Resources

Michael Rifenburg begins and ends his book with the melancholy story of a student who didn’t make it. A freshman at Auburn University, “Trey” was a star on the football field, but a dud in his classes. Rifenburg – then a master’s student working as a tutor for athletes – tries to help him, but it doesn’t work. When the Auburn football team wins a national championship a few years later, Trey has already dropped out and disappeared. Rifenburg’s book helps us understand what went wrong with Trey’s education. His ultimate argument – that writing teachers can better support student-athletes by understanding the embodied knowledge they bring from the playing field to the writing classroom – asks teachers to see the hidden talents in even those students labeled remedial. Rifenburg pushes past both the “dumb jock” stereotype and the tension that exists between academics and athletics in many colleges. He breaks down these misconceptions and boundaries to explain student-athletes as possessors of “a prior knowledge honed through bodily engagement with text and through writing practices that privilege the body as a central mode of meaning making” – a knowledge that has long gone unrecognized and untapped in the writing classroom, where the abstract practice of writing can seem disconnected from physical experience (5). As a graduate of Division I sports powerhouses like Auburn and the University of Oklahoma – where he worked in a writing center dedicated to serving student-athletes – Rifenburg is well-poised to make this argument. He was embedded for a season with the University of North Georgia’s men’s basketball team, where he attended practices and interviewed players and coaches about how they make meaning on the field. He performs detailed readings of baffling football plays from Auburn’s thick playbooks. His conclusion is that student-athletes learn complex theoretical plays through physical engagement, with the implication that this kind of learning is multi-modal, exacting, and collaborative – and potentially transferable to the traditional writing classroom. He concludes that student-athletes learn their sport through three “cognitive processes”: spatial orientation (or understanding their bodies in relationship to other bodies on the field), haptic communication (or physical touch, as when a coach re-positions a player’s hips), and scaffolded situations (or the step-by-step process through which players build up to learning a complex play). For Rifenburg, these skills are not that different from what writers do: position their ideas in relationship to other peoples’ (or spatial orientation), understand writing as a communal activity that takes place within and between groups of people (or haptic communication), and build upon many early drafts to create longer, complex texts (or scaffolded situations). He ends by prompting the reader to ask how these cross-currents between writing and playing can be leveraged to support student-athlete writers in the classroom. In the end, Rifenburg raises more questions than he answers. His description of the analogy between writing and playing sports is original and clear-sighted, but it remains only an analogy, as he stops short of offering strategies for putting this insight into action – an odd lacuna for a book that places so much emphasis on concrete, embodied experience. Indeed, I often found myself mindful of what is left out of Rifenburg’s book. While he displays deep familiarity with the field of writing studies, he does not acknowledge gender studies or disability studies, fields that are historically groundbreaking in exploring embodied meaning. Similarly, Rifenburg’s focus is exclusively on men playing high-profile, competitive, aggressive sports; do other types of athletes experience bodily knowledge differently? What of swimmers, runners, or dancers? Women athletes? Do student-athletes at small liberal arts colleges or community colleges – where athletics are not as prominent – experience a different kind of relationship between sports and academics? Rifenburg’s study opens the door for many important inquiries to follow. Ultimately, he provides a model for thinking about matter, mind, and underexplored student expertise.

