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Theological schools and seminaries have been relative latecomers to rigorous practices of educational assessment. There are varied and plausible reasons for that which "make sense." However, in the current age of higher accountability to accrediting agencies, stakeholders, and educational consumers,...

Dr. Efrain Agosto New York Theological Seminary We gathered for our regular summer session class on a Thursday evening at New York Theological Seminary, June 18, the night after the horrific shootings in an AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Three of my six students for the class were out sick; no doubt saddened by the tragedy of the night before, perhaps even so adversely affected that they had a kind of visceral, physical reaction that affected their health. Six of the nine African Americans murdered Wednesday night in Charleston were women, by all accounts gifted and faithful leaders of

Nyasha Junior, Ph.D Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible Temple University Department of Religion The Rachel Dolezal story is all over the news. The story is a horror show for many reasons, but as Dolezal was an African-American Studies instructor at Eastern Washington University, her story brings up important issues of race in the classroom. It has me wondering how my colleagues think about and handle these issues. What does the Dolezal story bring up for you as an educator? What assumptions do your students make about you based on your body? What assumptions do students or other scholars make about

An Empty Seat in Class emerges in the midst of the increasing deaths of young black and brown men and women around the country, and it seems rather prescient as the debate about responses to this violence emerges and takes center stage. While Ayers addresses the larger context of death and particularly the deaths of marginalized students in oppressed communities, this book is a shared meditation on grief and the role of the secondary school teacher in processing, responding to, and teaching alongside death and grief. It is shared because Ayers not only reflects on his personal stories and experiences in the classroom, but he invites a broad selection of teachers involved in secondary education to reflect on their experiences of and responses to the loss of a student. The book is framed around the recent death of one of Ayers’s students and his community and school’s response to this loss. Ayers is clear that it is not a how-to book and rather than focus on prescriptions or even overt psychological or pedagogical advice he turns to the practice and ritual of writing and reflecting. Ayers reminds that “our salvation lies more in literature and stories than psychological and political analysis”(6) and provides us with stories, engaging literature, and reflections as the reader proceeds through the tragic life cycle of a community’s, specifically a teacher’s, response to the death of student. The first half of the book outlines the complexity of dealing with urban violence and identifies the multiple issues faced by teachers, specifically those from vastly different socio-economic and political contexts than their students. Ayers does not shy away from the myriad ways that students and teachers respond to the “mystery” of death. He and his contributors look at the emergence of “murder economies” (23), individual and institution missteps, white privilege, and the simplistic and problematic assignation of blame and innocence that often permeates responses to death in urban communities and classrooms. While the first half of the book explicitly examines death and dying in urban, marginalized communities, the last section looks at mass school shootings and mortality in its many forms. By the end of the text, Ayers is clear that death is a specter that no one can escape and that all teachers and schools need to critically reflect on it together. Ayers emphasizes that “There are so many other ways that the terrible finger of fate points at our students. And for each of these tragedies, there is a classroom; there is a teacher” (88). I am deeply sympathetic to Ayer’s project, and the book makes a convincing argument for this type of intervention and its format. His work succeeds as a “meditation with and for teachers” (7) during these tragic times. However, the text also suggests that there is a better way to deal with death in our school communities, and I think more explicit engagement with successful models of intervention and more context about Ayers’s school and community would strengthen the book and would add nuance and depth to its focus on and argument for the inclusion of narrative and literature in our responses to death. Overall, Ayers’s multi-layered analysis that includes reflection, memorial, research, and deep attention to literature on death and grief will be an invaluable resource for teachers and will hopefully spur additional research on the practical and pedagogical issues that arise as a result of a student’s death.

