Pedagogies of Interpretation in Educating Clergy

Abstract. In this essay the authors describe how four seminary educators pedagogically engage students in practices of interpretation and explore how the variations in their teaching practices shape the critical thinking they seek to cultivate in their students. The piece is excerpted from an ethnographic study of Jewish and Christian seminary educator teaching practices sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (Educating Clergy: Teaching Practices and Pastoral Imagination, Jossey‐Bass Publishers, November 2005). The study explores how the classroom‐ and community‐based teaching practices of seminary educators prepare students to integrate professional knowledge and skill with moral integrity and religious commitment in professional practice. In addition to the pedagogies of interpretation explicated here, we observed pedagogies that engage students in practices of formation, contextualization, and performance. Attention is also given in the study to the influence of pedagogies embedded in the traditions of seminary education on student learning and to the cultivation of spiritual and professional practices beyond the classroom in community worship and through strategies of field education and small groups.     

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.     

Crossing Pedagogical Borders in the Yucatan Peninsula

A challenging intercultural teaching experience provided an opportunity for engaging embodied pedagogies that facilitated border crossings of language, age, gender, and experience. Influenced by the work of Augusto Boal, the author describes how improvisation, role‐play, music, and drawing led seminary students in Mexico into sacred time and space toward relevant learning. Drawing upon the critical pedagogy of several educators yields implications for teaching theology and religion. The essay also invites readers into dialogue about how such border crossings can benefit their own teaching.     

“Leaven in the Loaf”: The Wabash Center and Theological Education

Abstract. Assessing the impact of Wabash Center programs on theological education, this article focuses on the vocation of the theological educator, particularly on the impact of theological teaching on faith and on the institutions, values, and practices that shape living. Five contributions of the Wabash Center are highlighted: (1) guiding seminary faculty in the practices of teaching, (2) enhancing the teaching preparation of doctoral students for theological education, (3) linking effective teaching to the development of seminary curricula, (4) enlarging the literature on teaching in theological education, and (5) nurturing the vocation of seminary educators.     

How programs in prisons are challenging the who,where, how,and what of theological education

This paper claims that programs in prisons are challenging the very who, where, how, and what of theological education. The author draws on research from the fields of pedagogy and prison studies, nearly a decade of experience teaching master's level seminary‐style classes in prison , and the findings of a two‐year cohort of prison educators convened by the Association of Theological Schools for their Educational Models and Practices Project. Addressing displacement as a learning strategy, classroom diversity, the use of student experience, narrative grading strategies, and classroom ritual, the author shows how the teaching strategies emerging from prison classrooms provide vibrant models for the theological academy at large.     

Understanding Oral Learners

A five‐year research project of seminary students from various cultural backgrounds revealed that the slight majority of contemporary seminary students studied are oral learners. Oral learners learn best and have their lives most transformed when professors utilize oral teaching and assessment methods. After explaining several preferences of oral learners, suggestions for effective teaching are provided in this article in order to improve both teaching and assessment of oral learners. Applications are provided for face‐to‐face and online learning contexts.     

“Can We Talk?”: Boundary Crossing and Sexual Misconduct in Seminary Teaching

This article explores a variety of personal and professional boundary issues encountered by seminary faculty. The authors contend that boundary crossing is inevitable in contemporary theological education, which is structured such that professors engage in multiple roles with students as they attend to the education of the whole person. Guidelines are reviewed for minimizing risk to students and professors. Topics include life as a community member, student‐faculty friendship, and romantic relationships. Attention to work/life balance is seen as critical to the prevention of misconduct. The article ends with a call for continued conversation as well as institutional accountability and change.     

Assigning Integration: A Framework for Intellectual,Personal, and Professional Development in Seminary Courses

This article explores assignments as a core teaching practice essential to integrating the cognitive, personal, and professional identities of seminary students. These core practices emerge in seminary curricula where there is a strong focus on the teaching of canonical texts and a goal of achieving textual mastery. We propose that carefully chosen and constructive assignments achieve the kind of integration necessary for building content knowledge and the professional, spiritual, and religious identities of our students. While the difference between the educational goals of clergy‐training in a seminary and training graduate students in the academy can be sharp, we argue here for ways to make that contrast both productive and generative.     

