Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy最新文献

{"title":"Using Metadata and Maps to Teach the History of Religion","authors":"Lincoln A. Mullen","doi":"10.1353/TNF.2014.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/TNF.2014.0008","url":null,"abstract":"In 2014, I taught an undergraduate course in the history department at Brandeis University titled “Mapping Boston’s Religions: A Digital History Seminar.” The main assignment for the course was a collaborative mapping project, in which students researched nineteenth-century sources to make a digital map of religion in Boston from 1800 to 1880. In addition to their shared map, each student created an online exhibit about some aspect of religious life in Boston, such as the history of synagogues or the history of African American churches. These exhibits each featured an interpretative essay, images and photographs, smaller maps drawing attention to the importance of space for religion, and records containing metadata (such as date of founding and the institution’s denomination) about various congregations.1 Students pored over maps and insurance atlases to find out where and when churches, synagogues, and other religious institutions had been located in the city. The aim of the project was to teach advanced undergraduate students the research skills that they would learn in a conventional history course: researching, writing, and analysis. But in this history class as shop class, the goal was also to teach new digital skills such as mapping, collaboration, and project management.2 I introduced mapping in this course in order to engage with the recent spatial turn in history and other disciplines. The map and the exhibits were the finished product of the students’ scholarship. But the map was generated from hundreds of records of congregations and their changing locations, which are stored in the database that runs the site. The site runs on Omeka, an “open source web-publishing platform for the display of library, museum, achives, and scholarly collections and exhibitions” created by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.The map the uses the Neatline family of plugins created by the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia. Omeka is a system for keeping track of items (or records) and their metadata. Metadata is data about data. To use a concrete example, the books on the shelves of a library are data, and the library catalog records that keep track of information such as author, date, and call number are metadata. Metadata are usually kept according to some agreed upon convention; for example, library catalogs use various standards defined by the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) and the Library of Congress. Every item in an Omeka website can be described using the Dublin Core meta-","PeriodicalId":138207,"journal":{"name":"Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130120595","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Reinterpreting Schempp: Is Teaching Spiritual Identity Development in the Public Schools Permissible?","authors":"B. Randall","doi":"10.1353/TNF.2014.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/TNF.2014.0002","url":null,"abstract":"In the fall of 2004, I was teaching history and comparative religion at the Emma Willard School, an independent, all-girls, boarding high school. In October, the head of school appointed me to a committee examining student spirituality in a school-wide effort to promote personal development and academic excellence, the result of which was an extracurricular program called “Inner Journey.” The program provided “shared time and space for interested students to explore their life experiences as they relate to their individual belief development” (Dwyer, “Invitation” slide 5). Inner Journey consisted of ten weekly, small group meetings led by an adult facilitator. The students used journals, activities, and discussions to reflect on their lives and respond to existential questions such as “How did I get here?” “What is important to me as a human being?” and “What exists which is greater than myself?” (Dwyer, “Program” 1). In the final three weeks they developed and shared individual statements of belief. The underlying rationale for Inner Journey was to explore the critical role of adolescence in identity development drawing on research on the importance of spiritual development for adolescent girls. We also stressed the nondenominational and nonindoctrinational nature of the Inner Journey program, noting that the program would “allow small groups of interested students, of varying backgrounds and any or no religious affiliation, to contemplate and clarify that which make us human and moves us toward wholeness” (Inner Journey Task Force 2). Conspicuously absent from our considerations was any discussion of potential legal issues. Because I taught at an independent school, the law governing religion and public education in the United States did not apply. The committee definitely did not want to favor one religion over another or religion over non-religion, but we were free to focus on pedagogical rather than legal concerns in achieving this goal. Looking back at the inception of the Inner Journey program at Emma Willard, I remember thinking we could never implement it in a public school. Even though there were strong secular pedagogical justifications for the program, I assumed that it would run afoul of the United States Supreme Court’s 1963 decision in School District of Abington Township v. Schempp, which held that devotional Bible reading in public schools violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. In reaching its decision, the Court drew a distinction between impermissible BRENDAN W. RANDALL","PeriodicalId":138207,"journal":{"name":"Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114063818","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Embracing Resistance: Teaching Rhetorical Genre Theory in a Christian College","authors":"H. Hill","doi":"10.1353/TNF.2014.