Teaching and Learning Religion: Engaging the Work of Eugene V. Gallagher and Patricia O?Connell Killen

Eugene V. Gallagher and Patricia O’Connell have influenced a generation of religious studies professors through their leadership in Wabash Center teaching workshops. In this book, contributors pay tribute to their influence and build on their insights in short essays focused on three perennial themes: Place, Plan, and Persona. Firstly, the book considers how negotiating your institutional context is essential to effective teaching. Reflections include essays on places of learning, the interaction between person and place, and the online teaching environment. Secondly, the contributors explore how effective teaching requires intentional self-critical design of students’ intellectual experience, from the arc of the course, to the scope and purpose of the curriculum. Topics include planning for playfulness, teaching ‘strangeness’, and strengthening student engagement. In the final section on persona, topics include humour in the classroom, authenticity in the teaching profession, team teaching, and ungrading. This book contributes to the scholarship of teaching and learning in religious studies and higher education by engaging Gallagher and Killen’s insights, and by exploring a range of perspectives on core and enduring pedagogical concepts and questions.

Davina C. Lopez is Professor of Religious Studies and Chair of the Letters (Humanities) Collegium, Eckerd College, USA.

Thomas Pearson is Director of the Nielsen Center for the Liberal Arts at Eckerd College, USA.