Vocation of Teaching

Additional Info:
The editor of Teaching Theology and Religion facilitated this reflective conversation with five teachers who have extensive experience and success teaching extremely large classes (150 students or more). In the course of the conversation these professors exchange and analyze the effectiveness of several active learning strategies they have employed to overcome the passivity and anonymity of the large lecture format. A major point of debate emerges that contrasts the dynamically performative and highly informed and skilled lecturer with the “wasted time and money” that results from encouraging students to participate through various active learning strategies. Other themes include the importance of story telling in the religious studies classroom, the significance of the differences between students' learning styles, and the challenge of teaching and assessing critical thinking and communication skills.

Additional Info:
How is quilt‐making both metaphor and pedagogy for early‐career faculty of theology and religion who seek to cultivate critical and creative imagination for teaching, and to probe the challenges and promises of complex identities and vocations within 21st‐century landscapes of theological education? This forum presents essays (with explanatory introduction) by five members of the 2016–2017 Workshop for Early Career Theological School Faculty, who were impelled to story their experience of being “handed over to themselves” by an “arts and craft” project which forced them to think with their hands, speak with found objects, and re‐present themselves in the form of 12 × 12‐inch quilt squares. In self‐reflexive prose, these scholar‐teachers offer through this medium a glimpse of their unexpected moments of revelatory learning, as each was pulled into deeper contemplation of their personhood, experience, know‐how, and practical wisdom, each uncovering valuable hidden sources for more expansive theological query, and each re‐thinking the possibilities for theological education and its pedagogies.

Additional Info:
The following essay is based on an oral presentation, "On Being a Good Teacher and a Good Writer," which the author was asked to make for the Southwest Commission on Religious Studies, March 16, 2003. The purpose of the presentation was to encourage conversation among theological educators on the character of their vocation. A panel discussion of the theme followed the presentation. The presentation was designed to engage this subject at an autobiographical and reflective level rather than as an academic argument. The published version of the essay seeks to retain something of the personal reflective character of the original presentation.

Additional Info:
In this essay, I explore "narcissistic pedagogy," a pedagogy that centers disproportionately on the needs of the teacher – especially the need for admiration. I engage psychological discussions of narcissistic patterns, and I retell the ancient myth of Narcissus. The core of narcissistic pedagogy is that the teacher experiences students not as centers of their own activity but as part of the teacher's self. All educational situations are vulnerable to narcissistic dynamics, and I will consider strongly narcissistic pedagogy as well as milder narcissistic dangers. I will, additionally, explore healthy narcissism. I pose "conversational education" as an alternative to narcissistic patterns.

Additional Info:
This essay chronicles the academic odyssey of a young professor who sets out to revise the department's Introduction to Religion course only to realize that she must first clarify her vocational commitments before she can create a teachable course. She is convinced through working with many students who express disdain or even hostility toward the subject matter that she wants to model a relationship to the subject matter that says religion matters, but is uncertain how to do this. After an autobiographical foray into her academic upbringing in active learning, the author articulates four values to model in her teaching: personal relevance, academic responsibility, ethics, and community. The author then engages current scholarship in active learning, and narrates the process of translating those four values into concrete course goals and particular assignments. The essay concludes with an assessment of teaching the revised course.

Additional Info:
An extended metaphor for teaching. This essay draws out the useful parallels between the best kind of teacher and the Good Witch of the North, Glinda, from The Wizard of Oz. Unappealing to many viewers or readers of the classic children's story, Glinda offers an inspiring reminder of four important pedagogical points: (1) the master teacher always treats her student as a peer; (2) the master teacher acknowledges and encourages her student's abilities but lets her learn how to exercise them on her own; (3) the master teacher is often not equivalent or even similar to anyone the student has encountered before; and (4) the master teacher is not a surrogate parent but a more distant figure.

Additional Info:
Hugh Heclo's recent book On Thinking Institutionally (Paradigm Publishers, 2008) analyzes changes that have taken place in the past half century in how North Americans tend to think and act in institutions. The volume is receiving particular attention as it can be applied to higher education and to religious denominations, and so deserves consideration by those who teach in theology and religious studies. At an October 2009 conference, The Wabash Center hosted a lively discussion of Heclo's volume among invited religion and theology scholars, which resulted in the present compilation of four short responses to the book. What was and is clear from these responses is that while Heclo has identified a crucial issue, his analysis and prescription leave important theoretical and practical questions untouched. Indeed part of the energy around the discussion of the book flowed from the ways in which his lack of attention to social class, gender, race, and age circumscribed his ability to robustly describe and diagnose the challenge that gave rise to his book. In order to orient readers to the volume and discussion of it, the "Conversation" begins with a descriptive review of the book.

