Resources
One page Teaching Tactic: student presentations to practice culling important concepts from class discussion, encouraging students to see how course material connects from one class period to the next and practice posing readings-based questions.
One page Teaching Tactic: using Twitter for student discussions of films outside of class, teaches them to write thoughtful and critical comments in a succinct but expressive manner.
One page Teaching Tactic: a warm-up exercise requiring students to recall and synthesize course material by selecting what is applicable to a practical pastoral care setting that they might reasonably expect to encounter.
In this article, I explore an ethical and pedagogical dilemma that I encounter each semester in my world religions courses: namely, that a great number of students enroll in the courses as part of their missionary training programs, and come to class understanding successful learning to mean gathering enough information about the world's religious “traditions” so as to effectively seduce people out of them. How should we teach world religions – in public university religious studies courses – with this student constituency? What are/ought to be our student learning goals? What can and should we expect to accomplish? How can we maximize student learning, while also maintaining our disciplinary integrity? In response to these questions, I propose a world religions course module, the goal of which is for students to examine – as objects of inquiry – the lenses through which they understand religion(s). With a recognition of their own lenses, I argue, missionary students become more aware of the biases and presumptions about others that they bring to the table, and they learn to see the ways in which these presumptions inform what they see and know about others, and also what they do not so easily see.
Asynchronous online instruction has become increasingly popular in the field of religious studies. However, despite voluminous research on online learning in general and numerous articles on online theological instruction, there has been little discussion of how to effectively design and deliver online undergraduate courses in religious studies. Drawing on recent research, experiences teaching and learning online, and interviews with colleagues, this paper discusses key principles of effective online instruction. It recommends instructors focus on humanizing their course website, “chunking” their course content, making their approach to the study of religion clear, structuring and monitoring online discussions, prioritizing prompt and constructive feedback, and making course material relevant to learners.
This article provides two short responses to Kathleen M. Fisher's essay “Look Before You Leap: Reconsidering Contemplative Pedagogy,” published in this issue of the journal.
This paper presents a critique of a set of teaching strategies known as “contemplative pedagogy.” Using practices such as meditation, attentive listening, and reflective reading, contemplative inquiry focuses on direct first-person experience as an essential means of knowing that has historically been overshadowed and dismissed by an emphasis on analytical reasoning. In this essay, I examine four problematic claims that appear frequently in descriptions of contemplative pedagogy: (1) undergraduate students have a kind of spiritual hunger; (2) pedagogies focused on cognitive skills teach students only what, not how, to think; (3) self-knowledge fosters empathy; and (4) education needs a new epistemology centered on spiritual and emotional, rather than intellectual, experience. I argue that these claims underestimate the diversity of undergraduate students, the complexity of what it means to think and know, the capacity for self-knowledge to become self-absorption, and the dangers of transgressing the boundaries between intellectual, psychological, and religious experiences. [See as well “Response to Kathleen Fisher's ‘Look Before You Leap,’” by Andrew O. Fort and Louis Komjathy, published in this issue of the journal.]
Click Here for Book Review For 10,000 years, Alaska’s Native peoples have survived and thrived in some of the harshest conditions in the world. During that time, they perfected teaching and learning practices that ensured the survival of their communities and the wellbeing of their natural environments. Those ancient practices offer fresh insights for educators who care about the state of our world and seek ways to make education more relevant and engaging. This book describes a unique higher education project that broke some difficult silences between academic and Native communities by introducing a small group of non-Native faculty members to traditional Alaska Native ways of teaching and learning. It presents a model for a Native-designed and run faculty development intensive, strategies for applying indigenous pedagogies in western learning environments, reflection on education by Alaska Native Elders, and reports from participants on what they learned and what they tried in their classrooms. It is intended to stimulate discussion and reflection about best practices in higher education. (From the Publisher)
Click Here for Book Review The University of Alaska Anchorage and Alaska Pacific University created Start Talking: A Handbook for Engaging Difficult Dialogues in Higher Education, a field manual for professors who wish to engage their students more effectively in conversations about the most important issues of our time. The book addresses themes of academic freedom; classroom safety; rhetoric and debate; race, class and culture; science and religion; and business, politics and social justice. For information about the project, including faculty intensives on difficult dialogues and indigenous ways of teaching and learning, see UAA Initiatives. (From the Publisher)
Daryl G. Smith has devoted her career to studying and fostering diversity in higher education. She has witnessed and encouraged the evolution of diversity from an issue addressed sporadically on college campuses to a reality of the modern university experience. In Diversity’s Promise for Higher Education, Smith brings together scholarly and field research relevant to the next generation of diversity work. The book argues that achieving excellence in a diverse society requires increasing the institutional capacity for diversity while simultaneously working to understand how diversity is tied to better leadership, positive change, research in virtually every field, student success, accountability, and more equitable hiring practices. To become more relevant to society, the nation, and the world while remaining true to their core missions, colleges and universities must continue to see diversity—like technology—as central, not parallel, to their work. In Diversity’s Promise for Higher Education, Smith proposes a set of clear and realistic practices that will help colleges and universities locate diversity as a strategic imperative and pursue diversity efforts that are inclusive of the varied—and growing—issues apparent on campuses without losing focus on the critical unfinished business of the past. In this edition, which is aimed at administrators, faculty, researchers, and students of higher education, Smith emphasizes a transdisciplinary approach to the topic of diversity, drawing on an updated list of sources from a wealth of literatures and fields. The tables have been refreshed to include data on faculty diversity over a twenty-year period and the book includes new information about gender identity, stereotype threat, student success, the growing role of chief diversity officers, the international emergence of diversity issues, faculty hiring, and implicit bias. (From the Publisher)