Mark C. Carnes’s Minds on Fire: How Role-Immersion Games Transform College is the work of a true believer seeking the conversion of others to the path of right pedagogical practice. Fortunately, the approach he advocates, teaching history through month-long, immersive, student-led role-play, seems a worthy recipient of his impassioned testimony. I came to this book curious about contextualizing knowledge in the theological classroom, given the prohibitive expense and time commitment of many of the strategies currently used in theological education to achieve this goal (such as travel seminars, immersion, and community-engaged learning). As someone who has been frustrated by the inability of my school’s curriculum to excite students and engage them in the history of the development of religious traditions, I wondered if role-immersion games would be a useful tool in my setting. Reflecting on the use of published games from the Reacting to the Past consortium, a group of which Carnes is the founder, Carnes describes in glowing terms the work that these role-plays can achieve in classrooms full of disengaged, unmotivated college students and instructors. He makes sweeping claims, such as: “Role-immersion games in higher education today hold the promise of restoring the churning passions and subversive impulses that have always invigorated the life of the mind” (297). Using interviews and other outcomes data with former participants and instructors to weave compelling narrative descriptions of the method in action, he makes a strong case for why immersive play increases critical thinking, community, empathy, leadership, and other qualities that most schools have in their mission statements but are often unclear about how they actually teach them. He also addresses critics who worry about letting amateur historians imagine their way into historical periods, explicitly tackling concerns about the probability of “getting it wrong” and why this is educative. I appreciated Carnes’s depth analysis of two motivational vehicles for engaging historical material with critical passion: imagination and subversive play. While Carnes dismisses the luminaries of educational philosophy who would argue against role-play as a part of education, in one place lumping together “Plato, Freud, Dewey, Piaget, and Erikson” (295) as people who would hate this method, he unfortunately ignores the fine work of educational philosophers such as Elliott Eisner and Kieran Egan who have argued passionately for the role of imagination in education, and who would strengthen his argument tremendously. As someone who teaches primarily adult students (average age 41) rather than traditional college-age undergraduates in private liberal arts institutions (the primary subjects in this text), I was less enthusiastic about Carnes’s reflection on how taking on roles in the first person led to training in leadership, imaginative empathy, and other skills often already present in adult students. Descriptions of class starting before the assigned time and running late in the evenings and on weekends in residential dorms was also troubling, as the heavily scheduled lives of nonresidential adult students who also have jobs, families, and caregiving responsibilities would not lend themselves to this sort of educational strategy. The amount of time and intellectual commitment necessary to succeed in the games also causes Carnes to admit the inability of the Reacting teaching mode to become the single mode of instruction in an institution, “if only because no student wants to play more than one Reacting game at a time” (291). Additionally, Carnes’s detailed reporting of making African-American students argue for slavery in their roles without addressing the ethical implications of such imaginative ventures seemed inappropriate. I was intrigued by Carnes’s very exciting hint at transforming this mode of pedagogical instruction through collaboration with the world of immersive video gaming, and would welcome this innovation as a strategy in online teaching and learning. If you are interested in this topic, initially explore www.barnard.edu/reacting and the role-plays and teaching resources available through W.W. Norton and The Reacting Consortium Press. If you are intrigued but wary, Carnes’s book may be the motivation you need to invest in learning more about the method and trying it on for size in your setting.

While this book is dedicated to students, chapters showcase the dedication of professors to providing effective learning formats in diverse fields. An Illinois Sampler: Teaching and Research on the Prairie highlights teaching methods at the University of Illinois that can be applied elsewhere. It would be an excellent book for a new professor, including one looking for field opportunities for their students. The nineteen chapters are very short, but in essence provide quickly consumable case studies of everything from inmate education and research abroad to flipped classrooms and the standard lecture format. It would work well for a small group discussion of education students who could read it together while in session. Topics for small group discussion could include holistic education, teaching from the sciences and humanities, and student-centered learning. Higher education administrators might also appreciate an overview of some of the programs at the University of Illinois. However, these chapters are just glimpses of the authors’ insights; some readers might need to pursue further research. Examples like Rosu’s highlights of the iFoundry program created by the engineering faculty and Denofrio-Corrales and Lu’s innovative Chemistry and Biology of Everyday Life (CBEL) course structure organize around students’ interests. Precisely how they do it could be the theme for another book. Instead of a recipe, we are given a taste of the passion and flavor of University of Illinois teaching practices. This book is dedicated to students. The authors capture a learning environment that alumni and current students can be proud of, but the Illinois Sampler shows that across the spectrum, the professors dedicate their work to their students. In pages of reflection by faculty in the humanities and sciences serving traditional and nontraditional students, teaching with traditional and nontraditional methods, An Illinois Sampler teaches what it means to teach: It is a statistics professor trying to make numbers lead to a better quality of life. It is a lecturer uncovering the living complexity of once simple fairy tales. It is an education behind bars professor who liberates minds. It is the professor learning from collaboration with their students, and reigniting a teaching passion for and by them. This book acts as a sampler in its composition, moving from highlights in music to math to literature to science to dance. Unconventionally juxtaposed, one discipline does not outweigh the other. Everyone will be able to find something appealing in it because of the broad inclusion, and, readers will gain knowledge from perspectives across disciplines. It should also be noted that contributors “vary not only by expertise but also in age, gender, nationality, career stage, and even their position in the academic hierarchy” (ix). The real success of this book is the variety. An Illinois Sampler is both a recommended read and endeavor.

