GTU Teagle-Wabash Fellows Offer Wide Range of Spring 2008 Courses

A key component of the GTU Preparing Future Faculty project sponsored by the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Religion and Theology and the Teagle Foundation is the mentoring of doctoral students for excellence in classroom teaching. To that end, the twelve Teagle-Wabash Fellows have worked extremely hard through the summer and fall of 2007 to hone their approaches to classroom teaching. First, in an intensive Learning and Teaching Academy in August, the fellows worked through very practical issues in the design and delivery of courses, dealing with issues of content, structure, evaluation and measurement, and various modes of classroom diversity. During the Fall 2007 semester, in an advanced doctoral seminar on questions of meaning and value in liberal education with GTU President James Donahue and Dean of Students Maureen Maloney as well as teaching/research assistants to their faculty mentors, the Fellows engaged questions of pedagogy, disciplinarity, and vocation as these shape their approach to teaching. In Spring 2008, the fellows’ intense engagement with the theory and practice of teaching and learning are brought to bear in courses they will teach under the supervision of their faculty mentors. In many cases, these courses will only be offered during the Spring 2008 semester. GTU and member school students in all program areas are invited to consider the following courses as they register for the spring semester:

(Click here for a full description of all of these courses.)

UCB C104 Babylonian Religion
Instructor: Terri Tanaka, Ph.D. (Cand.), (Near Eastern Religions)
Mentor: Dr. Neik Veldius (UCB/Near Eastern Religions)

IDS 4202 Re-Imagining Globalization and World Christianity:
Contemporary Thea/ological Challenges & Alternatives
Instructor: Ajit Abraham (IDS)
Mentor: Dr. Gabriella Lettini (SKSM)

PS 1010 Introduction to Pastoral Theology
Instructors: Steven Bauman (Psychology & Religion) and Dr. David Gortner (CDSP)
Mentor: Dr. Kelly Bulkeley (JFKU)

STHS-2478 Women and the Church in the 20th Century
Instructor: Erin Brigham (Theology)
Mentor: Dr. Deena Abramoff (GTU/CJS)

RSED 2492 Engendered Pedagogy
Instructor: Michael Sepidoza Campos (IDS)
Mentor: Dr. Boyung Lee (PSR)

CE-2045 Fundamental Moral Theology
Instructor: Brian Green
Mentor: Dr. John Berkman (DSPT)

NTRS 3510 Apocalyptic Then and Now
Instructor: Courtney Gulden (Bible)
Mentor: Dr. Tat-siong Benny Liew (PSR)

CE 1053 Introduction to Christian Ethics
Instructor: Melissa James (Ethics & Social Theory)
Mentor: Dr. Martha E. Stortz (PLTS)

BSFT-3114 Healing in the Bible
Instructor: Sanna Reinholtzen (Liturgical Studies)
Mentor: Dr. LeAnn Flesher (ABSW)

LS-4510Asian Liturgies and Devotions
Instructor: Ricky Manalo (Liturgical St.)
Mentor: Dr. Mary McGann (FST)

SRA 4638 The Jesuits and the Arts
Instructor: Jenny Patten Gargiulo (Art & Religion)
Mentor: Dr. Mia Mochizuki (GTU/JSTB)

STCE 4218 Theology and Ethics in Black and White: Aesthetics and the Political
Instructor: Danté Quick (Theology)
Mentor: Dr. Christopher Ocker (SFTS)

Transforming a room into a space for learning and big questions

by Melissa James, Teagle-Wabash Fellow in Ethics and Social Theory

For many and sundry reasons I have been in a multitude of elementary school classrooms. The best and most effective classrooms seem to be those in which the teacher has transformed the room into a world unto itself. What I am constantly reminded of and amazed by is that through their efforts a simple room is transformed into a space where learning happens.

While very few higher ed classrooms will include a rug for story time or the classroom pet, there is something to be learned from the transformation of elementary school classrooms. A question that has been floating among the PFF fellows is: How do we transform a classroom into a space where learning happens, where “big questions” can emerge? Taking my queue from effective classrooms, I offer a few preliminary thoughts on this question:

1) Mind the space. Foucault suggests that the set up of a space displays and even defines the power dynamics of the interactions therein. There is no one “right” set up for a classroom, but, depending on the type of environment one is trying to create or dynamic one is trying to foster there are certainly set ups that hinder this.

2) Provide a variety of tools. Unfortunately this may not be play dough (though I have considered this); it can, however, be asking the question of what tools are available in the classroom to explore the question or content at hand? How can I use all of the room? How can I provide many entry points for engagement?

