Resources

The exploration described is rooted in the projects of five participants in the 2004/05 Wabash Workshop for Pre-Tenure Theological Faculty (led by Toni Craven and assisted by Daisy Machado and Steve Delamarter). All the projects related technology and pedagogy. Javier Alanís (Lutheran Seminary Program in the Southwest) wanted to use images to help his students engage various concepts of the Trinity, being sensitive all the while to an educational context marked by all kinds of diversity. Russell Haitch (Bethany Theological Seminary) was brought into the world of online teaching and found himself trying to assess its potential from the standpoints of scripture, reason, experience, and a trinitarian theological-anthropology. Mark Vitalis Hoffman (Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg) wanted to help his students experience a fresh encounter with Jesus' parables and ended up in the esoteric field of video gaming theory (ludology) for help in conceiving an environment and process interactive enough to do justice to all of the possibilities. Arun Jones (Austin Seminary) wondered how he might use historical images of mission work in India to help his students experience some of the issues surrounding intercultural ministry. Brent A. Strawn (Candler School of Theology, Emory University) had some vexing and complex concepts relating to Old Testament introduction (the nature of the interactions between biblical narratives and ancient Near Eastern texts) that required new points of access in order to be able to capture the understanding and imagination of contemporary students in his setting. Over the course of the year together (one week in June 2004, a weekend in January 2005, and a week in June 2005), participants worked on their project as all of us in the workshop explored issues of teaching and learning.

Students from different cultural backgrounds respond in a variety of ways to my teaching of biblical studies. Some sermonize or plagiarize quite unselfconsciously in their written assignments, while others consistently hand in work late or are silent members of the class. As I struggled with what these behaviors were saying about my teaching, I came to realize that limited ability in spoken and written English was not the only barrier. Deeper issues were at stake here about the nature of cross-cultural communication, teaching, and learning. In this note I analyze the issues of faith, authority, and styles of teaching and learning which underlie the "clash of educational cultures" (Ballard and Clanchy 1997, viii) occurring in the cross-cultural classroom. Then I suggest a number of strategies that I have developed to build bridges of understanding between the various educational cultures, to encourage deeper participation and to develop critical thinking.

Adult-learning theory challenges faculty to adapt their teaching to certain characteristics of adult learners, including self-direction: if adults direct the bulk of their lives outside of school, they should be permitted to direct their own educational experiences. To what extent is self-directed learning an optimal, or even realistic, methodology for seminary teaching? Does it matter what subjects we are teaching? This essay details an experiment with self-directed learning in a seminary ministry class: what worked, what might be improved, and how it challenges our view of ourselves as faculty to teach in this way. Student feedback from the course in question enhances our understanding of the best (and most challenging) features of the experiment.

Over the past fifteen years in New Zealand, theology has come in from the tertiary educational cold in various ways. One of the results or reasons for this has been willingness on the part of the state to accredit and provide funding for theological education and research. This has taken place largely through a compliance system of accreditation and resource allocation. The result has been academic recognition and a precarious financial boon for theology and some theological institutions and their students. But little attention has been paid to the epistemological and pedagogical temptations of compliance. Drawing on the recent experience of the writer, this article seeks to identify a number of the subtle temptations posed by state sponsored theological education and research.

Reformed Theological Seminary's Virtual Campus has successfully taught the biblical languages online since 1999. This article describes the theoretical principles that underlie the design and asynchronous delivery of online Greek and Hebrew to part-time adult distance students. The structure and administration of the courses is discussed, as well as how the students interact with their instructor and with the material. The fields of Adult Education, Learner Autonomy, and Distance Education suggest that online students must learn differently than traditional in-class students by being more responsible for their learning. Research also suggests that online instructors must teach differently, assuming a role more like a learning coach. Finally, the literature suggests that institutions must interact with distance students differently than traditional in-class students. The article concludes with a definition of "success" in these courses and description of the time commitment expected of faculty in these courses.

Because religions discipline and interpret bodies; create and define sacred spaces; generate, adore and study images in all media; regulate the intake of food; structure temporal experience; and in general interpenetrate and are permeated by the cultural landscapes in which they exist, religious studies must engage material religion and religious materiality. We encounter bodily realities of other religions and cultures through our own disciplined bodies, which are both necessary and problematic for those encounters. This article connects theoretical and practical resources needed to help students discover the stuff of religion – flesh and blood, bread and wine, songs and sound, knives and body parts, movement and music, human bodies, time, space, cosmograms composed of and composing the bodies of the religious – uncovering the materiality of religion, existing underneath, alongside, without, and amidst religious textuality and verbal ideation.

The challenge of learning to teach online leads a junior faculty person to achieve greater levels of teaching satisfaction and proficiency overall. For this professor transitioning an on-campus pastoral liturgy course to an online environment brings about serendipitous discoveries that allow him to do more than survive as a frustrated teacher. The transition creates a revolution in one professor's whole approach to teaching.

Face-to-face, hybrid, and online courses are part of the panoply of course options available to students and teachers in the twenty-first century. This essay tackles the promise of hybrid courses for enhancing student learning in seminary contexts. The author contends that the introduction of hybrid instruction prompts faculty to revisit questions about pedagogy and improves student learning.

Finding themselves teaching to increasingly diverse student populations, two mid-career faculty from different disciplines embarked on a common voyage to make their foundational courses more sensitive to student learning styles. Adrift in the seas of multiple intelligences and multiculturalism, the researchers quickly abandoned any hope of developing distinctive teaching portfolios for individual learning profiles. Instead, they structured the syllabus to be the passport into a common culture of teaching and learning in the classroom. Syllabus design and on-going "spot" assessments proved trusty guides in re-centering learning on the students' needs. In the process of outlining these two strategies for creating a common culture of teaching and learning, the article offers testimony that old dogs can learn new tricks! Additional materials, including syllabi used in these courses and in class assessment tools, can be found on the Web page of the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion: http://www.wabashcenter.wabash.edu/journal/greenstortz.html

In a postcolonial environment, our students will encounter multiple representations and diverse followers of various religions outside the classroom. Students need to think critically about the representations of all religions and recognize the humanity of all people. Too often, students leave courses discussing one or more world religions with an idealized view of other religions that draws strict boundaries around the components of each religion. Bringing postcolonial thought into introductory and survey courses highlights the diversity within each lived religion and encourages students to critique those strict borders and all representation of religions. Based on continuing experiments with critical theory in undergraduate classes, the six strategies presented here use the diversity of lived religions to promote critical analysis of representations of religions. These strategies move beyond the rejection of common representations by introducing set theory as an alternative framework that students can use to theorize about the complexity within religions.