Search Results

Responding to Resistance in Teaching about New Religious Movements

Eugene V. Gallagher

in Teaching New Religious Movements

Students frequently come to classes about new religious movements disinclined to take them seriously as legitimate religions. Borrowing from literature about race and diversity in the classroom and ... More

Students frequently come to classes about new religious movements disinclined to take them seriously as legitimate religions. Borrowing from literature about race and diversity in the classroom and using Peter Elbow's description of methodological doubt and methodological belief as analytical tools, this chapter discusses strategies for overcoming student resistance to taking NRMs seriously as religions. It is argued that the rigorous cultivation of methodological belief as an approach to the study of NRMs offers an effective way to dissipate some negative effects of stereotypes of NRMs and develop adequate descriptions of them. Advocating a rhetorical model of teaching, the chapter provides examples of active learning assignments and offers suggestions about course design that can make the politics of representation of NRMs a continuing topic for class discussions.Less

Course, Syllabus, and Lesson Design

Robert DiYanni, Anton Borst, Robert DiYanni, and Anton Borst

in The Craft of College Teaching: A Practical Guide

This chapter discusses course design. Teachers are required to design courses, syllabi, and lessons; activities, assignments, and assessments. This also includes a variety of teaching materials, from ... More

This chapter discusses course design. Teachers are required to design courses, syllabi, and lessons; activities, assignments, and assessments. This also includes a variety of teaching materials, from handouts to websites. Ultimately teachers are responsible for designing the kinds of experiences students will have in the classrooms. The chapter thus considers the primary pedagogical design responsibilities: courses, syllabi, units, and lessons; activities, assignments, experiences, and assessments. These design elements encapsulate the teacher's purpose in the classroom and reflects their pedagogical goals and how they might best be achieved. The key is to align them coherently with one another and with course learning goals.Less

Lecturing and PowerPoint

Robert DiYanni, Anton Borst, Robert DiYanni, and Anton Borst

in The Craft of College Teaching: A Practical Guide

This chapter deals with creating spaces for engagement. It considers the issue of coverage in designing courses and lectures, and for setting coverage requirements at the curricular level, and how to ... More

This chapter deals with creating spaces for engagement. It considers the issue of coverage in designing courses and lectures, and for setting coverage requirements at the curricular level, and how to balance that with what students do and experience in class to learn what is being covered. To solve the age-old problem of disengagement, the chapter argues that the heart of this problem is also the problem of how teachers help them learn during the presentation of content, material, or subject matter. In short: “Think of your audience. Think of your students.” Here, the teacher must design and deliver lectures with their subjective experience of the classroom in mind. These considerations will lead to informed choices about when and how to lecture, and how to lecture in ways that can engage students and enhance their learning rather than put them to sleep. The chapter explores some approaches to maximizing the benefits of lecturing for students, while minimizing the more common causes of disengagement.Less

Organizing Your Course as an Epic

Rebecca Pope-Ruark

in Agile Faculty: Practical Strategies for Managing Research, Service, and Teaching

This chapter offers advice for using an Agile version of backward course design for both revising an existing course and planning a new course. After reviewing two popular backward course design ... More

This chapter offers advice for using an Agile version of backward course design for both revising an existing course and planning a new course. After reviewing two popular backward course design frameworks, the chapter aligns terms from those approaches with Agile and Scrum terminology, encouraging the reader to think of their course as an epic and to create student learning stories rather than traditional student learning outcome statements. The chapter offers strategies for aligning course and student assessment criteria with the student learning stories and for developing a course schedule plan using a sprint model instead of traditional units. The chapter provides detailed examples of a course redesign and a new course design using the Agile and Scrum strategies in the chapter. Finally, the chapter extends advice to include redesigning multi-section courses and designing a program curriculum.Less

Educating Health Professionals on Peace and Human Rights

Neil Arya, Caecilie Böck Buhmann, and Klaus Melf

in War and Public Health

This chapter discusses education of health professionals, such as medical and nursing students, on peace and human rights.

Finding a Balance: Music at Liberal Arts Colleges

Victoria Lindsay Levine and Emily Kohut

in College Music Curricula for a New Century

Liberal arts colleges focus on undergraduate education, emphasizing the development of critical thought, the whole person, and values consistent with ethical participation in a civil society. Liberal ... More

Liberal arts colleges focus on undergraduate education, emphasizing the development of critical thought, the whole person, and values consistent with ethical participation in a civil society. Liberal arts music faculty now recognize the need to remap the music major and transform how music is taught and learned in order to remain relevant in the current economic and cultural climate, but the process is challenging. This chapter explores how liberal arts music faculty are striving to meet the challenge, using data from the Internet, a survey questionnaire, and interviews to compare the music major at thirteen colleges. We conclude that finding a balance between the conservatory-style curriculum and new curricular models does not imply replacing the Western concert tradition. Rather, it involves responding proactively to broader changes in musical life and recognizing the role of music in liberal education.Less