3) Don’t define all of the questions. My task as a teacher isn’t to define all the questions that students ought to ask in order to get the correct answers. There are times and places for prescribing questions, but, by helping students identify and name the questions they are asking (or trying to ask) the door is wide open for “big questions” to emerge.

This list isn’t even close to exhaustive of ways to create a space for big questions to emerge. What would you add?

Vocation as Pilgrimage

by Michael Sepidoza Campos, Teagle-Wabash Fellow in Interdisciplinary Studies

"I am slowly learning that vocation is intimately woven within the posture of listening. The “big questions” cannot be removed from the minutiae of class preparations, student-teacher engagement and syllabus formulation. There is much to be done at maintaining vigilance before systems that silence; at fostering spaces of honest engagement rather than suffocating 'formation models' that prescribe uniformity."

In the first quarter of the Teagle Seminar for Future Faculty, “vocation” occupied a pivotal space in our discussions concerning pedagogy, method and professional accountability. It was a familiar conversation that I initially shared with Benedictine monks who likened “vocation” to a posture of listening, an engagement where God is found most profoundly in the ordinariness of quotidian relationships. While I was content among these brothers, I sensed a perennial ambivalence within the community’s commitment to stability. An elder monk reassured me that this ambivalence stood at the heart of monastic life: stability assumes that one must remain a pilgrim. Thus, vocation evokes not a definitive response to static questions, but a deeper commitment to seeking.

In reflecting upon the “big questions” among the Teagle-Wabash Fellows, I was pushed to ask: For whom do I speak? And more importantly, from where do I seek? The rhetoric of social location—and the accompanying implications of social accountability—resonates deeply with Benedict’s counsel to listen with the ear of our hearts. This is a highly politicized space where the implicit narratives of race, class, gender and power differentials must be confronted and named for the doors that they both open and shut. My access to university in the United States was mitigated largely through affirmative action. While I remain critical of a system that, at its worst, reverses dynamics of discrimination, it remains the very location that opened access to conversations that problematized ethnicity, neocolonialism, gender and class. It gave structure and language to issues that were apprehended viscerally within my community. Learning to negotiate around systems serves as much an act of listening and as it is a tactic of survival.

If the “big questions”---as tied to vocation---were configured within the political, higher education must be willing to challenge prevailing canons that privilege one perspective at the expense of another. For bell hooks, an “engaged pedagogy” does not avoid complexity through the easy prescription of universal solutions. What girds life-giving curiosity arises from encounters with difference, disjuncture and conflict. This emerges poignantly in my context as GTU grapples with its own response to diversity. For learning to be transformative, one must engage diversity as a complex body of relationships, not merely a “category of difference” to which all ethnic, class, gender and intellectual “minorities” are pigeonholed to challenge power. Learning and committed pedagogy must begin in places where incomprehensibility opens forth avenues for creative translation; where the longing for wisdom is spurred by the confusion of difference.

There is a theological underpinning to yoking one’s professional obligation to the vocational imperative behind the “big questions.” The correspondence of “calling” and “response” is itself an encounter with difference, mystery—God. It is a place of tension where theoretical engagement is embodied within:

• An institution’s commitment to financially support students from underrepresented communities;
• The encouragement of alternative assessments that honor diverse learning styles; and
• The re-imagination of a liberal arts curriculum that transcends the boundaries of traditional disciplines.

Creative pedagogies at the GTU take place among students who critique from places of interdisciplinarity, from the margins of ethnic, gender, class and religious categories; at centers like the PANA Institute where proactive outreach to underrepresented communities enliven the configuration of popular education; and within conversations that “queer” theological language and trite assumptions of multi-culturality. At spaces both within and in between conventional academic study, the GTU attempts to engender creative pedagogies that pique my deepest longing for meaning. This is the posture of listening that frames my vocational commitment. There is life here, but like all efforts at transformation, there remains much more that needs to be done.

I am slowly learning that vocation is intimately woven within the posture of listening. The “big questions” cannot be removed from the minutiae of class preparations, student-teacher engagement and syllabus formulation. There is much to be done at maintaining vigilance before systems that silence; at fostering spaces of honest engagement rather than suffocating “formation models” that prescribe uniformity. I suspect that answers, really, are not what I seek. Thoughtful students ask provocative questions. Responding to one’s vocation is thus less about finding stability as it is about falling intentionally into the quagmires of our curiosity.

