Resources

Thinking about teaching as an act of intellectual hospitality has the potential to shape productively how teachers conceive of their own roles in the classroom, their interactions with students, and their execution of crucial tasks. It also offers a path to helpful reflection about a persistent issue that arises particularly for the many faculty members who teach in small departments of religion and are therefore called upon to address a wide range of topics in their teaching. In addition, adopting an ethos of hospitality in the classroom provides a salutary counterpoint to the pervasive and often corrosive academic practices of critique, refutation, and dispute.

A discussion about how instructors can host a hospitable online learning environment can address one of the fundamental philosophical and theological concerns frequently expressed about online learning – the loss of face-to-face interaction and, with it, the loss of community building (cf. Delamarter 2005, 138). This perceived link between physical presence and community creation, sometimes articulated, frequently assumed, often stands in the way of instructors, administrators, and even institutions fully embracing online learning. This article will argue that when one gives due attention to hospitality, the potential for building online community is greatly enhanced, and with it comes a more effective pedagogical strategy for deep learning. It will conclude with some general recommendations for employing hospitality for building online learning communities.

The authors discuss the complexities and responsibilities of teaching about Daoism in contemporary North American colleges and universities. Expanding and revising the findings of Kirkland (1998), they argue that enough has changed in educational and cultural contexts to warrant new strategies for teaching about Daoism. Textbooks are now available that offer more accurate and responsible presentations of Daoist history, and this enables a richer appreciation of Daoist culture and religion, and its significance within broader areas of Chinese culture such as art, politics, and science. On the other hand, students have a far greater possibility of interacting outside the classroom with North Americans of Chinese and European background who claim affiliation to the Daoist tradition especially through techniques of moving meditation such as Qigong and internal alchemy. This situation poses challenges in the classroom concerning claims of authenticity, tradition, and representation. Rather than shying away from these contemporary North American cultural forms, the authors argue that the skilled teacher can use these interactions to facilitate a deeper inquiry into questions of authenticity and tradition. Moreover, the authors discuss the use of an interactive website designed specifically to assist in reflecting on these issues in the classroom.

Emerging from the particular experiences of the marginalized, postmodern pedagogies (bell hooks, Paolo Freire, feminist pedagogies) argue that education is more than conveying information from teacher to student. Rather education should encompass the transformative process of shaping character, values, and politics through the dynamic interaction among the teacher, the students' experiences, and the content of the instructional material. These perspectives argue that educators should reject "the banking model" of education, and teach to transform. However, religious studies with today's black college student tests the mettle of these approaches. On the one hand, historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have long practiced transformative education through a commitment to shaping both the minds and characters of their students. On the other hand, many of today's black college students are less receptive to transformation, particularly in the academic study of religion. This resistance to transformation is a reflection of (1) the socio-economic reality of the current student, and (2) a new black religiosity that portrays the world in binary terms. These economic and religious realities present a teaching context for which few religious scholars are prepared. This essay discusses the particularities of teaching religion to today's black college student by sharing the challenges, failures, successes, and joys of teaching religion at a small church-related, historically black women's college in the south. I will discuss the techniques that fail, and the way in which this unique context causes me to transform the way I teach religion. In the midst of a commitment to postmodern pedagogies, I feel a need to return to the banking model's establishment of authority and emphasis on content. As I negotiate with this method, I find ways to stealthily infuse transformative pedagogical techniques. I also discuss the way such a dramatic shift in pedagogy has transformed me, the teacher.

The article begins with two brief theoretical descriptions of a pedagogy of desire vis-à-vis the Christian Bible. The first of these is a poem; the second summarizes the conversation constituted by four quite different books: the Confessions by Augustine of Hippo, Freud & Philosophy by Paul Ricoeur, Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire, and The Ethnography of Reading edited by Jonathan Boyarin. There follows, then, a case in point: an account of my most recent effort to teach the eros of exegesis at Emmanuel College (Toronto), using the Song of Songs. This account includes discussion of the (pre)conception(s) of the (biblical) text that inform(s) this undertaking and of the practice of communal reading as a specific type of bodily activity and social experience. In conclusion, the question of evaluation is addressed. How does one learn to love – when, by, in, with, and under – reading the Bible?

