Resources

What Teachers Need to Know (Etherington, 2017) is a substantial text defining the diverse and inclusive experiences of contemporary education systems. The book is a compilation with three major parts: “Ethics,” “Inclusion and Teacher Management,” and “Worldview and Story.” Each chapter provides reading questions for use in a classroom setting or for deeper reflection. This is well-suited for an audience in higher education, especially for readers who could share personal experiences with diversity and inclusion topics after a practicum or time teaching. I would recommend this book for a post-graduate education library. The first part, “Ethics,” includes works by Sherick Hughes, Martyn Rouse, Jonathan Anuik, Chet Bowers, Eva Maria Waibel, the editor, Matthew Etherington, and James Dalziel. There is quite a range of topics in this section, but the Wabash Center reader might be particularly interested in Anuik's essay on faith-informed discourse. It is a study about the influence of missionary education on Indigenous beliefs, and how that reaches into Canadian public education today. It compels the reader to contemplate whether church and state can truly be separate in an educational context when there is such a significant inheritance of practice and values from a period dominated by religious influence. Part Two, “Inclusion and Teacher Management,” includes works by Peter J. Froese, Ken Pudlas, Lucinda Spaulding, Karen Copeland, Bruce Shelvey, and Ken Bradley. Spaulding's essay reflects the current shift of attention to patterns of bullying and puts forward the mechanisms school communities can provide for the resiliency of the students. Other essays in this section discuss topics such as mental health, special needs, and even bring in the parents' view on these issues as they exist in the educational system. This is an exceptional collection of essays on inclusivity. The third and final part, “Worldview and Story,” includes works by the editor, Matthew Etherington, Edward R. Howe, Adam Forsyth, Leo Van Arragon, Christina Belcher, and Cynthia à Beckett. This section has the most obvious correlation to religious studies within educational contexts. Topics include: tolerance, science and religion, and epistemology. This section could serve as an excellent initial reading for students in a practical theology or other contemporized religious studies capstone course. This book might not be a comfortable read in a public classroom, but maybe that is exactly why it should be read. Etherington's compilation offers academic theological reflection for secularized educational contexts. This book could be useful in a range of contexts. It may be particularly helpful to new teachers, parent associations, pastors of students, and community leaders.

As many of the contributors to Teaching Interreligious Encounters point out, interactions with people of diverse religious commitments are becoming more frequent in the workplace, in civic affairs, and in many neighborhoods. Consequently, there is a need to help individuals develop the attitudes and aptitudes that will enable them to conduct those encounters in an informed, respectful, and personally satisfying fashion. This volume argues that education, particularly in the undergraduate classroom, can make a substantial contribution to preparing individuals to understand and participate effectively in a religiously diverse society. To that end, the contributors offer an array of resources, comments on course and assignment design, and concrete strategies to show students how to conduct themselves in and learn from “interreligious encounters.” Precisely what is entailed in such encounters and how they are to be enacted and understood receive a variety of answers throughout the book. At times, whatever lines might separate interfaith engagement from interreligious encounters, and either from comparative theology, and all of them from comparative religion do not appear in sharp focus. Some authors appear to use at least several of those terms as rough equivalents, while others strive to define their terms very clearly. For example, Eboo Patel and Cassie Meyer propose that “interfaith or interreligious studies is concerned primarily with the interactions between lived religious and nonreligious actors and communities” (300). Thus, they differentiate it from “comparative religions, comparative theology, and world religions” which they see as being less concerned with actual relationships and interactions. But several contributors cite with approval Francis Clooney’s statement that comparative theology “entails the interpretation of the meaning and truth of one’s own faith by means of a critical investigation of other faiths” (see 45), which would bring it closer to Patel and Meyer’s understanding of interfaith and interreligious studies. How to construct courses, course modules, and individual assignments to promote what Patel and Meyer call “interfaith literacy” receives a lot of attention. Joshua Brown, for example, describes and analyzes a course on political theology that uses examples from Christianity and Chinese religions. Jonathan Edelman provides a detailed consideration of the Bhagavad Gita as a theological text. Other authors focus more on pedagogical strategies. In one of the more interesting contributions, Devorah Schoenfeld and Jeanine Diller describe how they use the Jewish process of hevruta to encourage students to disagree with each other in their interpretations of texts while still remaining in conversation, recognize disagreements within and among religions, and value interreligious disagreement. Emily Sigalow and Wendy Cadge make a clear and strong case for the value of using case studies in teaching about interreligious encounters, something that several other contributors also mention. Most of the contributions emphasize that students can learn something personally valuable and meaningful from studying and especially participating in interactions with people who have religious commitments different than their own. This volume offers a rich set of suggestions about how to design and structure such learning opportunities.

