TPE 7

TPE 7.4: Encourage curiosity regarding God's will and a desire to pursue His will in students' own lives. Candidates will also provide opportunities for students to apply Scripture and Christian principles to their daily lives.

What is this?

I created this lesson as part of a unit project on cultivating a reading life (shown on my TPE 1 page) for EDUC 358: Literacy in the Content Area. In the first week of the unit, I ask students to contemplate why reading matters to their lives, and one takeaway I want to facilitate is that reading impacts how we live. In this lesson, students distill Bible stories and share the messages they glean from them, demonstrating how stories we see in Scripture can guide our actions. This will lead to a conversation on whether other literature can change us as well.

Why did I choose it?

I chose this lesson because it provides students an opportunity to pursue their interests when it comes to stories in the Bible, asking them to determine the lesson they are meant to take into their daily lives based on the story they selected. Having students contemplate how stories in the Bible can provide instruction on moral actions and grow our value systems provides a foundation for analyzing other literature in a similar way because the Bible is already often framed as a story meant to change how we live. 

What did I learn?

In writing this lesson, I learned how to integrate Biblical principles and Christian values into instruction in English. I had not previously tried to combine the two, but I found that by combining them, I could enhance learning in both disciplines. Considering the Bible and the teachings of Jesus as literature creates many new ways of approaching Scripture. Additionally, introducing the possibility of literature as a moral guide or an area in which Christian beliefs can also be studied makes fiction stories that much more impactful.