Rethinking Classroom Diversity: Three Student Cultures in a Mainline Seminary

Abstract. Discussions on teaching and learning within theological seminaries often center on the question of student diversity, focused primarily upon issues of race, gender, and ethnicity. At the same time that seminaries are challenged to deal with a multitude of pedagogical suppositions emerging from increasingly diverse learning goals, seminaries must also pay attention to the ways their students challenge an institution's core mission to train ministers for service in churches and denominations. Based upon the author's experience teaching in a mainline Protestant seminary, the essay discusses three student cultures that often overlap among today's seminarians. These three student cultures, referred to here as “church seminarian,”“new paradigm seminarian,” and “vocational seminarian,” carry very different understandings of the seminary's role to prepare students for ministry. A critical discernment of these cultures might challenge seminary faculty to reevaluate their educational and missional suppositions amidst divergent student career objectives.     

Should Faculty Members be Exempt From a Mandate to Receive Instructional Design Training Because of Their Rights Under Academic Freedom?

The quality of the educational experience for students may be at risk if they are not taught in ways that are effective and pertinent. While educational institutions (administrators, faculty senates or a combination) may try to compel faculty members to gain knowledge of and utilize up-to-date learning and instructional design strategies, these faculty members may baulk at this mandate, citing academic freedom as their right to design their courses in any way they see fit. Following is a discussion exploring the issue, suggesting that regardless of how academic freedom is interpreted, faculty members have an ethical obligation to deliver instruction in ways that do not violate students' rights to learn. Consequently, institutions have a right as well as a duty to compel their faculty members to follow through with this obligation.     

Clarity and creativity as womanist ethics for teaching and evaluating theological writing

This article uses womanist ethics and theories of writing instruction to illuminate the experiences of black women seminarians with theological writing at a predominantly white institution. The three cases presented here highlight two ethics for teaching and evaluating theological writing: clarity and creativity. Already triply marginalized by race, sex, and class, black women are often greeted with unwritten norms around academic theological writing that threaten their self‐concept and their development as producers of theological knowledge. This work centers reflections of student‐learning on the voices of black women who found their own ways of negotiating these demands. Their responses to the problems of writing for and in white, male‐dominated theological discourses provide moral strategies that all writers can employ and that all theology professors can make a regular part of their ethical pedagogical practice.     

Teaching Religion in Its Contemporary Contexts: A Case Study

Abstract. After the disheartening results of an informal investigation of content knowledge and reading comprehension among her students, the author ponders the implications for her teaching objectives. What are we, as educators in religious studies, really teaching and how are we doing it? How are we accommodating students with less traditionally honed academic skills without diminishing content? She describes her experiments with several new teaching strategies for enhancing student learning by helping them improve basic skills, develop cultural literacy, and relate course content to their personal experience.     

Ethical Consideration of Counselor Education Teaching Strategies

Counselor educators rely on a variety of teaching strategies to augment clinical instruction and enhance student learning. Such strategies include action methods, audio/video material, and self‐exploration. While using these strategies, educators are responsible for remaining sensitive to fundamental ethical issues, varied student needs, and academic/professional standards. Despite appearing straightforward and routine, this aspect of counselor education requires ongoing appraisal to ensure adherence to ethical guidelines, program integrity, and student well‐being. This article reviews various teaching strategies, discusses ethical implications associated with each strategy, and provides preliminary guidelines to enhance counselor educator ethical practice and student well‐being.     

The Black Student Experience at Predominantly White Colleges: Implications for School and College Counselors

Research from higher education and cultural studies that has examined the Black college student experience at predominantly White institutions (PWIs) is presented to assist counselors in understanding how Black college students' relationships with faculty, family, friends from home, and peers in Black student organizations can become assets or liabilities to their academic achievement and persistence. Implications are provided for assisting counselors in preparing Black students for, and supporting them while attending, PWIs.     

Evoked prior learning experience and approach to learning as predictors of academic achievement

Background. In separate studies and research from different perspectives, five factors are found to be among those related to higher quality outcomes of student learning (academic achievement). Those factors are higher self‐efficacy, deeper approaches to learning, higher quality teaching, students’ perceptions that their workload is appropriate, and greater learning motivation. University learning improvement strategies have been built on these research results. Aim. To investigate how students’ evoked prior experience, perceptions of their learning environment, and their approaches to learning collectively contribute to academic achievement. This is the first study to investigate motivation and self‐efficacy in the same educational context as conceptions of learning, approaches to learning and perceptions of the learning environment. Sample. Undergraduate students (773) from the full range of disciplines were part of a group of over 2,300 students who volunteered to complete a survey of their learning experience. On completing their degrees 6 and 18 months later, their academic achievement was matched with their learning experience survey data. Method. A 77‐item questionnaire was used to gather students’ self‐report of their evoked prior experience (self‐efficacy, learning motivation, and conceptions of learning), perceptions of learning context (teaching quality and appropriate workload), and approaches to learning (deep and surface). Academic achievement was measured using the English honours degree classification system. Analyses were conducted using correlational and multi‐variable (structural equation modelling) methods. Results. The results from the correlation methods confirmed those found in numerous earlier studies. The results from the multi‐variable analyses indicated that surface approach to learning was the strongest predictor of academic achievement, with self‐efficacy and motivation also found to be directly related. In contrast to the correlation results, a deep approach to learning was not related to academic achievement, and teaching quality and conceptions of learning were only indirectly related to achievement. Conclusions. Research aimed at understanding how students experience their learning environment and how that experience relates to the quality of their learning needs to be conducted using a wider range of variables and more sophisticated analytical methods. In this study of one context, some of the relations found in earlier bivariate studies, and on which learning intervention strategies have been built, are not confirmed when more holistic teaching–learning contexts are analysed using multi‐variable methods.     

