Showing papers in "Transformation in 2014"

Appropriation et individuation : un nouveau modèle pour penser l’éducation et la formation ?

Abstract: La notion d’appropriation connait aujourd’hui un regain d’interet dans le domaine de l’education et de la formation. Cet article programmatique propose de dresser un premier etat des lieux de la litterature dans le domaine afin d’en examiner l’etayage conceptuel. Il presente ensuite une approche phenomenologique et enactive de l’appropriation, en montrant notamment que cette notion, inseree dans une theorie plus large de l’individuation, permet de rendre compte des transformations de l’activite tout en renouvelant la maniere de penser l’apprentissage-developpement. La derniere partie de l’article est consacree a des problematiques "technologiques" et aborde la question de la conception d’environnements de formation dans une visee d’appropriation.

Lumumba's Ghosts: Immaterial Matters and Matters Immaterial in Sven Augustijnen's Spectres

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Les dimensions collectives de l’appropriation : questionnement sur les liens entre développement des collectifs de métiers et développement des instruments

Abstract: Les organisations evoluent en permanence, au rythme des innovations techniques. Il en resulte pour les travailleurs des transformations dans la realisation de leur tâche, necessitant l’appropriation de nouveaux artefacts. Ancre dans une perspective ergonomique, ce texte, a visee programmatique, porte sur les dimensions collectives des processus d’appropriation de nouveaux artefacts en milieu professionnel. Apres une presentation de la notion d’appropriation et des dimensions collectives des instruments, nous faisons l’hypothese que les dimensions collectives de l’activite (et plus particulierement les collectifs de metiers) jouent un role central dans les processus d’appropriation en milieux professionnels. Les resultats de recherches conduites dans differents domaines permettent d’etayer nos propos. Enfin le texte questionne en conclusion l’impact de cette perspective collective de l’appropriation sur les pratiques de formation professionnelle.

Min(d)ing the Gaps: Exploring Ancient Landscapes through the Lens of GIS

Abstract: Introducing her volume, Holy Land, Whose Land? geographer Dorothy Drummond invites readers to join her on a contemporary journey through ancient terrain. Placing contradictory commentary in conversation, Drummond juxtaposes modern landscapes and biblical narrative “geographically,” reading her present experience in light of the familiar Gospel accounts encountered in Christian Scripture. Describing the final stages of travel through the Palestinian countryside, Drummond eloquently highlights a litany of apparent disjunctures between ancient narrative detail and contemporary physical topography. Her reflections bear quoting in full:

"Your American Sign Language Interpreters are Hurting Our Education": Toward a Relational Understanding of Inclusive Classroom Pedagogy

Abstract: A few years after I began working as a tenure-track assistant professor at Pennsylvania State University, I taught a graduate seminar on ethnographic methods that was popular with international students and those interested in cross-national research. One mid-October evening after class, a small group of students confronted me in the hallway: “Your American Sign Language interpreters are hurting our education.” Although I am deaf, this class was the first time I had American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters with me at my workplace, or in any place for that matter. I grew up speaking and reading lips, and as a newcomer to ASL, I set out with fantasies of becoming as eloquent in sign language as I am in spoken and written English. But the more I learned ASL and immersed myself in signing communities, the more I realized merely becoming conversant in ASL was going to be a challenging enough aspiration. I came to appreciate that learning ASL was going to be equally as laborious and as much of a struggle as it had been for me to learn English. I eventually learned that ASL is a complex visual-gestural language with linguistic processes functionally equivalent to English phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics (Valli et al.). And I quickly learned that my fantasies of becoming eloquent in ASL were just that—fantasies. As a latecomer to ASL using sign language interpreters for the first time at work, I also had to come to terms with the fact that I had the receptive language skills of maybe a tenyear-old signer and expressive language skills of about a five-year-old. Strangely in ASL conversations, back then as well as now, I was and still am able to more readily recall the handshapes and movements for signing “pedagogy” and “ethnography” rather than “bacon” or “onions.” On top of my own struggles becoming a sign-user, I was confronted with what felt that October evening like an attack from my students on my right to ASL interpreters and full, meaningful community participation. Before coming to Penn State, I “passed” as a hearing person—for the most part. I was a deaf person who acted hearing. I had spent thirty-plus years JOSEPH MICHAEL VALENTE “

