Resources
Click Here for Book Review Abstract: This book offers an energizing Christian vision for the art of teaching. The authors - experienced teachers themselves - encourage teacher-readers to reanimate their work by imagining it differently. David Smith and Susan Felch, along with Barbara Carvill, Kurt Schaefer, Timothy Steele, and John Witvliet, creatively use three metaphors - journeys and pilgrimages, gardens and wilderness, buildings and walls - to illuminate a fresh vision of teaching and learning. Stretching beyond familiar clichés, they infuse these metaphors with rich biblical echoes and theological resonances that will inform and inspire Christian teachers everywhere. (From the Publisher)
Teaching and Digital Technologies: Big Issues and Critical Questions helps both pre-service and in-service teachers to critically question and evaluate the reasons for using digital technology in the classroom. Unlike other resources that show how to use specific technologies – and quickly become outdated, this text empowers the reader to understand why they should, or should not, use digital technologies, when it is appropriate (or not), and the implications arising from these decisions. The text directly engages with policy, the Australian Curriculum, pedagogy, learning and wider issues of equity, access, generational stereotypes and professional learning. The contributors to the book are notable figures from across a broad range of Australian universities, giving the text a unique relevance to Australian education while retaining its universal appeal. Teaching and Digital Technologies is an essential contemporary resource for early childhood, primary and secondary pre-service and in-service teachers in both local and international education environments. Empowers pre-service and in-service teachers to understand why they should or should not use digital technologies Notable team of contributors from across a broad range of Australian universities Companion website is kept up-to-date with any major technological changes as well as emerging ideas, debates, policy and other relevant information (From the Publisher)
Click Here for Book Review Abstract: Features an overview of research and writing for students in religious studies, for a reasonable price, and can be used as a resource for a student's entire academic career. Uses straightforward language to discuss the basics of research and writing. Instructors agree that as an overview, the Making Sense series is much easier to digest than heavier writing style guides, and they appreciate the discipline-specific content. Features up-to-date guidelines for documentation and referencing and provides the most current guidelines for documentation in religious studies, including coverage of MLA, APA, and Chicago styles and referencing. Along with including the most up-to-date citation styles, the Making Sense series also features current examples, and useful information on using the internet as a research tool. More Accessible. This edition contains more bulleted points and summaries to make the content easier to reference and absorb. New to this Edition: Chapters are reordered to better match the writing and learning process Includes comprehensive coverage of new developments in technology-based research and writing Sections on MLA, APA, and Chicago style have been revised to be completely up to date (From the Publisher)
The “Make Your Own Religion” class project was designed to address a perceived need to introduce more theoretical thinking about religion into a typical religion survey course, and to do so in such a way that students would experience the wonder of theoretical discovery, and through or because of that discovery hopefully both better retain knowledge gained from the project and nurture within themselves the practice of thinking more analytically about religion (and other social and cultural things). Despite a number of challenges and unresolved questions associated with the project, it has proven relatively successful at introducing and provoking theoretical thinking about religion in a compressed period of time, without taking an inordinate number of class periods away from the survey itself. A brief description and analysis of the assignment is followed by four short responses.
This series of short essays considers the complex choices and decision-making processes of instructors preparing to teach, and continuing to teach, introductory courses in religious studies. In a paper originally presented in the University of Chicago's “The Craft of Teaching in the Academic Study of Religion” series, Russell McCutcheon explores a “baker's dozen” of such choices and the larger pedagogical problems with which they are entwined, ranging from classic questions of skill development and content coverage to philosophical concerns around students' identification with their topics of study and institutional concerns around governance and assessment. Aaron Hollander provides a brief introduction and four doctoral students at the University of Chicago Divinity School respond to McCutcheon's essay, widening its scope, testing its applicability, and interrogating its undergirding suppositions from the perspective of early-career educators in the field.
One page Teaching Tactic: using visual arts in the biblical studies classroom.
One page Teaching Tactic: a method for engaging students' religious questions in an Islamic Studies course
This essay explores classroom dynamics when students identify and connect their own painful experiences to structural racism or ethnocentrism exhibited in the Holocaust or parts of Jewish history. The intrusion of this proximal knowledge can be an obstacle to student learning. If engaged by professors, however, I argue that proximal knowledge can be a catalyst that promotes learning. Social scientific theory provides a useful lens for helping students to better grasp and contextualize both their old experiences and the new materials that are being taught in the course within the larger structural frames of race, religion, and ethnicity that they have selected, but may not fully appreciate. Reflective guided journaling is an essential part of the learning experience.
This article emerges from the experience of incorporating doctoral students into our Contextual Education (CXE) Program at Emmanuel College (Toronto). This change, I argue, helped us to distinguish more clearly among and thus distinctly orient the different kinds of relationships and theological practices that make up our program towards the often-elusive goal of curricular integration. After outlining a definition of integration, I contextualize that definition in our particular practices at Emmanuel College using Kathryn Tanner's (1997) understanding of theology as a cultural practice as my guide. I then offer a brief overview of our CXE Programs to demonstrate how nurturing strategic partnerships within them has made certain forms of integration possible for our students. I close with some activities for practical application in other CXE contexts.
In this essay, I explore an exam format that pairs multiple-choice questions with required rationales. In a space adjacent to each multiple-choice question, students explain why or how they arrived at the answer they selected. This exercise builds the critical thinking skill known as metacognition, thinking about thinking, into an exam that also engages students in the methods of the academic study of religion by asking them to compare familiar excerpts and images. As a form of assessment, the exam provides a record of students' knowledge and their thought processes, and as a learning strategy, it encourages students to examine the thought processes they use to understand religion(s) and its many manifestations.