Greek Study Day

Today I've attended the Greek Study Day sponsored by the LTSN: Classics Centre. You can see the programme here. This was the third of these days; like the last one it was hosted by the University of Birmingham over in Staff House, who put on an excellent spread for lunch. About 25 attended, mostly from Theological Colleges and Bible Colleges in the UK though there were a handful of us from Universities. It was run by Geoffrey Williams (Spurgeons College), Steve Walton (London Bible College) and Jane McLarty (University of Cambridge) and the theme was "Helping Students Study the Greek New Testament". The day was most enjoyable -- lots of enthusiasm, lots of sharing of good ideas, lots of examples of good practice and so on. These days have a very congenial spirit -- they are all about helping one another in our task of teaching Greek. Attendance at the last one has actually affected the way I teach and assess Greek, and the same will definitely be true of this one. If you are a Greek teacher living in the UK, I strongly encourage you to come to the next one -- it will be very well worth your while. In particular, I'd like to see some more of my colleages from Theology departments in the universities who are teaching Greek.

After Philip Seddon from the Dept of Theology here in Birmingham welcomed everyone to the event, the first session was a presentation by Steve Walton and Jane McLarty on the "John for Beginners" project. This project emerged directly out of the previous Greek Study day and addresses the need for students beginning to work with Biblical texts to have some guidance on how to navigate their way through. This has been an LTSN funded research project in which materials were produced by Jane, Steve and Geoffrey Williams and then test run on "focus groups", i.e. groups of students at the relevant stages of learning. This was essentially the same report that Steve and Jane presented at the BNTC in September and it was as positively received here as there. The plans are to publish the results on the web and perhaps too in a book.

The next session was entitled "Back to first principles or defending the space? Why is learning Greek important for students of theology?" and began with Philip Seddon (Birmingham) and Paul Woodbridge (Oak Hill College, London) each giving their perspectives on why they think it is important for Theology students to learn Greek. Philip mentioned several factors including the role it plays in a department like ours where different religions are taught and where students of Islam, for example, learn Arabic; it would clearly be a disgrace if there was no Hebrew or Greek in such a setting. Paul focused more on the ministerial training side of things and mentioned, for example, that appealing to students' desire to get closer to the words of Jesus could be a factor in persuading them to take Greek, something I have some concerns about -- but that's why I'm more comfortable teaching in a university setting. There was an excellent discussion after Philip and Paul spoke, as with each session during the day.

After coffee there was a discussion about Memorisation: How Much is Really Necessary? This was led by Geoffrey Williams (who began with tales from Wallace and Gromit) and Ian MacNair. MacNair used to teach Greek at London Bible College and has written an introductory grammar that many still use, though I've not looked at it myself. Again it was a good discussion on how one aids the process of memorisation and on how much is necessary. The inductive / non-inductive debate reared its head here, not least because John Dobson was present, the author of an introductory text book that goes the inductive route. Dobson sat on the front row and was pretty vocal and kept a copy of his book close to hand throughout the day. I've no doubt that Baker publishers would be delighted to see how vigorously he champions the book in contexts like this.

One of the values of this session was the sharing of experience of different examinations, some advocating having grammars available as well as lexicons in intermediate Greek examinations and most advocating a strongly text and context based examination rather than too much out of context parsing and word testing. This began to raise the question over the usefulness of a central depository for different syllabi, examinations and so on. I think this would be a good idea for comparing notes and encouraging good practice and have offered the NT Gateway as a place for doing this should others be willing.

After lunch, it seemed that the general feeling was that it would be preferable to roll both of the planned simultaneous workshops into one. So first up was Jonathan Pennington and Ian MacNair on Teaching Beginners: Sharing Good Practice. This continued the discussion about what those present have found useful in practice. Jonathan, a PhD student teaching at St Andrews at the moment, but who comes from America, talked a bit about the Mounce grammar which he used in America but which is hardly known here at all. He talked briefly about the Jeremy Duff replacement of Wenham, which is due out next year, and which is being used in various places in the UK already as a test-run.

Unfortunately I had to leave early to pick up the kids from school so missed the last session on Intermediate Students led by Jane McLarty and John Proctor. If anyone present would like to add their comments on this or any of the rest of the day, feel free and I will publish them here.

A fine and productive day. I'd encourage anyone who is able to make it to the next one (assuming that there will be a next one) to do so.