Experimenting w Resource List Shortcodes

Paulo Freire needs no introduction. His reflections on critical pedagogy and problem posing methodologies have dramatically shaped educational practice for decades. This recent volume, Pedagogy of Commitment, is a collection of interviews and short reflections that took place at the end of Freire’s career. They represent geographical diversity and local concern, occurring in Argentina, Chile, Nicaragua, Paraguay, and Uruguay. They demonstrate the breadth of Freire’s concrete engagement in Latin America, as well as the cohesive scope of his vision and its enduring relevance. There is a liveliness and energy conveyed in these informal or semi-formal occasions, and we get to see Freire’s lucid mind and compassionate concern at work in responding to concrete questions and practical problems raised by his audiences.

Readers familiar with Freire’s work, particularly as expressed in Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Pedagogy of Hope, may not find new ideas in this collection. Furthermore, it will not make the best introduction to Freire’s thought for the uninitiated. Understandably, given the piecemeal and unsystematic nature of interviews, Freire’s ideas and guiding convictions are conveyed sporadically and sometimes indirectly throughout, in a way that might be missed by those less familiar with his writings. For those already acquainted with and inspired by Freire’s project, however, this collection remains worthwhile for a number of reasons. This book provides a valuable glimpse into Freire’s thoughts and attitudes at the end of his life and career. We see that his vision and project have not changed in fundamentals, although he himself has evolved. He admits to his growth in understanding patriarchy, for instance, and the need to move beyond gender exclusive forms of expression (88-95). He is all the more convinced that education is art, is an aesthetic process that should not be reduced to formulae or fixed frameworks (16-25). The relational and dialogical aspects remain paramount.

We also see how Freire responds to later developments in world economics and geopolitics, such as the fall of Soviet socialism, supposed neoliberal triumph, and late capitalist order (33-40). Here his emphasis on hope becomes critical. Freire remains hopeful and all the more committed to resisting the effects of socio-economic and political processes that dehumanize society’s most vulnerable. The pragmatic nature of his engagement becomes clear. The increasing prevalence of technocratic and abstracting forces that excise the human element in education (and social life more broadly) mean a doubling-down of efforts to connect, relate, engage, and dialogue, as well as to foster a classroom context that equips students as agents of their own destinies. There is no postmodern turn to his practice, no sense of irony or contingency to the goals of liberation. For Freire, the onslaught of global capital means educators must fight harder. As the title of one of the more memorable and hard-hitting interviews conveys, “The Confrontation is not Pedagogical, but Political” (33). But the fight remains hopeful and a labor of love.
           
This volume provides a resource for encouragement and renewal of vision for educators influenced by Freirean pedagogy. It gives a glimpse into the life and heart of the man, near the twilight of his days but still full of passion, conviction, and hope. The book is full of choice pieces of wisdom and reminders of the significance of the cause and necessity of endurance.

Graduates from religion and theology programs cannot expect to be hired to teaching positions (tenure-track or adjunct) without prior teaching experience, as the current job market demands that candidates gain significant experience and training prior to graduation. Graduate programs must therefore augment their academic offerings to students with an education that prepares them for successful teaching careers. To that end, a number of universities across diverse fields have adopted intentional Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA) programs to prepare future faculty for a profession of teaching.

The collection of essays in this volume examine multiple options for offering this kind of training, from institution-wide certification programs for teaching to single courses on pedagogy that can be embedded into existing degree requirements. Several chapters present case studies, providing a range of models for how an intentional GTA program might operate. Most of the programs reviewed are overseen by research universities with large student populations, such as the University of California-Berkeley. These programs are cross-curricular and focus exclusively on increasing teaching experience, and can be easily adapted for training teachers of theology and religion.

