Blogs

Nancy Lynne Westfield Associate Professor of Religious Education Drew Theological School Teach students where they are! This forthright adage is deceptively difficult. The question becomes – where are they in proximity to my own location? In other words, what does it mean for the effectiveness of my teaching if the.

Dr. Molly Bassett Associate Professor of Religious Studies Georgia State University I wish I could tell you exactly what I’ll be doing on the first day of my new course. But I can’t. What I can say is that the syllabus is mostly finished, and I’ve scheduled meetings with the.

We invite you to engage and follow the new round of Wabash Center’s "Stories from the Front (of the Classroom)” blog series. New entries will be posted every Tuesday from January 19 to September 20, 2016. Nancy Lynne Westfield (Drew...

During a recent webinar on the topic of leadership I offered a list of important skills related to the topic at hand. The list included something along the lines of the need for a leader to be "politically astute." That...

KC Choi Associate Professor, Department of Religion Seton Hall University I was horrified to discover that Dylann Roof regarded Asians as inherently racist and thus possible allies to white supremacist causes. That opinion received little media attention, except for spotty clusters throughout social networking sites. And while Roof’s assessment of Asians is nothing short of galling, I also found them disquieting; it was the words of a white supremacist mad man that had uncomfortably recalled a specific set of experiences in my course “Race, Politics, and Theology.” Students in my course have mirrored the relative racial and ethnic diversity of...

Theological schools and seminaries have been relative latecomers to rigorous practices of educational assessment. There are varied and plausible reasons for that which "make sense." However, in the current age of higher accountability to accrediting agencies, stakeholders, and educational consumers,...

Dr. Efrain Agosto New York Theological Seminary We gathered for our regular summer session class on a Thursday evening at New York Theological Seminary, June 18, the night after the horrific shootings in an AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Three of my six students for the class were out sick; no doubt saddened by the tragedy of the night before, perhaps even so adversely affected that they had a kind of visceral, physical reaction that affected their health. Six of the nine African Americans murdered Wednesday night in Charleston were women, by all accounts gifted and faithful leaders of

Nyasha Junior, Ph.D Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible Temple University Department of Religion The Rachel Dolezal story is all over the news. The story is a horror show for many reasons, but as Dolezal was an African-American Studies instructor at Eastern Washington University, her story brings up important issues of race in the classroom. It has me wondering how my colleagues think about and handle these issues. What does the Dolezal story bring up for you as an educator? What assumptions do your students make about you based on your body? What assumptions do students or other scholars make about

During a recent conversation among deans they commiserated over how difficult it was to bring about changes in their schools. Despite their best efforts at communicating the need for change, cultivating support, and implementing strategies, change was happening too slow...

For our final post, we each cover an overarching reflection or two from the 2014-15 academic year. Look for fresh content from the Wabash Center in the fall. In the meantime, feel free to visit our ongoing blog Race Matters...