“The definition of slow looking is straightforward,” writes Shari Tishman, “It simply means taking the time to carefully observe more than meets the eye at first glance" (2). Imagine taking students to an art museum and focusing on just one painting. You would be taking the time to support your students in looking, really looking at art. Can they list everything they see in the painting? Could they identify twice as many items if you gave them more time still? Does the painting look different if they move closer or change their angle? Are there interesting juxtapositions of objects, shapes, or colors within the painting? These questions are natural to slow looking. It is a rewarding classroom practice and an indispensable aspect of method in theological and religious studies. This book was written “with educators in mind” and it contains many practical ideas on how to use slow looking in the classroom. Examples range across disciplines: Virginia Woolf’s observations concerning “The Mark on the Wall,” zoological sketches of a caracal cat, and the mechanical intricacies of an old-fashioned office stapler, among others. Drawing on previous research, Tishman examines three dispositional tendencies involved in slow looking: ability, inclination, and sensitivity (145). Sensitivity is particularly critical; this is the capacity to employ slow looking in the appropriate context. As educators in the humanities seek to more clearly articulate the lasting benefits of our work, this careful examination of slow looking as an important lifelong skill is timely.    The beauty of this title is its ability to focus on the benefits of slow looking as educational practice in a deep way. Many excellent books on pedagogy adopt a wide scope. They pull their lens back and look at course planning or broad curricular systems. Slow Looking has much to offer courses and curriculum, but Tishman is adept at returning continually to the exercise of slow looking to reveal its complexity and practical efficacy from different vantage points. According to Tishman, slow looking is a “learned capacity” foundational to critical thinking (7). Foundational, yes, but it should not be thought of as synonymous with critical thinking or be conceptually absorbed by critical thinking. Slow looking is its own discrete process. Tishman explains, “Slow looking is not primarily judgment oriented, though its fruits certainly inform good judgments. Rather, slow looking emphasizes deferring judgment in favor of apprehending the complexity of how things are at the moment” (149). There are three types of complexity: complexity of parts and interactions (anatomy, for example), perspective (different physical or conceptual vantage points), and engagement (interplay between perceiver and perceived). Teachers will already see how parsing complexity in this way can lead to extended classroom reflection on a given subject of observation and the process of looking itself. Slow Looking strikes the perfect balance between practicality and philosophical depth. Tishman writes fluidly and moves easily among descriptions of classroom technique, phenomenological analysis of observation, and the intellectual history of student-centered education. Slow Looking will be a continual source of inspiration in my own teaching and scholarship – it is highly recommended.