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/TNF.2014.0004","url":null,"abstract":"After completing my graduate work at a large urban, state university in the Northwest, I experienced culture shock when I took a job teaching writing at Cedarville University, a small, private, conservative, Christian university in the Midwest.1 Although I am an Evangelical Protestant myself, and grew up in a conservative church, I had never taught students who were outwardly religious and displayed and discussed that in class. Religious identity was surely important to many of my students at the public university, but it was not openly discussed. At Cedarville, however, religious discussions are not just encouraged, but mandatory. Professors are required to integrate faith and learning in all of their classes: the students’ course evaluations assess them on their ability to do so, and they are required to write a formal research paper on their integration practices. When I began teaching at Cedarville, I was surprised that the theories that my pedagogical practice was based on—theories that were readily accepted, at least outwardly, by my students at the public university—were challenged by my Christian students. Although, as most composition teachers have experienced, “to teach composition is to encounter resistance on multiple levels, arising in response to a multiplicity of variables” as Karen Kopelson notes (116), the particular kind of resistance I felt from students at the Christian university was new to me. In this article, I add my voice to the ongoing conversation about resistance in composition, and discuss my experience moving from a secular institution to teaching at a conservative, evangelical Christian university and the resistance students exhibited in my composition classes. I will then discuss how I attempted to work with rather, than against this resistance, by integrating Christian faith","PeriodicalId":138207,"journal":{"name":"Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy","volume":"42 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128540097","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"What’s Best for Them: Teaching Disability Studies to Science Majors","authors":"A. Duane","doi":"10.1353/TNF.2014.0030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/TNF.2014.0030","url":null,"abstract":"In one of Seinfeld’s more controversial episodes, Jerry tells his friends that he finds Asian women particularly attractive. When someone else points out that fetishizing Asian women could be considered racist, Jerry is aghast. “If I like their race,” he demands, “how can that be racist?” Many of the students who walk into my class on disability in American literature and culture could relate to Jerry’s astonishment. Overwhelmingly, they sign up for that class because they like people with disabilities. Although the class is offered through the English department, the majority of students who enroll are science majors. Many are pre-med, often specializing in molecular biology and genetic science. Other students are majoring in fields like special education and physical therapy. They are all deeply steeped in the medical model of disability, and the attendant narrative of heroic doctors who rescue, cure, and otherwise fix their patients. They are deeply invested in being the good guys in the battle between sickness and health. A central task of my class on disability studies is to expose and interrogate the paternalism that often permeates the medical model. It is tempting—but I would argue, dangerous—to create a syllabus that simply swaps the doctor out of a heroic role into a villainous one. Much disability theory was created in explicit opposition to the assumptions that science and medicine have produced as truths about how bodies should work. One constructed “truth” that has proven particularly devastating is the assumption that medical professionals are the most valid authority on what’s best for the patient. As Nancy Mairs writes, this paternalism further diminishes the experience and agency of people with disabilities, rendering them still more marginalized. “To some extent,” Mairs argues, “paternalism infects [medical professionals’] relations with all their patients—a word that doesn’t share its root with “passive” by accident—because [physicians’] apparent (and often real) power over life and death reduces us all to a childlike dependency on their superior knowledge. We reinforce their dominance through our docility” (161). But for my students, the role of parent-doctor is an enticing one indeed, one that allows them to ease suffering, rescue the lost, and cure the sick. As young adults eager to escape their own childhood dependence, medical expertise offers tantalizing authority. My goal is not to shame them for their rescue fantasies, but rather to prompt them to ask how they might disentangle the desire to help from the need to control the unwieldiness of difference and suffering.","PeriodicalId":138207,"journal":{"name":"Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125006747","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Wanderer: Staging Autism as a Service Learning Project","authors":"T. D. Arendell","doi":"10.1353/TNF.2014.0020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/TNF.2014.0020","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":138207,"journal":{"name":"Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128896183","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“Jesus, My Homeboy”: Teaching Bruce Barton’s Jesus in Twenty-First Century Texas","authors":"Erin A. Smith","doi":"10.1353/TNF.2014.