Scope and sequence planning

Having just finished our team’s cultural themes paper, where I pulled together all the cultural knowledge I’ve discovered over the last three years, I’ve identified some core themes of the Kovol culture. I have been encouraged to start our scope and sequence plan for evangelistic teaching. While my cultural observations are fresh, the consultants said it would be a good time to start thinking about how specifically it will apply to the Kovol evangelistic Bible teaching.

It’s time to think about a curriculum. What should we teach, how many lessons should there be, what order should the lessons come in, and how will the material engage with the Kovol people’s cultural themes? The scope and sequence paper seeks to answer that. It isn’t the preparation of individual lessons, but an overview of the entire curriculum to ensure that it’s tailored to the Kovol people and addresses the Kovol cultural themes in a balanced way.

Our starting point is the 58 “Eternity to Eternity” lessons developed by NTM. These start with the creation of the world, tell the story of redemption in Christ, include some history from Acts and end with Christ’s return and the new heavens and new earth—31 Old Testament lessons and 27 New Testament lessons. The lessons are designed for church planters in cultures similar to ours to adapt and shape for the unique needs of the culture of the people they are teaching. It’s wonderful not to have to start from scratch! It will all need translating into Kovol, of course, so it will still be a huge project!

I’ve been reading through the lessons and charting out which Kovol cultural themes can be addressed by which lesson and which Biblical themes we’ll focus on. Every lesson could, in theory, touch on all the Biblical themes and all the Kovol cultural themes, but we’re going to choose to be more selective and intentional. The lessons that really hit a Kovol cultural theme head on will be dedicated to doing just that. What lessons should be added? What can be taken away? What should we put aside for later lessons, and what is essential for evangelistic teaching?

It’s looking like we’ll need to add a few lessons. The Kovol people’s story about Noah’s children Shem, Ham, and Japheth is fundamental to them. According to the Kovol people, the curse that was put on Ham, the black son, is the reason why they are poor and white people are rich. We’ve had at least three different genealogies given to us tracing the first Kovol ancestor from Ham. Each time these are delivered with gravity and an expectation that we will grasp their unspoken question, confirm the underlying thinking, and, I expect, reveal to them the secret of how they can get around this curse and become prosperous. I’d say it’s the number one requested bit of knowledge that people are hoping to gain from the teaching. It makes this quite important to include.

Including it is one thing, but how should we address it? I’m looking forward to discussing this with my coworkers when they return, but so far, my two ideas are

1. to point out that this was so long ago that no one today can be sure who they descended from. We’re talking thousands, not hundreds, of years.

2. To interpret the curse on Canaan (not Ham) as not being about skin colour and prosperity, but being about the Israelites being promised a land. The fulfillment of the promise was when Israel took possession of the land—everything is already wrapped up and finished.

I think we’ll need to add some New Testament lessons too to address the idea that God makes people sick if they sin and that if people are righteous, they won’t get sick or have problems. With adding lessons, should we also take some out? Is 58 the magic number? Well, no, but there’s got to be a balance between thoroughness, enough repetition of Biblical themes to make them stick, and also being short enough that people finish the course.

As I work through and mark all the Bible verses we’ll need to translate for the lessons, it’s becoming quite overwhelming. We have a lot of translating to do!

Best make sure I don’t score the same speaking level at my next, and hopefully final, language test this month! I’ve been making sure to get some practice in. Yesterday, I took Alice and Millie’s Peter Rabbit book with me to the village, showed it to the children, and translated it on the fly for them. I also got to coach two guys through how to do pull-ups and push-ups when they joined me for Wednesday’s workout. Usually, people see me doing sweaty white-man workouts and leave me to it. With only these two guys around, though, they decided to have a go! Eight pull-ups for their first time trying it isn’t bad at all!

I’m continuing to work on the post-literacy books also. Every day brings fresh corrections to our lexicon. The story of the little boy who got malaria includes “he received an injection in his backside”, not in his handle as our lexicon was saying. At some point in the past, we must have pointed to a handle on a cup or something and someone let us know we were pointing to its base. Misunderstanding them though we went with handle as the English translation. It’s such a challenge to learn an unwritten language. We’ll be making corrections for years to come!
I’ve also tried to understand Kovol tenses better. We have a dozen or so potential combinations of tense and aspect and I’m finding that I’m using the wrong ones in my drafts a lot. We have, for example, a combination for doing something habitually and one for an action that generally happened in the past. When describing an activity like “they looked after sheep” which one do I use? Both can work, but I’m seeing more of the one where the action happened generally in the past. Even saying that though I’m giving you the definitions as best as I can make them out! I’m sure I’ll learn more later on. 🙂