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Growing a Department: Cultivating Beneficial Processes and Results in the Development of a Team-Taught Capstone Course
Proposal abstract :
This project is designed to cultivate healthy and productive processes for creating a departmental capstone course at Austin College. Through a constructive process, involving all three members of the religion department, the project will engage in critical reflection about issues related to collaborative processes, team teaching, and modeling of collaboration. Goals: 1) To provide a core knowledge of methodology for religion majors; 2) To enable religion majors to see the common core in the three primary “tracts” of the religion major at Austin College; 3) To encourage religion majors to discern integrative connections and contrasting tensions among the three tracts; 4) To explore pedagogical approaches that contribute to a successful capstone experience; and 5) To build a healthier department, enhancing unity/community in the midst of diversity, through collaborative work and team-teaching.
Learning Abstract :
The grant and consultation allowed our department to weave the diverse threads of this course (multiple aims, objectives, rationales and motivations for teaching) into a more integrated design. We gained skill in the practices/processes of identifying competing and complementary perspectives and negotiating their coherent inclusion in the course. In the process we also discussed the following: the assessment of student learning; the most constructive pedagogical approaches given the diversities of the class; various course design options for the future; the roll of the syllabus in communicating aims and objectives of the course and structuring these into class sessions and assignments. These concerns were developed in relationship to the ongoing goal of providing a venue for departmental colleagues to engage in scholarly exchange with one another, thereby enhancing departmental community and providing our majors with opportunities to integrate diverse perspectives. These processes remain valuable for continual revisions of the course.
This project is designed to cultivate healthy and productive processes for creating a departmental capstone course at Austin College. Through a constructive process, involving all three members of the religion department, the project will engage in critical reflection about issues related to collaborative processes, team teaching, and modeling of collaboration. Goals: 1) To provide a core knowledge of methodology for religion majors; 2) To enable religion majors to see the common core in the three primary “tracts” of the religion major at Austin College; 3) To encourage religion majors to discern integrative connections and contrasting tensions among the three tracts; 4) To explore pedagogical approaches that contribute to a successful capstone experience; and 5) To build a healthier department, enhancing unity/community in the midst of diversity, through collaborative work and team-teaching.
Learning Abstract :
The grant and consultation allowed our department to weave the diverse threads of this course (multiple aims, objectives, rationales and motivations for teaching) into a more integrated design. We gained skill in the practices/processes of identifying competing and complementary perspectives and negotiating their coherent inclusion in the course. In the process we also discussed the following: the assessment of student learning; the most constructive pedagogical approaches given the diversities of the class; various course design options for the future; the roll of the syllabus in communicating aims and objectives of the course and structuring these into class sessions and assignments. These concerns were developed in relationship to the ongoing goal of providing a venue for departmental colleagues to engage in scholarly exchange with one another, thereby enhancing departmental community and providing our majors with opportunities to integrate diverse perspectives. These processes remain valuable for continual revisions of the course.