Penser les usages du numerique a l’universite pour professionnaliser les etudiants se destinant aux metiers de l’enseignement a partir d’une theorie de la formation

Abstract: Cette etude de cas cherche a apprecier si la mise en oeuvre d'un dispositif transformatif de formation universitaire, integrant les technologies numeriques, a partir de postulats empruntes a une theorie de la formation a un impact sur la nature des activites individuelles et/ou collectives des formateurs et des etudiants y etant impliques. Le dispositif support a cette etude etait celui d'une des unites d'enseignement (UE) constitutives d'un Master 2 preparatoire aux metiers de l'enseignement et de l'education. La transformation de l'integration et de l'usage des technologies numeriques au sein de cette UE a ete menee a partir d'une theorie de la formation professionnelle dont les soubassements epistemologiques sont issus d'une anthropologie culturaliste principalement inspiree de la philosophie analytique de Wittgenstein (2004). Les principaux resultats montrent que la mise en oeuvre de ce dispositif transformatif de formation universitaire a partir d'une theorie de la formation contribue a modifier l'activite des formateurs et des etudiants y etant impliques. Chez ces derniers, le dispositif a plus precisement un impact sur leurs activites reflexives et de pratique de classe. Structuree autour de trois points, la discussion des resultats permet de soutenir que l'usage numerique pour enseigner a l'universite n'a veritablement de sens pour accroitre la formation professionnelle des etudiants que s'il depasse le seul statut d'outil.

Exploring New Ground for Religion in the Classroom

Abstract: In their December 31st 1999 issue—the final issue of the millennium— The Economist wrote an obituary for God, boldly pronouncing him dead. After recounting the wide impact of religion in preceding centuries and acknowledging that, even in a post-enlightenment world, “the corpse just wouldn’t lie down,” the editors concluded that the time had finally come to bury the dead. Religion, they declared, had become largely insignificant (“Obituary”).1 As it turned out, the death knell was premature.2 Just a few years later, with the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and with wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the conflation of national identity (or national allegiance) and Christianity emerged with renewed zeal.3 For many Americans—including Muslim-Americans—these events intensified their previously held commitments and the degree to which their religion informed their worldview and sense of self. At times, intensified religious identifications have led to division and tension between religious groups in this country, sometimes erupting in violence. But, at the same time, these events have prompted in many Americans a desire to learn more about religious traditions other than their own and the media, scholars, and Islamic organizations have responded to meet this demand. Oprah, for instance, devoted a full episode to “Islam 101” and Larry King invited a series of Muslim guests to his show. News outlets humanized Islam by running features on Muslim Americans, from Girl Scouts to comedians (Helms; Lee). Scholars published popular books that analyzed the new religious landscape in America and that illuminated the perspectives of Muslims abroad (e.g., Lincoln; Lawrence and Howarth).4 Finally, mosques and Islamic organizations across the country hosted educational events as well as interreligious dialogue. So while fear and distrust have created fissures between some religious communities, a newly educated public has also begun to forge new interreligious understanding and relationships, revealing another feature of American nationalism: religious tolerance and freedom (Eck). In addition to playing a role in national identity and foreign policy, religion is also an increasingly significant indicator of political affiliation. (See, for instance, a recent Pew Center report on the coincidence of religious right membership and support of the Tea Party [Pew Research Center, “The Tea Party”].) Religious logic and rhetoric is also a persistent feature in domestic policy debates, most notably around gay marriage, abortion, and stem cells (Pew Research Center, “Religion”).5 So,

Note de synthese : l’interet pour l’"activite" en sciences de l’education. vers une epistemologie federatrice ?

Abstract: Depuis une dizaine d’annees, les travaux centres sur la notion d’activite se sont multiplies. Cette contribution propose de faire un bilan des orientations principales qui les structurent en sciences de l’education. Au-dela de leur description, l’analyse de leurs convergences permet de degager des pistes federatrices potentiellement utiles pour une pluridiscipline qui, comme d’autres (economie, gestion et management, information et communication, sante, sports, travail social) porte sur une grande diversite de champs de pratiques.

