You may have heard the announcements that the Wabash Center has launched a new open-access, online journal, The Wabash Center Journal on Teaching. The entire contents of the inaugural issue of the journal is now available for free download online.

For twenty-two years the Wabash Center has been publishing Teaching Theology & Religion (TTR), owned by Wiley-Blackwell. Now we’ve moved our whole editorial team from TTR to this new publishing venture in order to make our efforts available digitally without subscription. Although the Wabash Center will no longer be involved in the publication of TTR, Wiley-Blackwell intends to continue publishing it with a new editorial team beginning with volume 23 (January 2020).

When we started TTR as a new and unknown center for teaching in the 1990s, we needed the prestige of a major publisher in the field of religion and theology to lend gravitas to the emerging field of the scholarship of teaching and learning. But for many years now we have regretted the paywall our articles have lived behind, limiting our ability to promote this scholarship, support authors, and inspire readers.

The Wabash Center Journal on Teaching will continue publishing the high-quality, peer reviewed scholarship on teaching in the fields of theological and religious studies that has been the hallmark of TTR for over two decades. The new journal carries forward the same scope and focus of scholarship – but now our efforts will be freely available online.

In the new journal you’ll find the popular Teaching Tactics. In addition to Forums (with contributions now listed individually) we will also highlight Special Topic sections. And the new journal reintroduces Book Reviews, which were removed from TTR in 2015 to allow more space for articles in the print journal.

So while you’ll find The Wabash Center Journal on Teaching familiar, you will also begin to notice new developments. The open-access online platform allows us to provide convenient links to sources on the internet and links back to previously published articles. But more than that, the new platform provides the opportunity for The Wabash Center Journal on Teaching to become more than just a print journal available online.

It’s easy to insert links to video clips, graphics, or sound files – although these links must be found on the web or created by authors. It takes a leap of imagination to conceive how teaching issues and contexts, arguments and evidence, could be represented graphically, in motion, visually. Until now, the written word would have seemed to be the distinctive home for sustained rigorous, reflection on teaching. But we’re moving into a new world in which the “text” that creates and makes legible academic thinking needn’t be limited to words on a page.

So we issue this challenge to our readers and authors: send us sustained critical reflection on your teaching practice and context that explores the boundaries and possibilities of representational forms and genres available on an open-access online platform.

4 Highlights of the Inaugural Journal Issue

1. “State of the Field” essays by:

Frank M. Yamada

Eugene V. Gallagher and Joanne Maquire

A Conversation with Maryellen Weimer (longtime editor of The Teaching Professor, and leading authority on disciplinary based scholarship on teaching)

2. Reflections on the teaching legacy of Dr. Katie Geneva Cannon by several of her former students:

Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas

Karen K. Seat

Miguel A. De La Torre

Angela D. Sims

Edwin David Aponte

3. Special Topic:  Threshold Concepts in Biblical Studies (with contributions from John Van Maaren, Tat-siong Benny Liew, Richard A. Ascough, and Jocelyn McWhirter)

4. Teaching Tactics

Zoom in on Interpretive Skills by, Amy Beth Jones, Stephanie Day Powell

The Buddha's Positionality, by Christina Anne Kilby

Maximizing Engagement between Online and On-Campus Students Via Zoom, by Daniel Orlando Álvarez

Does This Sound Religious?, by Amy DeRogatis, Isaac Weiner