This volume is most useful for those who are at least generally familiar with the rationale for training graduate students for teaching vocations and the value of it, and who are familiar (in knowledge if not in fact) with formal GTA programs. Administrators of GTA programs will find this a helpful reference volume as it provides information about how GTA programs compare with one another – including data on the kinds of training being offered (programs, certificates, and courses). Those who have the beginnings of a program and want to improve it will find examples of success (and failure) in schools of comparable size and student population, and find lists pertaining to the components of robust programs. Administrators of programs in schools operating with limited resources will want to read Chapter 8, “Leveraging Existing PFF (Preparing Future Faculty) Resources to Create a Certificate of University Teaching” (125-146), which describes the steps Duquesne University followed to develop a Certificate of Teaching program from meager resources.

This is a data-rich volume, although the editors acknowledge the lack of discussion on teaching-related training regarding the ethics of teaching and professional behavior (170), as well as training to teach diversity (171). Also of note, the essays address professional development only insofar as it relates to teaching. They do not address training for supplementary skills needed to prepare future faculty of theology and religious studies, such as administration, community involvement, or advising/mentoring undergraduates.

In addition to preparing graduate students to teach, forward-thinking Professional Development Programs should consider careers for their graduates beyond teaching. To that end, programs should also include training in how to apply degree-related skills to the nonprofit sector, as well as education-based, non-teaching careers (such as administration and editing). Administrators will want to keep an eye on future publications of the series Studies in Graduate and Professional Student Development to supplement this otherwise comprehensive and detailed volume. 

Creativity and pedagogical competency are paradigmatic phrases in the ever-changing arena of academics. With the advent of online learning and degree-completion programs, traditional academic institutions have found themselves scrambling to meet the educational needs of diverse populations. For in-seat programs, the most fundamental yet also foundational change has occurred in how faculty view themselves in the classroom. A host of questions arise as faculty wrestle with their own teaching identity. Are we lecturers? Are we project facilitators? Do we allow the students to guide the curriculum? How do we promote academic competency while also honoring cultural diversity? As the designers of the Applied Creative Thinking program and Noel Studio at Eastern Kentucky University, the authors of this volume see their work not as the evolution of a new theory, such as social learning theory or distributed cognition, as much as the genesis of “an emerging creative literacy” (viii). They firmly believe that we have the ability to be creative established within us, and that we “get better applying creativity the more practice [we] have doing it” (xi). Therefore, this book is built on an argument that “creativity is a set of learnable skills” (xi).

Designed as the student manual for a course in creative thinking, this volume can be divided into three major sections: theory, strategies, and implementation. The first section consists of the first five chapters. In it the authors define four major perspectives of creativity − process, person, press, and product − and introduce the concept of recursiveness. This opening section provides the foundation for the subsequent chapters in which the authors address additional issues related to creative thinking, such as whether creativity can be taught and some common myths regarding creativity. The next major section (chapters 6 to 14) describes various strategies for developing creativity (such as piggybacking, collaborating, and using metaphors). The final section (chapters 15 to 21) discusses how to develop a creative environment, including chapters on developing a creative strategy and creative uses of media and technology. The volume is composed more like a workbook than a textbook, and each chapter includes a concept list, creative exercises, and a bibliography for further reading.

One might expect this volume to be written for faculty interested in becoming more creative in their teaching discipline or who are interested in integrating creative thinking strategies into their curriculum or course design. It took reading only the first lines to realize that this volume is, in fact, oriented toward students who are either involved in a course focusing on creative writing or contemporary leadership strategies (or are simply interested in becoming more creatively competent). Once I recognized that the volume was student rather than professor focused, I found it to be quite helpful for reflecting on how creativity is a process that must be engineered by the student, and how to implement the strategic parameters of creative thinking as a professor. As an instructor interested in developing my creative competency, I was elated to discover that the authors, along with Shawn Apostel, published a companion volume for instructors in February 2013, titled Teaching Applied Creative Thinking: A New Pedagogy for the 21st Century.