Structure et fonctions du système d’instruments mobilisé dans une activité d’enseignement : le cas d’une professeure documentaliste

Abstract: Ce texte contribue a elucider les connaissances sur les processus d’appropriation des artefacts en situation d’enseignement a partir de l’approche instrumentale de l’activite (Rabardel, 1995). L’etude porte sur une seance d’enseignement de decouverte d’un Centre de documentation et d’information (CDI) avec des eleves de seconde en lycee agricole. L’analyse met en evidence l’ensemble des artefacts qu’utilise la professeuredocumentaliste au sein de son activite. Ces derniers ne sont pas independants, mais forment un systeme d’instruments multi-finalise permettant a l’enseignante de viser une pluralite de buts adaptes aux contraintes de la situation d’enseignement. Cette contribution montre que le systeme d’instruments elabore par l’enseignante permet d’elargir son champ des possibles en actualisant l’ensemble des buts vises tout en prenant en compte de maniere simultanee l’evolution de la situation d’enseignement.

The Intersection of Disability Studies and Health Science

Abstract: On the first day of class I always ask my health science students, “Why disability studies?” Inevitably more than half the class answers, “Because I want to help people.” I groan and think, here we go again. I sit in my wheelchair facing a room full of future doctors, nurses, PAs, PTs, OTs, and human service providers, who have decided to forge their careers in healthcare services. To many disability activists, our students represent the medical model of disability—the enemy. They are those who see us as our disability. Who only see our deficits, and strive with their paternalistic knowledge to fix us and help us fit better into the construct of the normal they are accustomed to. Although I know they mean well, the task of changing over twenty years of societal indoctrination seems quite overwhelming and maybe a bit futile. I have to ask myself, “Why do I choose to attempt to educate future healthcare providers about what it means to live well with a disability?

La pratique theatrale dans la formation initiale des enseignants : construction d’une experience emotionnelle et corporelle

Abstract: En prenant appui sur une enquete empirique, cet article rend compte de la dynamique de construction de l'experience de trois etudiants inscrits en master metiers de l'enseignement, participant a un dispositif de formation utilisant la pratique theâtrale. Les resultats pointent les proximites que les apprentis enseignants reconnaissent entre la pratique theâtrale et la relation pedagogique. Ils illustrent en quoi l'experience corporelle et emotionnelle permise par la pratique theâtrale peut contribuer, potentiellement, a la construction de l'identite professionnelle d'apprentis enseignants.

Theory Meets Practice in an Introduction to Disability Studies Course

Abstract: These comments from two of our students in “Introduction to Disability Studies” are typical of responses to the undergraduate disability studies curriculum at the University of Washington (UW). Since 2003, the Disability Studies Program has offered courses that explore disability as an issue of social justice and human diversity. The students come from disciplines in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. The largest numbers are interested in disability studies as preparation for their careers in applied fields such as law, psychology, education, social work, and public health. For some the courses fulfill a major requirement, while others take disability studies in pursuit of the Human Rights or Diversity minors. Most students come into the introductory survey class with little prior knowledge of the history of the disability rights movement or the perspective that disability is a category of oppression, since disability and the voices of disabled people are rarely included in the rest of the university curriculum. The mission of our interdisciplinary program is to problematize society’s predominant understandings of disability, and to examine the social, cultural, political, economic, and historical factors that define and frame disability as a marker of difference. Four undergraduate courses are core requirements for the minor and major degrees in Disability Studies at UW. Typically five to ten students complete the minor each year, while a total of nineteen have graduated with the major. Our curriculum increases the depth and breadth of critical thinking around disability issues within the university as well as the community at large, enhancing the connections between relevant scholarship and informed social action. In this article we analyze and share insights from some of our collective experiences teaching an introductory survey course in disability studies. “Introduction to Disability Studies” provides a foundational understanding of the field and its relationship to the ongoing struggle for dis-

Teaching Critical Thinking about Media Technologies

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.

