Resources

Using seven design principles and a simple method, the World Café provides tools ("a powerful social technology”) for engaging people in conversations that matter.

Special issue of “Syllabus,” an online journal that posts annotated syllabi and short-article course descriptions submitted by college and university professors. 

One page Teaching Tactic: using images as an analogy to help students understand the difference between plagiarism and other appropriate uses of scholarship.

One page Teaching Tactic: individual oral exams during office hours in place of the first high stakes exam, helps encourage student engagement and diagnose learning problems.

One page Teaching Tactic: student-centered process demonstrating the processes and reasonableness of biblical textual criticism.

This essay analyzes student learning through place-based pedagogies in an American Religions course. In the course, students analyzed cultural meanings and practices of regional religious communities and participated in sensory awareness and ecological learning in a campus garden. Embodied learning increased student understanding and appreciation of land-based religious practices and epistemologies, and promoted multiple student literacies. In Religious Studies, place-based learning is vital to the examination of the rich dimensions and expressions of religious experience. Across disciplines, place-based pedagogies can expand and deepen text-based learning, cultivate recognition of various ways of knowing, foster affective connections to the local community, and develop critical skills for addressing patterns of displacement and ecological denigration.

This paper explores the possibilities and challenges inherent in employing community service-learning as a pedagogy for engaging undergraduates in theology and religious studies courses that contribute to racial reconciliation. The paper summarizes research from the scholarship of teaching and learning on best practices for structuring service-learning projects and processes that hold the possibility of students' genuine engagement with issues of race and the wisdom of the Catholic tradition.

“Metacognition” refers to helping students learn how to learn. This article provides suggestions for integrating student metacognition into a college course. It uses the example of a biology classroom, but the material is easily transferable.