There is a loss of confidence in college education today that is arguably unmatched at any point in modern American history. Government officials and the general public express concern about the goals and directions of higher education and the degree to which its institutions succeed or fail to meet the needs of society. Business leaders and state legislatures charge that our colleges and universities are overpriced, underperforming, and unaccountable to the public. Moreover, the modern institution of higher education faces declining growth and increasing operational complexity; meanwhile, costs continue to soar and resources become ever more difficult to secure. Indeed, the role and very definition of higher education has changed significantly in recent years. The focus now is on issues of relevance, applicability, and preparation for working life outside the academy’s protective walls, and difficult questions are being asked about cost, efficiency, productivity, and effectiveness. One educator, however, in a heartfelt culmination of a lifetime’s devotion to the classroom, offers a vision of education in the deepest sense: “a vision of what education is for in an existential, not merely an instrumental, sense” (4). Marshall Gregory’s posthumous Teaching Excellence in Higher Education is a beautifully written, insightful, humorous, and jargon-free reflection on pedagogical theory and an ethical vision for teaching as it should be, not necessarily as it is. “Excellence,” too-often a vapid buzzword deployed in the literature on higher education today – suitably vague as to commit to nothing, really – is anything but lifeless with Gregory’s masterful handling. The book, edited by his daughter, Melissa Valiska Gregory, associate professor of English at the University of Toledo, after the untimely death of her father, Harry Ice Professor of English, Liberal Education, and Pedagogy at Butler University for many years, reads like a teacher’s memoir, tracing the way he came to think about his students, his vocation, and his vision for education over the years. “Excellence” for Gregory is the “‘extra’ burden of helping students become the kind of citizens, neighbors, voters, spouses, parents, and general thinkers who play all of their life roles with judiciousness, thoughtfulness, and the ability to endure cognitive dissonance, ambiguity, and complexity” (18). A tall order indeed, but anything less, he insists, “is merely the training of expertise.” While higher education has acknowledged for some time that it is woefully deficient in teaching young graduate students to teach, Gregory takes this concern in a refreshing direction, not simply as a matter of classroom mechanics (protocols such as classroom management, syllabus design, testing, grading, and so forth) and the structures of our disciplines; rather, he digs deeper. Our training as researchers and scholars, Gregory argues, have obscured what we, as educators, really need to know in the classroom. He offers the seemingly startling claim that our individual disciplines are, in effect, beside the point; they are, rather, a means to something far more complex. Teaching excellence, he suggests, depends on our awareness of the difference between the intellectual content of our disciplines – the subject matter of our courses – and what he identifies as the “background issues” of ethical dynamics: “The deepest kind of learning is the learning that makes persons desire not some particular thing or some particular doctrine, but instead makes them desire to become someone different – more self-aware, more autonomous, more self-critical, more judicious, more thoughtful, less impulsive, and less in thrall to the clichés of their day and moment” (61). His is a vision informed by cognitive psychology and by the lasting wisdom of the humanist tradition itself. Gregory does this by coupling (re-coupling) intellect with ethics: “The ‘who’ that any of us is ethically is in large part a function of the ‘what’ that any of us knows intellectually” (79). Ethics, in other words, is not something to be grafted onto our teaching, as in statements of classroom conduct for students and guidelines for ethical behavior for faculty; rather, it is part of the very ether of the classroom experience, “running in the background like software code” (6). He sums up this negotiation quite nicely in a set of unspoken questions students ask of teachers and teachers ask of their students: “Are you honest? Are you kind?… Are you sensitive and fair, or are you a selfish pig and an insensitive butt head” (82). The ethical demands on teachers are many, and they are exacting dispositions: “open mindedness, creativity, curiosity, intellectual flexibility, civility, making good arguments, having a nose for evidence, making defensible judgments, and so on” (75). But these demands for ethical commitment – fairness, respect, charity, and civility – are not, Gregory reminds himself as well as his readers, some Hallmark card version of classroom kumbaya. They are defenses, in a sense, in the struggle against a notion of education as narrow utilitarianism and credentialing. It is not that those who have entered the profession with some genuine sense of vocation are unaware of these principles; rather, the disciplinary focus and scholarly commitment to content have obscured them, or trained teachers not to pay them much mind. The reclaiming of “excellence” for higher education is, for Gregory, a teacher of teachers, the performing of an “authentic, autonomous, thoughtful, socially responsible, and morally defensible life” (113).

