Resources

Click Here for Book Review The latest from an internationally recognized thinker at the intersection of faith and pedagogy Christian teachers have long been thinking about what content to teach, but little scholarship has been devoted to how faith forms the actual process of teaching. Is there a way to go beyond Christian perspectives on the subject matter and think about the teaching itself as Christian? In this book David Smith argues that faith has a critical role in shaping pedagogy and the learn-ing experience. Smith’s scholarly exploration of education combines both theory and practice. With clever and sometimes funny examples, he shows how teachers of every subject and age group can be atten-tive to how their students are experiencing and interpreting learning. From desk arrangement to discussion questions, there are myriad opportunities to design classes that are deeply rooted in Christian practices. On Christian Teaching provides fresh insight into Christian education that expresses faith and community. (From the Publisher)

Academic work, like many other professional occupations, has increasingly become digitised. This book brings together leading scholars who examine the impacts, possibilities, politics and drawbacks of working in the contemporary university, using digital technologies. Contributors take a critical perspective in identifying the implications of digitisation for the future of higher education, academic publishing protocols and platforms and academic employment conditions, the ways in which academics engage in their everyday work and as public scholars and relationships with students and other academics. The book includes accounts of using digital media and technologies as part of academic practice across teaching, research administration and scholarship endeavours, as well as theoretical perspectives. The contributors span the spectrum of early to established career academics and are based in education, research administration, sociology, digital humanities, media and communication.(From the Publisher)

Decoding the Disciplines is a widely-used and proven methodology that prompts teachers to identify the bottlenecks – the places where students get stuck – that impede learners’ paths to expert thinking in a discipline. The process is based on recognizing the gap between novice learning and expert thinking, and uncovering tacit knowledge that may not be made manifest in teaching. Through “decoding”, implicit expert knowledge can be turned into explicit mental tasks, and made available to students. This book presents a seven-step process for uncovering bottlenecks and determining the most effective way to enable students to surmount them. The authors explain how to apply the seven steps of Decoding the Disciplines – how to identify bottlenecks, unpack the critical thinking of experts, teach students how to do this kind of thinking, and how to evaluate the degree to which students have learned to do it. They provide in-depth descriptions of each step and, at the end of each chapter, at least one exercise the reader can do on his or her own. Because the decoding process works well with groups, they also provide exercises for leading groups through the process, making available to informal groups as well as groups led by professional developers, the tools to transform their understanding of teaching and learning by getting the student view that they refer to as “the bottleneck perspective.This book uses research and personal stories from university lecturers to explore pedagogical strategies that illuminate how students’ minds can be ‘switched on’ in order to unlock their extraordinary potential. It presents diverse ways to create inspiring learning environments, in chapters written by internationally respected experts in the broad field of the social sciences. Because it focuses on the mental moves that underlie the cognitive competencies we want students to develop, spelling out what critical thinking consists of for any field, the methodology helps teachers to get beyond focus on content delivery and transmission and provides criteria to select from the bewildering array of teaching tools the methods most appropriate to what they are teaching. This is a book for faculty who want their students to develop disciplinary forms of reasoning, and are moreover interested in a methodology with the potential to transform and reinvigorate their teaching. It is particularly suitable for use in communities of practice, and should be indispensable for any one engaged in cross-disciplinary teaching, as it enables co-teachers to surface each other’s tacit knowledge and disciplinary assumptions. (From the Publisher)

Walking the beach, I am caught by the ordered chaos of blue and white shards oriented around a large center shell. What a great image of centered-set thinking, I muse, and pull out my phone to capture the image. Isn’t a part of the deans’ job to keep pointing to the center? To guard not the boundaries but the heart? In the midst of shifting cultural forces, the changing nature of the institutional church and theological education (all our usual suspects), we are committed to a common mission, living a common life, journeying toward a common goal. But a poet reminds me that “things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” And the words trouble me because I long for the center to hold. What I don’t see, until I bring the captured image up on my screen, is the bright luminous reflection offering me a glimpse of another reality to which the whole enterprise is oriented. And I think, yes, it is true. The deans’ job is to keep orienting toward the center and fortunately, we do not do it alone.

