David Perkins’ Making Learning Whole

This week I am working to read through David Perkins’ Making Learning Whole. (I’m also aiming to write in smaller, more blog-sized thoughts.)

Perkins provides seven principles to lead his readers towards what he calls learning by wholes (p.8), rather than aspects or parts. He argues he learned baseball by playing junior versions of the game with his neighborhood friends, not merely throwing catch or spending his days in the batting cages. Sure, those can help us master the difficult aspects of the sport (more on that later…), but we best learn the sport when actually playing the whole game.

Using the analogy of baseball (and other sports), Perkins’ first principle is just this: play the whole game.

Much of formal education… feels like learning the pieces of a picture puzzle that never gets put together, or learning about the puzzle without being able to touch the pieces. In contrast, getting some version of a whole game close to the beginning makes sense because it give the enterprise more meaning. You may not do it very well, but at least you know that you’re doing and why you’re doing it. (p. 9)

So throughout the introduction, I found myself asking, “What is the game of Religious Studies?”  It seems Perkins’ whole venture would require one to have a vision for what the game actually is, right?

Religious Studies on the whole is a secular look at various religious traditions. It doesn’t aim to be doctrinal or define right belief as much as to take an anthropological, historical, and cultural look at religious traditions’ claims on doctrine and  orthodoxy. It’s comparative in nature and makes use of a whole host of disciplines within the humanities and social sciences (as noted in an earlier post, quoting from biblical scholar Amy Jill Levine: literary criticism, anthropology, economics, political science, history, art, anthropology, mythology, cross cultural studies, among others).

But I don’t think this is what Perkins is talking about. It just doesn’t sound very game-ish. Mind you, I’m still reading.

But I suppose my answer to defining and playing the whole game, if even a junior version, relates somehow to his second principle: make the game worth playing. In order to answer this, I ask myself “Why do Religious Studies?” To which I can think of a multitude of reasons: to broaden one’s understanding of society and culture, to identify patterns in history, to be engulfed by poetic and creative verse, to develop a deeper sense of empathy and compassion, to work for justice, to get a better sense of the human predicament, among others.

Is this playing the whole game or is this just how it become worth playing? Food for thought; thought for food. Either way, I’m excited to keep reading.

Thoughts on Developing a Classroom Wiki

A week ago I was invited by a friend and colleague to a meeting with University of Delaware English Professor Christopher Penna. Will, this friend and colleague of mine, set the meeting up after coming across Professor Penna’s Brit Lit Wiki and thought I’d enjoy coming along, as I too am working to find ways to best draw students to create original content that moves beyond the private transaction that is the traditional paper. For more time than I had in quarters at the parking meter, we sat in Professor Penna’s office looking over one another’s shoulders, discussing the origin of the wiki, the timeline for class, best practices for student engagement, how he assesses student contributions, how it integrates into the next year, as well as the things he wants to improve, change, and do differently in coming semesters. It was a wonderful exchange of ideas (mostly in our direction!) and Will and I left both intellectually exhausted and stimulated. Thankfully, there was no ticket upon our return to the curb! (Unless that kind of thing is mailed in Newark…)

After resting our minds a little at the start of our drive home, we began to brainstorm together and think of ways in which we could incorporate a wiki in our classrooms. I think Professor Penna’s work with his class and the subsequent conversation with Will have inspired me to use a wiki to help my students more fully explore the various lenses or “reading glasses” (PDF) one can use to better comprehend the traditions’ texts.

In thinking back on the year that’s just closed, I’ve thought I’d love to get students thinking earlier about various approaches to traditions’ sacred texts, specifically the various methods of biblical and literary criticism that can be applied. This thought arose out of our final exam of the year in which students were asked to respond to a supplied scenario from three different perspectives, one of which had to be their own. Students demonstrated they weren’t as familiar or comfortable with the historical critical methods as I’d hoped by the end of the year.

So here’s how I envision using a class wiki to remedy that discrepancy. They’re merely initial thoughts and I’d love any feedback, additional thinking, or resources that could help in this endeavor.

Once students have a basic understanding of the various critical approaches (I’m taking any suggestions for accessible resources if you’d like to make a recommendation in the comments!), I could assign groups to take ownership of a particular lens and build a wiki page for that method. In that sense, students would be responsible for building upon that page with each reading they’d have from a particular canon. Actually, we could break the wiki up by method or by the text itself. TBD.

