Resources

Click Here for Book Review Written by a sitting college president who has presided over transformative change at a state university, this book takes on the big questions and issues of change and change management, what needs to be done and how to do it. Writing in a highly accessible style, the author recommends changes for higher education such as the reallocation of resources to support full-time faculty members in foundation-level courses, navigable pathways from community college to the university, infusion rather than proliferation of courses, and the role of state universities in countering the disappearance of the middle class. The book describes how these changes can be made, as well as why we must make them if our society is to thrive in the twenty-first century.

In my classrooms, I have noticed that more and more students are coming to the study of religion with preconceived conceptions about different religious communities, most frequently, and consequentially, Islam. My sense is that many students in my World Religions courses have a sympathetic imagination about the religions of the “East,” and a positive familiarity with Christianity, even if they aren’t part of a Christian community. However, when it comes to learning about Islam, some students have slight anxiety about Muslims or, more rarely, an established intolerance of the tradition. As an expert in the study of Islam, I feel a responsibility to address why students have placed Islam in an exceptional position, seeing it as a tradition very different from others. Therefore, in addition to outlining key themes and activities about Islam in my World Religions courses, I set two goals: to dismantle the idea that Muslims pose a new and unique threat that legitimizes an unprecedented reaction in American religious history, and unpack why many of my students have come to this conclusion in the first place. As others have noted (Youshaa Patel, Debra Majeed, Sufia Uddin, Elliott Bazzano), we live in a time of rising levels of hateful public rhetoric towards Muslims, support for discriminatory policies, and general demonization of Islam. It’s easy to conclude that students’ deep-seated assumptions about Muslims are shaped by dominant media representations of Islam, which are usually sensational, one-sided, or incomplete at best. What’s key for my students is to understand how their media-informed prior knowledge has shaped their views about Islam. If students do not engage Muslims in their own experience–as their neighbors, doctors, peers, etc.–how can they unlearn their biases? How can we disrupt students’ implicit biases and reframe their understandings of Muslims? Media literacy is an important component of my World Religions class. I begin by thinking about news media because for many of my students the news is seemingly unbiased and simply an unmediated account of the world out there. Jolyon Mitchell’s essay, “Religion and the News: Stories, Contexts, Journalists and Audiences (from Religion and the News, eds. Jolyon Mitchell and Owen Gower (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), has been successful in revealing the various constraints of print and visual news media given the limits they create for its ability to convey stories with rigor and detail. Using this essay alongside several sources about a single current event effectively demonstrates how the structures of this medium require the use of labels, formula, and clichés (i.e. stereotypes). This primer on news media leads us to critically deconstruct representational forms that are clearly more produced (i.e. television and film, political campaigns, literature, etc.).         Moustafa Bayoumi’s book This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror (2015) is a useful source for this type of genealogical approach (cf. SherAli Tareen). Bayoumi outlines key aspects to the construction of the homogeneous portrait of Islam and Muslims that dominates mainstream media. He shows that the production of Islam in the American imagination includes several components: the effects of anti-Muslim political discourses, the production of knowledge about Muslims by so-called “experts,” policies of governance and policing, and an archive of images in popular culture. He effectively demonstrates the intersections of various forms of representation and their social consequences in lived realities. Through this focus on how Islam is envisioned in America, I find that frequently stereotypes remain invisible to students and they aren’t convinced that social policies or practices facing Muslims are unwarranted. Therefore, an important question is what histories do I need to provide in order to make students sensitive to biased representations? I place Muslims in the American historical landscape in order to highlight that anti-religious discrimination is recurring and typical. I want students to see that there is an extended history of prejudice and intolerance of religious minorities in the United States. Bayoumi aids this process by covering the long history of Islam in America, going back to the colonial period. I pair this with Peter Gottschalk’s book American Heretics: Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and the History of Religious Intolerance. By linking contemporary anti-Muslim racism with the legacy of American exclusion and religious persecution, I show students that oppression of minority groups is nothing new. Gottschalk clearly describes the parallel systems of oppression and operations of exclusion that dominant American religious groups have wielded over minority communities across our history. My hope is that by seeing the effects of discrimination historically, students will be inclined to denounce and act against similar forms of oppression that exist today. The final pedagogical piece is assignments that draw students into media production, thus highlighting the restricted nature of specific mediums, the structural boundaries within which media producers work, and how difficult it is to create content that is nuanced and complex. I find that responding to real life scenarios rather than abstract essay questions generates student knowledge about Muslims in robust and valuable ways. Writing prompts meet students within their own social context (i.e. the university, the regional community, other institutions, etc.) and require them to reflect on the current reproduction of issues we covered in class. For each assignment, they need to respond to local or national circumstances and justify their argument. Some of the tasks are very immediate and personal, such as outlining a conversation with friends about classes and discussing the assumptions their peers might have about Islam. Other assignments include activities such as responding to a vitriolic opinion-piece in the local newspaper, giving a presentation about Muslims to non-Muslim interfaith community members, reacting to a campaign to stop the construction of a new mosque, or attending a meeting with the University Board of Trustees to argue for internationalizing the curriculum. Overall, requiring students to address real life scenarios forces them to respond with clarity and nuance. It also empowers them to confront stereotypes and their social consequences in their local settings. Placing these new tasks within their acquired knowledge of the extensive history of American religious discrimination and the ways in which Islam is produced in an American context (as a reified entity) dismantles many of their previous suppositions about Muslims. Ultimately, it also reveals some of the rhythms of United States religious history that still play today.

