CFP: Precarious Institutions

Teaching Theology and Religion

Special Call for Papers

“Teaching in a Precarious Institution”

Many of us are teaching in institutions that have come under increasing and often untenable stress. Whether we teach in theological education or teach undergraduates in colleges and universities, financial pressures, student enrollment, and the viability of our institutions or department and majors, are requiring us to justify the relevance of our expertise and the future of our courses. This has become a hallmark of the contemporary academic condition in religion and theology. Teaching Theology and Religion, an international peer reviewed journal published by Wiley-Blackwell, seeks 5000 word essays that analyze how teaching in a precarious institution shapes your pedagogy. How does it shape the subjects that are taught and the ways that you teach? How does institutional or departmental health affect the joy and intellectual satisfaction of exploring the complexity of ideas? What are the opportunities for student learning that exist in the midst of crisis? What kinds of challenges have you undertaken and what kinds of resources have you drawn on? What particular teaching strategies have you developed and how did they work? We invite papers that address how you think of yourself as a teacher in a precarious context and the kinds of changes that are impacting the classroom. Are you teaching with, or against or in full disregard of institutional instability? Successful essays will move beyond description of institutional contexts to analysis of pedagogical challenges, experiments, and solutions that are intertwined with these precarious contexts.

5000 word minimum

Guidelines, Style Sheet, and Process for Submissions

Thomas Pearson
Editor, Teaching Theology and Religion
Associate Director, Wabash Center
( pearsont@wabash.edu)
800-655-7117

Wabash Center