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The Teaching Professor, Volume 29, Number 1

This paper explores the possibilities and challenges inherent in employing community service-learning as a pedagogy for engaging undergraduates in theology and religious studies courses that contribute to racial reconciliation. The paper summarizes research from the scholarship of teaching and learning on best practices for structuring service-learning projects and processes that hold the possibility of students' genuine engagement with issues of race and the wisdom of the Catholic tradition.

“Metacognition” refers to helping students learn how to learn. This article provides suggestions for integrating student metacognition into a college course. It uses the example of a biology classroom, but the material is easily transferable. 

See the responses by Nancy Fuchs Kreimer, Yael Shy, and Yehuda Sarna directly following in the table of contents linked here. Rabbinical students gain important knowledge and become more reflective teachers by learning about other religions and with people who practice them. They can also learn how to help educate non-Jews about Judaism and serve as representatives of, and advocates for, our community.

The Other Side of Pedagogy: Lacan’s Four Discourses and the Development of the Student Writer

Click Here for Book Review Abstract: Delineates Lacan’s theory of the four discourses as a practical framework through which faculty can reflect on where their students are, developmentally, and where they might go. University classrooms are increasingly in crisis—though popular demands for accountability grow more insistent, no one seems to know what our teaching should seek to achieve. This book traces how we arrived at our current impasse, and it uses Lacan’s theory of the four discourses to chart a path forward via an analysis of the freshman writing class. How did we forfeit a meaningful set of goals for our teaching? T. R. Johnson suggests that, by the 1960s, the work of Bergson and Piaget had led us to see student growth as a journey into more and more abstract thought, a journey that will happen naturally if the teacher knows how to stay out of the way. Since the 1960s, we’ve come to see development, in turn, only as a vague initiation into the academic community. This book, however, offers an alternative tradition, one rooted in Vygotsky and the feminist movement, that defines the developing student writer in terms of a complex, intersubjective ecology, and then, through these precedents, proposes a fully psychoanalytic model of student development. To illustrate his practical use of the four discourses, Johnson draws on a wide array of concepts and a colorful set of examples, including Franz Kafka, Keith Richards, David Foster Wallace, Hannah Arendt, and many others. “Graceful, provocative, thoughtful, and well researched, The Other Side of Pedagogy connects theory and teaching in compelling ways. This is a groundbreaking book that scholars of writing will want to read, reread, and teach.” — Joseph Harris, author of A Teaching Subject: Composition Since 1966 (From the Publisher)

The Culturally Inclusive Educator: Preparing for a Multicultural World

Click Here for Book Review Abstract: The Culturally Inclusive Educator asks educators to consider what they can do differently to create a welcoming, inclusive, and exciting environment for the 21st century. Based on the author’s national research and consulting work, this book examines the discrepancy between the current educational cultural climate and the need for educators and their institutions to prepare for a growing multicultural population. It asks what constitutes effective preparation, and provides guidance on overcoming personal and institutional challenges to cultural inclusiveness (stereotype threats, microaggressions, colorblindness/identity-blindness, implicit bias, among others). Samuels begins with the challenges facing the higher education community and then offers 8 transformative steps to help build cultural inclusiveness that any educator teaching any subject can utilize to increase their effectiveness. Culturally inclusive leadership is highlighted as the model for educators and institutions to embrace for success in today’s world. Book Features: - Diversity training and inclusiveness strategies for transforming curricula. - Reflective practices that unearth personal biases and behaviors. - Insights about faculty preparedness drawn from an unprecedented national study. - Attention to specific issues and intersections of race, gender, sexual orientation, and disability. - A lens for understanding cultural inclusiveness as a fundamental leadership practice. (From the Publisher)

The Teaching Professor, Volume 28, Number 10
Seminary Journal vol. 19, no 2, 2013

Includes syllabi from a variety of college and university courses, across all disciplines, that have a strong flavor of “civic agency,” the capacity to work across differences to solve public problems, create lasting civic goods, and shape the world around us in democratic ways. The project emphasizes courses that speak to citizens as citizens, concerned about co-creating their communities of different scale.

A project team developing resources for teaching Biblical languages using methods borrowed from the field of Second Language Acquisition used for modern languages. 

Wabash Center Staff Contact

Sarah Farmer, Ph.D.
Associate Director
Wabash Center

farmers@wabash.edu