Dan Haase
Four words describe me: husband, father, learner, and teacher. It is within these roles that I exist and find my deepest fulfillment in life. I am married to Kathleen who is a Residence Director in a dormitory on the campus of Wheaton College in IL. We have spent our whole married life working and living with college students. I homeschooled my two boys, Christopher & Benjamin, for a decade and have taught at Wheaton College for the past 15+ years. Along with teaching undergraduate and graduate students in the Christian Formation and Ministry department on campus, I also mentor students through the Center for Global and Experiential Learning. My areas of expertise are in discernment & intercultural development. My vocational passion is as an educator and I spend my days adventuring with these students in my care. I find my greatest joy learning alongside others. In my spare time I enjoy making art and writing haiku. A bit about my work: My whole professional career, I have taught at Wheaton College. My professional interest and research are in the exploration of how one teaches for deep learning and life change along with how to love in a world of difference. I am on a journey with my students to better understand and experience the use of educationally based spiritual formation. Dialogue Education has become the guiding approach to how I teach. My experience with DE: In 2011, my department read Jane Vella’s Taking Learning to Task as a part of a faculty enrichment grant. Through this experience together we invited Jane to campus in February of 2012. Jane gave us a two-day crash course in DE and it was then that I experienced “the death of the professor.” This led to my taking both the Learning to Listen, Learning to Teach course and Advanced Learning Design the summer of 2012 (as well as reading several more of Jane’s books). I then taught a fall semester graduate course using the system of Dialogue Education. This course was both an engagement with DE as well as an instructional course on how to teach using DE. I have since re-designed my other courses as well as implemented DE in various programs and trainings on campus. I will never teach the same after these experiences. In fifteen+ years of teaching at the collegiate level, I have never experienced the transfer within myself and among students like I have when DE has shaped the learning environment. I have watched not only programmatic elements of ministries change, but I have seen lives changed as well. I am deeply committed to Dialogue Education. Jane’s axiom states my own personal commitment and vision, “The end is learning, the means is dialogue, the purpose is peace.”
Articles by Dan Haase about Jane Vella and Dialogue Education
- The Death of the Professor: A Case for Dialogue Education
- Dialogue Education: A Learning-Centered Pedagogy
- Spiritual Formation Goes to College
- A Practical Theology of Teaching for Transformation
