Resources

This study provides insight into how highly rated instructors approached teaching compressed summer session courses, and offers a set of best practices that others might use when teaching in similar settings. Top-rated instructors indicated differences in the way they taught compressed-format summer session courses, with respect to course planning, classroom instruction, student assessment, and interaction with students. The study is of value to continuing educators, as universities are increasingly challenged to think about flexible delivery models, including teaching and learning in compressed formats.

Intensive mode teaching involves classes on fewer days and for longer on each day than is traditional in the discipline. The mode is used increasingly in universities in Australia. In a national research project, we developed an Intensive Mode Teaching Guide based on a survey of 105 coordinators of intensive mode units at 26 universities, and investigations in 8 intensive mode units at 4 universities. The guide was reviewed by 161 university staff members at 10 workshops, and 27 students in a survey. Threshold capability theory and threshold concept theory were used. We found that intensive mode offers opportunities including a retreat-like focus; development of learning communities; and time and flexibility for interactive, practical, and authentic activities that provide exposure to practice and/or practitioners. However, intensive mode also increases risks such as students falling behind. We recommend that teachers intentionally design to optimise the benefits and mitigate the risks.

In this study we explored faculty and student experiences of accelerated learning. We conducted interviews with faculty members who had delivered the same course in 12 and 6-week timeframes, and we analysed a student survey. Students reported overall positive experiences in the accelerated courses, particularly in the social aspects of learning, higher than usual motivation, and confidence in their learning. However, both faculty and students raised concerns about the scope and timing of assessment tasks, student workload expectations, faculty workload, and administration of courses. We offer recommendations regarding implementation, assessment practices, and management of learning in an accelerated timeframe.

This guide is designed to support academic staff at the University of Canterbury teaching in time-shortened settings. The process of transitioning standard semester-length courses to intensive or summer school formats requires more than the compression of lectures and teaching and learning resources. The following guidelines have been developed following an extensive review of the most recent research literature with respect to course compression. Subsequent to a brief summary of the benefits of course compression, we will address five main areas. These are: 1. approaches to teaching, 2. course design, 3. the classroom setting, 4. the blended/online environment, and 5. assessment. For each area we highlight relevant issues and what staff can do to address those in the context of their own teaching.

How is PhD pedagogy conceptualised in contemporary discourse? Doctoral pedagogy is usually figured as supervision, often, in particular in literature and popular culture, in the traditional dyadic form. Like other kinds of teachers, supervisors seem to hold a fascination, particularly for writers of novels and television dramas. In research literature, the attention garnered by supervision stems from another goal, a sense of needing to be more reflexive about it as a form teaching, usually by showing supervision at work through transcripts of supervisory meetings or through student and supervisor accounts of their experience of supervision. This examination of what is (or was) essentially a private form of teaching has operated in tandem with an increased scrutiny on supervision by institutions, as articulated in institutional policies, and a fostering of self-induced scrutiny through manuals on supervision. Both of these trends are suggestive of a perception at the end of the twentieth century, aided by studies showing high attrition rates and lengthy times to submission, that supervision was often not going well.

Almost twenty-five years ago a small, liberal arts college began a journey into critical pedagogies, both in some classes and at the departmental level. Students and faculty engage in department work together--setting curriculum, assessing programs, planning events, and rotating chairing of meetings. We are attempting to engage in transformative leadership with each other, as we re-imagine what a truly radical, democratic department would look like.

Discussions of world citizenship that elide the challenge of grappling with religious worldviews expose a covert intolerance at the very core of secularism, calling into question the “liberality” of liberal education. The ethical imperative of engaging with different worldviews not only demands that religions be taught, but also raises questions regarding how religious worldviews should be taught.

In 2014, a roundtable on pedagogy appeared in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion with an initial piece by Vanessa Sasson. Although neither Sasson nor the respondents explicitly situated her article as a part of the broader body of work known as the “ Scholarship of Teaching and Learning” (SoTL), readers would reap benefit from such a contextualization. In this article, after first exploring what SoTL is and how it has interacted with the field of religious studies, I explore three main elements of this particular kind of scholarship: research with human subjects and the Institutional Review Board, a foundation in other scholarship, and assessment. In these three areas, I uncover special questions, considerations, and resources for all religious studies instructors interested in embarking upon a SoTL project with the aim of contributing to the ongoing conversation about pedagogy.

Three arguments why we need the believing game: to help us find flaws in our thinking, to help us choose among competing claims, and to achieve goals that the doubting game neglects.

In May 2008, a group of women of color who teach religious studies in predominantly white colleges and universities came together at Texas Christian University in a Wabash Center for Teaching Theology and Religion consultation. The group examined what happens, both to them and with students, when women of color enter the space of the religion classroom, how their presence affects teaching and learning, and what strategies we might employ to ease interactions among students and teachers. This essay is a reflection on a crucial theme that we discovered in the consultation: authority.