In this vein, the vocation of a teacher stands squarely alongside that of the monastic pilgrim who seeks.

DIGITAL PEDAGOGY: What do students, teaching us about digital media, teach us about teaching?

by Steven C. Bauman, Teagle-Wabash Fellow in Religion and Psychology

Today’s child is bewildered when he [sic] enters the 19th century environment that still characterizes the educational establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns, subjects, and schedules.
– Marshall McLuhan, 1967

So begins Michael Wesch's newest video on digital pedagogy.

If you’ve been living under a rock (or working on your comprehensive exams), you might not recognize Professor Wesch's name but at the time of this posting his "Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us" was viewed just over 3.6 million times, making it the number one video on YouTube this year.

Wesch is a cultural anthropologist by training, and his current research explores the reciprocally deterministic relationship between digital media and human functioning. As a requirement in his introductory survey classes at Kansas State University, Wesch has students apply ethnographic research methods in digital fieldwork settings such as YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook.

Not only do Wesch's students engage the course material (on a level far beyond what many of us might expect from our own students) and demonstrate learning through creative and successful application of disciplinary methods, his students' final video projects are extraordinarily remarkable. In addition, Wesch succeeds at sustaining student interest, not just throughout the course, but also beyond the semester with many joining his co-curricular Digital Ethnography Working Group.

Before you dismiss YouTube final exams as a clever pedagogical manoeuvre for pandering to undergraduates, consider this: Where many of us fail in our classrooms to bring students into the discussion, Wesch succeeds by taking the conversation to where his students are “already invested.”*

But perhaps the bigger picture is to be found in what happens to us when we step away from the white/chalk board or out from behind our lecterns. Wesch persuades us to do without our props and crutches and walk among our students to “pursue with great passion the questions that are meaningful and relevant to their own lives.”*

Wesch’s latest project, “A Vision of Students Today,” gives us a picture of what this might look like. His (or rather, Their) “Vision” puts us in an introductory survey classroom with 200 undergraduates, and for five minutes, we’re shown what’s going on behind the vacant stares and laptop typing. It is perhaps, more than we may comfortably want to know about out students.

While retreating into lecture material is obviously not an option, neither is “going native” with undergraduates. Surely, better, relevant pedagogy isn’t just about updating our technology and building more “smart” classrooms. Wesch’s latest video shows us that our students have plenty to say about what is happening in the classroom.

The question is; are we listening?


"A Vision of Students Today" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o

Michael Wesch – Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Kansas State University http://www.ksu.edu/sasw/anthro/wesch.htm

"Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE

This blog entry was inspired by an October 25, 2007 segment on NPR “Future Tense.” http://www.publicradio.org/columns/futuretense/

Confessions of an Art Historian in the Field of Art and Religion

By Jenny Patten Gargiulo, Teagle-Wabash Fellow in Art and Religion

"I realize now that I am hearing yet another call layered over the initial call to teach. This new call tells me that it is also my task to help artists see the tremendous gift of their creations, and help others see the spiritual value of all works of art. "

One of the first subjects that we covered this summer in the Teaching and Learning Academy was “Intercultural Teaching and Learning” led by Professor Faustino Cruz from the Franciscan School of Theology. I must admit, I didn’t expect much from the presentation as I had been to some pretty mediocre seminars on this subject in the past. I expected to come away from his presentation with the typical array of material: some new statistics about the diversity of learners and perhaps some new considerations for creating a more intercultural classroom. Professor Cruz’ presentation was anything but typical. I found that I was quite shaken up by some of his powerful and probing questions, specifically those relating to vocation, although there are certainly are some intercultural issues operating at the core!

Here are two questions that had the biggest impact on me: Whose lives are at stake by your work (teaching and research)? Who is your audience of accountability?

These questions caused something of a crisis within me. The internal dialog went something like this: “What does he mean by whose lives are at stake by my work? I’m not a paramedic, I’m a professor, and I teach art history (albeit art history with theological sophistication). Nobody’s lives are at stake by my work!”

My reaction to his question has deep roots. Ever since I declared art history as my major in undergrad (some 13 years ago) I had often been posed a different question (one that admittedly was much easier than that of Professor Cruz): “You’re majoring in art history? What are you going to do with that when you graduate?” I eventually figured out the answer to that question: “I’m going to teach art history.” But all of a sudden, that answer doesn’t seem to be cutting the mustard anymore. I wondered if my colleagues with more theological specializations are struggling with this question, or is it just me, the one specializing in what often seems to be an expendable field?

