Richard A. Huebner

Assistant Professor, Eastern Nazarene College

Quincy, Massachusetts

(617) 745-3827

e-mail: HuebnerR@enc.edu

Faculty Development Workshop, Westmont College, May, 2003

Proposal

Goal

The proposed project will examine some of the techniques and strategies used to integrate faith and learning in the computer science & information systems classroom at a Christian college.

Details

There have been numerous efforts in the past on integrating faith and teaching. As a new faculty member at a Christian college, I am faced with the challenge of integrating my faith into the classroom. There are several questions that I would like to raise to the team. Does the fact that we teach at a Christian college supersede teaching in a particular area? Conversely, are we merely computer science and mathematics educators who happen to teach at a Christian college? How is the computer science classroom at a Christian college going to be different from a secular college?

I would like to focus on one particular area. How can I integrate faith (faculty and student) into a course such as Programming II (based on the C language)? I hope to discover ways to incorporate faith into these classes. Ethical and legal issues arise in a course called “Analysis and Design of Information Systems”, and the topic of our faith comes up frequently. This particular courses focuses on the analysis and design aspects (before a project commences the “coding/programming/development” stage) where many ethical considerations would come up. For example, the development of a software program that could bring harm to another human being or a program that does something malicious to another person’s computer. These types of issues will come up in programming related courses.

One high level challenge is that we, as Christian scholars and educators in our respective disciplines, somehow need to “fit” our own courses into the mission of the Christian college.

Proverbs 23:12 (NIV) states “Apply your heart to instruction and your ears to words of knowledge.”