Archives for October 2013

The main reason I don’t lecture is cowardice, plain and simple. I have never felt brilliant or knowledgeable or charismatic enough to carry a course on my own. Thankfully, though, I teach in a small department in a small institution where I have the luxury of small classes, so ...

Curricular integration remains a desire and challenge for many faculty and deans. Additionally, accreditation standards call for integration in a curriculum course of study, and increasingly, accrediting agencies call for evidence of demonstrable integration of the curriculum on the part of students. For example, the Association of Theological Schools identifies ...

I was sitting around the seminar table with eighteen students in a course on religion and popular culture. To get the discussion started, I asked them about the results of their web-based research on firsthand accounts of becoming a Star Trek fan. Numerous hands went up, research results were shared ...

Pedagogical Confession: I learn from lectures.  I’m one of those people for whom the traditional academy was made.  I listen to lectures on audiofiles (and I have since I was a teenager).  My larger classes in undergraduate and graduate school were large lectures with separate sections led by a ...

My unpleasant memories of middle school English classes are made much worse when I recall how some teachers taught poetry and prose by picking “important” passages and pontificating about them. Learning to “read” poetry was essentially learning to listen to a lifeless lecture.  When I first began teaching I too ...