Resources
When I was invited to participate in this blog series, I was preparing to teach, for the first time, a course on the Catholic sex abuse crisis. I had wanted to teach the course for quite some time but was held back both by my sense of not understanding adequately the massive amount of material that comprised the crisis and my anxieties about how this material might impact students. What about students who were survivors of sexual violence? What about students who understood themselves as faithful Catholics? Or who had left the Church angry and bitter? What about students—and this is particularly relevant to my geographical context—who were suspicious of Catholics as an exotic, mysterious, pseudo-Christian sect? I taught the class. I had students who identified with each of these subject positions. Neither their written work nor their in-class participation nor our informal one-on-one conversations contained any evidence that they were unduly troubled by the materials or unable to grasp with the questions they raised. In fact, it was our collective sense of inadequacy as we grappled with the enormity and complexity of what we were trying to interpret that left us feeling overwhelmed. But, as those who go to the gym more than I do—which wouldn’t take a lot—would say, it was a good kind of pain. This semester, as I am writing my contributions to this blog series, I am teaching, for the sixth time, a course focused on Jesus films. This is one of my bread-and-butter courses. It is popular with students and it works like a well-oiled machine. The films require us to grapple with questions about gender, race, sexuality, ethnicity, and violence, but I have never paused to worry that the course might run the risk of traumatizing my students. (Although the level of brutality in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ comes awfully close.) Given my experience over the years of teaching this course, however, I should know better. A few weeks ago, I got an email from a student who self-identified as a fundamentalist Christian, as someone who had been taught that the Bible was inerrant, literally true, and harmonious. The comparative, rhetorical analysis of the gospels that comprises the first few weeks of this course were challenging him in profound and unsettling ways. He was having to grapple with the idea—and the evidence—that the Bible did not speak with a uniform voice and that it may, in fact, contain tensions that simply could not be reconciled. This student was seeking out a conversation. Since I grew up in a very similar religious context, I am able to talk about these types of concerns, without undermining the perspective of the course. As I tell all of my students, they can enter and leave my class thinking that the Bible is the inerrant, infallible word of God, but they will have to grapple with the fact that we only have access to that word in a complex, rhetorically sophisticated document with multiple perspectives on who Jesus is and why he matters. Every semester I’ve taught this course, I’ve had at least one student with these concerns. Sometimes several. Some have sought out conversation. Some have worked through their concerns in assignments. Some have probably dropped the course—or just kept their worries under wraps. Some have been more open; others have been more hostile. Some have clung to an apologetic task; some have offered to pray for me. Some have the greatest trouble when we talk about the Bible; others face their Waterloo as we start talking about the films. Still, others find the greatest challenge when we review the history of American Christianity. My experience with this class reminds me that what we, as scholars of religion and theology, take as our baseline—that religious ideas, texts, and practices have a history, that they have been subjected to a variety of interpretations, that they have ugly legacies, that they vary by time and place—is a profoundly disturbing perspective to some people. Just as we have come to realize that “objectivity” is never truly neutral and that “secularity” entails a normative vision, we also need to grapple with the fact that the foundational moves of the academic study of religion and theology might be the most traumatic dimension of our courses for some of our students.
In "Arts of the Contact Zone, Pratt describes a manuscript from 1613 penned by Andean man named Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala. The manuscript was a letter written to King Phillip III of Spain and was titled The First New Chronicle and Good Government. The manuscript details Spanish conquest in South America. Pratt cites the manuscript as an example of autoethnography. She writes, “Guaman Poma’s New Chronicle is an instance of what I have proposed to call an authethnographic text, by which I mean a text in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of them”. The New Chronicle ends with a revisionist account of the Spanish conquest. Pratt uses the manuscript as an example of an oppressed person or group resisting hegemony, and she connects the practice of authoethnography, critique and resistance to the creation of contact zones.
This essay explores challenges that arise for professors who teach critical theory in our current climate of conservatism. Specifically, it is argued that the conservative commitments to non-revolutionary change and reverence for tradition are corrupted in our current political and intellectual climate. This corruption, called "ideological imperviousness," undermines the institutional structures put in place to produce a functional educational environment that imposes an unjust vulnerability on professors and risks depriving students of the opportunity to acquire the critical skills necessary to combat their own vulnerabilities.
In its first century the American higher-education system was a messy, disorganised joke. How did it rise to world dominance?
Written assessment feedback has not been widely researched despite higher education students continually expressing the need for meaningful and constructive feedback. This qualitative study employing focus groups captures and interprets the student perspective of written assessment feedback. Participants were Registered Nurses and non-traditional entrants to higher education. The findings generated a framework of themes and categories representing the feedback process experienced by the students. The themes were ‘learning from’,‘the process of receiving’ and ‘making sense of’ feedback.When this framework incorporates strategies such as ‘feed-forward’, selfmanaged learning and personalized guidance it then represents a heuristic model of effective written assessment feedback. The model, created as a result of the research, should enhance the student experience and aid understanding of the complex processes associated with providing written assessment feedback.
In classes that examine entrenched injustices like sexism or racism, studentssometimes use ‘‘distancing strategies’’ to dissociate themselves from the injustice being studied. Education researchers argue that distancing is a mechanism through which students, especially students of apparent privilege, deny their complicity in systemic injustice. While I am sympathetic to this analysis, I argue that there is much at stake in student distancing that the current literature fails to recognize. On my view, distancing perpetuates socially sanctioned forms of ignorance and unknowing, through which students misrecognize not only their complicity in injustice, but also the ways that injustice shapes the world, their lives, and their knowledge. Thus, distancing is pedagogically problematic because it prevents students from understanding important social facts, and because it prevents them from engaging with perspectives, analyses, and testimonies that might beneficially challenge their settled views and epistemic habits. To substantiate this new analysis, I draw on recent work on epistemologies of ignorance, especially Jose´ Medina’s account of ‘‘active ignorance.’’ In order to respond to student distancing, I argue, it is not sufficient for teachers to make students aware of injustice, or of their potential complicity in it. Beyond this, teachers should cultivate epistemic virtue in the classroom and encourage students to take responsibility for better ways of knowing. The article ends by outlining several classroom practices for beginning this work. Keywords Pedagogy Distancing Epistemology of ignorance Active ignorance
Kennesaw’s Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning maintains one of the most extensive directories of conferences focused on college/university teaching and their sponsoring organizations.  
Kennesaw’s Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning provides an extensive list of disciplinary and interdisciplinary journals in the scholarship of teaching and Learning (SoTL) focused on undergraduate and graduate education for teachers at colleges and universities, organized alphabetically. Last updated in July 2017.
This indispensable handbook provides helpful strategies for dealing with both the everyday challenges of university teaching and those that arise in efforts to maximize learning for every student. The suggested strategies are supported by research and adaptable to specific classroom situations. Rather than suggest a "set of recipes" to be followed mechanically, the book gives instructors the tools they need to deal with the ever-changing dynamics of teaching and learning. Available with InfoTrac Student Collections http://gocengage.com/infotrac.
Inspired by the #FergusonSyllabus, the #StandingRockSyllabus, the #BlackIslamSyllabus and others, this reading list provides resources for teaching and learning about anti-Muslim racism in the United States. 
Wabash Center Staff Contact
Sarah Farmer, Ph.D.
Associate Director
Wabash Center
farmers@wabash.edu