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/TNF.2014.0013","url":null,"abstract":"For many years, I have been teaching a lower-level, core curriculum humanities course called “American Studies for the Twenty-First Century” at the University of Texas at Dallas. I have three goals for the course: 1) to teach students how to be critical readers of American literary, historical, and visual texts; 2) to introduce students to the most exciting “classic” and recent scholarship in American Studies; and 3) to prepare students to be good citizens. I make no apologies for how old fashioned and naïve goal number three sounds. The course is organized thematically to explore issues and questions in five major areas: 1) gender and sexuality; 2) religion/politics/commerce; 3) race and ethnicity; 4) class, labor, and consumption; and 5) globalization. Each section is anchored by one or two major literary texts with a number of secondary readings to place the primary texts in their historical context. More contemporary readings invite students to think about how these themes continue to structure American social and political life. Students respond to these readings through both formal and informal writing assignments. My hope is to equip students with a “usable past,” a history of the debates that still shape contemporary society and politics, so that they can be better informed, more thoughtful citizens. The section “religion/politics/commerce” is anchored by Bruce Barton’s best-selling life of Jesus, The Man Nobody Knows (1925). I chose this text, because it raises questions about what religion scholar Leigh Eric Schmidt calls “the interplay of commerce, Christianity, and consumption” (13), an interplay as relevant today as it was in Barton’s era. Does God want us to be prosperous? Does He reward good people with wealth (or punish bad/lazy ones with poverty)? What’s the relationship between Christianity and profit-seeking? Is “Christian business” an oxymoron? Are faith and consumerism opposed? What if buyers are purchasing Christian commodities? Is consumerism itself a religion, and—if so—in what ways? Is there Biblical warrant for certain kinds of social and economic policies? Should it matter? Barton thought that running a business could be a Christian calling, and he cast Jesus as a role model for business executives and managers. One controversy over the book in the 1920s was whether Barton sanctified business (by raising it to a form of Christian service) or merely used Christianity to justify corporate profit seeking. Although scads of businessmen wrote to Barton to thank him for this Jesus they could relate to, one critic, for example, called Barton’s transformation of Jesus into a super salesman yet another","PeriodicalId":138207,"journal":{"name":"Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124748547","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Using Historical Materials to Teach Representations of Disability: A First World War Case Study","authors":"E. Burdett","doi":"10.1353/TNF.2014.0031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/TNF.2014.0031","url":null,"abstract":"Thinking critically about disability involves recognizing that the idea of disability as an “individual tragedy” for the disabled person is entirely insufficient and unhelpful. This traditional approach encourages the idea that the disabled person’s social circumstances are irrelevant. Disability studies instead views disability as something which takes place within a societal context rather than in a vacuum. As Hugh Gregory Gallagher writes, “There can be no doubt that the way a society perceives and deals with a handicap is a major factor in determining just how disabling – in a real sense – the handicap will be” (25). Gallagher gives a number of examples of how societal perceptions of disability work in practice. He writes:","PeriodicalId":138207,"journal":{"name":"Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132008658","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Gaming Religion?: Teaching Religious Studies with Videogames","authors":"Rachel Wagner","doi":"10.1353/TNF.2014.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/TNF.2014.0007","url":null,"abstract":"RACHELWAGNER As a scholar interested in the intersection between religion and culture, a few years ago I found myself wanting to teach about religion and videogames but not feeling especially competent to do so. This was around 2007, when the academic study of gaming was still new and little scholarship on religion and gaming existed. I knew a few people who were working on case studies of particular games, but what I most wanted to think about more theoretically was how gaming can work like religion. John Lyden had laid the theoretical groundwork for more careful study of religion and film in 2003 in his Film as Religion: Myths, Morals and Rituals. I wanted to use his work as a model, and provide students with the tools and language to think about gaming as a phenomenon with religious qualities. The problem was I didn’t know much about videogames, and I wasn’t very good at playing them. Furthermore, as a busy scholar and teacher, I didn’t have the time to immerse myself in fan culture or spend forty hours playing a single game. My solution was to involve my students in my own learning process. Over a period of several years, I taught three semester-long iterations of an upper level seminar called “Religion, Ritual, and Virtual Reality” as I worked on the manuscript of the related book, Godwired: Religion, Ritual and Virtual Reality. I spent the summer before the course creating the preliminary bibliography, then built the course around it. Each “unit” was affiliated with a projected chapter, and students worked through the bibliographical material with me, composing their own research questions and projects along the way. I wrote alongside them, discovering and synthesizing, asking questions for which I didn’t yet have the answers. Students thrived on the sense of co-discovery, and their insights were sometimes profound. After three iterations of the course, the book was finished, and several students had presented their own projects at local and regional venues.1 Right now, I am repeating this process as I teach the first of another series of upper level seminars that will result in my second book, to be focused on the intersection between violence, gaming, and popular apocalypticism. For this course, called “Religion, Media, Apocalypse,” we are again using selected videogames as part of a larger conversation about media and religion. We are also examining less interactive media like serialized television shows that explicitly evoke apocalyptic imagery as part of their negotiation of imaginations of the end times (Supernatural and Sleepy Hollow, for example). Any instructor who wants to learn about religion and gaming can adapt this kind of emergent teaching style in order to ","PeriodicalId":138207,"journal":{"name":"Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy","volume":"40 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127872555","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Teaching Critical Thinking about Media Technologies","authors":"James W. Hamilton","doi":"10.1353/TNF.2014.