Lesson 1-26 "Testimony"

A few weeks ago I attended a small academic conference focused on higher education teaching and learning, specifically an educational concept called "integrative learning." The traditional model for learning at college is based on the idea of discrete departments and courses, which can result in disconnected skills, concepts, ideas, or theories. In contrast, the idea behind integrative learning is creating an environment where students can connect the learning they're doing, to tie it together.

The conference's goal was to help educators find tools to accomplish integrative learning at the level of a single class (e.g. through reflective writing assignments asking them to formulate what they've learned and comment on their personal learning journey), or at the level of a major (for example, through learning portfolios to showcase what they've learned and accomplished across many classes), or at the level of the college itself (by designing the curriculum so that it includes interdisciplinary courses and acknowledges "co-curricular learning" such as clubs, volunteer work, or study abroad). One of the most successful and basic tools for doing this is to give students many opportunities to tell stories about how they learned. As they do this over and over, they (hopefully) become more self-aware about their own learning process and own their educational experience more. They learn that knowledge is not passively received, but actively made.

I've never taken education classes or studied much education theory, so this conference was eye-opening to me about why certain things work well to foster learning and why others don't. It isn't that some students can learn and others can't (although in the classroom it sometimes feels that way, both from the professor's and the students' perspectives). Everyone can learn, and everyone can get better at learning. And the simple but powerful act of telling yourself what you learned and how you learned it--crafting a narrative--is one way to secure the knowledge, "fix it" in your mind, and make it stick.

I realized that testimony meeting is a model of integrative learning. We invite people to articulate their experiences, apply gospel principles to them, and formulate statements about their beliefs and what they've learned from their experiences. We say that a testimony doesn't become solid until it's expressed to someone else, spoken out loud, or written down. In other words, the power is in the process of putting gospel truths into your own words. And remarkably, testimony meetings give Saints opportunities to do that frequently and in emotionally safe settings. The entire congregation is witness to the process as it unfolds - since testimonies (usually) have little prior preparation, the speaker is making those learning connections as she says them out loud. Add in the Spirit which can testify to both the speaker and to the listeners, and that's a powerful recipe for gospel learning, personal revelation, and inspiration.

Fortunately the youth program gives young people many opportunities to articulate, state, and formulate their testimonies at whatever stage they are at: tiny seedling, hail-battered or weed-choken plant, flourishing tree. Think about how many testimony meetings are built into a single year's calendar for youth. Think of how many times they hear (or should hear) their Sunday School, YW/YM and Seminary teachers bear testimonies. And flip through the Personal Progress book and look at how many times a goal involves writing one's testimony or writing down what is learned from scripture study. All of this, it turns out, is best practice for testimony-building as integrative learning.

One sentence in the lesson really stuck out to me - I know I've heard this idea before, many times, but it seemed key to me this time around - "Explain that no one is born with a testimony and that for many, acquiring a testimony begins seriously at the age of the young women in your class." I think that's true. Look at Joseph Smith, of course, but also at many other teens and young people in the scriptures or in Church history who began to really hunger, seek, study, and turn towards God with personal questions and get personal answers. Kudos also to the manual for including a story of a young woman in Taiwan whose testimony ended up converting her father's entire congregation in the early 1970s. I'd never heard that story before, very cool.