Resources
Describes the emergence of powerful fields of consciousness that influence students’ learning and personal transformation. This pioneering work in teaching and transpersonal psychology explores the dynamics of collective consciousness in the classroom. Combining scientific research with personal accounts collected over thirty years, Christopher M. Bache examines the subtle influences that radiate invisibly around teachers as they work—unintended, cognitive resonances that spring up between teachers and students in the classroom. While these kinds of synchronistic connections are often overlooked by traditional academics, Bache demonstrates that they occur too frequently and are too pointed to be dismissed as mere coincidence. Drawing upon Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphic fields, Bache proposes that well-taught courses generate “learning fields” around them, forms of collective consciousness that can trigger new insights and startling personal transformations. Moving beyond theory, this book is rich with student stories and offers practical, hands-on strategies for teachers who want to begin working with these learning fields to take their teaching to a more conscious level. (From the Publisher)
When faculty unexpectedly encounter students' religious ideologies in the classroom, they may respond with apprehension, frustration, dread, or concern. Instructors may view this exchange as a confrontation that threatens the very heart of empirical study, and worry that this will lead to a dead-end in the learning process. The purpose of this book is to explore what happens—and what can happen—in the higher education, and even secondary school, classroom when course content meets or collides with students' religious beliefs. It also considers the impact on learning in an environment where students may feel threatened, angry, misunderstood, or in which they feel their convictions are being discredited. This is a resource that offers ways of conceptualizing, engaging with, and responding to, student beliefs. This book is divided into three sections: student views on the role of religion in the classroom; general guidelines for responding to or actively engaging religious beliefs in courses (such as legal and diversity considerations); and specific examples from a number of disciplines (including the sciences, social sciences, humanities and professional education). Professors from public, private, and religious institutions share their findings and insights. The resounding lessons of this book are the importance of creating a learning space in which students can express their beliefs, dissonance, and emotions constructively, without fear of retribution; and of establishing ground rules of respectful discussion for this process to be valuable and productive. This is an inspirational and practical guide for faculty navigating thecontroversial, sensitive—yet illuminating—lessons that can be learned when religion takes a seat in the classroom. (From the Publisher)
Introductory courses in theology and religion are taught at most colleges and universities across the US and UK. From public to private, non-sectarian to faith-based institutions, theology courses fulfill humanities general education requirements, and provide a foundational education for students intending further theological study. This book describes the best and most effective ways of teaching these courses. Offering practical, realistic, research-based guidance, this volume explores the best and most recent methods in teaching-theory. This book addresses the questions and concerns frequently posed by the professors and graduate students who instruct these multifaceted courses. It covers issues such as a teacher's role in defining theology and religion, the teaching and learning process, course structure, and content. The volume also examines recent case studies of theology and religious studies courses at various institutions, including a private non-sectarian university, a public research university, a Catholic masters-level university, and at a Protestant baccalaureate college. (From the Publisher)
Does education have any relation to theology? How do the educator's worldview commitments speak to his or her practice of education? James Michael Lee brought a definite answer to these questions -- a firm no to the relations question, and an advocacy for empirical findings over and against any speculative or theoretical positions in reply to the commitments question. Lee claimed to have a universal, neutral metatheory for all religious education, a theory that would apply to all religious educators in any and every religion. But in proposing his theory he overlooked the way that empirical facts express worldviews. This book is a detective story, tracing commitments that lay underneath empirical "neutrality." In the process the reader will see avenues that unmistakably link education to theology. Education turns out to be a thoroughly worldview - conditioned process. This new work is essential reading for professors and students in both religious and general education. (From the Publisher)
By reclaiming the role of confession in the classroom, we can rethink the fundamental question of what it means to teach religion. That is, the project of thinking about the religious dimension of pedagogy should also force us to rethink religious studies in general. Pedagogy, after all, is not an incidental expression of religious commitments but is instead one significant place where the religious imagination takes shape and form. All religious reflection is confessional, because scholarship is only one form of pedagogy, and teaching is the act of saying who we are, where we are from, and where we are going.
