Resources

The advent of relatively inexpensive 360‚Äêdegree cameras and virtual reality (VR) headsets brings new possibilities to the study of religion by allowing students to become virtually immersed in distant religious environments at very little cost. These tools can serve as the basis for assignments that help to engage students and meet core learning outcomes such as empathetic understanding and ethnographic analysis of religious place, ritual, and behavior in light of theories of religion. This article describes and reflects on the experimental incorporation of these technologies in two sections of an introductory religious studies course at a small two‚Äêyear campus in the University of Wisconsin System.

This essay distills pedagogical principles that have emerged through a dozen years of experience teaching a seminary introductory Old Testament course online. The rich interactions and social cues that professors rely on to monitor student learning in face‐to‐face classrooms are replaced by a carefully choreographed pattern of student learning activities and peer‐to‐peer discussion prompts through which the professor “engineers” student learning. A careful description and analysis of the pedagogical intentions and choices embedded in the design of an online course reveals a sociology of online learning and the author's implicit theory of how learning happens.

One page Teaching Tactic: Students are presented with an ambiguous text that helps them explore how their own experiences and contemporary contexts shape biblical interpretation. It introduces the idea that an interpreters’ identities, cultures, politics, and individual histories significantly change their perceptions of a biblical text.

One page Teaching Tactic: a learning design that de-familiarizes students' expectations of what a book is, to open new ways of understanding biblical texts.

One page Teaching Tactic: a process to prompt students to meet and converse in a series of one-on-one discussions, while working to understand course material in preparation for deeper analysis.

Cases like that of John Howard Yoder – a pacifist theorist who perpetrated sexual violence – raise difficult questions about teaching material implicated in traumatic pasts. This paper argues that “moral injury” provides a useful framework for understanding the dynamics of teaching prominent cases of tainted legacies like Yoder's and for developing best pedagogical practices across the field of religious ethics. The moral injury framework empowers students to think critically and self‐reflectively about authority, conceptions of the good, the various stakes for different persons and communities in social issues, and the need for moral repair. It establishes the importance of professor and student preparation; propels students into the moral questioning and analysis that constitutes “ethics”; draws attention to the connections between and intersectionality of various moral problems while also attending to important moral distinctions; and affords opportunities to study individual and institutional efforts at moral repair.

The Baltimore Mural Project (BMP) seeks to connect religious studies education to the growing literature on threshold concepts in order to address bottleneck areas in student learning. The project is designed for undergraduate service courses comprised of mostly non‚Äêmajors: for example, world religions. Students in these courses often struggle to understand and apply the discipline's unique approaches to the study of religion (i.e. its threshold concepts). Rather than merely memorize certain facts about a religious tradition's myths [or world forming stories], rituals [or embodied disclosures], materials, and so on... students are asked to apply threshold concepts related to religion, art, and the social good to the study of murals in Baltimore. Through a series of project elements (including: field work, photography, digital geomapping, and quantitative, qualitative, and archival research) the BMP helps students who struggle with threshold concepts in religious studies by creatively connecting the more conventional aspects of world religions courses to social justice issues related to mural art in Baltimore. By experientially helping students to make these connections, they are able to find creative routes through otherwise hindering barriers to their learning in religious studies.

This article consists of four brief responses to Lucretia B. Yaghjian's “Pedagogical challenges in teaching ESOL/Multilingual writers in theological education,” published in this issue of the journal.

A theological school's international students contribute to and are constitutive of its diversity. Yet while research on diversity in theological education is flourishing, the pedagogical challenges of international ESOL (English for Speakers of other Languages) theological students and of their teachers have received scant attention. This article probes the pedagogical challenges of international student writers in theological schools, and of their teachers and tutors, by (1) reflecting on those challenges, their context, and responses to them; (2) connecting contemporary theories of ESOL language learning with the practice of teaching and tutoring non‐native English writers in a theological context; and (3) proposing a discipline‐driven, writing‐centered ESOL pedagogy that I call “Writing Theology as a Common Language.” See as well “Responses to Lucretia B. Yaghjian's ‘Pedagogical challenges in teaching ESOL/multilingual writers in theological education,’ by Steed Vernyl Davidson, Sheryl A. Kujawa‐Holbrook (with Ahsah Kyuelna and Angela Wendy Tankersley), Hyo‐Dong Lee, and Carmen M. Nanko‐Fernández, published in this issue of the journal.