Additional Info:
Mentoring is an important but often overlooked resource in theological education and students' academic and spiritual formation. This essay profiles the mentoring practices and postures of the writing tutor and the spiritual director as exemplars of academic and spiritual mentoring. An extended probe of this analogy affirms the integration of academic and spiritual formation as a core value in theological education; identifies mentoring in theological education as a hidden treasure fostering this integration and warranting attention as a theological practice; and re-envisions the theological practice of mentoring under the traditional rubric of the “care of souls,” embracing the relational, educational, formational, spiritual, and rhetorical dimensions of this practice.

Additional Info:
This is an edited transcript of a conversation between two founding women on the delights and demands of teaching and learning within and beyond traditional institutional life, facilitated by Lisa M. Hess of the journal's Editorial Board. The conscious feminine practices of a women's writing school, Women Writing for (a) Change (Cincinnati, Ohio), created the circle-container for the sharing of words and wisdom. Narrative, pedagogical, and organizational issues arose as the circle listened and examined the realities of contributing as a woman in higher education, yesterday and today.

Additional Info:
This conversation between the editors of Teaching Theology and Religion and Joanne Maguire Robinson continues an occasional series of interviews that has previously featured Jonathan Z. Smith, Stephen Prothero, Mary Pierce Brosmer, and Mary Elizabeth Mullino Moore. The exchange takes as its point of departure the teaching statement that Professor Robinson produced in support of her candidacy for the American Academy of Religion's Excellence in Teaching Award. Issues addressed include the impact of institutional context on one's teaching, teaching the humanities in universities that are ever more focused on job training, making the transition from a graduate program focused on research to teaching undergraduates who are unlikely to take even a second course in the study of religion, and ways in which women are challenged to navigate multiple responsibilities while striving to make their way in a male‐dominated academy.

Additional Info:
The article is a theological reflection on the vocation of university teaching that describes the heart of the matter of what faculty do in the classroom. The author draws on personal narrative, social-psychological analyses of how insight occurs and contexts for insights are constructed, and sociological accounts of shifts that have altered significantly the context of university teaching and learning at the cusp of the millennium to make her case. She argues that the vocation of university teaching involves creating spaces of gracious play that are potentially transformative for students and faculty. Creating such spaces, however, draws faculty into an asceticism that can be understood as a spiritual path. The article is a revision of the author's 1999 St. Elizabeth Seton Lecture at the College of Mount St. Joseph, Cincinnati, Ohio.

Additional Info:

Additional Info:

Additional Info:

Additional Info:
Beginning with a series of questions designed to peak reader curiosity and expose key challenges for mid-career faculty, the authors uncover several issues in post-tenure faculty life and work, and they reflect on images for understanding and responding to these challenges. Topics identified include mid-career as an opportunity for deeper investment in one's teaching, challenges associated with competing claims for time, shifts in research that can accompany the transition to mid-career, challenges in dealing with an increasing generational gap between oneself and one's students, responsibilities associated with being a longer-term member of a faculty, and feelings of fatigue and occasional alienation from one's educational institution and/or church.

Additional Info:
Theological school faculty at mid-career often discover a bifurcated work environment in the theological institutions they serve. Scholarly and pedagogical passions can be set in tension with academic administrative responsibilities – each vying for the lion's share of time. In this essay the author plunges into murky vocational waters to explore possible contributing factors for the bifurcated existence mid-career faculty experience. The essay suggests creative steps toward new visionary paradigms to aid theological institutions in adopting and modeling visionary theological education. This transformative model would strive to enhance community life, nurture leadership, foster intellectual formation, cope with institutional strife, and constructively shape an institution's future.

Additional Info:
Discernment about when to make career moves is often clouded by a host of competing desires and motivations. In this essay the author peels back layers of vocational choices in order to begin to reveal motivations behind those choices. Questions pertaining to notions of prestige, imaginative projection into a new position, clarity about what one values in theological education, and shifts in thinking about pedagogy in a new context are explored.

Additional Info:
A scholar's calling at mid-career is latticed with challenges and changing responsibilities. In this essay the author considers faculty role changes during the mid-career phase of life as a teacher. The essay first addresses issues related to the responsibility of mid-career faculty to mentor the next generation of scholars/teachers. Keenly aware of stresses under which pre-tenure faculty labor the author highlights proven strategies and insights for successful mentoring. The last half of the essay offers reflections on life as a scholar, colleague and teacher at mid-career. With transparent honesty the author scrawls contours of experience, motivations, and challenges for mid-career faculty and sketches specific strategies for maneuvering through this phase of one's career.

