Challenging Racism and White Privilege in Undergraduate Theology Contexts: Teaching and Learning Strategies for Maximizing the Promise of Community Service‐Learning

This paper explores the possibilities and challenges inherent in employing community service‐learning as a pedagogy for engaging undergraduates in theology and religious studies courses that contribute to racial reconciliation. The paper summarizes research from the scholarship of teaching and learning on best practices for structuring service‐learning projects and processes that hold the possibility of students' genuine engagement with issues of race and the wisdom of the Catholic tradition.     

Metaphor for Teaching: Good Teaching is Like Good Sex

Based on a real teaching experience in the classroom, the author reflects on the dynamics of gender, race/ethnicity, power, and privilege in the context of an undergraduate course in Christian sexual ethics. Through this analysis of pedagogical style and process initiated by a challenging moment at the midpoint of the semester, the author develops ten guiding principles for good teaching, using the metaphor that “good teaching is like good sex,” which emphasize the necessary elements and outcomes of a positive learning environment: intimacy, flexibility, creativity, satisfaction, care and attentiveness, vulnerability, fun and playfulness, reciprocity, full engagement, and risk‐taking. This experience provided the foundation for planning and assessment for the author's courses since.     

Learning for oneself: A Confucian‐inspired case for moral formation in ethics pedagogy

This article explores the disconnection between ethical theory and ethical practice in ethics courses at secular U.S. colleges and universities. In such contexts academic ethics focuses almost exclusively on “ethical reasoning” and leaves the business of practical moral formation of students in the realm of “student life.” I argue this disconnection is inevitable given the dominant understanding that moral formation must be guided by a consistent ethical theory, and must eventuate in certain prosocial behaviors, while norms of pluralism and free inquiry mandate that academic courses not attempt to dictate certain views or behaviors as normative. Drawing on the Confucian model of moral cultivation expressed by the early Chinese figure Mengzi, I argue for a different understanding of moral formation that focuses on open‐endedness, self‐direction, and the acquisition of skills in directing attention and will. This approach avoids the most serious challenges to practical moral formation in secular contexts, and I suggest some broadly applicable principles for implementing these ideas in ethics courses.     

Turning students into scholars: using digital methods to teach the critical study of religion

Incorporating digital tools into Religious Studies courses provides experiences and conditions that transform students into scholars. In this essay we discuss two courses we taught in conjunction with the Religious Soundmap Project of the Global Midwest, a collaborative digital humanities project that we co-directed from 2014 to 2016. Engaging students as contributors to a collaborative digital research project helped them to appreciate some of the key practical, theoretical, and ethical challenges that we face as scholars of religion. In particular, our work together brought to the fore critical questions about definition, classification, and representation. Even more, because they knew their work would be accessible to broader audiences outside the classroom, potentially including the very communities whom they were studying, students were able to perceive the stakes of these questions in ways we had not previously experienced. Incorporating digital tools enabled our students to see themselves as scholars of religion.     

Visions and Aspirations

SUMMARY

This chapter explores key characteristics of an ideal feminist educational environment, one that specifically focuses on the intellectual development and training of feminist therapists. Such an environment is dependent on an ongoing relationship among three entitiesstudents, instructors, and the institutionand characteristics of each of these three entities are discussed. The chapter evaluates the present climate within universities, and whether that climate offers the potential to promote or stifle a feminist environment.     

Integral Spirituality, Deep Science, and Ecological Awareness

There is a growing understanding that addressing the global crisis facing humanity will require new methods for knowing, understanding, and valuing the world. Narrow, disciplinary, and reductionist perceptions of reality are proving inadequate for addressing the complex, interconnected problems of the current age. The pervasive Cartesian worldview, which is based on the metaphor of the universe as a machine, promotes fragmentation in our thinking and our perception of the cosmos. This divisive, compartmentalized thinking fosters alienation and self‐focused behavior. I aim to show in this essay that healing the fragmentation that is at the root of the current world crises requires an integrated epistemology that embraces both the rational knowledge of scientific empiricism and the inner knowledge of spiritual experience. This “deep science” transcends the illusion of separateness to discern the unity, the unbroken wholeness, that underlies the diverse forms of the universe. Our perception of connectedness, of our integral place in the web of life, emerges as an attribute of our connection with the eternal, beatific source of all existence. This awakened spiritual vision “widens our circle of understanding and compassion, to embrace all living creatures in the whole of nature” (Einstein, quoted in Goldstein [1976] 1987). Our behavior, as it emerges naturally out of our perception of the sacredness of the natural world, will naturally embody love and respect for all life forms. This vision promotes the healing of our long‐standing alienation from the natural world and offers hope for renewal in the midst of widespread cultural deterioration and environmental destruction.     

On Paulo Freire's Debt to Psychoanalysis: Authority on the Side of Freedom

Paulo Freire's major work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, owes adebt to psychoanalysis. In particular, as this paper argues,Freire's account of teacher authority needs to be understoodthrough psychoanalytic sensibilities. Paulo Freire maintains thatteacher authority can be ``on the side of freedom.' This is ahighly charged claim given that liberalist traditions generallycast authority as the enemy of freedom. Breaking with liberalunderstandings of authority, Freire's ``authority on the sideof freedom' is a matter of maintaining the delicate psychicbalance that leads neither to domination nor to submission.This paper investigates how such an authoritative balance functions.     

Community psychology,millennium volunteers and UK higher education: a disruptive triptych?

In this paper I critically explore the ideological underpinnings of pedagogical and political practices in UK Higher Education (HE). I first map out the political and pedagogical features of community psychology and then describe the Millennium Volunteers project at the University of Northumbria—a scheme that integrates voluntary placements into undergraduate degree programmes, reflecting on the political and pedagogical premises upon which it is based. I consider the political context and recent social policy trends in UK HE. Through exploring the ideological underbellies of community psychology and Millennium Volunteers I describe the tensions created once both are situated within a HE student's learning and a lecturer's teaching portfolio. I reflect on how each appears to share similar wish lists but conclude that a surface comparison of the pedagogical practices of each can leave unrecognized serious ideological, ethical and political differences that can cause disruption at the interfaces of staff, students and HE institutions. I recommend making the political and ideological assumptions behind pedagogical practices and education policy initiatives more transparent to both students and lecturers alike and outline the reasons for doing so. I conclude by reflecting on implications for the widening access agenda in the present political climate from the standpoint of a community psychologist. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Pedagogical issues in the teaching of classroom guidance curriculum—a hybrid Hong Kong case

Unlike many other places in the world, guidance lessons in Hong Kong are taught mainly by class teachers rather than school counsellors. Given the unique educational context of Hong Kong as East meets West and given that guidance is essentially a concept from the West, it is important to investigate what kind of pedagogy is suitable for teaching guidance in Hong Kong. This paper examines what teaching guidance lessons are like in Hong Kong for the researcher and for some primary teachers. A qualitative case study methodology is used. Data are drawn from the author's own experience in a primary school teaching attachment and interviews with guidance professionals, primary school principals, teachers and students in three selected primary schools in Hong Kong. Pedagogical issues for the teaching guidance curriculum are explored and discussed. The researcher argues for a hybrid guidance pedagogy for the teaching of classroom guidance in Hong Kong. Findings are applicable to countries facing similar issues in parallel mixed cultural settings.