John R. Lanci, Stonehill College

John R. Lanci has been a college teacher for almost thirty years and is currently professor of religious studies at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts. Trained in New Testament and Christian origins, he is the author of two books and several articles on the early church, including Texts, Rocks, and Talk: Reclaiming Biblical Christianity to Counterimagine the World (Liturgical Press, 2002), as well as articles on active learning strategies for undergraduate teaching. Lanci received Stonehill’s Louise Hegarty Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1996, and is currently the college’s inaugural Center for Teaching and Learning Faculty Fellow. 

Raising the Question of Raising Questions: Background and Rationale

One day I was driving onto our campus. It was a crisp autumn morning flooded with sunlight, but the beauty of fall in New England was marred by the unsightly hole in the ground around which I had to detour to get to my office. They were pouring the basement for a huge new science center. As I made my way past the construction site, a question popped into my mind: What kind of artwork would the college put into the building? A crucifix in each classroom? Would that be it?

I had been casting about for a new approach to my popular religion course (which is probably why I had crucifixes on the mind), and after further reflection, I decided to structure the syllabus for this upper-level seminar around these questions: What kind of spiritual art should the college place in the new science center, and how should it go about finding that art?

I e-mailed the students who had already registered for the course for the following semester and explained what I had in mind. Because their work would involve others on campus, I also alerted members of the fine arts and science departments, as well as other administrators and staff whom students would be contacting as they worked on the problem. In the weeks that followed, over a third of the preregistered students dropped the class, and registration churned with adds and drops as word got out about what I had in mind. By the end of registration, the roster stabilized at eighteen, just about the number with which I had begun.

I gave up lecturing at undergraduates years ago. Instead, I conducted all classes, including the introductory ones, as discussion-based seminars of no more than twenty-five students who read texts, assisted by focusing questions, and then came to class and talked about them. Over a period of years I became comfortable in my role as facilitator of discussion, but eventually I found myself facing the fact that students were experiencing good conversations but not necessarily learning much that lasted with respect to the content of the courses.  

I needed a new approach to teaching, and I found it while participating in our undergraduate research program, which employed a number of active learning strategies. Could the engaged pedagogy, which proved effective with one or two research students, be adapted for a whole class? Could such a class make an original contribution to some aspect of our discipline? My questions were answered when I encountered “problem-based learning” (PBL). Developed by medical schools in the 1970s, PBL, like other active learning strategies, has its roots in much earlier calls for educational engagement. It has migrated from the sciences into the humanities, but we in religious studies have been slow to incorporate it into our stable of teaching techniques, despite abundant research indicating that active forms of learning are far more effective in attaining learning outcomes than traditional, passive “stand and deliver” pedagogies (see Bain; Meyers and Jones).

In Problem-Based Learning (PBL), one presents students with a complex, real-world problem that can be solved within a specifically designated time frame. To meet my learning outcomes (which include demonstrating to students that they can create new knowledge) and to keep students motivated in what is for them an unfamiliar learning experience, I create problems for which neither I, nor anyone else, has a ready answer. That way, students avoid the sense that they are “going through the motions” or being tricked into doing old work in new ways.

The context for the problems I develop is our college campus. This way, the solution to the problem will have a palpable effect on the local community, and the participants can sense that they have made a contribution to the good of others, something that the current generation of undergraduates particularly values. Since my first project concerning art in the science center, students have created, conducted, and evaluated a survey on student spirituality for the college’s mission division, challenged the president and trustees on how best to create effective engagement of students in the college’s Catholic heritage, and created an ecospiritual religion from scratch for students uninterested in traditional religious traditions.

The students approach the problem in stages: first, they reflect on what they know about the situation and the problem; next, they figure out what they need to know in order to solve the problem; then, they make a plan to fill out their knowledge and skills; and lastly, they integrate new knowledge with old and present a solution to the problem. In the process, students accept ownership for their own learning, they assess their own and each others’ work, and they figure out how to work in groups (delegating tasks, making and keeping scheduled meetings, and challenging one another to keep commitments). Most importantly for students of religion, informed by the readings I provide, they spend a great deal of time in and outside of class thinking and talking to people about religious issues — especially the topic for the course — at deeper levels than they can in a regular seminar. In my experience, this higher-order learning, which involves analysis, synthesis, and evaluation, is learning that lasts; more than once I have encountered students a year or more after their PBL experience, and they can point to specific ideas that they encountered and skills they learned as a result of the experience.

