Seminarium

The Elements of Great Teaching

Teaching with Meta-Questions

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What’s the point?

Do you ever get those blank why-are-we-talking-about-this stare?  Is your answer too often, diagnosis “Just because?”  Today’s challenge is to consider your larger course agenda and how it maps onto student curiosity.  More specifically, click it is time to identify the metaquestion you hope your course will answer.

Backwards Design

In Understanding by Design, Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe describe a way of designing courses “backwards.”  In other words, they say, start with the things that students should understand by the end of the course—what they call “enduring understandings.” Here are some possibilities for a Biblical Studies course:

Judaism, Islam, and the many branches of Christianity defend their faith, in part, by a selective, human interpretation of key Biblical passages.

  • It is difficult to reconcile the literalist view of the Bible with a historical understanding of the text(s) written by many men over many years.
  • One need not believe in the God of the Bible to appreciate the power of image, language, and history in the text and its influence on all the arts from the time it was written.

These “understandings” bring focus and clarity to course design. However, at a college level, young adult students are themselves able to develop these understandings when prompted by juicy questions such as these: What is the role of a sacred text?  What criteria of interpretation should be applied?  Should everyone read the Bible?

But not all students will have a stake in the questions above. Unless they find the question both relevant and urgent to them, they will likely disengage.  So let’s reconsider what bigger question—a metaquestion—might engage them.

Make it Relevant

Sharon Daloz Parks points out that college-aged students become more conscious of the fact that they determine their own sense of self, other, world, and “God”; they do this by engaging in dialogues about truth and responding in ways that are satisfying and just.[1] And according to a recent study, students take religious studies courses in order to work through their sense of personal meaning.[2] So let’s create an intentional space for students to explore their questions and to test their decisions by using our content to that end.

Identify a Metaquestion

When considering a course, aim for just one metaquestion; more than that becomes confusing.  Keep pressing until you find one that has these characteristics:

A metaquestion is bigger than a yes-or-no, multiple-choice, or a short essay question; it is even bigger than the long essay at the end of a final exam.  A metaquestion wonders why we ask the question in the first place.

  • A metaquestion might be asked fruitfully in a religion, philosophy, history, English, science, music, math, business, or art class. Indeed, a metaquestion is enriched when asked across the disciplines.
  • A metaquestion should provoke students to explore a wide range of content, both “what is” and “what is not.”
  • A metaquestion should be open-ended and multi-dimensional.
  • A metaquestion should address issues of personal meaning for young adults.

Here are some possible examples: What is truth? Why do people suffer? What is our moral obligation to the world? What is an excellent life? What is an honorable person? What is integrity?

They are age-old philosophical questions, but in my experience, not obviously applied in the religious studies classroom.

Design a Course around a Metaquestion

Once you have identified your question, design the course around it, making it both central and explicit (this is the key to success!!). Highlight it as

The first and last thing students hear from you

  • Part of the course description
  • Integrated into the assessments and rubric, e.g., Essay question on the final exam (“What enduring understandings answer the metaquestion?”)
  • Connected to the class discussions (“How does this connect to our metaquestion?”)
  • Part of the weekly course “check in”
  • Connected to the student’s chosen career path
  • Part of student evaluations (“Did the metaquestion promote personal meaning-making for you?”)

Rewards

When students have the opportunity to focus their learning around a metaquestion that has urgent personal importance to them, they will learn to value the scope and breadth of the discipline in new ways.  They also develop cognitive skills of problem-solving and application, and discover the gift of collaborative learning.  You gain clear objectives for the course that will facilitate material selection and assignments.

[1]Sharon Daloz Parks, Big Questions, Worthy Dreams: Mentoring Young Adults in Their Search for Meaning, Purpose, and Faith (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000), p.5.

[2]Barbara E. Walvoord, Teaching and Learning in College Introductory Religion Courses (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008).

 

 

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Jane S. Webster (PhD McMaster University, Canada) is Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Barton College, North Carolina. She conducts research in the Gospel of John, feminist biblical hermeneutics, religious healing, and the scholarship of teaching and learning. In addition to her many publications, she has authored Ingesting Jesus: Eating and Drinking in the Gospel of John (2003) and co-edited, Lady Parts: Biblical Women and The Vagina Monologues (2012). Prior to her academic career, Webster was a critical care nurse and missionary in South America.

Comments

  1. Thanks, Jane!

    When you suggest that we consider only a single metaquestion for a course, I find myself both excited and nervous: Excited, because I know the power of a delimiting factor to organize and vitalize a course design; Nervous, because it might not be obvious to me how to choose a metaquestion for certain kinds of course.

    For example, if a course explicitly addresses a social issue (HIV/AIDS, poverty, race or gender, etc), a certain set of metaquestions may suggest themselves. But, for content-type courses (Latter Prophets; the OT in the NT; Samuel-Kings; Biblical Hebrew), it might feel arbitrary, or based on my habitual concerns without obvious connection to the content.

    But I like the kind of thinking that it forces. So, for my “OT in the NT” course (largely concerned with literary allusion, rhetoric, and metaphor), I can imagine choosing an enduring question like, “Who decides what something ‘means’? And who decides who decides?”

    • Thanks for this comment, Brooke.  I like your question there.  It gets at a lot of reading strategies.

      In my Introduction to Old Testament course, I raise this question: How do historical events provoke the writing (editing, canonization) of the biblical text? For example, the Babylonia exile raises questions of identity that led to  the compilation of the Torah, the stories of the ancestors.  Other the semester, the students learn more and more how to consider the agenda of the written documents.  In the face of their inevitable resistance or difficulty with the concept, I tell them, “Everything written has an agenda; it is our responsibility first to identify it and then to make a decision about it.”  This seems to the students “mind-blowing”: they can easily identify the agenda in an advertisement. They can usually do it with emails, texts, and someone’s facebook status or date chatter.  They might be able to do it with a popular film, TV show, or cartoon.  (I think the intuitive impact is greater with a more immediate genre.)  It seems harder to do it with the written word, especially the Bible.  So if they can learn to do it with the Bible, they can learn to do it with anything.  The meta-question becomes this: “What are you trying to convince me to do or believe? Why?”  But if I started with that as a meta-question, the students would miss the connection to the historical and social context.  This seems to work for me.