Scholarship on Teaching

This conversation between the 2017 American Academy of Religion Excellence in Teaching award winner Lynn Neal and the editors of Teaching Theology and Religion continues an occasional series of interviews that has previously featured Jonathan Z. Smith, Stephen Prothero, Mary Pierce Brosmer, Mary Elizabeth Mullino Moore, and the 2016 Teaching award winner Joanne Maguire Robinson. The exchange takes as its point of departure the AAR teaching statement that Professor Neal submitted. Topics discussed include introductory courses, active learning assignments, religious intolerance and privatization, student learning outcomes, different levels of student skills and preparation, augmenting assignments through the production of video interviews with scholars, and finding conversation partners for reflecting on teaching under the life balance stresses of the academy today.

One page Teaching Tactic: students annotate popular song lyrics to help them review material from the course by analyzing that material in a new context.

One page Teaching Tactic: a highly structured scaffolding of assignments to support students' ethnographic site visit to a local religious place of worship.

One page Teaching Tactic: students work in groups to identify and discuss differences between scholarly and non-academic sources.

One page Teaching Tactic: using worksheets to provide a structure for a group of students to increase their reading and analytic skills by walking together through a longer and more complex text.

This Forum emerges from a session initiated by the Professional Development Committee at the 2017 conference of the Society of Biblical Literature in Boston. A panel of five Bible scholars, from both theological education and undergraduate contexts, provide brief descriptions and analyses of a specific course they have taught online. They describe creative assignments such as role play, online field trips, evaluating web sites, and staged debates. They analyze the opportunities for developing undergraduates' critical thinking skills as well as seminarians' formation for ministry. A comparison of online and face‚Äêto‚Äêface teaching contexts reveals shifts in our understanding of how learning happens and our own identities as teachers. The Forum concludes with questions from the floor, which turn the conversation toward institutional support for pedagogical and technological hurdles.

Students increasingly appear anxious, risk‐averse, and worried about getting things “wrong.” They may appear to lack intellectual curiosity, and be unwilling to engage in independent study. This essay explores how teaching and assessment in theology and religious studies might help students learn to take intellectual risks, and increase their resilience. One approach is to encourage students to experiment and “fail safely,” to increase their confidence that they understand what is expected of them, and to help them begin to understand learning as more broadly formational, not always directed toward a grade. I suggest three strategies: more formative assessment; a stronger narrative about the purpose of formative assessment; and an appeal to values, virtue, and the cultivation of character. Via these approaches, students might be encouraged to understand assessment in less utilitarian terms and increase their resilience for a world characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, prepared both critically and dispositionally to thrive and contribute positively to society.

Many courses in higher education rely on the hierarchical organization of Bloom's taxonomy to categorize and sequence learning. Introductory courses on scripture often emphasize remembering content and background as a basis for applying the sacred text to one's life. However, a review of the literature demonstrates little support for the widely assumed hierarchical nature of Bloom's taxonomy. Furthermore, this study examined the performance of traditional and non‚Äêtraditional students in a New Testament survey course on a comprehensive exam (a Remember task) and an application assignment (an Apply task) and found no correlation between the two. Furthermore, students struggled most with the interpretation portion of the application assignment, prompting the realization that interpreting a sacred text is a complex hermeneutical enterprise incorporating multiple levels of the taxonomy. Thus, introductory scripture courses may be better organized around the central, integrating practice of interpretation supported by needed information and application skills.

Site visits provide an irreplaceable learning experience to students in both religious studies and the emerging field of interfaith studies. The conceptual core of this thesis is the claim, drawn from feminist epistemology, that an embodied pedagogy – a pedagogy which engages students not only intellectually, but as embodied beings who inhabit a space, engage in physical activities, and undergo various sensory experiences – is ultimately more enriching than a pedagogy centered exclusively in the classroom. Factors that make a site visit a successful instance of embodied pedagogy include the provision of sufficient context to students in advance for them to understand and appreciate the experience, an opportunity afterward to reflect on this experience in an intentional way, ensuring the site and the community whose space it is are treated with proper respect, and ensuring that the religious sensibilities of one's students are also similarly respected.