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/TNF.2014.0014","url":null,"abstract":"During the past few years, I have taught critical thinking about media technologies to first-year undergraduates—people notoriously dependent (perhaps stereotypically so) on their smartphones, MP3 players, and social media accounts. Although the course does not fit neatly into traditional academic departments, an initiative at the University of Georgia to boost the quality of the first-year student experience by creating small one-credit seminars gave me the room to teach it. My university is a large selective school. Students choose the required one-credit seminar based on interest, and come to the course with a wide range of degree plans and interests. My course about media technologies takes a theoretical and historical view. Meetings in the first few weeks take up the theoretical component. In it, students explore common definitions and ways of thinking about media technologies. For the remainder of the semester, students conduct historical research using primary sources (largely newspapers and magazines) to investigate periods when media technologies were being introduced, initially publicized, and talked about. Searchable databases of digital facsimiles of historical newspapers and magazines facilitate this research. I learned the hard way the first time I taught the class how difficult it is for students to see the relevance of earlier times to their own, so I now address students’ habitual views of media technology much more explicitly in the first few weeks. Doing so disinters deeply buried truisms so that students recognize and consider them. The goal of the class ultimately is not to enforce a view but to enable students to make critical thinking a common part not only of this class, but also in all realms of their lives.","PeriodicalId":138207,"journal":{"name":"Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy","volume":"49 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128938656","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Here There Be Monsters: Teaching Disability Studies at CUNY’s Bronx Community College","authors":"J. Rodas","doi":"10.1353/TNF.2014.0033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/TNF.2014.0033","url":null,"abstract":"As a scholar deeply invested in disability studies (DS) and as an educator just as deeply committed to serving students at the City University of New York’s Bronx Community College (BCC), where I teach, I frequently reflect on the way we welcome novices to the field of DS. In the twenty or so years since the publication of Lennard Davis’ ground-breaking Enforcing Normalcy (1995) and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s foundational Extraordinary Bodies (1997), DS in the humanities has moved from an emergent arena of inquiry to a burgeoning field with hundreds of active scholars and dozens of academic programs in the US alone. It has weathered criticism from those who have portrayed it as one of “so many other trendy ‘studies’” in departments “where standards are forgiving and arcane theories flourish” (Allen), or, who derided it as being chief among the “victim disciplines” (Schoenfeld), and DS is now widely recognized and respected in larger academic communities. A 2013 New York Times piece confirms the academic stature of the discipline: “Like black studies, women’s studies and other liberation-movement disciplines, DS teaches that it is an unaccepting society that needs normalizing, not the minority group” (Simon). By every measure—programs, courses offered, scholarly publication, the growth of learned journals and societies—DS is flourishing. With this growth, the scholarly sophistication of DS has also developed. Though the field has always demonstrated substantial rigor, early work necessarily covered essential ground, pointing to the presence and role of disabled characters and authors in fiction, for example, or, reclaiming disability identity for historical figures like Franklin Delano Roosevelt. This initial work has given rise to ever more nuanced scholarship. For instance, early theorists of disability identity favored “people-first” language (e.g., a person with autism), arguing that an individual’s personhood should be respected as the foremost aspect of identity, but as thinking has developed, disability is increasingly regarded as fundamental to the composition of self, and recent scholarly writing in the field is beginning to evidence more direct language, reflecting the integral place of disability in identity (i.e., “autistic person,” or, “autist”). (Jim Sinclair’s widely disseminated “Why I Dislike ‘Person First’ Language” serves as an early expression of such resistance, but recent writing indicates a growing trend in this direction [Collier; Chacala et al.].) Likewise, early DS urged interpretations forwarding disabled agency; disability had for so long (and so destructively) been con-","PeriodicalId":138207,"journal":{"name":"Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy","volume":"42 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125600521","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}