Kathleen Gabriel’s Creating the Path to Success in the Classroom is a clear, engaging, and practical book that will be of use to anyone teaching in a university or community-college classroom. In his forward to the book, Stephen Caroll praises Gabriel’s “deep integration of theory and practice” (xiii). This integration is one of the book’s major strengths. Gabriel introduces the reader to scholarship on barriers to student learning, student mindsets, and effective pedagogy. Extensively referenced and cited, Gabriel’s book is thus a primer on classic and more recent scholarship of teaching and learning. After describing this scholarship, Gabriel then offers practical suggestions of classroom strategies designed to engage students effectively given the data. These range from one-time strategies – reading a particular article on growth mindsets as a class, doing an active-learning activity – to strategies that unfold over the course of an entire semester. Gabriel offers concrete scripts for welcoming students and setting a classroom tone, giving student feedback that encourages persistence and growth, creating and shuffling small groups, and much more. Gabriel not only suggests what to do and why, but also encourages faculty to make those reasons explicit to students, making students intentional partners in their own learning. Gabriel explores strategies for creating a positive classroom climate during the first days of class, engaging students during the first month of the semester, growth mindsets and mental toughness, creating interactive lectures, motivating students to read, think about, and discuss course readings, integrating critical thinking and writing into class activities and assignments, and developing student resilience and persistence. In four appendices, Gabriel offers even more practical suggestions. For example, in her chapter on classroom climate, Gabriel notes that “one way that professors can increase their own cultural competence is to read both nonfiction and fiction material that addresses multicultural issues” (20). Gabriel then directs the reader to Appendix A, a list of nonfiction and fiction readings by authors of color that helped her expand her own “cultural competence and awareness” (131). Gabriel is gentle in encouraging faculty to teach minority, first-generation, and academically unprepared students more effectively, suggesting incremental steps that faculty can take as they become more comfortable with new pedagogical strategies. She insists throughout that inclusive pedagogy not come at the expense of a rigorous academic standards: “We can design our assignments in a way that holds students to high standards, but, at the same time, we can give all our students encouragement, support, and resources so that they have ample opportunity to achieve those standards” (111). Creating the Path to Success in the Classroom will be helpful to teaching veterans and novices alike. In her opening chapter, Gabriel frames the book as designed to help faculty effectively teach and retain minority, first-generation, and academically unprepared students. As is the case with many implementations of universal design principles, however, these strategies ultimately improve student engagement and learning for all students.