So for example, we read the Abraham narrative quite early in the year as it offers the basis for,  you guessed it, the Abrahamic traditions. One group could focus on the narrative of the reading (what’s actually taking place in terms of plot, character, movement, etc. in both the Qur’an and Genesis texts), another group could center in on the form or sources of the texts (from where did the Qur’an draw in developing it’s narrative? what sources did the Genesis account draw from? how does the genre of the text help readers better understand the text?). Still another could approach it from a feminist perspective (in what way are Sarah and Hagar presented? does the text promote patriarchy? can the text be rescued or ought it be rejected?). This could continue for as many methods and narratives as we’d like to focus on.

In class discussion then, students, in conjunction with other authors and sources, would get to be the specialists on the particular method they were assigned (or opted for in groups?), responsible for presenting the concerns and content contained within the text as deemed important by their method. At the end of each unit, the groups would be responsible for making a contribution to the wiki page of that topic (again, the actual text or critical approach) in order to add to the broader class’s understanding.

By the end of a given unit (or probably some other division of time–month, quarter, or semester), we could switch each group’s focus so that students would have an opportunity to master a handful of methods by the time the exam came around. (This could also offer fodder for the counterarguments they’ve been lacking in their essays, of which I’ve recently written about and don’t want to get away from completely.) By the end of the year, with this wiki project, students would have a higher degree of focus on and familiarity with the various methods, and would thus be better prepared to present a host of perspectives in response to the presented scenario, that which is the final exam.

Building a Loose-Leaf Sacred Canon

I attended a UU service back in the spring that gave me an idea I think I’d like to integrate into coursework for my sophomores. The service’s sermon drew from Rev. Richard Gilbert’s “While Standing On One Foot: A Unitarian Universalist Catechism.” Gilbert provides a fascinating approach to the role of sacred scriptures in the UU tradition…

The Bible with its Jewish and Christian scriptures, is a vast and valuable compendium of human wisdom and folly collected over a period of centuries. The lovely legends of creation, the poetry of the psalmist, the insight of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, the zeal of the prophets, the moral imagination of Jesus, and the eloquence of Paul are a rich resource. It is a human book, however, shot through with the best and the worst of human nature. It is not the word of God to humanity, but the word of humanity about its understanding of humanity and divinity and where they meet in human life. There are other religious scriptures to which we would also turn. The ethical demands of the Koran, the beauty of the Tao Te Ching, the simple ethic of the Analects of Confucius, the mystical insights of the Bhagavad Ghita, the existential wisdom of the Sutras of Buddhism – and the rich abundance of the whole human literary tradition – all these contribute to our human store of goodness and beauty and wisdom.

We celebrate a loose-leaf bible which affirms that revelation is not sealed. Truth has not been embalmed in any one age or tradition; it is an unfolding process. The truths of yesterday are often the superstitions of today. We need the freedom to remove from our loose-leaf bible ancient ideas that no longer stand the test of time, keep those that do, and add our own insights to its pages.

The sermon that worked from this excerpt went on to explain the way in which the speaker had borrowed from this idea and created her own testament, full of her own original writings, images, thoughts, poems, and artifacts from other authors and sources as well that she found to be sacred and meaningful. As Gilbert writes, the speaker acknowledged the dynamic nature of her testament, the way in which the meaning of an object is sometimes transient. But, rather than remove an object that had lost meaning, she put them in a section dubbed as her “old testament.” Of course, I’d argue such language is problematic, playing off the idea that the Hebrew Scriptures, traditionally referred to as the Old Testament in the Christian tradition, have lost meaning, therefore promoting supersessionism, while in fact such texts are quite full of meaning both within and outside Jewish and Christian communities. Still, I find the general concept fascinating.

What if we had students build their own set of “sacred scriptures” or collections of texts throughout the entire year that speak to their understanding of humanity and divinity and where they meet in human life? One of my colleagues has students keep notebooks throughout the year with the various handouts and notes they keep; this would be different but wouldn’t have to replace the other in that it would simply include what the individual students determined to hold special meaning in their own lives within or outside the class.

We already do a small scale version of this at the start of the year in what we call our “Sacred Song Exercise.” Students are asked to bring in a song that they’d define as sacred; after some self-reflection, we play excerpts of it and offer the students a brief moment to share a little about why they chose that particular song. Pedagogically, it’s meant to help students discover the various ways we define, understand, and locate the sacred in our lives.

But, if we had a collection of student writing, various texts, links, videos, songs, anything really, that were compiled throughout the year, I sense there’d be the added benefit of also shedding light on the way in which sacred scriptures have been created, edited, redacted, added to and subtracted from, etc. In fact, if they included their own original work, it also plays into the whole idea of building a portfolio, something of which I’ve written briefly about before and one of the projects I’m focussing on this summer. In that sense, it’s value is also in offering a space for students to collect their own work to reflect upon throughout the year.

