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.
This paper addresses a perennial question of the religious studies and, indeed, of most liberal arts classrooms: How do I get my students to read texts thoroughly and with understanding? After briefly reviewing the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) data, I argue that what teachers desire is not just basic literacy, but fluency, which is the capacity to read analytically (and, for me, appreciatively), deploying the strategies of reading in a high process, improvisational mode. I unpack the elements and efficacy of one close reading classroom teaching practice I use, guided annotation, as a strategy for developing fluency. I argue that close analysis of a short, intentionally chosen passage with a guiding question builds towards reading fluency. Annotating short passages, singly and then in relation to other passages, with the author's and disciplinary concerns as the foci, practices the skills that build fluency. Annotation is akin to playing scales in music, repeating a baseline task of reading; working slowly and simply at first, but then with increasing speed and complexity, moving the student towards reading whole texts well.
An extended set of conversations conducted by three religious studies faculty teaching at large public universities in the Southern United States spurred these reflections on how their institutional locations inflected issues such as the cultural expectations students bring to the classroom, how these expectations interact with the evolving priorities of religious studies departments, and how these factors affect the balance among the various subfields of religious studies and theology that make up such departments.What cultural expectations do students from particular places bring to religious studies classrooms in public universities? How do these expectations interact with the evolving priorities of religious studies departments? How should these factors affect the balance among the various subfields of religious studies and theology that make up such departments? Surely these are questions that many kinds of teachers can benefit from pondering, and we do not claim to address them in any comprehensive or authoritative way in this article. Nor do we recommend approaching the practical challenges these questions pose with any one-size-fits-all formula. Nevertheless we believe we can contribute useful insights to discussions of these interlocking issues. Through a series of structured conversations we came to pose the above questions in sharp relief and deepen our reflections about them -starting from our shared teaching experiences in public universities in the Southern United States. The purpose of this article is to share some of the insights we gained.In the summer of 2005, the Wabash Center for Teaching Theology and Religion convened its first Colloquy for Mid-Career Faculty Teaching Religion at Colleges and Universities. Among the twenty participants and staff, the three of us (Sandie Gravett of Appalachian State University, Mark Hulsether of the University of Tennessee, and Carolyn Medine of the University of Georgia), found ourselves telling similar stories in discussions on teaching despite our significant differences in training and scholarly specializations. The common link appeared obvious. We all worked in large public universities in the Southeast. During the course of many meetings over a three year period -both in the original colloquy and a follow-up project in which the three of us worked with colleagues from our home institutions -we discovered that our teaching landscape shaped our experience as instructors in ways that were distinctive, IN THE CLASSROOM Conversation
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