And just who is my audience of accountability, anyway? Would that be the names on my class rosters, the faces I see looking back at me when I gaze out into the classroom? Or perhaps it is my colleagues in the art department at Sonoma State University? Maybe I answer to the CAA (College Art Association – something like the AAR for the field of art history)? If not the CAA, then perhaps it is the AAR (American Academy of Religion – something like the CAA for the field of theology)? Maybe my audience is my fellow hybrid art and religion colleagues here at the GTU?

And then come more unsettling questions and considerations: What in my life is impeding me to accept the role of an academician in society? Sometimes life isn’t just about not saying something that could hurt somebody, but thinking about who could be hurt by my not saying something.

Personally, all of these questions and issues came at a crucial moment for me. I had just returned from Italy where I left my husband to care for his dying mother. I offered to give up everything I had going for me academically and professionally to be with him through this terribly difficult time. My husband encouraged me to stay the course and take advantage of enriching opportunities like the Teagle Wabash Fellowship. Thinking back on this moment, I realize I was largely motivated by my selfless love for him and empathy for the difficult months that awaited him. On the other hand, I must have seen my vocation as something rather disposable in order to consider leaving it all behind so easily. Only a week after this conversation, there I was back in Berkeley, at the beginning of the Teaching and Learning Academy, being asked to talk about great issues of meaning and value within the context of my vocation.

I wanted to know the answers to Professor Cruz’ questions, and finding the answers required a great deal of soul searching. I kept coming back to certain thoughts and images that seemed to be answering the questions for me. I saw snowflake-like Hawaiian quilt patterns (kapa) and I thought about my theological aesthetics research on the subject. I saw the faces of Hawaiian “aunties” and tutus (grandmothers and elders) and I remembered them beaming with joy when they learned that I shared their deeply theological art form with audiences at the GTU, Saint Mary’s and even the AAR, for I helped give a meaningful voice and create genuine artistic appreciation for their otherwise silenced “craft.”

I began to realize that my audience of accountability isn’t just my students, my peers and the academies; I am responsible to the artists, as well. I realize now that I am hearing yet another call layered over the initial call to teach. This new call tells me that it is also my task to help artists see the tremendous gift of their creations, and help others see the spiritual value of all works of art. Theologically some really powerful things can happen when we look at art as expressions and experiences of spirit, faith and religion. This has some big connotations for "folk art," which is often the art of marginalized people, and also for the art and material culture of popular religion, which is often not taken seriously or valued by the academy. Now I have found a new significance to my work, one that was there all along, but ironically not given voice.
Jule Kamakana's Hawaiian quilt (kapa) pattern: Hala'ai (Pineapple)

Pedagogies of Presence and Praxis

By way of introducing their own vocational sense, at the beginning of the GTU Preparing Future Faculty Project's Learning and Teaching Academy, the twelve fellows reflected on an essay by Clark Gilpin, "Formative Practices of the Theological Teacher's Vocation" (in The Scope of Our Art: The Vocation of the Theological Teacher, ed. L. Gregory Jones and Stephanie Paulsell (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), 3-17). Gilpin argues in the essay, among other things, that as doctoral students develop in the vocation of the teaching scholar, a critical learning process involves "achiev[ing] a self-critical understanding of the connection of individual scholarly questions to prior, background public questions of religion." This, says Gilpin, "is the invigorating heart of doctoral education" (13).



This heart could clearly be felt and heard beating in the presentations delivered by TeagleWabash Fellows which aimed to position the courses they will be teaching in the Spring 2008 semester not only in institutional and learner contexts or which they envision teaching in other settings. But the Fellows have also risen to the challenge of setting their proposed courses in the context of larger public questions of meaning and value that inform the worlds students move through as the enter, attend, and leave religion and theology courses. For T-W Fellow in Theology Dante Quick (shown above,l, with Steven Bauman), teaching the course Theological Ethics in Black and White: Aesthetics and the Political at American Baptist Seminary of the West provides an opportunity for students to both grasp the basic theology and ethics that have developed out of African American experiences of oppression and liberation, but also to use this learning to explore a social issue in their local context through an articulated theological lens.

