Transformative Teaching Models

The course designs favor feminist/womanist educational models that push teachers, students and administrators to integrate their academic learning with the social issues at stake in our society and world. We offer examples of a shift in education that includes a more holistic educational experience and promotes a faculty that embraces an engaged pedagogy. The teaching models:
• incorporate activism into course designs and classroom assignments.
• represent classroom teaching on issues of community based learning, integration of political and economic concerns, racial and gender analysis, and integrating styles such as case study and performance.

Social Awareness and Analysis
Community Based Learning
Social Justice/Historical

Social Awareness and Analysis
Rebecca Alpert, Temple University
“. . . a careful examination of how race and gender function in their lives and in society.”

Shannon Craigo-Snell, Yale University Divinity School
“No matter what we say or read about knowing in ways other than the modern model, we are still performing that model in our classroom.”

Mary Churchill, Sonoma State University
Case method: “students . . . learn how to assess and approach prolems affecting our communities and society, problems in which gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, religion and nation play crucial roles.”

Boyung Lee, Pacific School of Religion
“I emphasize small group work since community-less education can be dangerous.”

Rebecca Todd Peters, Elon University
“. . . the environmental impact study helps students see their own complicity and responsibility in perpetuating the environmental crises, it is also important to empower them with the understanding that they can be agents of change in the world around them.”

Community Based Learning
Elizabeth Bounds, Emory University
“. . . how to build longer term relationships between academic institutions and community partners . . .”

M. Shawn Copeland, Boston College
“. . . service or advocacy work provides students with ‘up close and personal’ contact with the breakdowsn in U.S. society and helps them to grasp the impact of social oppression . . .”

Jung Ha Kim, Georgia State University
“If we are committed to train students to learn from the community, we can also work together to provide more opportunities for people in the community to learn from the academy.”

Joyce Ann Mercer, Virgina Theological Seminary
“The backbone of this teaching strategy is partnership with one or more contexts in which people are addressing the issues of our course’s focus in their lives.”

Social Justice/Historical
Allison Gise Johnson, Virginia Union University
“the womanist matrix is a pedagogical approach to teaching that articulates history as an ethical enterprise . . .”

Margaret Eletta Guider, Weston Jesuit School of Theology
“. . . how we listen to what is being said about Jesus Christ throughout the world and how such listening informs and influences (or not) our way of proceeding in terns of the concrete particulars of a ‘faith that does justice’.”

Emilie Townes, Yale University Divinity School
“. . . consider ways in which their experiences and commitments to spirituality and social witness speak . . .”

Rosetta Ross, Spelman College
“. . . to encourage students to take seriously the meaning of gender for women they know by formally – though briefly – examining real women’s stories and experiences.”

*The papers posted on this page were written for a consultation held at Union Theological Seminary, NYC in May 2007. There was a two page maximum requirement. The consultation brought together women teaching/scholars of religion who seek to combine action for social change with their academic profession. The idea for this consultation was generated at Women and Religious Organizations: Collaborating for Change, supported by the Wabash Center and The Sister Fund, August 9-13, 2006. The participants included senior, mid-level and junior scholars from a variety of institutions, religious backgrounds, and racial/ethnic groups. The consultation was an opportunity for them to work together as an inter-generational, interracial and interfaith group to share their transformative strategies.