Job Evaluation and Gender: The Case of University Faculty

This study examined the effects of students' and professors' sex on student evaluations of professors' teaching effectiveness. Ratings of over four hundred faculty made by over nine thousand students were analyzed. After controlling for a large number of variables, the main results showed that (a) male faculty were given significantly higher evaluations on global teacher effectiveness and academic competence than female faculty; (b) when controlling for extraneous variables, female faculty were not found to be rated as more sensitive to student needs than male faculty; and (c) when making overall, global judgments of faculty performance, students seem to place more weight on academic competence for male faculty than for female faculty.     

Combating Academic Fraud: Are Students Reticent about Uncovering the Covert?

This study links Cressey’s established fraud triangle theory to a recently developed academic fraud risk triangle as a platform for identifying the determinants of academic fraud risk factors. The study then evaluates the magnitude and extent to which students are willing to confront the realities of academic fraud and move towards a culture of academic integrity. Most of the studies pertaining to combating academic fraud have primarily been the opinions of the researchers, namely, the faculty. Although students may not be expected to police the fight against academic fraud, their opinions as to what would work and what would not, have not been sufficiently examined, and this study contributes to filling that void. We explore the agreement among students and groups of students concerning specific deterrent strategies. We find two types of strategies, student action and faculty/administration action. Results from 740 students surveyed found that the most widely supported strategies are stronger penalties, parental notification, an anonymous tip line, and administering a uniform policy. The least supported strategies were academic honor code, no strategy at all, requiring an ethics course, and leaving individual instructors to determine penalties. Further, full time, domestic, undergraduate, and male students favor student action strategies, which are more reactionary and less punitive.     

The study-skills workshop

A concern for improving the study skills of individual students led the Student Counselling Service at the University of East Anglia to consider aspects of the learning environment as a whole, and particularly the relationship between faculty and students. From cautious beginnings the development of the study-skills workshop has enabled counsellors, faculty and students to share problems, experience and expertise in a non-threatening context. The work-shop with its emphasis on an experiential approach provides ample opportunity for developing empathic qualities in both students and faculty, and is often a springboard for change, faculty members being persuaded to reassess their teaching and tutorial performance in the light of student concerns and difficulties expressed during workshop sessions.     

Faculty attitudes about student evaluations and their relations to self-image as teacher

With the worldwide implementation of students’ evaluation of teaching (SET), faculty attitudes and trust in students’ feedback as well as possible defensive (i.e., self-protective) motivations seem most relevant to the facilitation of the primary organizational goal of SET, namely, teaching improvement. A questionnaire—administered to 2241 faculty members of all ranks in two dozen varied institutions—measured positive attitudes and trust, on the one hand, and beliefs in salient negative faculty SET myths, on the other hand. The most widely-held negative attitudes concerned student fallibilities: vindictiveness; lack of maturity; and negative evaluations of low-achieving students. Despite believing in myths, more than half of the respondents reported trusting SET, thought that it accurately reflected their teaching performance, and considered SET-based feedback useful. A derived index comparing self-evaluations to reported students’ evaluations demonstrated that more than a third of the participants rated their own quality of teaching higher than the ratings they reported typically receiving from their students. This ‘underestimated’ group believed more intensely in SET myths and mistrusted it, which suggests a possible self-protective motivation underlying faculty attitudes. A subgroup of 9% felt strongly underestimated by their students, and a series of comparisons gave clear indications that, for this group of hard-core disgruntled faculty members, the administration of SET questionnaires and the provision of SET feedback are counter-productive. Insights from this research might encourage academic administrations to improve the implementation of SET measurement to increase faculty receptiveness and trust.     

Teaching Exegesis in Historically Black Theological Schools

This Forum collects the papers presented at a 2010 panel at the Society of Biblical Literature, an outcome of a Wabash Center funded grant project. The project examined the unique dimensions and experiences of teaching Biblical exegesis at the six historically black theological schools (HBTSs), including discussion of the unique needs of HBTS students and their communities, and appropriate learning goals and effective teaching practices for this context. None of the biblical studies faculty were prepared as graduate students for the unique challenges that they have encountered teaching at a HBTS, so they have all had to “learn on the job” how best to approach the unique needs of the student body. The brief statements collected here summarize the findings from the project, describe and analyze some effective teaching strategies, and offer suggestions for continuing the conversation.     