During a recent conversation among deans they commiserated over how difficult it was to bring about changes in their schools. Despite their best efforts at communicating the need for change, cultivating support, and implementing strategies, change was happening too slow...

For our final post, we each cover an overarching reflection or two from the 2014-15 academic year. Look for fresh content from the Wabash Center in the fall. In the meantime, feel free to visit our ongoing blog Race Matters...

Leann M. R. Kaiser, Karen Kaminski, and Jeffrey M. Foley’s edited volume Learning Transfer in Adult Education offers a concise and readable entry point into the topic of learning transfer. While the stated focus of the volume is adult education, many of the themes and strategies considered will be of interest to those teaching traditional undergraduates as well. According to the editors, “Learning transfer, simply stated, is the ability of a learner to apply skills and knowledge learned in one situation or setting to another” (1). This goal, they suggest, is fundamental to any educational enterprise.             In the first chapter, Foley and Kaiser introduce learning transfer and concepts associated with it, providing a useful framing for the chapters that follow. In particular, Foley and Kaiser explain the distinction between “near transfer,” in which the new situation closely resembles the original learning context, and “far transfer,” in which it does not. These and a handful of other key terms reappear throughout the essays; this chapter deserves a careful reading. The chapter also offers a brief overview of some tools available to instructors, many of which reappear or are discussed in greater detail in later chapters. Chapters 2 through 7 offer a variety of perspectives. Nate Furman and Jim Sibthorp (chapter 2) consider experiential learning techniques. These include problem-based learning, project-based learning, cooperative learning, service learning, and reflective learning. Three strong case studies are offered in this chapter, which help demonstrate the techniques in action. One of the techniques, problem-based learning (PBL), is the focus of the contribution by Woei Hung (chapter 3). Hung introduces the distinction between “well-structured” and “ill-structured” problems; the latter are more commonly found in the workplace and thus are productively used in PBL. Hung also comments on the cognitive processes that underlie effective learning transfer; these are complemented nicely by Jacqueline McGinty, Jean Radin, and Karen Kaminski’s study of “Brain-Friendly Teaching” (chapter 5). As the phrase “brain-friendly” suggests, the chapter skews toward pop psychology, but many of the techniques seem to hold potential. Patricia L. Hardré’s contribution (chapter 4), meanwhile, offers a serious engagement with the question of authenticity as it plays out in technology design. The remaining two case studies take up broader concerns. Rosemary Closson (chapter 6) offers a nuanced review of issues surrounding race and cultural difference in learning transfer, combining theoretical and practical discussion. This chapter is especially valuable for instructors interested in race, cultural difference, and pedagogy. Jeani C. Young (chapter 7) offers an equally sensitive treatment of personal change. The volume concludes with a discussion by the editors on “applying transfer in practice.” While those teaching adult learners will especially benefit from the specific examples and case studies, all interested readers stand to profit from this volume. In particular, its wealth of practical examples and classroom strategies offer quick and immediate value to the busy reader.