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Postcolonial biblical scholars use the hermeneutics of decolonization to reinterpret the biblical text. One goal is to find contemporary applications for an age-old message. This article explores the challenges and implications of postcolonial hermeneutics for biblical pedagogy. First, the author explores fundamental hermeneutical principles of postcolonial biblical criticism. Then she reviews its challenges for a liberative biblical pedagogy. Finally, the author applies these principles to a Bible study using the story of Hagar.

This paper explores how adult learners in a college composition course resisted pedagogies and teaching strategies designed to critically examine student and teacher assumptions about classism, racism, and sexism as well as other oppressive structures and discourses.

It is a commonplace that scholarship and teaching inform one another. Minimally, this means that the materials of research guide the formation of a syllabus. In courses that are introductory, however, teachers are called to reflect on the foundations of their scholarship. In this task, teaching serves to unsettle and provoke research, not only in the decision of what books to teach, but also in the course's argument. I propose that this argument be directed not toward a field in some ideal shape but toward the more elementary concepts of course, canon, and introduction themselves, since teaching an introductory course is perforce to consider the very nature of introduction. The three concepts of introduction, canon, and course are integral to thinking across the arts and sciences, nowhere more so than in the study of religion, where the work of Jonathan Z. Smith has tunneled, if only partially, into their paradoxes.

The purpose of this study was to examine the gender bias in student ratings of effective teaching. Students in five colleges were invited to rate instructors on three factors: interpersonal characteristics, pedagogical characteristics, and course content characteristics. We analyzed group differences based on student gender, instructor gender, and student level. Ratings of pedagogical characteristics and course content characteristics yielded significant interactions between student gender and instructor gender, but no differences were found among groups on interpersonal characteristics. We concluded that gender bias plays a role in students’ views of effective teaching in terms of how students evaluate pedagogical and content characteristics and that this bias generalizes across student levels.

This chapter looks at the teaching of special topics in the study of religion, in this case the representation of evil. Employing the medium of film to teach this topic enables students to reflect on “religious” assumptions and their implications for how we experience ourselves in the world. With the focus on a particular film, Crash, and the theoretical work of Paul Ricoeur, this chapter considers evil by analyzing the racism in Crash and its relationship to alienation, confession, and redemption. The more general project of a similar course would be to introduce students to evil as a complex dimension of human experience. Reading films critically increases the likelihood that students will move beyond either/or and black/white dichotomies toward a more integrated understanding of the problem of evil.