Scared but Not Too Scared? Fear & the Creative Act Posted on September 16, 2013 by A+ Brooke Lester, CuratorHe turned to me, looked at my face and said sharply, “Something on your mind, son? Speak up!” “Uh—” I blurted it out. “Sir, that temporary third lieutenant—the one that got cashiered. How could I find out what happened?” “Oh. Young man, I didn’t mean to scare the daylights out of you; I simply intended to wake you up.” (dialogue from R.A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers, 1951. “I didn’t mean to scare the daylights out of you; I simply intended to wake you up.” Two of our Seminarium bloggers have raised, each in her or his own way, the observation that frightened people don’t learn…
Okay, Academics: Should I Be “LinkedIn”? Posted on September 3, 2013 by A+ Brooke Lester, CuratorA colleague brought this to my attention: LinkedIn is introducing “University Pages.” (The technical details are mostly over my head, but you may be interested.) It looks to me as if the initiative targets students rather than faculty, though I don’t know whether that means faculty really have no role in “University Pages.” But it raises for me the perennial question: Should I stop deleting those LinkedIn requests, and go ahead and start an account? As a scholar in Biblical Studies, should I be “LinkedIn”? As far as I know, LinkedIn helps users do two things…
Full Reverse! The OT/HB from Writings to Torah Posted on August 16, 2013 by A+ Brooke Lester, Curator“Say, I know! Let’s teach our students, at term’s beginning, a model of Pentateuch formation that requires many of them to make a major emotional adjustment, and further involves learning the ENTIRE TIME LINE AND POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY of a thousand years of ancient Israel! Because, pedagogically speaking, how could that go wrong?” JEDP as a starting point for Old Testament study: what have we been thinking? But I admit, that’s not the real reason that I began to teach the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible (OT/HB) “in reverse”…
More Backward Course Design: Getting Learning Done! Posted on August 1, 2013 by A+ Brooke Lester, CuratorImagine yourself at term’s end, talking with a sympathetic faculty colleague, or with a partner or family member. Your head is full of final papers or exams, ranging from exceptional to disappointing, and you cry out, “Argh! I just want them to ‘get’ that…(your rant here)!” If you can complete that sentence, then you have all you need for a start on “backward course design,” an idea fundamental to the widely-used framework Understanding by Design (book by McTighe and Wiggins), and having some similarity to David Allen’s Getting Things Done system of task management. Jane S. Webster blogged here at Seminarium on her own experience with “backward course design,” inspiring in me the same impulse I get when I meet someone with whom I share a love of some obscure musician: an urge to shout “Me, too!” and then talk everybody’s ear off on the subject….
Welcome to Seminarium Posted on July 23, 2013 by A+ Brooke Lester, CuratorWell-known-as-excellent Instructor 1: “Some of us were talking at lunch about how our efforts in course design, and in the scholarship of teaching & learning, fit in as part of our professional development here at Local Seminary.” Well-known-as-excellent Instructor 2: “I really want to hear more as you work that out, because–in all sincerity–it would never have occurred to me in a hundred years that someone would ‘design’ a course.” It’s in the spirit of this exchange that we welcome you to Seminarium: The Elements of Great Teaching, a group blog and resource site dedicated to pedagogy for religious studies in higher education.We invite you to join with us here as we “bootstrap each other up” on our understandings and practices in the craft of education.