The Lively Classroom: A Fusion of Gen Ed and Religious Studies

The Lively Classroom: A Fusion of Gen Ed and Religious Studies - Hospitable and Charged

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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 six paradoxes in the classroom:

Learning space should be open and bounded.
Learning space should be charged as well as hospitable.
Learning space should invite the voices of both the individual and the group.
We must honor both the little stories of our lives and the big stories of the disciplines.
Learning space should support solitude and surround it with the resources of the community.
Learning space should honor both silence and speech.

From Palmer, 2007, chapter 3

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.

“Flipping” means using videos, audios, transcripts, and essays (many from the New York Times) that can be digested by students on their own time, stopping and starting as necessary, and taking notes as they go. In the flipped classroom, lectures are delivered via webcasts and class time is “humanized,” personalized, and devoted to working on problem sets. The “problem sets” we work on during class time involve thinking together about the material.

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.

Hannah Arendt observed of Adolf Eichmann that his ordinariness implied an incapacity for independent critical thought: “the only specific characteristic one could detect in his past as well as in his behavior during the trial and the preceding police examination was something entirely negative: it was not stupidity but a curious, quite authentic inability to think.” [Arendt 1970, 417]. The antidote to what Arendt identified as Eichmann’s clichéd, conventional way of being is what I call metathinking. Metathinking is the same thing as Robert Bellah’s “second-order thinking” in his newest book (Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age, 2011).

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.

From a student evaluation: What worked well? “The course was wide open, open-ended, encouraging a variety of viewpoints.” What didn’t work? “The course was wide open, so many perspectives.” (The strength is the weakness is the strength . . . .)

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.

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