Religion, Illness, and Healing in an Interdisciplinary Classroom

Abstract: I teach a research seminar, “Religion, Illness, and Healing” for advanced undergraduates and graduate students at Indiana University, a large, Midwestern, public, research-intensive university. The course typically enrolls between ten and twenty-five students. What surprised me most when I first taught this course—and the impression has now been confirmed over several semesters—is how many of my young and apparently healthy students struggle with illness. Many of them enroll in the seminar not because it meets a graduation requirement, but because they are searching for resources to make sense of their sufferings and longings for wholeness. Other students are on a premedical track and wisely want a broader perspective on the needs and experiences of future patients. Most have family members with a personal stake in the questions broached by the course. Many of us who teach in religious studies departments are careful neither to advocate nor debunk religious solutions to life’s problems. We instead seek to cultivate critical thinking skills that equip students to understand, re-articulate, analyze, and navigate diverse perspectives. When students come to a class deeply invested in the subject matter, they often struggle with the task of neutral scholarly inquiry. I use a semesterlong research project to turn this challenge into an opportunity for students to become and stay fully engaged in intellectual problems. The complexity of these problems unfolds as they undertake sustained research, discussion, and writing. Students begin the semester acquiring some basic theoretical tools for thinking about how our key terms—“religion,” “illness,” and “healing”— get defined in various ways by scholars of religious studies and medical anthropologists, biomedical doctors, practitioners of complementary and alternative medicine, and patients. For this purpose, I turn to Linda Barnes and Susan Sered’s edited volume, Religion and Healing in America. The editors’ introduction concisely defines terms, traces a brief history and context for understanding religious healing in America, and identifies a “methodological toolbox” of potential research approaches. Alongside this introduction, students read the book’s two concluding chapters, one written by a historian of religion, the other by a physician. Martin Marty develops a typology of “The Four Expectations” that Americans have historically expressed about religion and healing; this typology provides a framework that helps student-researchers begin categorizing how they may hear peo-

"Cute Girl in Wheelchair—Why?": Cripping YouTube

Abstract: Hi I’m Kaley! I am trans and proud! I go to Salisbury University to study Social Work, I’m Hispanic, and I have a muscle degenerative disorder called Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. In November of 2013 I opened up about being a trans girl! Coming out has been a tough emotional roller coaster and I will do my best to overcome those difficulties. I will give it all I’ve got! I made this channel for others that are going through what I’m going through and show them they are not alone. The show is about me trying to become who I am. We will get to see my progress to become Kaley! I hope you can join me in my awesome journey!

Rewriting Another: Discussing Ethics and Disability through Lucy Grealy's Autobiography of a Face and Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

Abstract: What does Grealy’s disability have to do with her friend writing a memoir about her?” John, a student in my graduate-level memoir class, asked.1 During a discussion of Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face and Ann Patchett’s Truth and Beauty, other students echoed his sentiments, refusing to see any problems with Truth and Beauty, a memoir by an “able-bodied” writer describing her friendship with a “disabled” writer, written and published after Grealy’s death.2 Grealy became famous for her memoir about how her battle with cancer left her with a face that others described as “disfigured.” Patchett’s book, Truth and Beauty, began as an obituary of Grealy written for New York magazine. It was marketed as Patchett’s memoir, but reads as more of a biography of Grealy. Writing about someone after her death has its own ethical considerations, but is perhaps particularly complicated when an able-bodied person rewrites the story of a disabled person.3 “Disabled doesn’t seem to be the right word for her because this memoir is really about her face,” remarked one student. She had a point. Many of Grealy’s struggles had to do with cultural conceptions of beauty that do not accept difference. Nevertheless, her experiences complicate the category of disability. While much of Grealy’s pain came from how others viewed her face, she did have cancer. She also endured debilitating pain, and eating was difficult at times because of her jaw.Then again, the students in my class were right to interrogate the broad notion of “disability” in relation to Grealy’s memoir. In The Ugly Laws, Susan Schweik shows that there is a history of laws devoted to punishing and discriminating against those who do not fit the bodily norms of a particular culture. I was concerned that students’ discomfort with discussing Grealy as a “disabled” author partly expressed their need to pretend that disability was invisible. They were also uncomfortable discussing disability. Their stance was along the lines of “It’s mean to call her disabled,” and their discussions often focused on what they saw as the irrelevancy of her disability to her work as a memoir writer. While I understood the reluctance to focus on an author’s identity rather than her writing, Grealy’s memoir concentrates on her experiences of feeling different and on how others’ and her own perceptions shaped her identity. Grealy takes control of her identity through her writing. She wants readers to consider how disability—and her experiences of disability—are perceived. 1 This class is an English elective for MA students and upper-level undergraduates at a small, comprehensive university.

