Seminarium

The Elements of Great Teaching

Seminarium Blog 2015: A Call for Bloggers

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As Seminarium moves into its third year, we invite you to consider whether you have something to add to the conversation with blog posts of your own. If interested, you may write to David Schoenknecht, Fortress Education developer and managing editor of Seminarium via seminariumblog@gmail.com

And, as ever, we invite you to engage our current bloggers through your comments here at Seminariumblog.org, as well as on Twitter (@seminariumblog), Facebook, Ello, or where you will.

Since July 2013, Seminarium Blog (powered by Fortress Press) has hosted essential conversations about teaching and learning in today’s religious-studies and seminary classrooms. Many of us of the large changes sweeping other academic disciplines into new learning models, content delivery technologies and deep systemic changes. How are these reflected and perceived among the institutions, professors and learners that have come to count on Fortress Press for progressive leadership in religious academic publishing?

Our topic areas speak to a different kind of academic blog, one that’s not so much about breakthroughs in scholarship as it relates to seminary and Religious Studies disciplines. We are more concerned about breakthroughs in pedagogy—the art and craft of teaching our disciplines in today’s academic milieu.

Seminarium is a “seedbed” for ideas that inform and inspire teachers in a variety of settings: faith-based and secular; face-to-face and online; private, public and virtual!

Plant Potato Here

“The Elements of Great Teaching,” as our tagline suggests, are split into a number of key categories:

  • SemClass: What’s happening in that liminal space between student and professor that is really working for you? Is it something that you are willing to share with others?
  • SemTech: Technology is often the bane of academics. But we know that some of you get it. You are doing amazing things out there. Can you help to mentor others into your brave, new reality?
  • SemLoci: Our respective disciplines and subject matters make a difference in how learning “plays out” in our classes. What discipline specific pedagogical trick and tips do you have up your sleeve? Are you willing to share?
  • SemTrends: This category is reserved for the biggies. Flipped classrooms! Adjunctification! Mobile learning! Student debt! Neuroscience and learning! Paradigm shifts in pedagogy, institutional change, things we need to know about the generation we labor among and on behalf of. Let’s let’s offer one another some courageous and hopeful thought-leadership here.

Get Some Inspiration

If so inclined, Seminarium also offers “Inspiration” posts from bloggers who have walked many miles in your shoes. Their offerings are not so much about being cutting edge as they are about mentoring the fundamental and counseling the beleaguered.

We are looking for bloggers with the gift of encouragement. It’s a tough world out there for academics. Institutions are reneging on tenure. Full-time profs are moved into part-time. Many teach online or blended courses without substantive orientation to non-traditional learning environments. Adjuncts are catching it from all sides while try to cobble together their peripatetic careers.

An encouraging word would be welcome on all counts. Help?

A Word from our Curator

As assistant professor in Hebrew Scriptures at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, I teach Hebrew Bible and Hebrew language classes. As Director of Digital Learning, I collaborate with faculty colleagues, administrators, trustees, and staff to develop and implement a vision for digital learning.

I want to help Seminarium become your go-to place for hashing out the nuts and bolts of being a better teacher of the subject matter you love. If we create a more intimate tryst between a passion for content and a passion for students, we’ve had the affect we are hoping for.

The Question is…Will you Join Us?

Again, you can indicate your desire to join our blog roll by emailing your contact information and topic suggestions to David Schoenknecht, Fortress Education developer and managing editor of Seminarium via seminariumblog@gmail.com.  You may not hear back from David  right away, but you will by mid-January when he wraps up our 2015 master calendar.

Happy teaching and learning!

Photo Credit: “Dibble sticks, donkeys and diesels_p94a” by IRRI Photos – CC by 2.0

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Brooke Lester, Ph.D, is an Assistant Professor in Hebrew Bible and Director for Emerging Pedagogies, at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary (Evanston IL). He received his degree in Old Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary.

We are pleased that Brooke has agreed to serve as Seminarium’s curator, because – in his own words – I am an instructor who has “discovered” the scholarship of teaching and learning, and who talks about it with something of the fanaticism of the convert.

Brooke writes: There is a famous curse about being doomed to live “in exciting times,” and it’s not always fun to be living through the greatest upheaval in literacy since Gutenberg (or possibly since the dawn of writing), but, well…here we are!

My favorite thing about “digital learning” is that the stakes are in fact as high as we think they are: the digitization of language makes us talk together about how we really think learning happens, and then it makes us reconsider almost everything we think we know about that.

More insight into Brooke’s pedagogical “reconsiderings” can be found on his personal blog: http://www.anumma.com.