Double narrative of a researcher and the researched: the journey of English-language learning

As I embarked on my PhD study in Australia, I felt excited because my study was born out of reflection on my own journey of English-language learning. I decided to use my experiences as a touchstone for an understanding of the experiences of others like me. The study presented here is part of a larger study and is a double narrative that explores the researcher’s and the four participants’ experiences of learning English language in their home country contexts and also in Australia while they are studying in an Australian tertiary context. Through a reflective practice, I have reflectively studied my and the participants’ experiences with language learning strategies (LLS) to improve English-language skills and to better socialise into Australian academic and social discourses as international students. By linking the researcher and the researched closely, this research makes a contribution to English learning and teaching on the development of English-language skills of international students through the use of LLS. It provides some implications to institutions and advice to students like me.     

MERLOT: A faculty-focused Web site of educational resources

The Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT) is a community of academic institutions, professional discipline organizations, and individual people building a collection of Web-based teaching and learning resources where faculty can easily find peer-reviewed materials for use in their classes. The MERLOT project is currently supported by 23 systems and institutions of higher education and by the National Science Foundation. MERLOT is developing collections of learning materials from many academic disciplines, including psychology.     

Method,MacIntyre, and Pedagogy: Inviting Students to Participate in Theology as a Living Conversation

Teaching theology within academic institutions with confessional commitments and theologically conservative students requires holding together, in creative tension, two pedagogical goals. The challenge is to promote rigorous academic inquiry by encouraging student openness to engagement with perspectives that challenge their own beliefs while simultaneously constructing a course that is experienced as a safe space where students do not feel their personal faith is under attack. This essay presents the argument that a methodological framework for introductory theology courses informed by Alasdair MacIntyre's reflections on the nature of living traditions holds great promise for achieving these objectives. The essay will also describe how a creative extended analogy drawn from the game of basketball facilitates student comprehension of this initially abstract intellectual framework. Finally, the essay will offer some representative examples of student participation in course online discussion forums in order to illustrate the effectiveness of this approach for student learning.     

先前学业成就与学习动机、策略的关系:学业情绪的中介作用

采用整群抽样法抽取高中生670名,分别用学业情绪问卷、学习动机问卷和学习策略问卷来探讨学业情绪在先前学业成就与学习动机、学习策略之间的中介作用。以学业情绪的控制-价值理论和认知-动机模型为基础,运用偏差矫正百分位的非参数Bootstrap法对学业情绪的中介作用进行检验,结果发现:积极学业情绪在先前学业成就与学习策略、学习动机间起完全中介效应;消极学业情绪在先前学业成就与学习策略、学习动机间起部分中介效应。     

“My Entire World Stopped”: College Students’ Psychosocial and Academic Frustrations during the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted normalcy for college attending young adults which resulted in a loss of the campus environment and classroom setting. This change in setting may interfere with a student’s personal and academic wellbeing. This study used an online survey to evaluate college students’ academic and psychosocial frustrations during the COVID-19 pandemic. Data were collected from March–April 2020 at a land-grant university in the Appalachian region. Data were available from 2643 undergraduate and graduate students. There was a 65.8% and 15.7% increase in the number of students who reported their learning and health as fair, poor, or very poor after the COVID-19 pandemic, respectively. Qualitative responses were coded and 8 themes and 24 subthemes emerged. College students expressed frustrations regarding technology, classwork, research, family, social, emotional, behavioral, and financial aspects of life. These results can be used by higher education administration, faculty, and staff when planning for online courses. Ensuring that student frustrations and barriers to success are recognized and considered may help prevent students departing from higher education during this time.

     

Formation for the Whole Church: A New/Old Vision of Theological Education in the 21st Century

This article offers a proposal for a vision of theological education beyond the boundaries of training and teaching for traditional professional ministry roles. Particular attention will be given to the idea of education as formation and the shared role academic institutions have with congregations. Implications for reshaping definitions of student and faculty will be explored.     

Exemplary efforts in psychology to recruit and retain graduate students of color

Many psychology departments are striving for a greater representation of students of color within their graduate preparation programs with the aim of producing a more diverse pool of psychological service providers, scientists, and educators. To help improve the minority pipeline in psychology, the authors identify and describe recruitment and retention strategies used at 11 departments and programs considered to be making exemplary efforts to attract and retain minority students of color. The strategies most consistently used included engaging current minority faculty and students in recruitment activities, offering attractive financial aid packages, having faculty members make personal contacts with prospective students, creating linkages with historical institutions of color, having (or approached having) a critical mass of faculty and students of color, offering a diversity issues course, and engaging students in diversity issues research. Despite the similarities, the programs and departments were each distinctive and innovative in their overall approaches to student recruitment and retention. Highlighting the strategies used at successful institutions may help others develop plans for improving the minority pipeline within their own departments and programs.