Dispelling The Magic: Blogging in the Religious Studies Classroom

Abstract: For most students, the university course is the product of an illusion. Courses like “Western Civilization,” “American Literature,” and “Religious Studies” appear in the catalog and online registration system magically. As historian of religion Jonathan Z. Smith put it, university courses are “mysterious objects, because the students have not seen the legerdemain by which the object has appeared” (“The Necessary Lie“ 80). Introductory and survey courses are particularly mysterious. In order to engage students more deeply in our courses, we must reveal the trapdoors, mirrors, and deflections that make up the illusion of “Western Civilization“ or “World History.” How can our syllabi engage the question, “why this and not that?” How can teachers best invite students to peek behind the curtain? I have taken up these questions in my “Introduction to Religious Studies” and “History of Religions of America” courses. At first blush, content and its importance appear to be the answer to the mystery of the university course. Religion is important, right? Many people claim it is a universal and fundamental human experience. But content itself does not solve the mystery, because the importance of this content versus that content is always already assumed. Content is important because it is on the syllabus. The mystery and the magic remain. To dispel the magic, the pedagogy of religious studies must shift from content to critical thinking in ways that mirror a theoretical shift in the study of religion. Beginning in the late nineteenth century and lasting through the twentieth century, the study of religion focused on descriptive accounts of religions. As Mircea Eliade wrote in his foundational work The Sacred and the Profane, “Our primary concern is to present the specific dimensions of religious experience, to bring out the differences between it and profane experiences of the world” (17). Beginning in the 1980s, scholars critical of Eliade’s descriptive approach argued that religion, or “the sacred,” was not a universal and essential given. Rather, “religion” was a constructed category whose content shifted depending on the circumstances. As Smith has argued, “religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization.” Thus, “the student of religion must be able to articulate clearly why ‘this’ rather than ‘that’ was chosen as an exemplum” (Imagining Religion xi). Scholars of religion have pushed past Smith’s argument toward studies investigating the political, racial, social, and colonial ideologies that shape the construction of religion.1 1 See, for example, Chidester, Savage Systems and Empire of Religion; and Masuzawa.

Construction de l’expérience et dynamique d’appropriation des artefacts.: Le cas d’apprenants au métier d’enseignant d’EPS.

Abstract: Cette contribution apprehende la problematique de l’appropriation des artefacts dans le champ de la recherche en formation professionnelle initiale de futurs enseignants, sur le terrain de l’EPS. L’analyse porte sur la construction de l’experience d’enseignants novices, dans le cadre d’un dispositif de professionnalisation utilisant des extraits d’enregistrements video de classe. Le but de cette contribution est de comprendre de quelle maniere les artefacts materiels (enregistrements video, tableau, diaporama) et symboliques (grille d’analyse, geste professionnel, tactique pedagogique, etc.) deviennent des instruments dans le processus de transformation de l’activite interpretative de situations professionnelles et permettent l’ouverture de possibles pour agir en classe de maniere adequate. Le croisement d’une approche sociotechnique de l’environnement de formation et d’une approche semiotique de configurations d’activites collectives produites par les apprentis et leur formateur dans des situations de formation contrastees conduit a mettre en valeur les conditions materielles et sociales dans lesquelles les artefacts sont utilises comme des instruments de mediation qui encouragent la construction de savoirs relatifs au metier d’enseignant.

Using Metadata and Maps to Teach the History of Religion

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-

Gaming Religion?: Teaching Religious Studies with Videogames

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 

What's Best for Them: Teaching Disability Studies to Science Majors

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.

Embracing Resistance: Teaching Rhetorical Genre Theory at a Christian College

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

Field Trip to the Kosher Kitchen: Religion and Politics in the University Dining Hall