Red Light Means Stop! Teaching Theology through Exposure Learning in Manila's Red Light District

This paper explores exposure learning as a strategy for teaching theology in a Christian seminary, by describing and analyzing one multicultural Asian class's exposure to the “Red Light Districts” of Manila (Philippines). Exposures consist of short‐term experiential learning events through participation and immersion into a specific context, preceded and followed by a process of study and reflection. Exposure learning has the potential to minimize certain forms of student resistance around emotionally‐charged subjects, such as the integration of race, class, and gender into theological education, because it is the experience together with shared critical reflection on it and not the teacher's viewpoints per se that unsettle prior interpretive frameworks. Exposure learning also carries certain risks and ethical dilemmas, and its long‐term effects on transformation remain unclear. In spite of these pedagogical issues which the paper explores in detail, the paper supports exposure learning as an alternative experiential form of education for transformation.     

The Potential of the Hybrid Course Vis‐à‐Vis Online and Traditional Courses

Abstract. Face‐to‐face, hybrid, and online courses are part of the panoply of course options available to students and teachers in the twenty‐first century. This essay tackles the promise of hybrid courses for enhancing student learning in seminary contexts. The author contends that the introduction of hybrid instruction prompts faculty to revisit questions about pedagogy and improves student learning.     

“The Grand Experiment”: Modeling Adult Learning with Adult‐Ministry Students

Abstract. Adult‐learning theory challenges faculty to adapt their teaching to certain characteristics of adult learners, including self‐direction: if adults direct the bulk of their lives outside of school, they should be permitted to direct their own educational experiences. To what extent is self‐directed learning an optimal, or even realistic, methodology for seminary teaching? Does it matter what subjects we are teaching? This essay details an experiment with self‐directed learning in a seminary ministry class: what worked, what might be improved, and how it challenges our view of ourselves as faculty to teach in this way. Student feedback from the course in question enhances our understanding of the best (and most challenging) features of the experiment.     

Instituting heteronormative belief in the law: the case of California's Proposition 22

This paper is based on ethnography of the ‘worship time’ at ‘Breakfree’ Church, a Pentecostal congregation in suburban Perth. I begin by exploring the ritualistic ways in which music is used to catalyse an ecstatic experience. Making use of the metaphor of ‘break free’, borrowed from a popular worship song, I demonstrate that music is used in deliberate ways to assist people in leaving behind the profane and encountering the sacred. Drawing on the thought of theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher and philosopher Paul Ricoeur, I explore the ways music facilitates and symbolises this experience. I demonstrate that for church members, the ecstatic divine-human encounter is the centre of their church worship and the antidote to difficult experiences such as grief or illness.     

The Online Theology Classroom: Strategies for Engaging a Community of Distance Learners in a Hybrid Model of Online Education

One factor contributing to success in online education is the creation of a safe and vibrant virtual community and sustained, lively engagement with that community of learners. In order to create and engage such a community instructors must pay special attention to the relationship between technology and pedagogy, specifically in terms of issues such as course design, social presence, specially tailored assignments, learner expectations, and objectives, and facilitation of sustained engagement with the course material, fellow learners, and the instructor. Several strategies for accomplishing this goal are presented here based on the author's experiences teaching second‐career students in hybrid introductory theology courses at a mainline denominational seminary.     

Just Call Me by My Name: Worship Music in Asian Ecumenism

This article examines the historical development of worship music in Asian ecumenism by examining three ecumenical hymnals from the 1960s to the present. It identifies key personalities and institutions involved in the formation of Asian worship music. The essay argues that the maturation of Asian Christian spirituality via music making requires the church to hold in tension both its missional heritage and local cultural practices. It proposes the development of robust theo‐liturgical scholarship as being critical in helping the church mature.     

