| Abstract: | 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. |
