Luther, learning, and the liberal arts

Abstract

The learning goals of a well-designed course in the liberal arts include not only the imparting of knowledge but also the development of critical thinking and disciplinary expertise. A class on Luther can help students acquire those intellectual skills associated with the discipline of history and the liberal arts more generally as they consider broader questions about institutional religion, spirituality, moral choices, and human agency. Current scholarship on how people learn highlights the importance of adequate mental frameworks for the acquisition, retention, and retrieval of new ideas and information. This scholarship underlies the choice of specific strategies used to teach about Luther and the Reformation. Assignments provide "scaffolding," which begins with modeling and then moves from simpler to more complex assignments. Students practice the specific intellectual skills of critical reading and textual analysis over the course of the semester. KEYWORDS Martin Luther, 95 theses, learning, disciplinary expertise, scaffolding, critical thinking 1 | INTRODUCTION Every few weeks an article shows up on my Facebook feed defending the value of the humanities or lamenting the declining enrollment in humanities courses. 1 As a historian of the Reformation, I have been involved with colleagues and community members in planning various ways to commemorate Luther's posting of the 95 theses in 1517. These two areas of interestone very broad, concerning the liberal arts, and the other quite specific, centering on the figure of Martin Lutherform the backdrop to my thinking about the biggest challenge of my professional life, helping students learn something about the past and its continuing influence on the present. The 500th anniversary ofLuther's 95 theses not only brings increased public attention to the Reformation but also provides an occasion to think about why we teach Luther and how that instruction relates to our broader goals as teachers.