Resources
Reverence is a forgotten virtue in teaching and learning. Indeed, it is a largely forgotten virtue in American society. This book argues that there is much more to teaching students than merely imparting knowledge. Good teaching involves forming character, molding destinies, creating an enduring passion for learning, appreciating beauty, caring for others, and much more. In some sense of the word, teaching is a spiritual, although not necessarily a religious, activity. When done well, it cultivates human intimacy and allows teachers to find creative self-expression in classroom community. The essays gathered here examine reverence as a way to understand some of the spiritual dimensions of classroom teaching. (From the Publisher)
This essay highlights a range of questions that arise when white suburban students engage urban neighborhoods of poverty and color in the United States. How can involvement in an “other” context move beyond “educational tourism”? The essay presents a pedagogical style that raises questions of the kind of socialized body one inhabits: either one shaped by presumptions of control and rights of academic observation, or one mobilized to risk involvement in a differently communalized episteme. And while the pedagogy described may not be replicable by faculty who do not share the author's background or cross-cultural orientation, the rhetorical style of the essay itself enacts the tensions that this pedagogy contends with: the efforts of a white male educator – altered by decades of inner city involvement – to open “white” space in the classroom to other norms of embodiment and other modes of learning. Here is the necessity and impossibility of moving beyond “educational tourism.”
Learning in a Musical Key examines the multidimensional problem of the relationship between music and theological education. Lisa Hess argues that, in a delightful and baffling way, musical learning has the potential to significantly alter and inform our conception of the nature and process of theological learning. In exploring this exciting intersection of musical learning and theological training, Hess asks two probing questions. First, What does learning from music in a performative mode require? Classical modes of theological education often founder on a dichotomy between theologically musical and educational discourses. It is extremely difficult for many to see how the perceivedly nonmusical learn from music. Is musicality a universally human potential? In exploring this question Hess turns to the music-learning theory of Edwin Gordon, which explores music's unique mode of teaching/learning, its primarily aural-oral mode. This challenge leads to the study's second question: How does a theologian, in the disciplinary sense, integrate a performative mode into critical discourse? Tracking the critical movements of this problem, Hess provides an inherited, transformational logic as a feasible path for integrating a performative mode into multidimensional learning. This approach emerges as a distinctly relational, embodied, multidimensional, and non-correlational performative-mode theology that breaks new ground in the contemporary theological landscape. As an implicitly trinitarian method, rooted in the relationality of God, this non-correlational method offers a practical theological contribution to the discipline of Christian spirituality, newly claimed here as a discipline of transformative teaching/learning through the highly contextualized and self-implicated scholar into relationally formed communities, and ultimately into the world. (From the Publisher)
Though there is a general awareness of the need for change in education relative to school organization, teaching and learning, curriculum, and school administration; most, if not all, of what is said is only partially processed by the reader's mind. The need for profound, revolutionary change in the way we think about education is highlighted in this work. Author J. Richard Wingerter addresses the natural shortcomings of the mind's thinking process in an attempt to bring about fresh, new ideas to contemporary education literature. (From the Publisher)