Ricky Manalo, T-W Fellow in Liturgical Studies, envisioned a very different context, Washington Theological Seminary, for his proposed course, "Intercultural Communication in Pastoral Settings." While the course has the goal of introducing students to "major concepts and approaches in intercultural communication encounters within pastoral settings," this goal is in service of responding to an arguably larger question: How do ministers and leaders in the Roman Catholic Church learn to really hear and engage the diverse members of the communities they serve on their own terms? Ricky is particularly concerned to address the growing proportion of Hispanics in a church which still largely communicated in Anglo-American registers.

The "moral discourse project" that will be the capstone experience in T-W Ethics Fellow Melissa James's "Introduction to Christian Ethics" at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary is meant very specifically to enable students to "hear and identify various voices in a community" as they engage issues of moral concern. Students will draw from readings in ethics as well as from the novel Montana 1948 to begin to frame responses to ethical questions and challenges from a faith perspective. The process of moral deliberation in which students will engage throughout the course will serve as a grounding practical methodology for ethical action as leaders in the church.

We'll share more about T-W Fellows' course proposal presentations in future blogs.

Learning, Teaching, Living

"What is surprising about the current attack on education, especially in light of the growing corporatization and privatization at all levels of schooling, is the refusal on the part of many theorists to rethink the role academics might play in defending the university as a crucial democratic public sphere," says educational and cultural theorist Henry Giroux [2002:1]. He is probably right in a very general sense, but as regards the diverse the particularity of the Graduate Theological Union's Teagle-Wabash Fellows, he is exactly wrong. The twelve GTU students who gathered this week, along with a number of other doctoral student guests, to engage a wide range of senior scholars on the current practice of learning and teaching in religion and theology attests, if to nothing else, to the willingness of emerging teaching scholars to locate their work--their vocations, in the language adopted by most in the group--at the epicenter of critical concerns in the public sphere. As we reach the end of nearly two weeks of simultaneously engaged, affirming, conflicted, prayerful, power-laden, and generally provocative conversation, we are exhausted and invigorated all at once by the theoretical, spiritual, and practical challenges of creating religion and theology classrooms in which, truly and transformationally, “religion meets the world.”

Over the next few weeks, Teagle-Wabash Fellows will be invited to share their reflection on the two-week Learning and Teaching Academy (LTA), a pedagogical intensive which anchors a year-long project in which experienced faculty mentor doctoral students to engage teaching as vocation in courses which aim to provoke and integrate questions of meaning and value. For now, here are a few glimpses of the first LTA, the Teagle-Wabash Fellows, invited presenters, and doctoral students whose work together have made for such a rich experience.

Ethics and Social Theory Fellow Melissa James and Psychology and Religion Fellow Steven Bauman end a content-rich day with collegial conversation. The LTA offered a sequence of practical content modules meant to engage Fellows in the real work of the teaching scholar. But, Fellows also worked together each afternoon in small groups to both sift through content and articulate its place in their own sense of vocation and in their approaches to classroom teaching.

A panel on Institutional Contexts for learning and teaching, for instance, invited Fellows to consider how questions of meaning and value in liberal studies play out in diverse settings. Here, University of California, Davis Religions Studies Instructor Wendy Terry, Ph.D. and Santa Clara University Director of Resident Ministry and Associate Campus Minister for Vocational Discernment, Theresa Ladrigan-Whelpey discuss critical differences in secular and denominational institutions, both in terms of student populations and institutional expectations.















University of California, Berkeley Professor Carol Redmount offered insights on the opportunities and demands of teaching in a large, urban, elite research university.

Mills College Professor Judith Bishop (R), shown here with GTU Dean of Students Maureen A. Maloney, Ed. D., added the perspective of a private, secular, liberal arts college to the mix. Mills is a womens college at the undergraduate level, where questions of gender and diversity more broadly understood are central to classroom teaching in any discipline.

Daily small group discussions--such as this one with Near Eastern Religions Fellow Terri Tanaka (L), Theology Fellow Erin Brigham (C), and Interdicisplinary Studies Fellow Michael Campos (R)--were intended not only to invite Fellows to explore key issues as they might play out in the religious studies classroom, but also to develop professional relationships with colleagues across the field.

Morning full group discussions, creatively facilitated by the Fellows themselves, allowed for critical reflection, review, and challenge as the Fellows processed a weath of content in light of their own vocational interests and commitments and their emerging pedagogical philosophies. Shown here (L to R) are: Erin Brigham, Courtney Gulden, Melissa James, Sanna Reinholtzen, and Dante Quick.

Over the next few weeks, we will post segments of presentations on such topics as course concept development, instutional context, revising a course, instructional technology, and measurement and assessment as well as reflections from the Teagle-Wabash Fellows.