Resources

Teaching Tactic: role play helps students learn how far a custodian's salary goes.

This article describes and analyzes controversies in Japan brought about by an intercollegiate educational project on religion. The project team, consisting of selected members of the Japanese Association for Religious Studies and the Japanese Association for the Study of Religion and Society, has been planning a new system for qualifying undergraduates as "specialists in religious cultures" (sh ky -bunkasi). It is anticipated that students with this qualification will be engaged in various occupations that require knowledge of different cultures. The project reflects an increased awareness that the academic study of religion should play a social role and be recognized as worthwhile by the public. This article will focus upon the academic and pedagogical challenges that the project members faced in the process of planning a system to assess and qualify students' literacy in religious traditions. It will argue that religious literacy involves the dynamic ability to put knowledge into practice as well as to reflect continuously upon previously acquired knowledge.

To increase understanding of how Master of Divinity education actually functions and to respond to accreditors' emphasis on the outcomes of learning, this paper presents a research-based model that focuses on how M.Div. education transforms students. The students-in-seminary model is conceptually undergirded by life course theory. In the model, students attending seminary engage in a messy process in which they respond to competing demands of school, church, and family. The author compares the students-in-seminary model with the dominant message model for theological education articulated by Carroll et al. (1997) and argues that the students-in-seminary model more adequately describes the process of theological education. The author calls for further research to study how seminaries promote key messages to their students, the plasticity of students' sense of calling, the impact of church requirements on M.Div. students, and the complexity of life for multiple-role students.

This essay considers Christian theological education in South Asia highlighting pertinent issues in pedagogical content, form, method, and praxis. Debunking the notion of students as "empty bottles" to be filled, and criticizing the top-down model of education, the paper argues that theological education is an ongoing and interactive process in which students and teachers are participants who share and reflect upon each other's faith and socio-cultural experiences. Participants reject, test, negotiate, and choose – while remaining open to the variety that is embodied in different human experiences. The paper stresses the relationship between the theological college and the church and calls for mutual responsibility, respect, and accountability. In an increasingly communal and fundamentalist atmosphere that poses a threat to multi-culturalism, the role of the laity in shaping theological education is highlighted and public debate is encouraged. The paper calls for interactive and dialogic learning. A version of this paper was published in Ministerial Formation 100 (2003): 5–16.

This article begins by recognizing the increasing use of film in Religion, Theology, and Bible courses. It contends that in many Biblical Studies (and Religious Studies and Theology) courses, students are neither taught how to view films properly, nor how to place films into constructive dialogue with biblical texts. The article argues for a specific pedagogical approach to the use of film in which students learn how to view a film closely, in its entirety, on its own terms, and in its own voice. Viewing a film in this manner by attending to its aesthetic integrity is a prerequisite for constructing a fruitful dialogue between films and biblical texts. The essay concludes with three specific examples of what this approach might look like. Two responses follow the essay; Erin Runions of Pomona College considers two additional learning goals we might consider, and Richard Ascough of Queens University at Kingston helpfully distinguishes a range of possible pedagogical goals for introducing film into the Biblical Studies classroom.

One page Teaching Tactic: providing a series of web pages for students to visit and respond to in online posts.

One page Teaching Tactic: take home writing prompts to get mid-semester feedback on the course while simultaneously helping students to make connections to their other courses.

One page Teaching Tactic: encouraging discussion of significant course material on the first day of class.

Theological education typically includes classroom worship, a practice of great pedagogical power and curricular import. As pedagogy, classroom worship does four things. It focuses teaching and learning on God, and fosters theological dispositions necessary for sustaining that attention. Second, it rightly positions the entire class in dialogical relation to the divine Thou, in communal relation to each other, the larger church and the wider world, and in personal relations that risk transformation. Third, it frames theological education as an integrative practice of faith and learning. Finally, it invites teachers to know their students as whole persons and students to trust their teachers as spiritual guides. As curriculum, classroom worship may have greater significance than chapel worship for many students and at particular schools. It should be moved from implicit curriculum to explicit, with careful attention to the null curriculum and to the matrices of relationship within which worship has meaning.

This article outlines an ongoing method the author developed for seeking to enable predominantly White students in theological education (those training for authorized public ordained ministry) to engage with the central tenets of racial justice. The quest for racial justice has been an important part of the mission of the major church denominations in the United Kingdom over the past twenty years, as they have declared that "Racism is a sin." Ordained ministers are now charged with the task of seeking to lead church congregations into faithful, anti-racist forms of practice – namely, the quest for racial justice. This paper outlines the working method the author has developed in order to conscientize ministers in training for this significant task.