Mary Ann Beavis and Hyeran Kim-Cragg, a biblical scholar and a practical theologian, respectively, address a number of topics that are engaged by people outside of the contours of usual religious contexts; those who tacitly or consciously engage with scriptural and religious themes. It is this audience that the authors seem in particular to target: the everyday person whose religious viewpoints are influenced by media and popular culture, without their realizing the underlying misconceptions borne of poor theologies, or uncritical appropriation of traditions with little or no basis either on sound doctrine or biblical knowledge. In juxtaposing biblical themes such as creation and apocalypse, sin and salvation, Moses and Jesus, Jews and Christians, God and Satan, Christ and Antichrist, gender and God, purity and sex, and suffering and sacrifice, in a creative dialogue with cinematic culture, the authors seek to dispel many of these aforementioned misconceptions. Beavis and Kim-Cragg have succeeded in making scholarly information accessible, taking pains to define technical terms – whether Hebrew, Greek, or theological jargon – that would otherwise be foreign to nonexperts. They provide solid exegetical and theological analysis of the themes they have chosen. Readers and teachers will find the creative way in which they use movies from a wide array of genres to further their discussion helpful. “Before viewing” and “after viewing” questions allow one to link their cinematic selections with the theological theme under discussion. This is especially helpful since, for the most part, the authors did not choose religious movies; it is, after all, an engagement with popular culture, not religious media. As a professor of constructive theology, I especially appreciate the discussion of salvation in chapter 2, subtly broadening its meaning by disconnecting it from the notion of sin and at least implicitly relating it to the Reign of God, and their discussion of eschatology in chapter 5, rightly linking it with relationship. Another discussion which I found to be of importance in this time of intolerance and rising tides of anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, and nativistic impulses, was their discussion on Jews and Christians (chapter 4). While their assertation that “Jesus was a Jew” might seem simplistic, I can attest to the fact that such a statement can be a surprise to some beginning seminary students. Beavis and Kim-Cragg honestly tackle texts in Second Testament that have been interpreted as “anti-Jewish” as well as the history of anti-Semitic interpretations in Christian theology. It is their conclusion that in spite of this persistent prejudice, we stand well to remember that “God blesses all” (62). For teachers in the areas of practical theology, this book can be used in courses that integrate biblical studies with Christian education, theology, or preaching. The authors’ approach to theological themes can prove helpful to beginning seminary students who come with popular misconceptions, only to become disconcerted by learning in the classroom what they believe to be contradictions of faith. The book’s methodology of integrating theological content with media is insightful and consonant with the contemporary world in which our students live and practice ministry. It is particularly useful as teachers become aware of the various learning styles of students and expands their arsenal of creative pedagogical practices. I would hope that this book invites teachers to consider the use of movies, music, photography, and online content such as TED talks in their classroom. This book is a good companion to such sources as Timothy B. Cargal’s, Hearing a Film, Seeing a Sermon, although the latter tends to focus more on homiletical and liturgical integration. I do have some questions. While I assume that the audience for this book is either a lay or church community, the authors themselves never clearly identify their audience: is this meant for a more evangelical or progressive church community, or was it directed primarily to an unchurched community? I would have found it helpful for the authors to have been more explicit about their audience. This leads to a second question: why their particular juxtaposition of selected themes? Was it influenced by context and audience? For example, why discuss God and gender, and not God and justice? Would the latter not have allowed the discussion to be broader than simply whether our God-talk is inclusive in terms of male or female images? At a time of imposition of heteronormativity, homophobia, and rising tide of violence against people of color, it could have led to larger questions about white privilege, and broader assumptions about gender could have been broached. Along those lines, could the discussion have been further enriched with the inclusion of more voices of color, both in the authors’ scholarly sources and in their movie choices? Could some of these very themes have been underscored with such movies as Hidden Stories, The Color Purple, Selma, Even the Rain, The Joy Luck Club, or others that showcase actors of color or LGBTQI persons? These questions, of course, do not detract from the overall importance and value of the book. This book, with its solid theological and biblical analyses, is an important resource particularly for those of us who continuously encounter groups or individuals in our churches, classrooms, and communities that espouse uninformed biblical and theological beliefs influenced by popular culture.