My course began with an iconic book by bell hooks and ended, after several other readings, with a beloved text by Parker Palmer. On the last day of class, a white woman student came up to me to tell me how much she enjoyed the course (she had earned an A in the course), and to give me feedback, saying, “Next time, start with the white guy and not bell hooks; it will be easier for us white people to stay in the conversation.” So much teaching is complicit with dominant race ideologies and patriarchy, yet we yearn for different ways to teach. White normative approaches to disciplinary-subject matter, reading lists which strain to add even one non-white author, grading standards which insist upon majority culture assessment categories are only a few of the ways that the ideals which normalize whiteness permeate our daily living and teaching. Disrupting these patterns of evil and shifting these detrimental values takes mixing things up, muddling stuff, creating newness and difference. Increasing our knowledge of new resources and redefining our criteria of what might constitute acceptable academic resource for our classrooms, might be a way forward. Look for narratives which resist and repudiate the story of whiteness. Stories that champion and reinforce whiteness and patriarchy, stories that allow for a token few minoritized people to triumph, but refuse to portray a change in the oppression for all or stories which never question the absence of powerless people in significant roles permeate our airwaves and imaginations. We are persons immersed in the narrative which supports and promotes white supremacy, white nationalism, and patriarchy. We have to find ways to resist. A critical challenge for all teachers who want to teach as a disruption to whiteness and patriarchy is that, regardless of personal social location, each of us must expand our knowledge of freedom narratives. We, all of us, given the ethos of the United States in the 21st century, must with great intent, seek out and immerse ourselves in the counter-narratives to the lie of whiteness. We must internalize a narrative of freedom, love, creativity, and forgiveness. We must believe in the sacredness and worth of all human beings and teach this story in unflinching and believable ways. As a spiritual discipline, take time to fill your consciousness and imagination with freedom narratives as a way to fortify yourself for teaching against the status quo. We must re-teach ourselves in order to teach toward freedom.   Read stories that depict and portray people of color as intelligent, generative, and caring human beings – as normal. This is why the movie Black Panther was so popular and so refreshing. It did not start and end with chattel slavery. It made use of fresh portrayals of people of the African diaspora which told a story of community, kinship and the complexity of freedom.  Avoid the motifs of the individual superhero like the ways Martin Luther King’s or Harriet Tubman’s legacies have been distorted. Look past the stories of inferiority and degradation often told in the daily news cycle. Find stories where the women are not one-dimensional wooden beings and the people of color are not gratuitously violent, oversexualized, or stupid. Teach yourself to identify the narratives of freedom and bring them into your classroom. In immersing yourself in freedom narratives, look for a multiplicity of mediums: film clips, music, screenplays, artwork, photography (all means of storytelling), and then consider making use of the best ones in your classes. Narratives that are sophisticated about race/gender politics are seeping into the U.S. culture. Look for new stories like “Dear White People” on Netflix. Binge watching both seasons of “Dear White People” took focus and stamina. I managed to do it in 48 hours – taking occasional breaks to walk my dog, get a snack and sleep. The well-written Netflix series is based upon an acclaimed film of the same name. The plot is set in a 21st-century fictitious college called Winchester University. The story depicts the lives of African American college students at this Ivy League, predominantly white university. The Black students are bright, articulate, culturally and politically conscious, and conscientious. In other words, the black folks are woke. The title “Dear White People” is a clue that the white folks of the community are not woke. The lead character and protagonist has a campus radio show. She often, to inform white peers, professors, and university administrators formats her radio soliloquies in the form of a letter which begins, “Dear White People.” Then in great poetic rant, she informs and reprimands the offending, or simply ignorant, white people about their white supremacy, privilege, and the ways their behaviors and the racist, sexist systems which privilege them, to which they seem to be oblivious, continually affect her and her friends. The poignant stories disclose and interrogate cultural bias, social injustice, misguided activism, and the zeal that comes with college-aged persons. The stories are also about the relationships of young people and the ways they struggle to negotiate their social, cultural, and intellectual growth. Creator and executive producer Justin Simien is a storyteller who understands the ever-present irony, bitter humor and too often anger for persons attempting to live life while being a target of white supremacy and patriarchy. “Dear White People” is an expanding of freedom narratives. This is the kind of material you want to explore for possible classroom use. Material which unapologetically tells the story from the perspective of the oppressed and the ways we navigate the dehumanizing terrain.  Consider radical ideas as you find new resources. What if you taught your introductory course with no white or male authors? Develop a course which is soundly disciplinary, but has no majority culture readings. This might mean using all articles and no textbooks, per se, but why not? Teaching to transform might not mean including a few voices of the marginalized --- it might mean excluding the voices of the oppressor so we can learn the perspectives, voices, and stories of the oppressed. And/or consider introducing each text to be read by providing, or having your students research, the social locations of each author. If an author is white and male, identify the person in this way. Resist only identifying the gender and race of authors who are female and people of color because it signals they are “exceptions” to the routinely read normal readings authored by white men.  Creating educational spaces for which the voices of the oppressed and marginalized is taken seriously, respected, even prioritized is a paradigm-shifting act – an act of freedom in which you can participate by the stories you bring into your classroom.

I imagine that once upon a time, a child joyfully ran along the beach in this sandal - picking up shells, building sculptures in the sand, playing in the waves. But, after a season at sea, this sandal would be difficult to walk in – it’s nearly broken in half, now the home of sea life, and no longer part of a pair. Plus, the child who wore it last summer has likely outgrown it. A new season calls for new equipment. Deans are called to help theological institutions, and the people within them, realize these same sorts of things. The shoes we’ve been wearing (perhaps our curricula, organizational structures, recruiting processes, systems of student support, and faculty cultures) don’t always serve us well in a new season. Moving beyond unneeded parts of the past – first naming and then letting go of old ways and sacred cows – can be difficult, however, and so deans also need to care well for faculty, staff, students, and ourselves amid times of significant change. It’s OK to swap out equipment, and sometimes it’s the best option. We still need shoes to get us where we are going, shoes that will provide cushion and support and protection and make the journey easier, but it’s likely time for a new pair of sandals. New equipment may take time to break in, but we can trust that it will serve us well in this new season and allow us to explore and build and play in response to the divine invitation to equip God’s people to serve as they have been called

The ocean – dynamic, powerful and vast – the dean must be willing to be there; walking with and leading others into the movements of change. The dunes - stable, protective and slow – the dean must be a stable and sustaining presence, standing strong with others in the midst of storms. Or perhaps the dean must be the bridge, creating the pathway between energies of stability and change; walking purposefully back and forth between the two and inviting others to walk along.