Several years ago, I was expecting a guest speaker in one of my courses. To prepare for the colleague’s visit, I asked my students what questions they had for the person.  Silence. And not a quizzical silence, just a dead silence. I tried to prime the pump by repeating the guest’s research agenda as well as the topics of our course’s conversation. The response by students was underwhelming – the not so faint sound of crickets could be heard. I signaled my dismay by using a displeased tone of voice and reminded the students that they must have questions. In distress, a woman blurted out, “I don’t have any questions!” I realized she meant that she did not have any deficits.  She thought questions only signaled what she was supposed to know, but did not.  Questions, for her, were a confession of inadequacy, unpreparedness, and ignorance. I had failed to teach that questions were tools of curiosity and a method of inquiry to interact with the guest lecturer. Since that moment, I have been trying to cultivate and nurture student curiosity.  In this journey, I have learned that what I am curious about is not necessarily what my students are curious about. I have learned that some students have no curiosity for classroom learning because their energies are tied up in modes of survival, credential earning, and the distractions of family and wage earning. These students are difficult to gather-in. I have learned that students have been told that their genuine curiosity is without merit, so they have learned not to voice their real questions or pursue their authentic passions. I have learned that some deep, marvelous curiosity is voiced in a language/vocabulary that is academically unsophisticated and I have worked to train my ear to hear these curiosities. I have challenged myself to “think like my students” and try to anticipate the kinds of questions and inquiry they will levy toward a reading or learning activity. I want to align with them and use their inquiries as starting points.  I’ve had some success with this tactic – but it’s not easy.  Mostly I’ve learned that students are so eager-to-please that when I tell them they are to formulate their own genuine curiosity about a topic – they do.  Last semester I had two kinds of assignments in my seminar. First, the students were to consider the assigned readings, then like jazz musicians, riff off of the author’s argument. I called them Riff Reports. The instructions were to bring to the class a report about what the reading sparked in their thinking and imagination. I challenged them, “Bring your own insights, curiosity – do not repeat the reading, do not report the reading.  Consider your own passion, interests, situations, then build, expand, add your voice, perspective, and idiosyncrasies to the conversation.” At the beginning of the semester, I modeled in class sessions what I meant by Riff Reports by doing my own version of riffing off of the readings. In my three-hour session, I would do a one-hour riff, then two students, each taking 30 minutes, would riff off of the same reading. This would give the class three riffs from one reading – a cornucopia of meaning and wonder! Second, by the end of the semester, the students completed a Curiosity Report, building off of the reading, their Riff-Reports, my Riff-Reports, and the conversations we had in class sessions. The Curiosity Report could culminate in a critical reflection essay or it could be a creative portrayal. Regardless of its final embodiment (the student’s choice), the report had to include a method of inquiry which addressed the student’s own curiosity. Students were invited to explain why this curiosity was important to them and their people. They had to sit with the librarian to create a bibliography, interview experts, and go on field trips to visit the locales needed to satisfy their inquiries. By mid-semester, students gave oral reports about their topics, questions, and inquiry methodology. By the end of the semester, students gave an expanded presentation and then handed in a written form.  Watching and helping students formulate their own curiosity was a very different way to teach than telling them what was important, critical, or required in the disciplinary canon.  Helping them develop, unearth, and investigate their own agendas was not the same as performing my passions, thoughts, and ideas for them at the front of the class.  Witnessing their process of being inspired by our reading, then taking a kernel of their own idea and working it up into a full project, was very meaningful to me. This witnessing gave me a real sense of reverence for their ability to think, create, and hope – I felt as if I was witnessing beauty.  In every case, students selected topics that were personally relevant, intimately related to their life circumstances, and in some cases, life-giving. Our librarian called me to comment on the breadth and uniqueness of their topics and how interested he was to help students who were interested in inquiry. In two instances, I sent students to talk with faculty colleagues whose research interest matched the students. In both instances, the conversations were generative for both student and colleague. Finding like-minded thinkers feels like water in the desert.  At the risk of romanticizing the experience, I did have one student who, in my opinion, got lost in the process. The student preferred being told what to do and how to do it.  When that was not the task, the effort needed for discovery and self-motivation was too much. The student was able to articulate a fascinating question of inquiry, but could not follow through on investigation and creative research methodology. Pursuing curiosity requires time for introspection, consideration of on-going context and conversation, and the where-with-all to investigate.  Structuring classrooms for student curiosity seems like a no-brainer, but it has taken me many years to get here.