Resources

The Academic Teaching and Biblical Studies Section of the Society of Biblical Literature chose Wisdom Ways, by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, as the basis for a discussion on teaching at its November 1902 meeting in Toronto. Each presenter commented on the underlying pedagogy of the book, sharing exercises and assignments they had used in their classrooms to help students interpret the materials, especially from a feminist and/or liberationist perspective. Adapted from the SBL presentations, this is a different type of review essay that describes the use of a book in three different settings: a free-standing seminary, a state university, and a university-affiliated divinity school. These three distinct contexts are in turn the settings for three individual pedagogical styles. The result is a conversation among author, teachers, text, and students that illustrates the interplay of teaching, learning, and context.

Seminaries have a responsibility to engage students in reflecting upon the spiritual life, as well as providing opportunities to deepen their own spiritual journeys. It also is important that they consider the intentional ways that their understandings and experiences of the spiritual life influence their leadership in the Church. Spiritual formation of seminarians provides particular challenges to faculty of liberal, ecumenical seminaries. This article describes a course designed to address these issues and argues that spiritual formation can be effectively integrated into the curricula of liberal, ecumenical seminaries.

After the disheartening results of an informal investigation of content knowledge and reading comprehension among her students, the author ponders the implications for her teaching objectives. What are we, as educators in religious studies, really teaching and how are we doing it? How are we accommodating students with less traditionally honed academic skills without diminishing content? She describes her experiments with several new teaching strategies for enhancing student learning by helping them improve basic skills, develop cultural literacy, and relate course content to their personal experience.

There seem to be two irreconcilable approaches to reading the Bible, and these often collide in an undergraduate's first college class in religion. Students from a devotional background find the scholarly approach a disappointment compared with their preferred way of reading. Yet upon closer examination the limits of an exclusively devotional way or an exclusively academic way soon become apparent. A way beyond this impasse is described as an incarnational approach, which seeks to honor the integrity of the literary, cultural, and historical features of the Bible while also taking seriously the personal faith of both student and instructor. This strategy is not original of course, but is a case study of a way in which the Christian tradition may address the quarrel between two competing ways of reading and turn it into a conversation.

This brief meditation on teaching was shared at a gathering of mid-career theological school teachers for a retreat in Scottsdale, Arizona. It draws upon the author's familiarity with the desert to provide a metaphoric exploration of the "desiccation and delight" that surprises us repeatedly in our classrooms and instructs us in humility and hope.

For several years the field of Second Language Acquisition has benefited from methods associated with communicative language learning. However, these benefits have largely been overlooked when teaching ancient languages, likely because the objective for ancient languages is literacy, not oral fluency. This article outlines an experiment that capitalized on communicative language methods to accelerate literacy for beginning students of Biblical Hebrew.

Finding ways to reduce students' anxiety and maximize the value of learning Greek and Hebrew is a continual challenge for biblical language teachers. Some language teachers use technology tools such as web sites or CDs with audio lessons to improve the experience. Though these tools are helpful, this paper explores the value gained from understanding first how students learn and then how technology tools best support that learning. Developments in cognitive psychology and neuroscience offer many insights concerning adult learning and retention. After a presentation of key insights, several ideas are suggested for enhancing the learning and retention experience of biblical language students.

Teaching religion and theology requires interpretation of the vast corpus of religious poetry that is found in every religious tradition, but students are generally ill-equipped to interpret this material. Therefore teachers would do well to teach the students how to interpret religious poetry. This article discusses some of the challenges of teaching this material to students and discusses techniques and exercises that have been found useful in teaching students how to navigate the terrain of religious poetry.

This essay discusses the process and findings of an experiment on the scholarship of teaching and learning conducted in a religious ethics classroom that utilized an experiential approach to teaching and learning about social justice. The first part lays out the focus of the investigation and the pedagogical principles drawn from experiential learning theory that provided the foundation for the experiment. The second part describes all of the components of the pedagogical strategy used in the experiment, the social justice action project. The third part discusses the qualitative methodology used to gather evidence and the findings drawn from that evidence. What the evidence shows is that an experiential approach to teaching and learning about social justice can be quite effective. The essay concludes with discussions of areas for further study and the implications for the practice of others.

This article explores the art form of dance as a metaphor for the teaching of theology. Employing the work of Maria Harris, the author contends that there are seven elements of dance than can serve as metaphors for teachers of theology: preparation, rhythm, movement, expectancy, response, embodiment, and performance. Each dance element is described in detail, and the correlations between specific elements of dance and how one might teach theology are presented as possible methodological steps for teaching.