Resources

The Active Life is Parker J. Palmer's deep and graceful exploration of a spirituality for the busy, sometimes frenetic lives many of us lead. Telling evocative stories from a variety of religious traditions, including Taoist, Jewish, and Christian, Palmer shows that the spiritual life does not mean abandoning the world but engaging it more deeply through life-giving action. He celebrates both the problems and potentials of the active life, revealing how much they have to teach us about ourselves, the world, and God. (From the Publisher)

The author argues for an organic or process approach to religious, moral, and theological education. She takes up five reigning educational methods (case study, gestalt, phenomenological, narrative, conscientizing), gauges their strengths, weaknesses, and theological promise, and offers practical reformulations of each method. (From the Publisher)

Transforming Knowledge suggests that education can serve neither the quest for knowledge nor the promise of a genuinely democratic system until some very basic intellectual errors are uncovered and corrected. Examining the heritage of a tradition created primarily by white Euro-American men who considered themselves the norm and the ideal for all humankind, Elizabeth Kamarck Minnich identifies these errors, characterizes them, and demonstrates how they work to distort and limit our knowledge. She cites work primarily by feminist scholars and activists, but also from ethnic, peace, and ecological studies, and argues that a reorientation of education and thus thinking and thus knowledge makes sense. This book is the result of more than twenty years of work in higher education during which the author talked with thousands of faculty members, administrators, students, and community people about the necessity to transform the curriculum in this country. Drawing also on her years of work with Hannah Arendt and on Dewey, Kant, Plato, and Socrates, Minnich confronts the "dominant meaning system" that perpetuates errors in thinking, particularly faulty generalization and universalization, circular reasoning, mystified concepts, and partial knowledge. In light of the heated debate in which such critics as William Bennett and Allen Bloom charge that a return to "the classics" is the only acceptable route for education, Transforming Knowledge offers a philosophical analysis of the cultural, intellectual, political tradition behind our curriculum. Minnich warns that it is in and through education that a culture, and polity, not only tries to perpetuate but enacts the kinds of thinking it welcomes, and discards and/or discredits the kinds it fears. (From the Publisher)

Leypoldt provides forty distinct ways to teach young people and adults, with diagrams to illustrate each method. (From the Publisher)

In this profound and provocative book, acclaimed authors Maria Harris and Gabriel Moran challenge the religious education community to risk change. Writing in the form of a give-and-take conversation, a conversation that includes Jewish educator Sherry Blumberg and European educator Friedrich Schweitzer: the authors incorporate ecumenical and international perspectives into their analysis of the state of contemporary religious education - and its future. (From the Publisher)

Themes for a Spirituality of Pedagogy (1988 Madeleva Lecture in Spirituality), Maria Harris. An essay that focuses on teaching as a form of spirituality; five different themes that resonate in the lives of women are explored: silence, remembering, ritual mourning, artistry, and birthing. (From the Publisher)

This book offers an orientation in Christian theology, broadly conceived. Its subject is not that single discipline in the theological curriculum to which the title of 'theology' is nowadays often reserved, but rather the whole curriculum, or the whole range of disciplines which together constitute the enterprise of Christian theology, and whose study constitutes theological education. (From the Publisher)

This book provides teachers and trainers with sensitive and practical help in working effectively with groups of culturally diverse learners. Raymond J. Wlodkowski and Margery B. Ginsberg combine their respective expertise in motivation and multiculturalism to go beyond the usual rhetoric on promoting diversity, offering real-world guidance and suggestions for successful teaching in today's changing classroom environment. Using a motivational framework for culturally responsive teaching complete with extensive examples and illustrations, the authors describe the values, learning strategies, and structures necessary to establish inclusion, develop attitude, enhance meaning, and engender competence. By considering a set of eight guidelines, teachers and trainers can learn how to revise syllabus and assessment formats, form cooperative collegial groups, and create action plans for implementing a culturally responsive pedagogy. Diversity and Motivation shows all postsecondary faculty, instructors, trainers, and administrators how to create safe and respectful learning environments with teaching practices that cross disciplines and cultures to engage the motivation and honor the integrity of all learners. (From the Publisher)

At a time of widespread perplexity about the social role of humanistic scholarship, few disciplines are as anxious about their nature and purposes as academic theology. In this important work, W. Clark Gilpin, dean of the University of Chicago Divinity School, proposes that American theological scholarship become responsible to a threefold public: the churches, the academic community, and civil society. Gilpin approaches this goal indirectly, by investigating the historic social roles of Protestant theologians and the educational institutions in which they have pursued their scholarship and teaching. Ranging from analyses of the New England Puritan Cotton Mather to contemporary theologians as "public intellectuals," Gilpin proposes that we find out what theology "is by asking what theologians "do. By showing how particular cultural problems have always shaped the work of theologians, Gilpin's work profoundly illuminates the foundations of American academic theology, providing insights that will help guide its future. (From the Publisher)

Learning used to be taken for granted by teachers. No more. Growing numbers of teachers realize that teaching does not always promote learning. More Quick Hits offers simple but successful strategies that award-winning teachers have found promote learning. Included among these strategies are tips for designing courses and environments that promote learning, and advice on creating learning communities — communities where not only students learn, but teachers do too. More Quick Hits also includes special sections on service and learning, technology and learning, and using assessment and evaluation for learning. Finally, More Quick Hits offers thoughts on how teachers themselves learn about teaching, including through their mistakes. An annotated "Quick List" of weightier resources on teaching and learning is included at the end of the volume, and "Quick Wits" — words and pictures to both encourage and amuse — are sprinkled throughout the book. (From the Publisher)