Friday Recs: Guided learning, adventurous leaders
Plus a tentative podcast recommendation
Programming note: I'm back from a five-day road trip that anchored the second half of Daddy-Yona Month, my post-vacation, pre-kindergarten season of full-time parenting in response to my recent layoff. I'll have some reflections to share on this season soon, as well as my promised post-layoff professional announcement.
In the meantime, I wanted you to know that I plan to do two issues next week. F and I are off to Madison next Thursday through Saturday for some fun with friends in my favorite city in the world.
Guided Learning Mode
In a couple weeks, I'll be joining the seriously impressive group of Episcopalians representing our denomination at the conference Faithful Futures: Guiding AI with Wisdom and Witness. I've expressed interest in joining the working group on learning and discipleship, so I'm brushing up on some of the frontier labs' educational offerings.
When I spoke with Peter Levenstrong on the Church AI Toolkit podcast, one of the use cases I unabashedly endorsed was using AI to "get reps." Even in an educational world that has largely moved on from a strong reliance on early 20th century behaviorism, no one sensibly denies that repetition and sustained, consistent effort are important to long-term learning.
For people who can't afford a human tutor or coach to structure and administer learning drills, or who want to supplement the value of such a relationship, I think AI is a great option. Google just rolled out Guided Learning in their Gemini app, and it's exactly the sort of tool you'd want for this task.
I really appreciated that I didn't have to do any sophisticated prompting to get what I needed. (E.g., "Pretend you are a language tutor working with an intermediate adult learner of German working on his fluency. Please administer exercises that will ...") Instead, I simply gave the grammatical topic I wanted to brush up on, and off we went.
Gemini provided a helpful combination of purely instructional material with interactive exercises. It also checked in periodically about the direction we were taking and where I wanted to go next with our review and practice. I chose a topic where I was like 90% confident, and I'm pretty sure Gemini didn't tell me anything untrue. When I asked it to remember where we left off for next time, it told me it could.
I'd recommend giving Guided Learning mode (or Open AI's study mode) a try if you haven't already. Fairly promising, especially in conjunction with other structured learning tools—and hopefully human engagement.
'Cultivating Adventurous, Missional Leaders'
I try not to let this newsletter turn into a place where I recommend every new post on Building Faith. But it's a primary resource in the Episcopal faith formation space for a reason!
I definitely hope you'll check out this post by my friend and colleague Katie Nakamura Rengers, whom I've lauded in this newsletter before. More than most teachers and trainers in the Episcopal Church, Katie has thought a lot about how we form the kind of leaders who can plant new churches, redevelop existing churches, and otherwise respond in wise and effective ways to the many changing conditions society is presenting to us.
I like Katie's framing of this work as "adventurous leadership," and I especially appreciated a couple of her final tips:
5. Become marginalized includers
Most are familiar with Henri Nouwan’s phrase “the wounded healer.” Talk about what it means to be a marginalized includer. We need leaders who have carefully examined their own story and can use this to relate to others on the outskirts of society and the church.
[...]
7. Examine discomfort
Explore discomfort and dislocation. When does God call us to sit in uncomfortable conversations, unpredictable situations, or disruptive experiences? We’ve all placed ourselves in these situations for the sake of love at one time or another. Could we do it for the sake of inviting new people to join with us in the body of Christ?
Katie Nakamura Rengers (she/her/hers)
'The Child in Our Midst' podcast
I live just down the street from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, not necessarily an institution I'd be overly interested in engaging with theologically. But I always take seriously the recommendations of Sarah Bentley Allred, who passed along a link to The Child in Our Midst, a production of Trinity's Center for Faith and Children.
So far I'm pretty impressed with the center and the podcast. I really like the center's stated core convictions:
- High view of children
- Faithfulness to God
- Bridging theory and practice
And I was delighted that the very first voices I heard on this thoughtful and entertaining episode about why it's so hard to get ready church were the voices of real children. (Probably the children of the hosts and/or guest, but still ...)
If you can handle male pronouns for God and other signals that some of the participants come from more conservative traditions, I think you might find enough common cause to put this podcast in regular rotation. I plan to.
