Resources
They’re not the students strolling across the bucolic liberal arts campuses where their grandfathers played football. They are first-generation college students—children of immigrants and blue-collar workers—who know that their hopes for success hinge on a degree. But college is expensive, unfamiliar, and intimidating. Inexperienced students expect tough classes and demanding, remote faculty. They may not know what an assignment means, what a score indicates, or that a single grade is not a definitive measure of ability. And they certainly don’t feel entitled to be there. They do not presume success, and if they have a problem, they don’t expect to receive help or even a second chance. Rebecca D. Cox draws on five years of interviews and observations at community colleges. She shows how students and their instructors misunderstand and ultimately fail one another, despite good intentions. Most memorably, she describes how easily students can feel defeated—by their real-world responsibilities and by the demands of college—and come to conclude that they just don’t belong there after all. Eye-opening even for experienced faculty and administrators, The College Fear Factor reveals how the traditional college culture can actually pose obstacles to students’ success, and suggests strategies for effectively explaining academic expectations. (From the Publisher)
The Human Timeline invites students to physically re-create biblical history. Each student holds a card that denotes an event randomly selected from the biblical timeline. They then arrange themselves chronologically to learn the correct flow of biblical history. Because of the movement involved and the arbitrary layout of the cards among their classmates, learners engage their spatial-kinesthetic intelligences through this activity. The exercise proves popular among students who identify themselves as "visual" learners, and ultimately serves the biblical studies classroom by reinforcing biblical history as a necessary framework for understanding the biblical text.
A 1000 word essay on using textbooks in introductory courses (or not).
A 1000 word essay on using textbooks in introductory courses (or not).
“Teaching the Facts, Inculcating Knowledge, or Instilling Wisdom? Rationale for a Textbook in BS101”
A 1000 word essay on using textbooks in introductory courses (or not).
One page Teaching Tactic: students learn theology by working in pairs through the semester.
One page Teaching Tactic: creating a safe context to discuss race, ethnicity, and language.
One page Teaching Tactic: discussion of art objects in a one week intensive course.
This paper explores the way students learn theology through a small qualitative research project. It is undertaken in conversation with current higher education learning theory. This learning theory suggests that it is important to discover how a student conceptualizes learning and how they perceive the teaching environment. Students interviewed increasingly spoke of the value of this academic or more cognitive side of learning as they learned "deep approaches." Important in this movement to deep, transformational learning was the presence of a relational teaching environment in which peers and teachers played a crucial role. This present study offers support to the view that the tradition of the learning community remains important for deploying deep approaches to the learning of theology in higher education. The paper argues that these relational principals of teaching and learning remain important in the face of the increased use of technology-based tools and other pedagogical challenges to theological education today.
Wabash Center Staff Contact
Sarah Farmer, Ph.D.
Associate Director
Wabash Center
farmers@wabash.edu