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.

In our ostensibly secular age, discussing the real-world contexts and impacts of religious traditions in the classroom can be difficult. Religious traditions may appear at different times to different students as too irrelevant, too personal, or too inflammatory to allow them to engage openly with the materials, the issues, and each other. In this “Design & Analysis” article Aaron Ricker describes an attempt to address this awkward pedagogical situation with an experiment in role-play enacted on the model of a mock conference. This description is followed by four short responses by authors who have experimented with this form of pedagogy themselves. In “Conplay,” students dramatize the wildly varying and often conflicting approaches to biblical tradition they have been reading about and discussing in class. They bring the believers, doubters, artists, and critics they have been studying into the room, to interact face-to-face with each other and the class. In Ricker's experience, this playful and collaborative event involves just the right amount of risk to allow high levels of engagement and retention, and it allows a wide range of voices to be heard in an immediate and very human register. Ricker finds Conplay to be very effective, and well worth any perceived risks when it comes to inviting students to take the reins.

One page Teaching Tactic: working in groups to practice reading carefully and write academically.

One page Teaching Tactic: Students imagine themselves as film directors to help visualize scriptural narratives, and thereby read more carefully.

One page Teaching Tactic: taking students outdoors for creative activities and discussions about creation in Genesis.

This paper introduces Rewritten Scripture and scriptural rewriting as a creative process that, when mirrored in a teaching exercise, may serve as an effective practice in teaching sacred texts. Observing changes made between scripture and its rewriting may allow readers to identify different contexts among these texts. Furthermore, the act of rewriting scripture mirrors descriptions of creativity, which itself is argued to be the highest level of cognitive operation in learning. Therefore, the paper shows how scriptural rewriting can be simultaneously the object of the lesson and the method of learning through a two-step teaching process, using an example of scriptural rewriting in a Dead Sea Scroll. The first step offers a way to understand the meaning of Rewritten Scripture and what exegetes can learn from it, while the second step engages creativity by practicing rewriting scripture itself.

One of the most illuminating finds in Barbara E. Walvoord's Teaching and Learning in College Introductory Religion Courses (2008) is what she calls “the great divide,” a mismatch between instructors’ goals for their courses, which are academic, and the students’ reasons for taking them, which relate to their personal interests and development. Motivation – or, rather, the lack thereof – is not explicitly considered as a potential victim of this mismatch. This article will turn its attention squarely to this issue. First, I will review data about the “great divide” and link them to the common practice of asking our students to bracket the personal when they take our courses. The article will juxtapose this practice with what research tell us about motivation, which will allow us to further explore why the divide Walvoord and others have identified is so problematic. The article will conclude with pedagogical strategies that can help instructors intentionally influence motivation in religion courses. Ultimately, I suggest that we may be doing students – as well as ourselves, as the purveyors of our discipline – a disservice, if we do not attend to (or, worse, if we actively avoid) what we know motivates students to learn.