Two years ago I decided to kill voice-over PowerPoint as an online teaching tool. It wasn’t nearly as hard to kill as I thought it would be. And, for good reasons, I won’t go back. If you are new to online teaching, someone will inevitably suggest voice-over PowerPoint as a core component of online course design. They may even insist it is an “easy” entry into online teaching. When I started teaching online graduate seminary courses in theology, I relied heavily on voice-over PowerPoint. I used it for several consecutive years. But not anymore. Voice-over PowerPoint is taxing, redundant, and rigid for both instructors and students. More important, it doesn’t support productive or engaged learning online. Voice-over PowerPoint allows an instructor to design a visual presentation and then record narration or lecture content in sync with the slides. Thankfully, individual slides can be re-recorded without starting over from the beginning. In the narration recording, the instructor controls when the slides advance for the viewer. In online courses, typically the file is converted into streaming video that can be posted for students to view. Slightly more sophisticated tools (Prezi, Screencast-O-Matic, Camtasia, etc.) provide non-linear options or include video. At first glance, these tools simulate residential classroom practices. In residential courses, PowerPoint can enhance learning by adding visual content, important textual information, and helpful organization and pacing. Constructing PowerPoint presentations without voice-over narration is relatively straightforward, and most residential classrooms have appropriate technology support. In residential classrooms, I use PowerPoint to support interactive lecturing, which includes collaborative in-the-moment conversation, clarification, and imagination. Recreating residential patterns for using PowerPoint therefore seems to make sense in the habitat of online teaching and learning, but there are uncomfortable surprises. Voice-over PowerPoint is time intensive, not easily updated, and it tends to lock-in problematic course design. Voice-over PowerPoint is more time consuming when it is an online course component. Even if you are not a stickler for articulate and well-paced narration, it takes substantial time to get it right. Rendering voice-over PowerPoint files to streaming files takes considerable computer processing time. The first time I rendered a video, my computer was locked and unresponsive for six hours. With adequate technology support services, the process can move faster. Yet this means working on lectures well ahead of time, and many instructors lack adequate technical support. In addition, once a PowerPoint is rendered into streaming video, any changes, even very small changes, are incredibly cumbersome and frustrating to implement. One colleague of mine finds rendering videos so exasperating that she works from the tight space of her bedroom closet where she can curse and pound the walls every time her laptop computer crashes. On one occasion it crashed seven consecutive times. In course evaluations and check-ins, my online students have reported that voice-over PowerPoint feels laborious and redundant while residential students often found it helpful. The difference has to do with how online students multitask and manage fulltime work environments while pursuing education. Online learners prefer content they can listen to or watch without long stationary stretches at a computer in a solely receptive rather than interactive mode. When PowerPoint is content heavy and stretches beyond 15 minutes, students report being confused and frustrated. For example, they struggled to take notes while watching and listening because both tasks required the same screen. I responded by providing copies of slides and note-taking guides, but the situation and frustrations did not improve. Relying heavily on voice-over PowerPoint lecturing is not good online pedagogy. In residential contexts it can be interactive and invitational, but online it is one-directional and redundant. Instructors spend a lot of time putting together content not easily updated or augmented. Students spend a lot of time tediously copying down content, memorizing content, and repeating it on an exam. This kind of copying and rehearsing is labor intensive. And in the end, it does not mean students can demonstrate how new information or paradigms are useful, fruitful, or relevant. The learning patterns of redundancy don’t truly engage a learner or enhance a learner’s agency.   Thus, no matter how much time you have already invested, it is wise to avoid relying heavily on voice-over PowerPoint and equivalent tools. Instead, consider these alternative best practices for promoting productive and engaged learning online. Try moving PowerPoint content to course pages. Course page content can include images, links, and embedded PDF readings. Components and texts can be easily updated and corrected by the instructor. Page content can be saved and transferred if your course platform changes. Make sure the information you want to convey to students is not already available from trusted online sources or trusted scholars. Curate, rather than recreate, the best resources to avoid redundant faculty work. In the discipline of theology, this introduces students to a wider range of voices, generously celebrates other scholars’ expertise, and models how and where to find good theological information online. Incorporate interactive learning activities that invite students into the learning process in ways voice-over lectures cannot. For example, one of my objectives in an online Christology course is to raise critical awareness around how images of Jesus can support nationalism, injustice, violence, and racism. I used to provide images in PowerPoint presentation. Now I ask students to go in search of images and post them to a digital bulletin board (such as ./>Padlet). Subsequently students move through page content, external links, and course reading. Afterwards, students return to their posted images and comment on what they have learned, see differently, or want to ask. Due to this small design change, learning became engaged and interactive while requiring far less time-intensive setup. I also widened my own pool of online images. Use short (approximately 10 minutes) recorded video segments to orient students to the content, learning, and objectives you have in mind for a whole course or course module. Basic computer apps and programs support short videos student can watch, listen, or download. Resist the editing impulse and keep it real. This allows students to hear and feel an instructor’s presence as an important point of orientation. Use PowerPoint or related tools sparingly for short forays into content that will not likely need updating. When slide presentation is crucial for course design, consider alternative tools such as ./>VoiceThread which allow students to comment, respond, or ask questions of the instructor in ways embedded in the slide presentation. (There is a yearly fee for VoiceThread, but it may be worth the expense.) Two years ago I killed voice-over PowerPoint in online teaching, and I won’t go back. The kill meant eliminating a central source of my own and student frustration. Not one student has complained about its absence, and the new course design gets strong reviews. Better strategies and shifting imagination have resulted in more sustainable online teaching and learning practices. Best of all, instead of repeating my recorded words and imitating my own voice, students are learning to exercise their own. And I get to see and evaluate more accurately what they are truly learning.