Still, I could also imagine it taking shape by collecting an entire section’s set of texts to highlight that any sacred canon is created in community and not simply by an individual. After particular decisions were made, we could work to highlight the power dynamics and context that played a role in determining what artifacts were in or out.  Does the diversity of the texts included reflect the diversity of the class? Are there more Christocentric texts included in the final canon because there are more Christians in the class? In what way does the class’s sex, gender, and race help us understand what was or what wasn’t included in the final version of the canon?

Certainly something to think more about over the summer for the fall.

Brief Thoughts on the Year: 2 (Seemingly) Successful Practices

In my first year of teaching, a friend shared Brookfield and Preskill’s “Discussion as a Way of Teaching” in which the authors argue that classroom discussion is part and parcel to the democratic experiment—“an important way for people to affiliate with one another, to develop the sympathies and skills that make participatory democracy possible.” Throughout, they offer a number of applicable exercises to help cultivate, sustain, and track discussion, one of which I’ve used consistently throughout my four years of teaching. Here’s one ripped from their text (pg. 69) and the context of how I’ve integrated it into my course as outlined in my course description…

Students are expected to do all nightly readings and come prepared to discuss the material each meeting. In an effort to best prepare for discussion, students are expected to complete a short homework assignment with each reading. These assignments are intended to help students access the readings and begin to wrestle with the concepts and ideas presented before class discussion. For example, students may be asked to finish two of the following four statements:

1. I find the author’s primary concern to be…
2. What struck me most about the text we read was…
3. The idea I most take issue with in the text is…
4. The question I would most like to ask the author of the text is…

Somewhere along the line, the four statements above transitioned into an exercise we called “The Idea I found most…” Exercise in which students were asked to identify the ideas they found most interesting, challenging, absurd, and applicable in any given reading. We ended our last several classes discussing these ideas we identified within our final text, Rehmann and Baptist’s Pedagogy of the Poor, and the course as a whole (syllabus in hand to remind ourselves all that we’d covered). It was a nice way to wrap up the year and left me excited about the different ways the course had affected students—many were still confused by the hermeneutic circle; many felt Rehmann and Baptist offered much that was applicable to their future selves. In the end, it gave me a handful of lasting impressions the students had, certainly things that will guide my planning for next year.

However, the most rewarding testament to this exercise came today. Over two weeks after graduation, a former senior wrote an email sharing, “Just this morning I finished Jim Holt’s “Why Does the World Exist?” which [the Religious Studies Department] generously gifted me. I thought, for old times’ sake, I would share a few reflections on this existential smorgasbord of a book (Which was difficult to say the least).” He went on to write two pages worth of analysis using the exercise noted above (identifying the interesting, challenging, absurd, and applicable ideas).

Though I’d always seen value in the exercise, I’d been unsure about how often I would employ this technique next year. However, this student’s email speaks powerfully to the value in repetitively asking ourselves these questions as we engage a text. As evidenced in the recent email, it builds a habit that can be long-lasting; not only causing us to identify specific concepts or ideas that stand out, but it moves us enter into conversation with them as well, in conversation with the text, with one another around the discussion table, and with one another outside of class.

Another practice I adopted from Brookfield and Preskill’s work, and arguably the most helpful as I look back on the year and begin to plan for the next, was their Critical Incident Questionnaires, or CIQs (pgs 48-9). These are weekly evaluations that asks students to reflect on the following…

1. At what moment in class this week were you most engaged as a learner?
2. At what moment in class this week were you most distanced as a learner?
3. What action that anyone in the room took this week did you find most affirming or helpful?
4. What action that anyone in the room took this week did you find most puzzling or confusing?
5. What surprised you most about the class this week?

It’s aimed at feedback for the whole group, not simply the instructor. Each week students had an opportunity to praise one another or offer critique, receive feedback and thoughts on their contributions. Truth be told, sometimes I wanted to leave the criticism out—”Spoon feeding ideas and making things obvious vs. having us come to our own interpretations; may have talked too much” will forever be etched in my memory!—but I promised from the start that I’d keep all their criticisms in no matter what was written. (For the greater good, democracy, right?) So any given week we’d begin classes with a brief glance at the prior week’s reflections, asking ourselves, “What do we want to be conscious of and avoid or embody? Who can we celebrate and model our contributions after?” Some meetings took more than half our time to discuss and debrief, others only minutes. On the next week’s CIQ, students would write that our discussion on the previous CIQ was helpful because it made them feel their voice was being heard; others complained discussion of the CIQ was detrimental to their learning because it took away from the day’s prepared content.

