2001
The Voice: Fall 2001
Hielema hopes to inspire passion and commitment
Sally Jongsma
You can’t separate what you teach from how you teach,” says Dr. Sydney
Hielema, the recipient of the 2001 John Calvin Award. The award is presented
each year to a faculty member who demonstrates a commitment to teaching from
a Calvinistic perspective and to developing and transmitting reformational insight in a discipline.
The faculty member is nominated by alumni, fellow faculty members, and selected alumni.
“Every ten years or so someone says something that makes a light go
on for me,” Hielema says. A comment made by a student when Hielema
left high school teaching to earn his Ph.D. has become one of those
memorable remarks. He was told: “Everyone feels like you accept them.” Even though
Hielema says he didn’t realize that comment described how he taught, he’s since
been on guard to make sure he doesn’t change.
He describes his career path as “falling into teaching.” “I didn’t take a
teacher education program, but after graduating with a music major I didn’t know
what else to do with it.” He was interested in making connections—between himself
and students and between what is happening in their lives and what he
teaches. Those connections are not only what drew Hielema to teaching but also
what keeps him there.
“I assume a high level of correlation between what I’ve experienced and what
students are experiencing,” he says. He tries to teach in a way that
draws on his experience—although he says he worries a bit that as he
gets older his experiences and theirs will become more different.
Hielema doesn’t believe that he simply has a body of information to impart.
He tries hard to hear what lives in his students, he says. What
they write and what they say in class help provide the structure for
what he teaches. For majors in upper level theology classes, getting to know
them well enough to sense how to focus his teaching is not difficult.
In fact, smaller classes and repeat enrollments make this relatively easy. It’s more
difficult in the larger freshmen theology classes, though. He requires students in these
classes to write a self-identification piece so he has some sense of what
he needs to address in the lives of his students as he helps
them learn about the Reformed faith.
His goal for students is to leave his classes with a sense
of passion that is based on depth of insight.
“Students are often passionate, but their passion is not always an informed one.
They like to get great grades but tend to put their academic work
and passions in separate camps.” Academic work is not a hoop to jump
through, he believes, but a tool to better work and serve in areas
they feel passionate about.
And passionate is how Hielema feels about his work.
“To get paid to study the Bible is phenomenal,” he says. Working with
highly motivated students from a range of majors who want to learn more
about the Bible is simply a joy for him. It’s a bigger challenge
to teach large introductory classes where students try to hide or put in
time, he says. But he keeps going back to Ecclesiastes 11:6 when he
gets discouraged: “Sow your seed in the morning…for you do not know which
will succeed….”
Hielema feels privileged to be rooted in and teach out of a tradition
and a perspective that he believes can open things up as fully and
deeply as they can be opened up in this world. And he believes
that the breadth and depth of the Reformed tradition allows it to learn
from other traditions.
“The stronger you are the more able you are to be strengthened by others,” he says. That, he believes, is the Reformed tradition at its best. And it is the tradition out of which he teaches.