Such higher-order learning was well revealed by the students’ achievements in my popular religion course. When the semester began, we hit the ground running. I interspersed a few preliminary readings on the nature of religion and modern approaches to Western spirituality with other texts introducing the students to the concept of installation art. As the students articulated the kind of spiritual approach they thought should be represented in the art, they invited guests to help them with the project, beginning with the faculty member in charge of “shepherding” the project to completion — whom they grilled at length about the architectural plans — and several members of the fine arts department to anchor a discussion of the role and nature of public art.

My role quickly evolved from professor to project manager and facilitator. On the first day of class, I had challenged the students to decide how to proceed, whom to contact, and how to develop the project, and they responded with enthusiasm; soon they were running the seminar. I assigned the readings for the first third of the course; after that, they told me the areas they needed more information about, and I sent them to appropriate sources to find what they needed. They divided into groups to tackle various aspects of the project: researching what other colleges had done with art in their science centers; interviewing faculty who would work in the building; learning more about the nature of installation art; and working with the development office to explore ways of funding the art project. I assigned reflection papers on the readings we did, met with students individually throughout the semester to discuss their work, and collected weekly logs of the work they had done. I monitored the blog they set up as a forum for discussion outside of class and developed rubrics for self- and peer-evaluations.

By the end of the semester, the project was not quite complete, but their proposal — for an endowed student committee that would curate a series of arts installations in the science center — was in good enough shape for some of them to pick up the project on their own in subsequent semesters. 

Using Problem-Based Learning (PBL) with an undergraduate class in religious studies is not without its challenges. The role of the faculty shifts dramatically in the direction of facilitator or support staff, and with that shift comes a cluster of boundary and power issues that one must negotiate anew with each experience (see McManus; Weimer). Experience indicates that the best problems are those that are the least sharply defined; this, combined with the decline of professorial control may lead to procedural chaos and eventual failure to solve the problem (Amador). But that is the point: in this exercise, as in their future careers, students might fail at what they set out to do. We have to give them the right to learn that difficult lesson early on.

There are other challenges as well. Though one may employ traditional forms of assessment in PBL, how does one assess learning if examinations and term papers would not contribute to solving the problem (Major)? What does one do with the ever-present “free rider,” the student who just does not do the work? And what of other forms of resistance? Some of our best students got to be our best students by learning how to perform in traditional ways, and they sometimes resist new forms of engagement; as one honors student complained on his course evaluation — he wanted more lectures and more guidance than I was willing to provide — “You’re the one with the PhD. Use it!” More commonly, students’ early excitement at this novel approach to learning can fade, especially about mid-semester, when they realize how much more responsibility (and work!) they still have to grapple with, and how much of it will have to be accomplished outside of scheduled class time. 

There is little doubt that engaged active forms of pedagogy promote deep learning (Bransford, et al.; Meyers and Jones). Yet, admittedly, if student learning in one’s class must involve predominantly the appropriation of “facts,” one would have to modify one’s approach to PBL; for instance, the problem presented might be solvable in a shorter period of time, in as little as a week, and it might involve the application of the material the students have just studied. My teaching context is a small liberal arts college, but faculty in humanities at large institutions have also employed PBL effectively by modifying the format of the process (Duch, et al.). 

In traditional forms of undergraduate research (UR), one typically works with a few students over a period of a semester. Active learning pedagogies can introduce an entire class to undergraduate research, as well as to the excitement of going where no one has gone before in the creation of new knowledge. In addition, it offers an opportunity for faculty to spot especially gifted students who can then be approached for more focused UR work in the future. Indeed, this is what happened with my “Art and the Science Center” course. One student — Kendra McKinnon — distinguished herself with her commitment to the project, and I subsequently invited her to work with me as an independent researcher. Much of what appears in this article resulted from our collaborative work.

At the end of one recent PBL experience, a student complained to me about the amount of work the participants had had to do. Asked if it was worth it, he shrugged. “Well, it was cool, the way we all got the job done,” he said.

I took that as a yes.