Some students struggled to be specific, merely offering a word or name in response, but many wrote in detail that offered insight both for the week ahead as well as, I trust, for my planning for next year. After 30-some-odd weeks of class, I have pages of feedback on what readings paired well, what concepts were consistently confusing, what teaching opportunities I missed (“We didn’t talk about Romero or the newspaper. Learning opportunities missed. Those were the 2 most interesting discussion topics we’ve had and we didn’t take advantage of them!”), as well as what readings were, as one student wrote of Peter Singer, “too long—could have gotten to his point in about 2 pages.” Here’s an example (PDF) from the middle of the year after I compiled their responses into one document.

I only used CIQs for my seniors but felt I had such success with them that I look forward to integrating the practice into my work with sophomores next year. (Its successes aside, I don’t expect an email anytime soon with a student’s weekly summation of their summer break: “I was most distanced as a learner this week when my mother woke me up early and forgot that summer means I can sleep until noon!” etc.)

All that’s to say, I encourage you check out Stephen Brookfield and Stephen Preskill’s “Discussion as a Way of Teaching.” There’s great stuff in it that is immediately applicable, helpful, and rewarding as a teacher aiming to help facilitate positive discussions. For those hesitant to buy, I also came across an easily accessed (read: free) online document Brookfield has put together with various (not all)  discussion techniques (PDF) he explores in the book. The CIQ information is on pg 22, though the “Sentence Completion Exercise” is not in the online document.

Counter-Argument v. Counter-Thesis

One of the goals of the Religious Studies curriculum is getting students to engage perspectives outside their own. In that vein, we encourage students to be critical of their own argumentation by way of providing thorough counterarguments in their own work.

Working with younger writers, I often find that they have difficulty in formulating a counterargument. If included at all, it comes in the form of, “Some say X. However, Y because Z.” I’d describe this as a decent but not excellent counterargument. It’s decent because they’re taking the time to show how they support their claim, claim Y, via Z. Yet, it falls short of excellence because the students are not showing how “some” support X (it’s rarely an actual person or author they draw from, but that’s another story). In that sense, they do not give much of an argument in their counterargument, but rather offer a counter-thesis.

Here’re some examples from a student over the course of their final three essays of the year.

The first comes from an essay in which students were asked to write on the extent to which Christians are responsible for the Holocaust:

Many will continue to argue that it was anti-Semitism that was responsible for the concentration camps and the majority of the deaths, thus Christians are directly to blame for promoting anti-Semitism. Although this is a valid argument, it was not anti-Semitism being present that caused the Holocaust but how Hitler was able to use it.

The next example comes from an essay in which students were asked to craft a theodicy in response to the problem of evil:

On the other hand, some may continue to argue that if God is all-powerful, why does he not simply eliminate evil all together and let humans progress in other ways. Yet, if God would do so there would be no conception of good and evil at all, we would simply be living in utopic world where we have no decisions or free will and are a slave to the concept of “good”.

This final example comes from the student’s last essay of the year in which all were asked to write on the extent of which the sacred scriptures could and should be used to create a sexual ethic:

Some will argue that this theoretical sexual ethic I created is a result of me “picking and choosing” as I praise parts of the scriptures but show vast contradictions of them later. Although this is a valid argument, one cannot create a sexual ethic from the scriptures in their entirety as the bible commonly contradicts the good themes of love and faith. However, those good themes are very powerful, and alone, can be utilized to create an exceptional set of sexual ethics.

I’d argue there’s growth from the first to the last here. What begins with no analysis on how one might attribute anti-Semitism to Christianity, ends with at least analysis on how one might claim the author is “picking and choosing” in developing his own sexual ethic. Still, this particular student hasn’t quite captured what I would described as an excellent counterargument. (Obviously, there are more problems than the counterarguments here; I trust my readership can spot the other concerns as well, but my aim here is simply to focus on the student’s formation of a counterargument.)

As a result of facing these kinds of counterarguments all year, I began to draft a document that emphasizes the difference between a counter-argument and a counter-thesis. It began as an email I sent to students before their final essay was to be submitted, but I still need two examples which can model what I’m asking of students. I’d also need to explicitly connect the document to the rubric we provide students with at the start of the year as well. Once completed, I plan to share this document at the start of the year before the student’s first essay is assigned. I’ll also likely share it with other departments beforehand to glean ways in which they help students on this front. That said, I welcome questions, critique, and thoughts on how other educators help facilitate the development of counterarguments among their students as well as feedback on the drafted document, both in the comments below and within the document itself (I’ve aimed to allow anyone with the link above not only access but editing and commenting capabilities as well).