains mysterious. After more than fifteen years of teaching, I measure my success by those moments when I see or feel them. But it is easier to explain how not to destroy the conditions that make epiphany possible than it is to articulate how to make that magic happen. Like a novelist or a spiritual pilgrim, a good teacher sticks with it, keeps trying to give voice to ideas without obstructing them, trusting that the work will come alive.

For the time being, I remain “defiant compliant” with the culture of assessment insofar as I resist its standardization of creativity. Learning must come alive in the heart of the teacher if it is to stand a chance of kindling deep comprehension in a student. If the culture of assessment is to endure, it will need to embrace and nurture the teachers who say with Thoreau, “I desire to speak somewhere without bounds; like a man in a waking moment, to men in their waking moments; for I am convinced that I cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation of a true expression. Who that has heard a strain of music feared then lest he should speak extravagantly any more forever?”