Celia Brewer Sinclair, University of North Carolina, Charlotte

Celia Brewer Sinclair is a senior lecturer in religious studies at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and adjunct faculty at Queens University. She holds degrees from Duke University and Yale Divinity School. She has taught in the fields of Bible and religion since 1978, first in a preparatory school and since 1992 in college settings. Currently, Brewer Sinclair is teaching courses titled “Jesus and the Buddha,” “Suffering and the Problem of Evil,” and “Heroes and Warrior Women.” She is author of three books published by Westminster/John Knox Press, A Guide through the Old Testament (1989, under the name Celia Brewer Marshall), A Guide through the New Testament (1994), and Genesis (1999, under the name Celia Brewer Marshall). Brewer Sinclair is a writer of curricula for the United Methodist Publishing House and the author of the Disciple Short-Term Bible Study on the Old Testament (with James D. Tabor, Abingdon Press, 2005). She wrote the 2006–2007 Horizons Bible Study: In the Beginning, Perspectives on Genesis (Horizons Presbyterian Women’s Press, 2006), which was the winner of the Associated Church Press 2007 Award of Excellence in Bible Resources.

The Challenge of Gen Ed

So reads the rationale for the general education program at a large public university in the North Carolina system. I teach “gen ed” courses at this university. I teach as a member of the religious studies department. And I love what I do.

“Gen ed,” and specifically the courses called “liberal studies” at my university, is a challenge. It is the challenge of developing courses that are interdisciplinary grab-bags of materials and majors. Each course is a wonderful mess that brings together future engineers, nurses, educators, etc., and asks them to read, to watch, and to reflect together. What I love is identifying big questions, both contemporary and enduring. For instance, this semester in LBST 2101 (Western Cultural and Historical Awareness) we ask: Why do bad things happen to good people? Why do good people do bad things? Historically how have thinkers in the West answered these questions? What patterns and perspectives can we identify in Western thought? What patterns and perspectives are found right here in the classroom? The title of my LBST 2102 (Global and Intercultural Connections) section this semester is “Heroes and Warrior Women.” Questions asked in this course include: How have different cultures defined heroism? What models and theories inform the class when they think of the heroic?

Class size is medium (30–35 students), but the feeling is intimate. In her Teaching and Learning in College Introductory Religion Courses (Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2008), Barbara Walvoord speaks of what we intuitively know to be the foundation for a successful classroom: care. Care for subject matter certainly, but also care of persons. Similarly in his discussion of “paradoxes of the classroom,” Parker Palmer writes that the space should be both hospitable and charged (Courage to Teach, 77). More on “charged” in a moment, but in the classroom hospitality is reciprocal and expected. Immediately we meet and greet (this is a classroom where everybody knows your name) and establish the norms of discussion: everyone is given an opportunity to speak and no one is disrespected, ever. We are careful and deliberate about being together.

The “flipped classroom” model successfully used by so many K–12 educators (see Thompson, 2011) pertains to what I do. What Salman Khan calls a “one size fits all” presentation, or what I call the medieval model of a sage on stage, is deadly to my soul and deadening to my classes. So I do not lecture; instead, I outsource as much content as I can. Plenty of folks can say more about the Four Noble Truths (for instance) better than I. When it comes to introducing material or simply explaining something, there’s already someone out there doing this in a high-quality lecture on the web or on a good website. Why compete? I’ll humbly focus instead on process rather than the knowledge product. I am a live teacher after all. Conversation is what I can offer.

Charging the classroom is crucial. Charging and clarity go hand-in-hand. I am clear about what I require in assignments. I never say, “Go home and read x pages for next week,” then cross my fingers and hope this happens. Not in a gen ed course, not in an introductory course, not ever would I do that. I require plenty of work at home, but then I allow students to use their notes on that work as they take a short quiz (fifteen multiple-choice items) at the beginning of every class. Everyone is expected to be prepared for discussion by demonstrating his or her successful completion of assignments for the day. We go over the answers immediately. Voilà, we are all on the same page, ready to build on the who/what/where/when of that day’s material. We are primed to have a conversation. Pedagogically, this method works so well that students are disappointed when I skip this step. The quiz is like the voucher for class and students are eager to cash in.

A quick quiz, like a Zen master’s bark, charges the atmosphere, gets everyone’s attention, and raises expectations that something will indeed happen in the classroom. What do I hope for? I want students to think about the way they think, to recognize patterns and behaviors that they naturally follow (in a reactive or “sleep-walking” sort of way), to be conscious of choices they can identify, and changes they can make in their thinking. Metathinking is being mindful. Students are attracted to mindfulness and self-reflection, especially when I emphasize that this is notoriously hard to do.

My favorite question in the classroom is simply, “What gets your attention?” Adult learners must be interested in order to be motivated to dig deeper into material and ideas. And I need to know where they are engaged. Typically I come to class with more material for discussion, more sites and documents on Moodle, more content available than time allows. I adjust according to what I hear and where interest levels are high. My role is to create an environment where conversation can happen. As Walvoord points out, students want to be heard and they want a space where growth can happen and where big ideas can be discussed. So the classroom is a place that is hospitable to inquiry (no question or comment is dumb) and my task is to facilitate honesty and care in expression of ideas (after all, students have come prepared to discuss what they think). Discussion examples: After reading Genesis 2–3, What happened in the garden? Or after reviewing a history of the women’s movements in the United States, what’s it like to live in the Third Wave? What would you make sure you did if you were the parent of a thirteen-year-old girl in the United States today? I structure the conversation, and then I get out of the way.

The rules are simple. Everyone has an opportunity to speak. Students are allowed to “pass.” All responses go up on the white board without my editing. Students can clarify what they want to say, but I don’t edit their comments. When the board is covered, or time is up, we step back and say, “What happened here? What got complicated? What is new? What’s the take-away?” As Parker Palmer writes about the six paradoxes of the classroom, it’s a space where we honor both the little stories of our lives and the big stories of the disciplines (2007, 79). It’s metathinking time.

Small group reflection is built into each week’s activities. That small group has its own integrity, and its success is evaluated by group members at the end of the term. Application of class theory to contemporary culture is an important part of what we do throughout the course and especially in final presentations, where each student sets up a conversation between theory and a dramatic film that she or he chooses.

What do I want from students? I want them to be curious about the human family, past and present. I want them to be interested in thinkers and ideas, traditions and practices, art and narratives that are not their own. I want them to know the confidence that comes with good research skills, using electronic resources from the library for fun and profit, evaluating websites with a discerning eye. I want more and more student evaluations that read, “I want to travel, to explore other cultures, to further expand my world.”

I conclude my course descriptions with a list of learning outcomes — abilities to evaluate websites, to locate library resources, to use scholarly research, to collaborate with others, to read for sense and meaning, to create and present a project using film. But my biggest hope, my most cherished outcome for students, is this: To grow as curious, respectful, interested, and mature citizens of our global village. Palmer identifies the six paradoxes of the learning space where this sort of growth can happen, along with Walvoord’s “care, clarity, and conversation.”

The conventional wisdom among students about general education courses is that they are a necessary and often unwelcome step to getting a degree. Many faculty shy away from teaching general education courses because the students are not always committed or focused. But I find that the future engineers and computer scientists who sit in my classrooms have a chance to do something different — and perhaps more meaningful — in my classes. One student remarked, “Projects, labs, sleep: that’s all I do otherwise. I come here for a breath of fresh air.” Over and over I have heard that there’s a largeness, a liberality, an expansiveness that students feel in the classroom. “It’s a place for a big sigh,” one student commented, and others agreed. General education classes might be one place where state university students can tie in who they are with what they do.