1. Wisdom

Connecting Wisdom to Science

This lesson gets students to reflect in visual or tangible ways on what they have learned up to this point. Visual representations can be useful to help students realize misconceptions or faulty thinking. The activities here should give students a concrete visual representation of how they have been thinking.

You may begin with A Map, a short activity designed to help students identify what they already know about the relationship of the Bible to discussions of faith and science. It engages them in identifying the passages, topics, and questions they associate with these discussions.

Working in groups, students will create lists of topics, passages, and questions about the Bible and faith and science topics. You might ask students whether they included any Bible passages which became apparent thanks to their work on wisdom over the past few classes.

After this, you can introduce the activity Write a Psalm. This activity allows another opportunity for students to make their thinking about wisdom more tangible. It does so by engaging students in composing a psalm that reflects what they have been learning about the relationship of biblical and scientific language. They will have an opportunity to offer a personal response to what has been learned as well as have space for prayer and worship.

Near the end of the lesson, you can lead a brief discussion with students about ways in which the two activities are different:

• How does representing our understanding in words, images, or diagrams help us think?
• How do different representations help us to think differently?

Before students leave at the end of the lesson period, you may give them the journal prompt “Science and Wisdom” from the Models and Methods Journal Prompts. With this journal entry, students are invited to reflect on their learning since beginning the course and to consider what events, conversations, or assignments have led to their growth.