Teaching invented languages to the undergraduate major: A capstone course

Angela C. Carpenter

in Language Invention in Linguistics Pedagogy

This chapter discusses how creating an invented language allows students to master critical reasoning skills and apply their linguistic knowledge to a creative language project by using the various ... More

This chapter discusses how creating an invented language allows students to master critical reasoning skills and apply their linguistic knowledge to a creative language project by using the various strands of linguistic training they have received during their undergraduate years to produce their own invented language. The structure of the course, which includes weekly discussions and presentations, along with a grammar workshop that focuses on each of the elements needed to build the language, starting with phonetics and phonology and then continuing through various syntactic elements such as word order, case, and relative clause structure are detailed and discussed. Pedagogically, the course builds on four pillars: peer-to-peer learning, close and critical engagement with original source materials, problem-solving, and creative engagement with linguistic theory.Less

Stopping the Zombie Apocalypse: Ascetic Withdrawal as a Tool for Learning Civic Engagement

Elizabeth W. Corrie

in Teaching Civic Engagement

This chapter looks at current literature that reveals a correlation between high participation in consumerism and low levels of civic engagement. One pedagogical strategy is highlighted, the Ascetic ... More

This chapter looks at current literature that reveals a correlation between high participation in consumerism and low levels of civic engagement. One pedagogical strategy is highlighted, the Ascetic Withdrawal Project, as a way of addressing this trend in the classroom. Combined with other assignments with the course design that deepen students’ understanding of particular global issues and encourage them to apply this knowledge by teaching it to others, the Ascetic Withdrawal Project helps students make connections between personal choices and their global impact, overcoming “civic schizophrenia.” This, it is argued, is a critical first step in learning civic engagement. This project is then placed within the context of theological education, and the role this type of assignment can play in training students for civic engagement as persons of faith is suggested.Less

Learning about language through language invention: “I was really proud of the language I created”

Skye J. Anderson, Shannon T. Bischoff, Jeffrey Punske, and Amy V. Fountain

in Language Invention in Linguistics Pedagogy

This chapter analyzes the implementation of Invented Language Projects in different institutional and pedagogical contexts, focusing on introductory level linguistics. The data the chapter draws on ... More

This chapter analyzes the implementation of Invented Language Projects in different institutional and pedagogical contexts, focusing on introductory level linguistics. The data the chapter draws on come from students at three public universities, in a variety of class sizes, across undergraduate cohorts, and using a variety of integrations of language invention in course materials, over the last five years. The chapter identifies patterns of effectiveness in the use of language invention in the classroom by analyzing data collected inside and outside of these courses, assessing students’ mastery of core concepts in linguistics, their beliefs and attitudes about language, and their perception of the utility of language invention for their own learning. Though there is variation in the effectiveness of these strategies as they are instantiated in different contexts, the chapter shows that language invention is a promising way to engage with and effectively teach introductory students about the workings of natural human language.Less

Using language invention to teach typology and cross-linguistic universals

Matt Pearson

in Language Invention in Linguistics Pedagogy

This chapter outlines a group project where students learn about language typology by creating a naturalistic constructed language. Students learn about cross-linguistic variation in natural ... More

This chapter outlines a group project where students learn about language typology by creating a naturalistic constructed language. Students learn about cross-linguistic variation in natural languages (in areas such as phoneme inventory, word order, and case alignment), and then determine which grammatical properties their invented language will have. Decisions are made at random by spinning a wheel. Attached to the wheel is a pie chart, where the size of each slice represents the percentage of the world’s languages possessing a given setting for some structural parameter or combination of parameters. Crucially, each decision constrains subsequent decisions in accordance with known implicational universals. For instance, in determining whether the language has prepositions or postpositions, the pie chart is adjusted based on the order of verb and object in the language, as decided by a previous spin of the wheel.Less

Introduction

Marc A. Pugliese and Alexander Y. Hwang

in Teaching Interreligious Encounters

Teaching Interreligious Encounters is a multidisciplinary volume of original essays addressing pedagogical issues related to teaching that occurs through experiences of different religious traditions ... More

Teaching Interreligious Encounters is a multidisciplinary volume of original essays addressing pedagogical issues related to teaching that occurs through experiences of different religious traditions or interreligious encounters. The book brings together international scholars who work in and speak from a variety of contexts as loci for teaching interreligious encounters: undergraduate and graduate programs, secular and religiously affiliated institutions, divinity schools and seminaries, as well as graduate career preparation in nonreligious professions. There are four sections in the volume: “Theorizing Encounters” is partly propaedeutic but also representative of how theory constantly informs praxis even as it is informed by praxis; (2) “Arranging Encounters” contemplates planning and pedagogical strategies; (3) “Textual Encounters” contains essays on text-based teaching approaches; and (4) “Practical Encounters” presents pedagogical strategies with attention to the importance of lived experience through hands-on practices like case studies, site visits, and immersion programs.Less