“As I teach, I project the condition of my soul onto my students, my subject, and our way of being together" - Parker Palmer, The Courage To Teach

Description: 

This workshop is for teachers in any stage of career. It is for teachers who are ready to tend to the heart of their vocation, not only to the mechanics of their classrooms. This cohort is designed for self-reflexive teachers who desire to explore their impulses and motivations for teaching, who are hungry for personal and communal growth, and are willing to be formed anew in the process. Together, we will explore what it means to remain curious about ourselves, our students, and others without grasping at mastery. Instead, we will seek to cultivate porous spaces where genuine teaching and learning can unfold. In our time together, we will explore how classrooms, our relationships, and our pedagogical practices create, shift, and sustain power dynamics, and how they can also become practices of beauty, healing, and intentional transgression. At its core, this workshop is an invitation to reground our teaching life in pedagogical purpose, so that our work in the classroom flows from a place of clarity, integrity, and hope.     

This workshop invites participants to engage in:

• Storywork as formation 
• Dialogue and facilitation in the classroom
• Assessing and reorienting power dynamics 
• Examining Inter and Intrapersonal classroom dynamics 
• Pedagogical design with intention

Guiding Questions:

1. What impulses and hopes drive the way I design courses and teach?
2. What motivates and discourages me as a teacher?
3. What are the marks of a healthy inner life of a teacher? 
4. What kinds of pedagogical designs awaken both joy and honest challenge for me and for my students?
5. When have I felt at my best as a teacher, and what, specifically, were the conditions that made that moment possible?
6. Thinking back on my own education, what moments of teaching and learning felt life-giving and what do they reveal about what I now try to do or avoid as a teacher?
7. Why did I choose this teaching life and does that original call still speak to me now?
8. What are the key stories and experiences that have shaped me into the teacher I am today, and how do they operate in my classroom, named or unnamed?
   
    

Participant Eligibility

• Full-time tenure track or continuing term relationship with one school
• At least 3 years of teaching experience in a full-time position at the institution of current employment; persons having taught for 6+ years are equally encouraged to apply
• Teach religion, religious studies, or theology in an accredited college, university, or seminary in the United States, Puerto Rico, or Canada. If working in related fields, the applicant must be teaching primary courses focused on issues of religion or theology
• Institutional support and personal commitment to participate fully in all workshop sessions
• Hold a job description or contract that includes at least 50% teaching responsibility
• Applicants must already hold a doctoral degree at the time of application

Application Materials:

1. Contact Information Form
2. Essay: In 500–700 words, describe a moment from a class that marked a turning point in your teaching. Reflect on why this moment was significant and how it became a paradigm shift for you as a teacher. You might focus, for example, on an event such as a student’s reaction to your teaching, a classroom incident, an observation, an interaction among students, or a last-minute change in your teaching plan.
3. Academic CV (4-page limit)
4. A letter of institutional support for your full participation in this workshop from your Department Chair, Academic Dean, Provost, Vice President, or President. Please upload this letter directly to your application per the online application instructions.