In her Teaching Theology & Religion review of Nicola Whitton’s Learning with Digital Games: A Practical Guide to Engaging Students in Higher Education, Rachel Wagner observed that the book “offers general advice for those brave enough to write their own games for educational use, but the book is not, nor does it claim to be, a handbook on how to produce video games” (Teaching Theology & Religion 15, no. 1: 91). Whitton’s newer co-edited collection with Alex Moseley, presumably, is intended to be that handbook, though many of its initial chapters seem to replicate Witton’s original call for more educators to take an interest in game pedagogy and put some investment in games for the secondary and post-secondary classroom. From there, the book offers the fundamentals, from the rudimentary to the quite advanced, but breaks it into such discrete units that a certain degree of disconnect forms between the separately useful entries.

Whereas an entire chapter, co-written by Whitton and Dave White, did not need to be dedicated to “Narrative” (such as explaining what conflict or plot is), other sections, like “Mapping Games to Curricula” by Moseley and Rosie Jones, could have been given more page space to explore their complexities. In fact, the collection does offer real-life case studies of games developed for and attempted in the classroom, but their lack of variety in terms of academic disciplines disappoints; [in]visible Belfast and ViolaQuest are marvelous examples of games-based education promoting the literary exploration of a city and the social orientation of students to the wider campus community, respectively, but, in as much as they document successes in this form, they do not suggest how to replicate it in other fields. 

Perhaps the most useful portions of the collection for instructors of religion or theology come from two altogether different approaches within its covers. The chapter with the clearest ready-made step-by-step process or blueprint for game development is Simon Brookes and Moseley’s primer on constructing authentic learning activities (ALA) across what they term “the reality gap” of the game and the classroom (94, 96). Though editors Whitton and Moseley have their own chapter on design considerations, Brookes and Moseley’s discussion includes and exceeds the editors’ clear preference for Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) where a blend of real-world technologies lead students through a semi-fictional narrative toward the game’s learning objectives. While the thrill of an ARG can be contagious, chapters like Brookes and Moseley’s will still benefit the instructor-reader who is not yet ready to take such an intensive, immersive plunge.

Sarah Smith-Robbins delivers the other superlative chapter, a highly theoretical but ultimately rewarding consideration of virtual worlds’ utility for learning. True to Whitton’s early warnings to “scaffold” games so that they move from easy to harder to then still-harder tasks, Smith-Robbin’s chapter is reserved until close to the end, a quantum leap into Activity Theory and Game Ecology Models from the rudimentary material on quantified competition (such as “pointsification”) or multimedia options that form the initial foundation of the book. It seems highly unlikely, however, that the reader who began with those would “level up” to Smith Robbins’s discourse.

Using Games to Enhance Learning and Teaching is an impassioned, valuable book, entirely worthy of educators’ consideration, as are games for educational purposes overall. The collection can easily be likened to some of the most popular games available, with many playing them simply to complete them and not to uncover their every secret. Likewise, most educators will find the book more valuable for its constituent pieces rather than its entire whole.

With the ongoing Syrian refugee crisis quite literally fanning the flames of Islamophobia across Europe, Adem Aygün’s well-written and meticulously researched book makes for trenchant reading on the state of Islamic religious education for Muslim minorities in Germany. While Aygün’s particular focus is on Islamic youth in Turkey and among Turkish immigrants in Germany, the book raises questions about Islamic religious pedagogy that have larger, E.U.-wide implications, namely through its challenge to both how non-Christian religion is taught (or not) by the secular apparatuses of European universities and secondary schools, and the pedagogical methods for learning theology that are intrinsic to immigrant Muslim communities in a European country like Germany.

The book will interest anyone who works on or with the models of faith development as pioneered by the American theologian James W. Fowler (1940-2015); as Aygün rightfully notes, Religious Socialization constitutes one of the first attempts to bring Fowler’s influential step-models to a non-Christian context (183), using Fowler’s “stages of faith” to frame how Muslim youth in Germany and Turkey see themselves in relationship to their religion and the larger, social world. This book is important reading for scholars who work on the state of theological education in Europe, particularly when it comes to non-Christian religions.