This note examines some pedagogical strategies for the formation of students who read the Bible both confessionally and critically. Some students in both church-related and secular colleges and universities enter courses with confessional views of the Bible that inspire a literal interpretation of the text, what the author calls a flat reading. Teachers struggle to lead students to a more nuanced view of the text in a way that is both sensitive to the students' development and academically responsible. The author indicates how he approaches this challenge through: (1) a discussion of texts that have been used to enable students to see the nature of the biblical text and to transform their understanding of it; (2) a description of techniques and exercises that work toward the same goal; and (3) reflection on the application of sociological research on group change in the transformation of individuals.
Two theologians teaching religion at the same college engage in a dialogue about differences in their understandings of teaching religion in order to explore serious pedagogical and theological issues. Their reflections on their teaching touch on issues of learning goals, institutional identity, student freedom, faculty self-revelation, and the liberal arts that most teachers of religion face. Along the way, they explore the relation of pedagogy to theological topics like grace and ecclesiology. We invite readers to join the conversation begun in this article by engaging Webb, Placher, and one another through the public discussion list we've created for this article on the Wabash Center Discussion Forum at http://ntweb.wabash.edu/wcdiscus/.
Recently scholars of religion have disputed whether theology properly belongs to the study of religion in institutions of higher education (McCutcheon 1997a, 1997b; Cady 1998; Brown and Cady forthcoming). At the same time, religious authorities have increasingly censored the work of theologians in seminaries and church-related schools; witness the loyalty oaths required of scholars in religious studies programs at some Protestant denominationally related colleges and the Catholic Church's recent stand expressed by Ex Cordae Ecclessiae. Both scholars who would exclude theology as a field from the study of religion and ecclesiastical authorities who would censor it fail to acknowledge the emergence of academic theology as a field that does not depend on institutional religious affiliation or personal confession of faith, a field that by its nature does depend for its continued existence on academic freedom. This article suggests a working definition of academic theology and then poses three questions: What might studying different kinds of theology academically teach us about religion? How, properly speaking, is theology as performed in a non-sectarian environment now a nomad wandering within the formal study of religion? What are the implications of this shift in status for how academic theologians teach? The article is a revision of the inaugural address, by the same title, given for the Margaret W. Harmon professorship in Christian Theology and Culture at Macalester College, Saint Paul, Minnesota, November 18, 1999.
This classroom exercise developed out of an effort to make the methodology and practical techniques of our field come alive for students of New Testament at a variety of undergraduate levels. Adapting the controversial "voting" technique of the Westar Institute's "Jesus Seminar," students vote with colored beads on the authenticity of Jesus' sayings in Matthew's Beatitudes (Matt. 5:3–12). The point of the exercise is not to judge or dismiss Biblical text, but to work actively and thoughtfully with the critical tools and methods of New Testament scholarship, to ponder the implications of academic assessments of "authenticity" when it comes to Biblical text, and to stimulate discussion concerning how we, as professional scholars of the Bible, approach the Gospels.
Biblical studies professors in Christian liberal arts colleges typically face greater hostility from students nurtured in fundamentalist churches than they do from those who attend mainline churches. Guiding them through their first academic study of the Bible poses many challenges. To avoid the course becoming a battlefield, and to facilitate integration on a higher level, the Wesleyan Quadrilateral provides a middle way between right-wing and left-wing extremes. This approach gives priority to the Bible as the primary source for determining theology and practice, but relies heavily on tradition, reason, and experience as well. It also promotes interaction with the spiritual, moral, and ethical concerns expressed in the biblical texts. To adopt the Quadrilateral involves active concern for character formation, inspiring students to become better people. If we merely dispense historical-critical or literary information without considering contemporary relevance, we bore students and fail in our duties as educators.