Faith education is not only about teaching or, concretely, delivering the knowledge and content of Christian faith. Faith education is a so comprehensive process that it is more than a dimension of knowledge beyond what human cognition process can obtain. It is an integrative education where bodily and cognitive experience, communication and encounter take place.
The study tries to seek for a methodology of biblical learning, with which learners can encounter the Bible face-to-face by themselves and actively express what they experience. For that purpose, the paper introduces the elementarization(Elementarisierung) theory and constructive pedagogy as the theoretical background of the integrative biblical learning, and it further examines in detail the RPP(Religionspadagogische Praxis) which some scholars with catholic background have recently developed.
The notion of elemenarization(Elementarisierung), which semantically implicates ‘essential’ and ‘core,’ means none other than ‘simplifying a content without overlooking the essential.’ The elementarization theory understands teaching-learning process as interactive and bidirectional movement, and thus, as a theory of teaching and learning, it seeks for correspondence between the elementary structure in content and the elementary experience in human life, as borrowed from Klafki’s terms, between the fundamental and the elementary.
Religionspadagogische Praxis(RPP), which is translated as Religious-Pedagogical Praxis, is a methodology of church education aiming at “wholistic and sense-oriented education”(Ganzheitlichsinnorientiert erziehen und bilden), which developed in Germany during 1972-1978. It is known as a child-centered eduction based upon the educational thoughts of Jean-Jacque Rousseau and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi whose background was the German reformational pedagogy, and it uses an inductive educational method started and developed from educational fields. This RPP belongs to a category of constructive methodology in that it modifies, supplements and reconstructs the acquired knowledge in its interaction with the environment.
This study suggests as a model for integrative biblical learning a biblical learning example of youth camp. For, based upon the elementarization theory and the constructivist pedagogy, it focuses upon symbols and experience, and the ground picture(das Bodenbild), which outwardly expresses them.