Additional Info:

Additional Info:
Participants in a Wabash Center consultation on vocation discussed the variety of expectations, opportunities, and challenges that create contexts for teaching as they move through careers. These essays emerge from the experiences and reflections of four participants about different stages of careers in diverse contexts. Tom Massaro writes from the perspective of one who recently navigated the challenges leading up to the tenure review in a Jesuit theological school and notes common patterns amidst the diversity of challenges. Phyllis Airhart ponders vocational fidelity in the transitions to new roles and responsibilities at mid-career in a Canadian university. Barbara Brown Zikmund deals with what she calls the 'mature years' and traces a major shift in her career from administration in an American school to teaching in Japan. Raymond Williams reflects on vocation during the process of preparing for retirement from teaching in a liberal arts college, attempting to respond faithfully to the inevitable question, 'What are you going to do when you retire?' Vocation is a thread that runs through each essay as reflection on the integrity and continuity of careers. The authors raise issues and make suggestions that may help others reflect on their vocation as teacher.

Additional Info:
Short tribute to Bill Placher, as teacher, on the occasion of a panel of AAR Teacher of the Year Award recipients.

Additional Info:
Raymond B. Williams, Professor Emeritus of Religion at Wabash College, founding Director of the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion, long–time member of the Executive Board of the American Academy of Religion, and founding editor of the journal Teaching Theology and Religion, has moved on to what will no doubt be a very active retirement. An interview with Williams was conducted by Malcolm Warford to be published in a venue unknown to the subject, thus enabling Warford to capture the spontaneous, unguarded vocational narrative of this private, humble scholar–teacher. After Warford transcribed and edited the interview, Lucinda Huffaker, co–editor of Teaching Theology and Religion, inserted commentary to set out themes and emphases on teaching and learning (desig. – LAH). As an autobiography, the article is both a window and a mirror – revealing both the formative influences in one professor's life and providing readers with an opportunity for reflective comparison with their own vocational paths and identities.

Additional Info:
Changing pedagogies is an ongoing process consequent upon personal and social change. Those of us who teach in religious studies or theology departments risk failure in changing pedagogies if we attempt such change alone. This essay, cast as a personal journey, reviews the changing student body, the reasons why we must adapt our pedagogies to this change, and the processes and consequences of adapting these new pedagogies. The goal of changing pedagogies is to allow the plurality of voices and pedagogies to speak and be used to sustain a community of love and concern in the midst of diversity.

Additional Info:
As associate director and then director of the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion, Lucinda Huffaker has been a key factor in the Center's reputation for hospitality. The Center's work presupposes that reflection on teaching improves teaching and learning, and good reflection on one's teaching requires taking risks and making oneself vulnerable. Hospitality helps create a "safe space" that encourages such risks, even in the current inhospitable academic world, where factors like competitiveness and the increasing use of adjuncts make honest reflection on teaching difficult.

Additional Info:
One goal of the Wabash Center is to honor teachers for their potential, and hospitality has been a primary means to that end. A lesson learned is that the intention and effort to honor teachers create contexts for meaningful discussions, creative learning, and personal renewal of those engaged in workshops and consultations. The lesson is valuable for those engaged in all forms of adult learning, especially in colleges and theological schools.

Additional Info:
The editor of Teaching Theology and Religion facilitated this reflective conversation with four teachers who recently moved from undergraduate institutions to seminaries and divinity schools. Three major themes emerge in the conversation: (1) developing their pedagogical craft in undergraduate settings made them better teachers in their new contexts; (2) they moved, in part, to achieve a "better balance" between teaching and scholarship, and while this was generally achieved it was manifest in unexpected ways; (3) the communities or publics among whom and on behalf of whom they engage in broader service shifted in ways that have effected both their scholarship and their teaching; and (4) the move to a new teaching context enhanced their professional lives because they were able to consider their own visions of career in relation to the mission of their new institutions.

Additional Info:
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.

Additional Info:

Additional Info:
Historically, the Presbyterian/Reformed tradition has placed a heavy emphasis on education and has honored teaching as an important vocation. This paper begins to explore insights and models that tradition offers to help teachers clarify their calling. The article discusses five themes in Reformed theology and how these themes play out in an educational context, providing examples from one Presbyterian college. The paper concludes by suggesting four ways to think about pedagogy in Presbyterian institutions that are both consistent with Reformed principles and practical in their relevance to teaching and learning.