Resources

Focuses on the tensions and contradictions within feminist pedagogy. Contradictory dimensions of feminists' locations in the academy; Power and authority; Pedagogy and performativity; Feminist difference and the politics of positionality; Claims of authority and the impossibility of normative judgments; Contradictions of institutional and pedagogical authority.

This paper discusses how the growth of technology and its impact on our communication paradigm requires a deconstruction of power and authority in the classroom. It exposes the ways in which faculty expertise in content in a technological environment, that is, being the most skilled and competent computer user in the classroom, negatively informs our understanding of classroom authority and teaching success. It argues that a creative problem-solving process is a more useful measure of successful teaching and calls for flexible pedagogies that focus on community-building while maintaining clear conceptual and theoretical frameworks. This paper also provides a case study of the author's approach to altering classroom authority by examining, for example, such practices as teaching multiple courses concurrently, eliciting student voice, discussing course pedagogy in the classroom, involving students in decision-making about grading and deadlines, giving students peer teaching responsibilities, and focusing on consensus as the classroom decision-making process.

In instructional design for higher education, it is important to the success of all students to take into account the differences in individual learning styles. Research indicates that different student populations have characteristically different approaches to learning and that teachers can use patterns of effective practice to foster success across cognitive styles. (Author/MSE)

Journal Issue

A college student getting a liberal arts education ponders filling out a questionnaire that includes an opportunity for him to evaluate his instructor. At times it appears that the purpose of his education is just to entertain him.

Richard Miller, Laurie Patton and Stephen Webb ask several questions about the goals and aims of those teaching religious studies and what actually occurs in classrooms. The authors are concerned about the lack of a common working vocabulary for speaking about such philosophical issues. They note that teaching religion is typically classified according to one of two paradigms, either instrumental or transmission. The "instrumental" paradigm views teaching in terms of its technical components, while the "transmission" paradigm seeks to impart the concepts and tools necessary for critical analysis to the students. Miller, Patton and Webb propose a third alternative, the "rhetorical" paradigm. This model seeks to empower voices within the classroom, including that of the teacher. It requires teachers to reexamine the power relations present in the classroom and to reconfigure these relationship in such a way that students feel free to engage actively in the course. The authors consider the rhetorical model in light of the three specific subdisicplines of religious ethics, the comparative history of religions, and theology.

Berling discusses pluralism as one criterion of excellence for theological schools. She acknowledges the challenge to the very idea of excellence implicit in pluralism and thus the need to define adequate standards of excellence. She also indicates a concern with the education of faculties prepared to deal with issues of pluralism.

This essay, the first in a series about the priorities of the professoriate, offers a vision of the new American scholar. The first part of the essay examines the numerous activities that surround faculty work and how they relate, in a changing external environment, to the role of the scholar. The stage is set by defining how higher education relates to the larger purposes of American society and by noting the assumptions and consensus within which academic professionals have traditionally operated. The essay then examines how the contexts of faculty work are being transformed in the 1990s by financial constraints, the technological environment, and basic assumptions about work itself. The second part of the essay deals with how these changes affect and necessitate rethinking faculty careers. It discusses changes in the academic workplace, the shifting concept of scholarship, the interdependence of teaching and research, the relationship between personal and professional needs, interactive approaches to learning, working within a collaborative organization, the career implications of crossing knowledge domains and moving in and out of the academy, and tenure and alternative employment arrangements.