Resources

One page Teaching Tactic: student presentations to practice culling important concepts from class discussion, encouraging students to see how course material connects from one class period to the next and practice posing readings-based questions.

One page Teaching Tactic: using Twitter for student discussions of films outside of class, teaches them to write thoughtful and critical comments in a succinct but expressive manner.

One page Teaching Tactic: a warm-up exercise requiring students to recall and synthesize course material by selecting what is applicable to a practical pastoral care setting that they might reasonably expect to encounter.

In this article, I explore an ethical and pedagogical dilemma that I encounter each semester in my world religions courses: namely, that a great number of students enroll in the courses as part of their missionary training programs, and come to class understanding successful learning to mean gathering enough information about the world's religious “traditions” so as to effectively seduce people out of them. How should we teach world religions – in public university religious studies courses – with this student constituency? What are/ought to be our student learning goals? What can and should we expect to accomplish? How can we maximize student learning, while also maintaining our disciplinary integrity? In response to these questions, I propose a world religions course module, the goal of which is for students to examine – as objects of inquiry – the lenses through which they understand religion(s). With a recognition of their own lenses, I argue, missionary students become more aware of the biases and presumptions about others that they bring to the table, and they learn to see the ways in which these presumptions inform what they see and know about others, and also what they do not so easily see.

One page Teaching Tactic: describes a kinetic classroom exercise to help students’ reading comprehension

One page Teaching Tactic: student writing assignments in which they are forbidden to use direct quotations but required to provide a citation for every sentence that uses information from one of their sources.