I love the face-to-face learning environment. Even when I stood before my first class, uncertain if I knew enough to teach for 10 minutes much less 75, I thrived on the energy in the room. I also felt somewhat at ease with the basics, given I could draw on a lifetime of experience as a student.  When we become teachers, most of us start by emulating the best we have known and their classrooms. In my career, I have handled the auditorium lecture, the seminar, the project-based learning course, and on-site education in the streets of another country. I had good models for them all. Then came online. Until I started working on a system-level “e-learning” committee, I knew little about this mode of delivery. It did not exist when I went to school. And at my institution, there was a decided distrust about the whole enterprise. Most faculty thought online education ran counter to the best of what college instruction should be. Many administrators thought it ran counter to the ethos of the institution itself. But I needed a change and a challenge.  Out of curiosity, I enrolled in an online course at another UNC-system institution. The course was well thought out, beautifully mounted, and, with an engaged instructor, I loved it. I wanted to try teaching in this format, although I recognized that I was an advanced adult learner and my students were largely beginning undergraduates. Luckily, my chair and colleagues said okay. Even with no institutional training or incentives, I dove in. My first time out, I taught three different fully-enrolled general education courses. Miraculously, I survived and some fifteen years later, I have no desire ever to go back to a traditional classroom. The reasons for that change are complicated, but I want to focus on three ways in which I found myself becoming a better teacher online. First, online teaching reinforced that learning happens when students invest in pursuing questions that intrigue them. Thus, when conceptualizing my classes, I chose to position myself as a mentor and a guide instead of the authoritative voice or the day’s entertainment. By creating opportunities that assist students in understanding and formulating the kinds of questions scholars ask, I watched the learning space become less about transmitting knowledge and more about helping students find their own academic voices in line with their interests and learning goals. Rather than mastering a set of facts, we spend our time on skills such as locating appropriate academic resources, analyzing primary and secondary texts, crafting better arguments, and making persuasive and polished presentations. Second, being attached to a computer all day produced greater diligence with my own research. The pressure of setting up an online course (and I change my courses almost every term) feels intense while it is happening. But once class gets underway, the structure of each week produces a rhythm. The teaching tasks (answering questions, grading, interacting in discussion) come in predictable spurts and get accomplished more efficiently. I am not constantly scrambling to get materials together for the next class session. This calmer and steadier pace allows me to build in the time I need for my scholarship, which, in turn, feeds back into my teaching and makes for improvements on the next course iterations. Third, I see student needs and challenges more clearly. Believe it or not, evaluations prove key here. Do not get me wrong. Feedback about online courses invites trolling. And many students, most likely due to the physical remove, tend to be harsher with their assessments. But if you look past the complaining, you see that they are frequently saying “we are ill-equipped for self-directed learning” (especially if the expectation was for something rote). My students are smart and capable. But they have often not been pushed by an increasingly impoverished K-12 system to ask their own questions, to evaluate resources analytically, or to make cogent arguments in sound grammatical form. They are also not accustomed to seeing professors as partners in learning, who will work with them. I have to do considerable outreach and encourage students to ask for the time and attention they might need. I still have spent more of my life in a face-to-face educational environment as opposed to online. But I now know more about the mechanics of learning because of leaving my comfort zone and teaching online. I was forced to think through my pedagogical choices. I stay current with and adapt to the available technology. And I have to work to construct a learning community, rather than counting on shared space to do the job. Teaching online is making me a better teacher. Questions for Consideration: Who am I in the classroom? How do I define my role and how does my pedagogy reflect that position? Do I make time to review my classes over the duration of each term, making certain that my assignments correspond to the learning goals I have established, including the skills I want to help my students develop? How can technology be helpful to me in my instruction? What do I use outside of the classroom (e.g., to stay in contact with family and friends, to shop, to organize my life) that might be useful in the classroom?

A course by Alfred Freddoso at the University of Notre Dame is designed " to see in some depth the relation among the main elements of St. Thomas's general moral theory as laid out in the First Part of the Second Part of the Summa Theologiae, viz., the treatises on beatitude, action, passion, habit, virtue, sin, law, and grace, and (b) to explore in more detail certain specific aspects of these treatises." The distinctions between Aquinas' moral theory and deontologism and consequentialism are also discussed.

A 2008 course by Catherine Wessinger at Loyola University New Orleans aims to "understand the ways women's roles in society and religious beliefs are interrelated and affect one another . . . through the historical study of some of the major religions of the world."

A 2011 course by Janet McDaniel at Florida International University surveys "the construction of gender and roles of women in the Hebrew Bible, New Testament and early Christian communities. The course will utilize Feminist Reconstruction methodology by examining the historical, cultural and religious settings of the texts, including their subsequent transmission through Western Civilization into the present."

A 2006 course by Catherine Wessinger at Loyola University New Orleans seeks to understand "in historical terms of the tension between the significant religious opportunities available to women in the Christian tradition, and the subordination of women in Christian institutions. An understanding of the history of women in the Christian tradition will contribute to an understanding of women’s roles in contemporary American society and in American Christian churches."

A 2011 course by Kelley Flannery Rowan at Florida International University explores "the various experiences of women throughout the world’s religious traditions. . . . includes an exploration of the religions and the rules, rituals, and views that have developed concerning women’s lives, bodies, and their acceptable roles in both society and religion. We will look at how women have confronted, ignored, or found alternate paths in which to grow in their spiritual lives . . . ."

A course by Martha Reineke at the University of Northern Iowa explores "from a psychoanalytic perspective the emergence of the capacity for religious belief in children," with particular attention to Freudians, "object relations theorists," and Lacanians.