Teaching with an Accent: Sounding Otherness in the Classroom
English is not my first language. The first time I went to an English-speaking school was in Baguio City, Philippines, in 2003. I was nervous about learning in a language that is not my own. Would I manage? And…
Continue readingInhale … Exhale: Exploring Breath in the Classroom
Take a deep breath in … and exhale. This has been a recurring practice in my classrooms lately. Taking a moment to breathe – both physically and pedagogically. What started as an interesting idea to shape my classes in a…
Continue readingTeach Them How to Learn
More important than any topic I teach is teaching my students how to learn. Facts can change. The percentage of Christians in the United States that I teach first-year students today may be different by the time they graduate. The…
Continue readingConfessional with Caveats: Womanist Confession as a Form of Embodied Teaching
This semester I taught the Gospel of Luke for the first time. My class was a seminar style class with seven students who worked diligently through the Lucan text while also engaging various scholars and they ways that these scholars…
Continue readingTrauma-Informed Pedagogy: A Journey from Classroom to Community
Trauma. Is there any more apt word for the past few years? COVID-19, social distancing, racialized violence, political insurrection—these are just a few of the collective traumas affecting our lives. I’m sure each of us can name additional layers from…
Continue readingMusic as a Way to Build Bridges in Religious Education
During my teaching experience in Zambia, music became an important part of the day-to-day life of my students’ coursework. When I first asked the students to share about things they valued from their own culture, one of the elements they…
Continue reading21 Ways to Welcome BIPOC Faculty
It is well substantiated that the retention rate in predominantly white institutions (PWI) for BIPOC faculty is abysmally low. Newly hired BIPOC faculty in PWIs report feeling ignored, unwelcomed, even shunned by colleagues and students. They are treated as if,…
Continue readingCuration in Teaching
I’ve been doing some nonfiction creative writing recently (you can see my latest piece here, if you’d like). And it’s been an interesting exercise in curation, a term most closely associated with the world of art history, but now used…
Continue readingBeyond Breakout Rooms: Multisensory Learning in the Virtual Classroom
Proponents and practitioners of multisensory learning are experiencing a loss as it becomes clear that the shift to virtual and hi-flex learning has become a norm in many institutions, not the short-term solution it once seemed it would be. How…
Continue readingVisiting MIT’s Media Lab
What do artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, and other new media arts have to teach us about the teaching and learning of religious worldviews, imagination, and symbols? To find this out, a small group of scholars in religion and theology,…
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