Resources

Order and organization are valued in the classroom, and there is a prevailing understanding that chaos should be avoided. Yet chaos can also be potent space or a source from which new things spring forth. This article investigates biblical, scientific, and cultural understandings of chaos to discover how these contribute to a revelatory metaphor for teaching. It examines Catherine Keller’s engagement with chaos theory in creation theology for pedagogical implications. Using a framework suggested in the work of Mary Elizabeth Moore, the author interprets powers and practices of chaos teaching and provides examples of how the metaphor plays out in the teaching of religion and theology.

One page Teaching Tactic to determine the level of knowledge and understanding students have of a particular subject (in this case, in a Hebrew Bible course).

One page Teaching Tactic: a method for convening discussion in large groups.

One page Teaching Tactic: using study sheet handouts to help students learn from lectures, in a compressed "Maymester" class.

For Life Abundant, the fruit of sustained reflection among systematic theologians, practical theologians, and pastors, is an important new work that deserves attention. The volume provokes creative and critical thinking about practical theology. Its contributors conceptualize the field as a disciplined practice of imagination and skill residing at the confluence of Christian tradition and living ecclesial communities, and ask what such a construal of practical theology might mean for theological education. Given the significance of For Life Abundant, Teaching Theology and Religion asked three theological educators who are located in different regions, types of institutions and fields, to review and respond to it. Rebecca Slough describes the volume’s central questions and organization, and considers how it might contribute to the deliberations of a seminary faculty regarding a school’s curriculum. Martha Stortz shows how the process and structure of For Life Abundant are in themselves illustrative of the conceptualization of practical theology for which it argues. Kwok Pui-Lan notes the volumes strengths and goes on to probe its lacunae, particularly with regard to global, gender and multi-cultural considerations relevant to a robust construal of pastoral theology in our time. While the authors of these three reviews and responses to the volume did not interact as they wrote them, together they comprise a conversation that should be on-going. TTR invites further responses to the volume.

Educational theorist Richard Kiely highlights the central importance of “high intensity dissonance” in successful international service-learning. This essay applies Kiely’s model of dissonance and transformative learning to Intercordia, an international service-learning program offered at the University of St. Michael’s College and the University of Toronto, in partnership with the Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) Intercordia Canada. By placing its students in situations of significant vulnerability and weakness, the Intercordia program attempts to problematize familiar assumptions about the otherness of oppressed persons and thereby encourage an authentic sense of belonging across boundaries of difference. The results, as reported by participants in the program, are quite profound. At the same time, the program design invites critical questions about how, and to what extent, such transformative experiences of dissonance should be scripted for students as an expected and desired result of their international service.

This article explores a set of practices in the teaching of Talmud called “the pedagogy of slowing down.” Through the author’s analysis of her own teaching in an intensive Talmud class, “the pedagogy of slowing down” emerges as a pedagogical and cultural model in which the students learn to read more closely and to investigate the multiplicity of meanings inherent in the Talmudic text, thus bridging the gap between an ancient text and its contemporary students. This article describes the specific techniques in the pedagogy of slowing down, and the ways in which this teaching practice contributes both to students’ becoming more attentive readers and to the ongoing development of their religious voices.