Fowler, like William James long before him, decoupled belief from catechism or creed, and relocated it (via a developmental psychology derived from Piaget) in the personal experiences of the self. Some of the fundamental characteristics of Fowler’s hierarchical categories of faith development – such as self-realization, and the acceptance of complexity and diversity – are indubitably imprinted by the liberal Protestantism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and it could be said that Fowler’s project was as much a (biased) theological one as it was objectively psychological, or sociological. Aygün’s book, thus, begins by posing a fascinating methodological problem: can Fowler’s typologies, tinged as they are with their echoes of Paul Tillich and H. Richard Niebuhr, even fit a non-Christian setting, where the relationship between the self, God, and the world ostensibly seems to have a fundamentally different kind of constellation?

Aygün’s book is part sociological – his seventy in-depth interviews with Islamic youth from the bulk of the empirical chapters of the work – but also part theological, and the first chapters offer illuminating close readings of the Koran and the Islamic concept of Fitrah to demonstrate (in answer to this question) how critical thinking and self-reflexivity are arguably at the very core of Muslim faith. Reading Islamic theology through Fowler’s models, Aygün deftly argues, illuminates how Islamic traditions are more than adequately equipped with the kinds of theological tools necessary for grappling with the individual’s place in modernity, and the successful integration of the self’s belief with all the complexities of the global world (Fowler’s last, and highest, stage of development being the “universalizing faith” of a Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr.).

The empirical portion of Religious Socialization that presents and reflects on the results of Aygün’s extensive interviews provides some surprising juxtapositions between Turkish Muslims living in Germany and their peers in Turkey. Because of the lack of Islamic institutional apparatuses for Muslim migrants in Germany, the teaching and learning about the Koran has strengthened the family as the critical locus for value-building and faith formation, whereas Turkey’s complex and dense history of state secularization and religious politics has meant that Turkish youth have consistently had a much broader and more diverse exposure to the kinds of the theological education necessary for progressive faith development: the net effect being that religious belief among Turkish youth is “easily on average higher” on Fowler’s scale than it is for youth in Germany (183).

A fascinating observation is offered by Aygün here, that the ad hoc system of immigrant mosque education that developed in Germany in the seventies and eighties (54-55) has meant that the mosque as a site of faith-formation plays a much more significant role than it effectively does in Turkey. Regrettably, Aygün notes, the dominant pedagogy offered in these German mosques remains a kind of medieval formalism that focuses on catechismal recitations, often at the expense of developing critical thinking and self-reflection. Ultimately, this kind of “imprisoning of the individual into traditional ways of thinking” (193) has hurt the viability of Islam as a public religion, as it loses its functionality within the pluralizing contexts of the E.U.

Aygün is not simply casting stones: the book is a strong, pragmatic call for the German (and by extension, European) university and school systems to better integrate Islamic theological education into their curriculums, and thereby inculcate the kind of reflective and dynamic forms of belief that espouse the cosmopolitan values as present in the higher levels of Fowler’s scaled categories of faith development. Such an institutionalized religious pedagogy could help undo stereotypical prejudices against Islam (all the more resurgent now than at the time of Aygün’s original writing), aid in the coexistence of different religions, and even potentially benefit Turkey’s attempts to join the E.U. (197).

There is, to date, very little of such institutionalization in place. The recently established partnership between the universities of Frankfurt and Gießen for a Center for Islamic Studies with a special emphasis on teaching (Religionslehrer) is one positive sign of development in this direction (and Aygün is now teaching at Gießen as a professor for Islamic theology and religious education). Given the extraordinary inflow of Islamic refugees into Germany over the last ten months alone – at least 800,000, by conservative estimates – more such university initiatives are urgently needed, both for the state of European inter- and intra-religious education, and perhaps for the fate of the E.U. itself, with its still laudable, if utopic, commitment to a pluralistic open society.