Teaching the College “Nones”: Christian Privilege and the Religion Professor

Working with undergraduate students invites teachers into relationship and conversation with young people at a time when they are emerging as adults and forming their identities. Faith is one area of identity formation often attended to by scholars, college professors, and their institutions. But within that, little attention has been paid to those who do not identify as religious. Additionally, “the overwhelming presence of Christianity at American institutions maintains it as the spiritual norm on campus. … Those within the spiritual norm gain a level of privilege that is often unconscious” (Seifert 2007, 11). This has an effect not only on nonreligious students but on any student who identifies as anything other than Christian; and it has a unique effect on teaching and learning in the religion classroom. In this article, I will explain what Christian privilege is, why it is a unique problem in the undergraduate religion classroom, and what teachers of religion might do in response to it. In the end, I argue that educators need to better understand the effects of Christian privilege in our classrooms and become allies to the nonreligious in particular by using pedagogies that include and support all students, in their many religious affiliations and unaffiliations.     

Religion,reason and non-directive teaching: a reply to Trevor Cooling

In other work I have argued that decisions about what to teach directively and what non-directively should be governed by an epistemic criterion. Trevor Cooling has recently advanced some objections to my defence and application of the epistemic criterion and proposed an alternative to it. Here I reply to his objections and comment on his proposed alternative.     

Teaching an Introduction to the Global Philosophy of Religion

Currently, the recent history of the field shapes the content of introductions to the philosophy of religion. In order to substantively engage students, whose experiences and destinies are already shaped by global realities, such teaching must undergo revision. A shift from introducing philosophical theology towards active learning analyses of ostensibly religious phenomena is the means by which the field can regain its relevance for students. This article first explores the rationale for teaching differently, and then works out a pedagogy that has students themselves practicing a global philosophy of religion.     

The Suffocation of Marriage: Climbing Mount Maslow Without Enough Oxygen

This article distills insights from historical, sociological, and psychological perspectives on marriage to develop the suffocation model of marriage in America. According to this model, contemporary Americans are asking their marriage to help them fulfill different sets of goals than in the past. Whereas they ask their marriage to help them fulfill their physiological and safety needs much less than in the past, they ask it to help them fulfill their esteem and self-actualization needs much more than in the past. Asking the marriage to help them fulfill the latter, higher level needs typically requires sufficient investment of time and psychological resources to ensure that the two spouses develop a deep bond and profound insight into each other's essential qualities. Although some spouses are investing sufficient resources—and reaping the marital and psychological benefits of doing so—most are not. Indeed, they are, on average, investing less than in the past. As a result, mean levels of marital quality and personal well-being are declining over time. According to the suffocation model, spouses who are struggling with an imbalance between what they are asking from their marriage and what they are investing in it have several promising options for corrective action: intervening to optimize their available resources, increasing their investment of resources in the marriage, and asking less of the marriage in terms of facilitating the fulfillment of spouses’ higher needs. Discussion explores the implications of the suffocation model for understanding dating and courtship, sociodemographic variation, and marriage beyond American's borders.     

Salesperson knowledge distinctions and sales performance

Although it is conceptually and practically posited that salesperson knowledge has a direct relationship to performance, empirical research concerning this topic has been limited. In a free elicitation study of 150 multi-line insurance agents, the authors demonstrate that higher performing sales personnel have more elaborate, contingent and context-specific procedural knowledge than that of less effective agents. Moreover, higher performing sales personnel's contingent knowledge is shown to be more relevant to the sales call and more adaptive or responsive to the specific contingency than lower performers. In addition, higher performers have more intermediary and indirect goals prior to initially contacting a prospect. These results fuel a call for further research concerning the procedural knowledge roots underlying sales performance, as well as the practical exigencies involved in developing, managing and retaining the knowledge resource of the sales force as a firm-level asset.     

AN ANALYST'S UNCERTAINTY AND FEAR

The motivations for choosing psychoanalysis as a profession are many and differ depending on the psychology of the analyst. However, common to most psychoanalysts is the desire to forge a helpful relationship with the individuals with whom they work therapeutically. This article presents an example of what happens when an analyst is confronted by a patient for whom being in a relationship and being helped are intolerable.     

Parental goals and talk with toddlers

Myriad studies support a relation between parental beliefs and behaviours. This study adds to the literature by focusing on the specific relationship between parental goals and their communication with toddlers. Do parents with different goals talk about different topics with their children? Parents' goals for their 30‐month olds were gathered using semi‐structured interviews with 47 primary caregivers, whereas the topics of conversations that took place during interactions were investigated via coding videotapes of observations in the home. Parents' short‐ and long‐term goals spanned several areas, including educational, social–emotional, developmental and pragmatic goals. Parental utterances most frequently focused on pragmatic issues, followed by play and academic topics. Parents who mentioned long‐term educational goals devoted more of their talk to academic topics and less to pragmatic topics, controlling for socio‐economic status. Thus, parental goals differ and these differences relate to the conversations parents engage in with their children. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A parametric analysis of errors of commission during discrete-trial training

We investigated the effects of systematic changes in levels of treatment integrity by altering errors of commission during error-correction procedures as part of discrete-trial training. We taught 3 students with autism receptive nonsense shapes under 3 treatment integrity conditions (0%, 50%, or 100% errors of commission). Participants exhibited higher levels of performance during perfect implementation (0% errors). For 2 of the 3 participants, performance was low and showed no differentiation in the remaining conditions. Findings suggest that 50% commission errors may be as detrimental as 100% commission errors on teaching outcomes.     

Interteaching: the impact of lectures on student performance

Several studies suggest that interteaching improves student learning more than traditional lectures, but few have examined which components of interteaching contribute to its efficacy. We examined whether the lecture component of interteaching affected students' exam grades and cumulative point totals in a research methods course. Although students who received lectures had consistently higher exam scores than students who did not, the differences were statistically significant on only 2 of 5 exams. Students who received lectures, however, earned significantly more points during the semester.