Nashotah House

Summary

This is the story of efforts to deal with aging concerns in a seminary with a small student body and a highly structured and required curriculum. This account may prove helpful to many seminaries facing similar situations.     

Metaphorical Mapping: The Arts in Graduate Theological Education

Doctoral students in Bible, theology, ethics, history, preaching, worship, pastoral care, and Christian education come together for a required seminar in teaching. Assignments include reading and discussion, student‐led teaching demonstrations, and the ‘metaphorical mapping’ of each student's field of study. In developing their ‘metaphorical maps’ students use artistic and expressive media to demonstrate their understanding of their field. The assignment has been successful in establishing an open and mutually respectful climate in the classroom, in fostering a pattern of critical reflection on teaching, and in demonstrating appropriate inclusion of personal experience in the academic classroom.     

Inviting perspective transformation: Sexual history awareness for professional formation

How do we deal with our own sexuality as teachers and as learners in the classroom? As a seminary professor in a mainline Christian context, I find that discussing sexuality increases student discomfort levels by threatening to raise questions about the connections between morality, behavior, and bodies of those in the room – questions we have been culturally trained to avoid. In order to decrease discomfort, many instructors approach sexuality only as content‐based subject matter. Particularly for ministry students, this approach can be a disservice to their discernment process and preparation for future ministry contexts, especially for those in turmoil regarding sexuality‐related issues. By explicitly engaging how personal experience and cultural contexts shape our sexuality, pedagogical models can promote critical self‐reflection and seek perspective transformation, not values change, as a resource for professional sexual ethics training in ministry.     

The Tug-of-War Between Cash Flow and Institutional Values in a College-Seminary Merger

This case study documents the merger of a liberal arts college and a seminary, with particular attention to fiscal aspects of the venture. The interaction of Friends Regional University (FRU) with its seminary offers important theoretical lessons because of the interplay of three factors:1) FRU has a strong institutional context based on the evangelical Christian identity of the school. The undergraduate program was created more than one century ago as a Christ-centered opportunity for young people to integrate their faith and learning.2) From 1986, FRU had become more dependent on adult programming to meet its budgetary commitments. The adult programs also served to broaden institutional scope in the transition from college to university.3) Furthermore, throughout the history of FRU, the leadership had a strongly developed perceptual schema shaped by their evangelical Christian faith and lifestyles.

Tension between the institutional perspective and resource dependency was evident in how FRU dealt with its seminary during the time of the case study (1996–2002). The seminary was clearly Christian and had lost money each year for the past several years prior to 2003. In the perspective of the president, vice president for academic affairs, and the board, the seminary was categorized as an adult program and therefore should have been able to cover all its direct costs as well some indirect costs. The article reviews these issues and concludes with a discussion of how the difficulties created by the merger were negotiated.     

Developing identities and attitudes in musicians and classroom music teachers

Background. The Western classical training of many secondary music specialist teachers may be inappropriate for the demands of the contemporary secondary school classroom, leading to a conflict between their self‐concepts as ‘musicians’ and as ‘teachers’. Aims. To undertake a short‐term longitudinal comparison of the developing identities and the attitudes of a group of intending specialist secondary music teachers, during the transition into their first teaching post, with a group of music students from university and conservatory backgrounds. Sample. Twenty‐nine trainee music teachers completed Phases 1 and 2 of the study during their final weeks of training and during the second term of their teaching career, and a comparison group of 29 final‐year undergraduate music students did so in the first and last terms of their final year. Method. A specially devised composite Musical Careers Questionnaire gathered information in both phases about self‐efficacy in music and in teaching, identification with professional groups in these two domains, and attitudes towards important skills for musicians and teachers. Results. A series of ANOVAs comparing the student groups' scores in each of the two phases revealed no significant main effects or interactions for either of the self‐efficacy measures, a significant group effect for professional group identification, and some changes in the attitude measures. Conclusion. Although participants' views of their own general effectiveness as teachers and as musicians changed very little over the period of the study, their attitudes towards music teaching and perceptions of the skills required showed some changes.