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January 25, 2018
Valerie Schmalz
The goal is to ‘bring students to beauty, truth and goodness’ to ‘help maximize their potential to both be good and do good in the world.’ – Chris Valdez, Marin Catholic High School principal
The Catholic intellectual tradition is a buzz phrase that Marin Catholic High School is turning into an updated curriculum – beginning with a pilot ninth grade English course this year.
The goal is to “bring students to beauty, truth and goodness,” said principal Chris Valdez, to “help students maximize their potential to both be good and do good in the world.”
The idea of Catholic integration is to infuse all courses with the Catholic intellectual tradition, a process Marin Catholic began about a decade ago when it sponsored the Substantially Catholic several-day seminar.
Next year, Marin Catholic will be changing its schedule and so this is a good time to also revamp the curriculum to be more intentional about Catholicism, he said.
The English course, which is a joint project of three English teachers, including a Dominican of Mary Mother of the Eucharist sister, a teacher who came to the school from an independent school, and a Theology teacher convert to the faith, is the first step, Valdez said, and benefits from having three very gifted teachers with varied backgrounds and training involved. “The synthesis of these three great teachers is remarkable,” Valdez said.
How does Catholic integration work in a ninth grade English class?
The theme for the freshman year is “Who is my neighbor?” and the Scriptural inspiration is the Parable of the Good Samaritan. As the template for the approach explains, “In this parable, Jesus proclaims the two great commandments: Love God and Love your Neighbor As Yourself. He also goes on to answer the essential question, who is my neighbor?”
Literature the students study includes Shakespeare’s “Othello,” J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit,” poems like Frost’s “The Mending Wall,” as well as short stories by Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor whose stories address learning to live as neighbors in the newly desegregated South, Valdez said.
The approach is not dogmatic, but intellectual and encountering ideas in literature and life, Valdez said. For instance, a key quote the students consider from another novel, Their Eyes Are Watching God is: “Love is like the sea. It’s a moving thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from the shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore.”
The students apply the core teachings in theology by engaging in directed community service as well, so that they are seeing how the Gospel teaching applies in their own experience.
A critical piece in the new approach is resetting perspective through a clear and explicit Catholic lens which Valdez said is “extremely important. That has been slow going but the lens through which you see our humanity has deep impact on how we choose texts and how we make sense of what we read.”
Step two is “baptizing teacher curricular strategies,” he said, “to ensure that students are not only developing requisite skills but are having an encounter with a book that is going to inspire virtue.”
This is both new, and a return to some of what Catholics learned in schools that were dominated by religious men and women trained and practiced in deep faith, Valdez said. He noted while he attended Catholic high school, he attended UC Santa Barbara and earned his teacher’s credential at San Francisco State University’s program, and his public university experience is common to many Catholic educators today.
So, he said, this approach of reintegrating Catholic intellectual tradition into the curriculum and school life, “is a return in a lot of ways. It is a remembering.”