News & Events
Divinity School Introduces a New Seminar Series:
The Craft of Teaching
Based upon the recommendation of the Divinity School faculty's Task Force on Teaching (Dean of Students Teresa Hord Owens, Professors Lucy Pick and Jeffrey Stackert), which is seeking to develop a full constellation of activities and programs in the Divinity School for pedagogical and professional preparation in teaching, Dean Mitchell has announced The Craft of Teaching series. Starting winter quarter, 2012, the School will invite to campus each quarter one of our alumni or other accomplished educators in the academic study of religion to offer a seminar centered on one of their course syllabi.
All Divinity School students are warmly encouraged to attend. These sessions, which will highlight the range of institutional contexts and programs within which religion is taught in American and international higher education, will focus on pedagogical goals, educational design, significant and difficult choices, modes of instruction and assignments, anticipated and unanticipated outcomes.
Starting off the Craft of Teaching series will be M. Cooper Harriss, Ph.D. 2011 (Religion and Literature), Instructor and Visiting Professor of Race and Religion, Department of Religion and Culture, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Blacksburg, Virginia).
Professor Harris' seminar will take place on Monday, January 30, at 4:30 p.m., in Swift Hall Room 200.
Professor Harriss offers courses in American and African-American religious traditions, religion and modernity, and religion and literature. His teaching and research interests include the concept of race in western and American intellectual history, the religious and theological valences of the concept of irony, the intersections of religious thought and practice with American cultural production, and the impact of preachers and preaching upon American literature.
In the Spring Quarter Ann Taves, A.M. 1979, Ph.D. 1983 (History of Christianity), Virgil Cordano, OFM, Professor of Catholic Studies and Professor of Religious Studies, University of California at Santa Barbara, and the Divinity School's Alumna of the Year for 2012, will give the Craft of Teaching seminar. This event will be held in conjunction with the American Religious History Workshop.
Professor Taves teaches courses that focus specifically on Catholic history and practice as well as courses that examine Catholic history and practice alongside other traditions. Her undergraduate courses are structured around questions in the study of religion that can be addressed from both the perspectives of the humanities and the sciences, e.g.: How and to what extent do religious or spiritual practices transform people? What happens to a tradition when it is transmitted from one cultural context to another? How do people know or decide if an event or experience should be attributed to a supernatural source?
Professor Taves is also a faculty participant in the graduate Emphasis in Cognitive Science, where she teaches some courses that focus specifically on topics in the evolutionary and cognitive science of religion and others that integrate that approach alongside others. In that program, she draws particularly from research on situated cognition (embodied and embedded) in order to understand the connections between cognitive and cultural processes.
Professor Taves' seminar will take place on Thursday, May 3, 2012, at 12:00 noon (room TBA). Her Alumna of the Year lecture will follow that same day at 4:00 p.m., in Swift Lecture Hall (3rd floor).
