Memorandum of Understanding
Azusa Pacific University and Asian Theological Seminary
This MOU between APU and ATS details the following common understandings regarding:
1. Core values
§ Urban poor focus: the wholistic empowerment of urban poor rather than merely providing professional credentials
§ Leadership development: the development of students’ leadership and managerial capacity under the tutelage of senior practitioners and educators
§ Movement generating: training of leaders who evidence the potential to catalyze or strengthen redemptive movements, large or small, through networking, coalition-building, and creative problem-solving.
§ Practice-oriented: theoretical study is integrated with experience-based learning so that students don’t merely learn about urban poor realities, but are directly engaged with urban communities through each of their courses
§ Community: forming a learning community alongside residents of local slums supported by program faculty, field supervisors, and community mentors.
§ Reign of God: Students learn a reverence for the life of God in the whole of creation, serving the God of justice and justification, who is especially concerned to “uphold the cause of the oppressed, to give food to the hungry, to set prisoners free, and to give sight to the blind (Ps. 146:7-9).
§ Incarnational lifestyle: Rather than being sequestered in an academic compound, students learn to enter the pain and problems of resource-poor residents through direct, first-hand encounters
§ Transformative pedagogy. An incarnational community that embraces a teaching-learning process characterized by:
— Self-limitation -- relinquishing some of the privileges and prerogatives associated with a lifestyle of comfort, convenience, and indifference.
— Involvement -- entering into direct, physical relationship with slum life rather than merely learning about it.
— Multiple perspectives -- valuing different points of view related to complex problems, and make informed moral judgments and commitments.
— Responsibility – recognizing that the ultimate purpose of training as not merely the understanding, but also the application, of knowledge, skill, and personal resources in the transformation of God’s good creation.
— Redemption -- shaping a vision of a renewed creation that challenges “what is” in terms of “what ought to be.”
§ Collaboration. Since our Lord is Lord of all we network as broadly as possible in participating in His Kingdom.
§ Local theologizing. Students learn to relate the “text” of Scripture and theology to the context of community issues.
2. Curricular content
3. Program pedagogy
The MATUL program is to feature a learning-centred, praxis-oriented pedagogy (vs. teaching-centred, information dissemination-oriented pedagogy). This approach contrasts sharply with the century-old but still dominant model that features teacher-fronted lectures and small group discussions in classrooms embedded within a campus compound. There are a number of assumptions underlying this common modern academic structure: It’s believed that the path of knowing begins with the mind, viewed more as a “storehouse” to be filled with knowledge and skills than as human potential to be developed through its own activity (like learning to ride a bicycle). Relevant knowledge exists “out there,” divorced from time and culture. It comes in “chunks” and “bits” pre-arranged and dispensed by professors who do their best to induce student commitment to subject matter. Rather than assist students to discover, define, and act on actual problems in the external environment, these professors consider it their duty to transmit a fixed tradition to students undistracted by the “real world.” In fact, the community is largely irrelevant. One does not discover “truth” by entering into a mutually accountable relationship with a world in which we are intimately bound. Truth is known as we stand back and analyze phenomena with emotional objectivity. The primary bond of the knower to the known is of logic, not of love. In fact, caring deeply about the world, much less taking action in accordance with one’s concern, only serves to politicize what is deemed a scientific and apolitical procedure.
With precious few exceptions, students enrolled in academic programs where these assumptions reign learn to separate their mind from their heart, the rational from the emotional. Rather than knowledge being rooted in a real-world relationship between the knower and the known, they’re trained to keep that which is to be known “at arm’s length,” uncontaminated by personal feelings and opinions. This allegedly “objective” way of knowing creates a world “out there” of which students, as knowers, are not challenged to be much more than informed (“professional”) spectators.
It is our understanding that instructors will be recruited who are already skilled in, or willing to develop competence in dynamically integrating dialogical story-telling (classroom-based) and participatory fieldwork (community-based) as primary methods of learning.
— In-depth interpretation of community problems using the tools of biblical reflection and social analysis
— On-going testing of theory (concepts) against real-world realities (experience)
— Goal to challenge and change the world (not just understand and adapt ourselves to it)
Overseas studies programs can too easily reproduce the campus “bubble” abroad by ghetto-izing students in group housing and indoor courses. Segregated support is substituted for direct experience, and pre-formulated answers for creative inquiry. Participants may obtain some valuable information about the local culture, though without much real involvement with it. In the end, program directors may be baffled by students’ conspicuous absence of world concern and moral imagination, wondering what happened. A number of factors, together, might explain such a reality. But a conventional style of teaching and learning is often a main culprit.
Of course, no single pedagogy will be appropriate for all types of programs and situations; experimentation can and should yield myriad forms, but we can expect it to yield pedagogical schemes with several distinctive features:
· Individually-paced. Explorations are flexible and adaptive to learners having different backgrounds, different motivations and interests, different levels of experience and knowledge, and different learning styles. (Key to solving the “flexibility” problem.)
· Task-based. Competencies to be acquired are embedded in tasks that reflect the real uses of those abilities in the world; learners know what knowledge and skills they need and why, and what problems they are likely to encounter (Key to solving the “motivation” problem.)
· Context-related. Tasks are grounded in the context of a clearly perceived, real-world need or dilemma, and employing direct experience of (rather than merely about) the phenomenon. (Key to solving the “retention” problem.)
· Cyclically-organized. Learners repeat a cycle of planning what they want to learn, trying to do what they have planned, and reflecting back on (evaluating) the effectiveness of the approaches taken. (Key to solving the “learning” problem.)
· Learner-articulated. Learners publicly demonstrate and articulate the learning derived from their experiences to a community of practice, making it available to others. (Key to solving the “transfer” problem.)
4. Program assessment procedures
5. Recruitment procedures
6. Admission policies
7. Residency requirements
8. International student fees
9. Student affairs and academic advising
10. Program faculty and administration qualifications
11. Provision of library materials and access
12. Program governance (balance between institutional autonomy and accountability to peers)
13. How cultural issues will be addressed
14. How program quality will be maintained