Abstract: One Tuesday afternoon during our regularly scheduled class period, my students and I took a class trip to a space that was intimately familiar to them: the dining hall located amidst the freshmen and sophomore dorms. We gathered just outside the serving area, near the tables where a few students lingered over a late lunch or an early afternoon snack. The à-lacarte serving area is clean, shiny, and attractive. Built only four years ago, it offers a diverse selection of options at different stations—including, most importantly for our class, a kosher station. As the class gathered, my students greeted friends who walked by, laughing self-consciously, “I’m here for a class!” Once my fourteen students had arrived, we followed Karen Zeffren, a kosher kitchen supervisor, through the serving area and into a space my students knew less about—the kitchens and storerooms where the food was prepared. We walked past busy food service workers. “Here are the new dishwashers!” joked one chef. We followed Karen through the kitchens, up an elevator, and into the much smaller space of the university’s kosher kitchens. At Washington University in St. Louis, I taught an upper level, interdisciplinary course on the politics of religion and food among Jews in the United States. Beginning with the colonial period, we examined the cultural, social, historical, political, and economic practices relating to the production and consumption of food that have sustained and demarcated American Jewish communities. The course is weighted toward twentiethcentury and contemporary concerns, bringing questions about organized religious institutions, individual choices, and structures of power closer to students’ lives. Thus, while I generally encouraged students to bracket their own opinions and religious perspectives in order to minimize preconceptions about our subject matter, students’ backgrounds and experiences were often relevant to our conversations. Washington University is a private research institution in suburban St. Louis, with a national and international student population. According to Hillel International, a Jewish campus organization, 25 percent of the undergraduate population of Washington University is Jewish, and many Jewish students come from the northeast US, particularly the New York metropolitan area. Of the fourteen students in my class, nearly all had some Jewish background; only one positioned herself as a non-Jew in classroom discussions. The students were a mix of classes and majors, from first-year students in the business school to seniors majoring in Jewish, Near Eastern, and Islamic Studies. All of them could be urged into enthu-

Reinterpreting Schempp : Is Teaching Spiritual Identity Development in the Public Schools Permissible?

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

Pushing Up against Too Much: Reading, Writing, and Witnessing Illness in the First-Year Seminar

Abstract: Nearly a decade ago, I taught a first-year seminar at Adelphi University that remains simultaneously my most challenging and my most rewarding teaching experience, both personally and professionally. I designed “Illness as Narrative: Bearing Witness to Cancer and AIDS” around an ambitious reading schedule, fusing trauma theory and concepts from disabilities studies with stories of illness. Although I have considered offering a version of this course at my current university, and I frequently teach many of the texts and theories in smaller doses within a semester, this intensive twiceweekly seminar required a uniquely high level of emotional stamina from the very start. On the first day, I asked the students why they had selected our class out of the dozens of options open to them. This is what I heard: “My aunt had breast cancer.” “My mother is a breast cancer survivor.” “I have cancer in my family.” “My dad has cancer.” “I was an HIV/AIDS peer educator in high school.” “My uncle died of cancer.” “My grandfather died of AIDS.” “My mother recovered from breast cancer.” “I work with an AIDS organization.” “My grandmother had cancer.” “So did mine.” “I am a cancer survivor.” “I have cancer in my family.” Days into the semester, students told bits of their stories of illness and disability, expanding both beyond the family circle and beyond cancer and AIDS: stories of friends who had serious physical disabilities, of a community allowing itself to forget a young man dead of AIDS, of a student living in fear of her family’s history of heart disease, of another student’s battle with anorexia. Over the course of our time together, the onslaught of pain and loss did not subside: that fall, one student lost a close friend, another’s grandmother died, yet another’s father was losing ground to his cancer. And days after the semester ended, one student went home to Florida to learn his mother had just been diagnosed with cervical cancer.

Shifting Students' Imaginings of Disability

Abstract: The artwork in this essay was produced by members of a 2013 undergraduate course, Intergroup Dialogue on Disability, in which Kathryn Linn Geurts was an instructor and Jessica Hansen was a student. These visual responses, such as “Freakshow” (figure 1), reflect reactions to several readings and showcase the critical learning objectives and goals of the course. Inherently interdisciplinary, the class was offered through the Conflict Studies program and was cross-listed with Social Justice, Anthropology, and Public Health Sciences at Hamline University, in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Hamline is a private institution with a small but growing commuter population; it attracts students who grew up primarily in the Midwest, and is somewhat selective. With no Disability Studies program at Hamline, this mid-level course met Conflict Studies program requirements and also fulfilled “Cultural Breadth” requirements all students must meet to earn an undergraduate degree. The aim was to teach students to communicate through dialog across social, cultural, and power differences. Through sustained and meaningful cross-group contact and relations, the course encourages students to explore both conflict and common ground, particularly around issues related to ableism. It challenges students to examine their assumptions and their political and social understandings of disability as they engage in reflective conversations and inquiry. Early in the semester, Jessica Hansen created this assemblage and titled it “Power and Control” (figure 2). Her explanation of her work’s origin and meanings reflects the pedagogical approach of the class: