Skip to main content

Resources

CLASH! Superheroic Yet Sensible Strategies for Teaching the New Literacies Despite the Status Quo

This book offers ideas that secondary teachers, university content faculty, and teacher educators can use to challenge traditional literacy practices and demonstrate creative, innovative ways of incorporating new literacies into the classroom, all within a strong theoretical framework. Teachers are trying to catch up to the new challenges of the twenty-first century. It is a superheroic feat that must be achieved if education is to stay relevant and viable. There is a lot of zip, bam, whap, and wow in the fast-paced, social networking, technological world, but not so much in the often laboriously slow-paced educational world. Where is the balance? How do teachers and students learn together, since one group has seasoned wisdom with limited technological know-how and the other uses all the cool new tools, but not in the service of learning? These are some important issues to consider in finding the balance in an unstable, fast-moving, ever-changing world. This book is practical and useful to literacy teachers, teacher educators, and university faculty by bringing together the expertise of composition/rhetoric researchers and writers, literacy specialists, technology specialists, and teachers who are on the cutting edge of new literacies. (From the Publisher)

One page Teaching Tactic: to introduce and discuss course content on the first day of class, students work in groups to list what they know about the topic.

Effective pedagogy in the capstone course or integrative seminar — a 1000 word response to a Call for Papers.

Effective pedagogy in the capstone course or integrative seminar — a 1000 word response to a Call for Papers.

Effective pedagogy in the capstone course or integrative seminar — a 1000 word response to a Call for Papers.

What is the relationship between the academic knowledge of the guild and the formation of students in the classroom? This Forum gathers four essays originally presented at a Special Topics Session at the 2009 conference of the American Academy of Religion (Atlanta, Georgia), with a brief introductory essay by Fred Glennon explaining the genesis of the panel. Douglas Jacobsen and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen clarify some of the issues at stake in undergraduate liberal arts classrooms by distinguishing between four dimensions of what they refer to as “the (in)formation teaching matrix: institutional context, course content, faculty roles, and student outcomes. John Thatamanil argues that all learning necessarily presupposes formation. Amanda Porterfield argues against using the word “formation” because it complicates and undermines her teaching goals to historicize religion and narratives about it through open-ended inquiry. And, finally, Mary Elizabeth Moore explores the interactive processes linking formation, information, reformation, and transformation.

One page Teaching Tactic: students discuss the nature of religion by comparing brief descriptions of founders.

One page Teaching Tactic: students are exposed to a reading of sacred text in the native language.

Seminary education requires that students learn a complex body of theological knowledge, engage in the practices of ministry, and develop as persons of faith and vocation. Utilizing the six aspects of significant learning experiences defined by L. Dee Fink – foundational knowledge, application, integration, the human dimension, caring, and learning how to learn – the author explores teaching practices that reframe knowing, doing, and being in seminary classrooms.

How do seminarians move from imagining ministry to embodying pastoral imagination? Stories gathered from seminarians in their final year of study show the complexity of shifting from classroom work, which foregrounds theory and intellectual imagination, to more embodied, relational, and emotionally intense engagements of ministry. Stories about learning ministry articulate a process we call the birth of pastoral imagination. New ministers test their use of knowledge acquired in classroom and books within the limits of actual ministry situations. They become overwhelmed by multiple variables in situations where they must make choices and act. These moments of action are fraught with risk and responsibility for the outcomes. Articulation and theological reflection are formative for students learning the practice of ministry. Implications for theological education include making greater “use of knowledge” in ministry practice and “use of practice” in classrooms. Points of crisis in the student stories raise additional questions about how some complications and interruptions to the “birth process” may present tragic consequences.

Grant Coaching

The Wabash Center understands our grants program as a part of our overall teaching and learning mission. We are interested in not only awarding grants to excellent proposals, but also in enabling faculty members to develop and hone their skills as grant writers. Therefore we offer grant coaching for all faculty interested in submitting a Wabash Center Project Grant proposal.

Sarah Farmer, Ph.D.
Associate Director, Wabash Center
farmers@wabash.edu