Seminarium

The Elements of Great Teaching

Put it Out There: Publicly-Performed Course Work

Posted on by

Engaging strangers on Twitter. Teaching an adult-education session in a church. Blogging an interview with a high-profile scholar. When learners accomplish their course work by means of public performance, the common student refrain, “What will I do with this stuff?” becomes “Let’s examine what I’ve done with this stuff!”

Publicly-Performed Course Work:

Jennifer Shepherd writes this week about “being heard,” particularly outside the classroom…

Scared but Not Too Scared? Fear & the Creative Act

Posted on by

He 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…

Welcome to Seminarium

Posted on by

Well-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.