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Nancy Lynne Westfield Publications
Publications of Dr. Nancy Lynne Westfield Blogs Huffington Post – contributor 2015-16. Wabash Center Blogs under the headings of “Reflective Teaching,” “Teaching, Religion, Politics,” “Learning from the Front (of the Classroom)” – 2014 to present. Podcasts “Dialogue on Teaching” moderated for Wabash Center. “Womanist Conversation” moderated by Dr. Tina Pippin, in conversation with ...

Agency: Onward Through the Fog!
The task is impossible, yet ours to accomplish. Our students need us to shape our classrooms for a future we cannot foresee or anticipate. In the courses we design, our students need us to hone their voices, imaginations, and problem-solving abilities for a future that is unmappable yet will require ...

Permission Giving
The Wabash Center teaches toward freedom in hopes of liberation and healing. We have learned that acts of freedom occur in many forms, and occasionally involve receiving permission. Since 2019, I have had the honor of reading the feedback forms completed by participants at the end of events and programming experiences. ...

Fear Will Make You Hurt Yourself
Fear is the anxiety that you are about to lose something you love, need, have rightfully earned or deserve. Fear will make you hurt yourself, silence yourself, edit yourself in ways that contradict or disavow your own best pursuits. Since we teach who we are, showing up afraid will only ...

A Key Ritual: Summoning Student Agency
Our attempts to teach towards openness, towards possibility, towards new glimpses of an uncharted future mean that teaching can be demanding, even confounding. One way I learned to embrace this approach was by incorporating rituals in my course designs. The use of rituals in classrooms allows students an experience that ...

Look to the Stars
My friend Kenneth Ngwa and I have ongoing conversations about impossible questions concerning the current malaise of education. How do you make your way and guide others when there is no clear direction, when what is next is unclear? How do you do what is needed when you do not ...

Disrupting a Single Chronological Narrative to Teach a More Racially Just and Ethnically Inclusive History of Christianity in the United States

Growing a Department: Cultivating Beneficial Processes and Results in the Development of a Team-Taught Capstone 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. ...

Theological Education in a Multicultural Environment: Identifying and Evaluating Best Practices for Empowerment. Part I - Research and Planning
The Joint Faculty Multiethnic Concerns Committee of Fuller Theological Seminary proposes a four-stage evaluation of student perceptions of classroom practices. The proposal is conceived as the first part of a larger planning initiative to further policymaking and pedagogy which will support the culturally diverse ministries of our student body. Stage 1 ...

Discovering Student Learning in the Religious Site Visit Assignment
Support for a small research project to identify the goals of the religious site visit assignment with respect to student learning. Specific project goals include: 1) a workshop for Georgia faculty to discuss the religious site visit assignment and determine how best to assess student responses in an experiential learning environment; 2) ...

Rethinking the Christian Studies Classroom: Mapping the Hidden (and Not So Hidden) Dynamics of Teaching Religion in the South
Support is requested to enable a group of professors with responsibilities for teaching Christianity in large public universities in the south to gather during a two-year process in which they reflect critically upon the place of Christian Studies in religious studies in large public universities, develop new models for teaching ...

Extending the Principles of Flipped Learning to Achieve Measurable Results: Emerging Research and Opportunities
As higher education continues to grapple with expanding online coursework in meaningful ways, faculty must confront a perennial question: how can online coursework mirror the rigor of in-person classes while preserving the flexibility that makes online learning attractive to students? In Extending the Principles of Flipped Learning to Achieve Measurable ...

Specifications Grading: Restoring Rigor, Motivating Students, and Saving Faculty Time
Concerns about mastery of learning outcomes or competencies, grade inflation, student motivation, and faculty time compel reflection on how we assess students in higher education. In Specifications Grading, Nilson critiques the traditional, point-based grading system and argues that students should be assessed on whether they have mastered course learning outcomes. ...

Understanding Bible by Design: Create Courses with Purpose
Lester, Webster, and Jones came together from different academic contexts to create a practical, succinct resource for professors on course design. Lester and his co-authors set out to demonstrate how the principles of Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe’s 2005 updated Understanding by Design (UbD) model can be applied to theological ...

Minds on Fire: How Role-Immersion Games Transform College
Mark C. Carnes’s Minds on Fire: How Role-Immersion Games Transform College is the work of a true believer seeking the conversion of others to the path of right pedagogical practice. Fortunately, the approach he advocates, teaching history through month-long, immersive, student-led role-play, seems a worthy recipient of his impassioned ...

Teaching in the Cracks
Teaching in the Cracks: Openings and Opportunities for Student-Centered, Action-Focused Curriculum Brian D. Schultz New York, NY: Teachers College Press, 2017 (xiv + 128 pages, ISBN 9780807758311, $29.95) Teaching in the Cracks by Brian D. Schultz, a professor of education at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago, explores ways to make current K-12 classrooms more student-empowering, ...