Resources

To help non-specialists ensure that their teaching of Taoism is state-of-the-art, the author offers six suggestions: (1) Teach real Chinese Taoism, as it has been revealed by the social, textual, and historical research of Asian and Western specialists since the 1970s. (2) Use textbooks that reflect current scholarship. (3) Cover all phases of the Taoist tradition, not just the long-fetishized Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu. The classical text entitled Nei-yeh helps students understand modern forms of Taoist meditation, such as those in Ch'üan-chen Taoism, which has been neglected in our textbooks. (4) Use reliable translations by responsible scholars. (5) Use real Taoist texts, such as now appear in Livia Kohn's anthology, The Taoist Experience, and other new sourcebooks. (6) Make responsible choices. The author compares different pedagogical models and explains his own approach, designed to provide accurate knowledge of Taoist history and practices in a form that students will appreciate.

AAR Teaching Religious Studies Series (Oxford University Press) Classes organized by means of the 'religion and …' rubric cut both ways: they are elastic enough to attract wide student interest, thereby enhancing a department's enrollment statistics, but they are often theoretically unsophisticated, thereby hampering the future development of scholars of religion. After discussing the costs and benefits of such classes, this article focuses on one particular example of this popular rubric that would benefit from redescription: the use of films in the religious studies class. After identifying two competing approaches to using films, the essay concludes by discussing three feature films that can be used in all of our classes to teach a fundamental theoretical topic in our field: the insider/outsider problem.

This article presents an overview of a course entitled 'The Ethics of Ambition' which over the period of the last fifteen years the author has taught to undergraduates and seminarians, as well as in church-sponsored adult education programs. It summarizes and describes a number of pedagogical strategies that have evolved over time in response to the exigencies of these varying educational environments. More topically, the article offers a brief criticism of certain 'neo-conservative' assumptions regarding the pedagogical efficacy of the Christian narrative as these impinge upon the actual teaching situation.

The author believes that the value of teaching in the academy will continue to be diminished as long as teaching and scholarship are viewed as separate and unequal. Thus, pedagogical proficiency is a fundamentally important component of religious and theological scholarship. Pedagogical skills allow scholars to be in dialogue with people outside of their content specialization and outside of the academy; therefore, they enable dialogue with the people of a religious tradition who are not scholarly specialists, but who are the living community of the religious tradition. The article seeks first to articulate a clear understanding of teaching competency, drawing on the concept of pedagogical proficiency. The case is then made for the role of teaching in scholarly research and, finally, its specific role in religious and theological research, showing that research accountability to a living religious tradition necessarily demands teaching competency.

Three conceptions of general education developed under the titles 'general,' 'generalist,' and 'generalizing' are matched with appropriate strategies for teaching the Bible. These provide the basis for two points relevant to teaching the Bible in colleges and universities: first, that the prime object of attention is not the Bible, but rather a corporate agreement regarding an educational project; and second, that the ways in which the Bible might be taught will vary, appropriately, according to the ways in which that educational enterprise is understood. A corollary is stated: teachers of the Bible need to be as informed about research in teaching as they are in biblical research.

This article describes a study of the theology of Karl Barth carried out by four students at Memphis Theological Seminary who used the Internet and e-mail in addition to other means for learning. Dr. Donald K. McKim taught the class and here describes the way in which the class was structured, how students used the World Wide Web, a Newsgroup in which students participated, and their use of e-mail to amplify discussion. McKim indicates the advantage of using these resources which introduced students to a "new world" of media and unique resources, linked them with others throughout the world who also had an interest in Barth, and provided an enhanced means of communication for the students with each other and with the professor. He also provides further reflections about the experience in relation to seminary teaching.

The author describes the risks and rewards of her use of liberatory pedagogies in a "Feminist and Womanist Ethics and Spirituality" course. In addition to defining liberation pedagogies and providing a brief bibliography, she includes classroom rules and the projects undertaken that contributed to the character and success of the course.

During the 1996–97 academic year the authors conducted interviews with seminary professors known by their students, colleagues, and deans as teachers who had remained vibrant into the last decade of their teaching careers. The purpose of the interviews was to hear how these professors viewed the teaching vocation as they had given it expression in their specific institutional settings. From the interview transcripts, the authors have identified eight common threads among the participants, illustrating these with material quoted from the interviews. The last section of the article relates these threads to four orientations: to educational institutions, to the church, to vocation, and to one's own spiritual life.

This modified "note from the classroom" is a dialogue between two scholars about African American study of the Bible. Bellis introduces the subject by advocating the primacy of social location and the African American student's religious experience in the method that she uses in her classes. (Her sample bibliography, syllabus and course outline for teaching about the Bible in African American perspectives can be found on the Wabash Center web page: http://www.wabashcenter.wabash.edu.) Brown's response takes a different stance with regard to the relative importance for exegesis of historical-critical method and the reader's social location. While Bellis and Brown agree on the appeal that the King James Version holds for many African Americans (but for different reasons), their differing assessments of translations, the distinctiveness of African American interpretations, and the ethnicity of Biblical characters models a lively discussion of issues in teaching and learning.