The paper describes an orientation to teaching New Testament Studies at Vancouver School of Theology, a theologically liberal school in the context of Vancouver, Canada – paradoxically one of the most secular and multi-religious cities in the world. Guided by Denise Levertov's poem, "Overland to the Islands," it explores the promises and challenges of biblical study grounded in the material reality of the world, amidst older students who bear the marks of secularity, who are impatient with traditional orthodoxies, and who long more for life before the grave than after it. Adopting ideas from Roland Barthes, Paul Ricoeur, and Julia Kristeva, it explores teaching the Bible in a way that promotes the polyvalence, strangeness, and irreducibility of biblical texts, in order to move students away from exegetical and hermeneutical theories content with recovering authorial intent and reconstructing historical origins as the primary tasks of biblical study. The paper describes a model of teaching that celebrates the materiality of the New Testament together with its textual, social, theological, and historical complexity, as well as a tradition-constituted means of apprehending the world, and which treasures students as living texts who in the course of interpretation awaken ever-fresh meanings relevant to their own communal and personal identities.

The exploration described is rooted in the projects of five participants in the 2004/05 Wabash Workshop for Pre-Tenure Theological Faculty (led by Toni Craven and assisted by Daisy Machado and Steve Delamarter). All the projects related technology and pedagogy. Javier Alanís (Lutheran Seminary Program in the Southwest) wanted to use images to help his students engage various concepts of the Trinity, being sensitive all the while to an educational context marked by all kinds of diversity. Russell Haitch (Bethany Theological Seminary) was brought into the world of online teaching and found himself trying to assess its potential from the standpoints of scripture, reason, experience, and a trinitarian theological-anthropology. Mark Vitalis Hoffman (Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg) wanted to help his students experience a fresh encounter with Jesus' parables and ended up in the esoteric field of video gaming theory (ludology) for help in conceiving an environment and process interactive enough to do justice to all of the possibilities. Arun Jones (Austin Seminary) wondered how he might use historical images of mission work in India to help his students experience some of the issues surrounding intercultural ministry. Brent A. Strawn (Candler School of Theology, Emory University) had some vexing and complex concepts relating to Old Testament introduction (the nature of the interactions between biblical narratives and ancient Near Eastern texts) that required new points of access in order to be able to capture the understanding and imagination of contemporary students in his setting. Over the course of the year together (one week in June 2004, a weekend in January 2005, and a week in June 2005), participants worked on their project as all of us in the workshop explored issues of teaching and learning.

Students from different cultural backgrounds respond in a variety of ways to my teaching of biblical studies. Some sermonize or plagiarize quite unselfconsciously in their written assignments, while others consistently hand in work late or are silent members of the class. As I struggled with what these behaviors were saying about my teaching, I came to realize that limited ability in spoken and written English was not the only barrier. Deeper issues were at stake here about the nature of cross-cultural communication, teaching, and learning. In this note I analyze the issues of faith, authority, and styles of teaching and learning which underlie the "clash of educational cultures" (Ballard and Clanchy 1997, viii) occurring in the cross-cultural classroom. Then I suggest a number of strategies that I have developed to build bridges of understanding between the various educational cultures, to encourage deeper participation and to develop critical thinking.

Adult-learning theory challenges faculty to adapt their teaching to certain characteristics of adult learners, including self-direction: if adults direct the bulk of their lives outside of school, they should be permitted to direct their own educational experiences. To what extent is self-directed learning an optimal, or even realistic, methodology for seminary teaching? Does it matter what subjects we are teaching? This essay details an experiment with self-directed learning in a seminary ministry class: what worked, what might be improved, and how it challenges our view of ourselves as faculty to teach in this way. Student feedback from the course in question enhances our understanding of the best (and most challenging) features of the experiment.

Over the past fifteen years in New Zealand, theology has come in from the tertiary educational cold in various ways. One of the results or reasons for this has been willingness on the part of the state to accredit and provide funding for theological education and research. This has taken place largely through a compliance system of accreditation and resource allocation. The result has been academic recognition and a precarious financial boon for theology and some theological institutions and their students. But little attention has been paid to the epistemological and pedagogical temptations of compliance. Drawing on the recent experience of the writer, this article seeks to identify a number of the subtle temptations posed by state sponsored theological education and research.