Overview

With insights gleaned from thirty-two years of teaching college students, seminarians, and graduate students, David Rhoads shares how he sought to create the classroom as a community of learners ripe for transformation through dialogue. He charts his personal journey struggling to generate discussion, evoke questions, deepen conversations, and strengthen writing and oral skills. Reflections include such innovative topics as radical hospitality, the physical environment of the classroom, overcoming blocks to learning, and the power of silence, as well as issues of a liberative pedagogy, the importance of method, the role of social location, experiments in intercultural dialogue, the use of case studies and slogans, and performing Scripture. This approach to education fosters openness, respect for difference, tolerance for ambiguity, and creative collaboration. In addition to university, seminary, and graduate students and teachers, schoolteachers, pastors, and parish educators will also benefit from these reflections.

Full Product Details

9781620328798

Table of Contents

Reviews

""Teachers will love this book! They might want to read it just for the sheer pleasure of receiving the affirmation Rhoads offers to anyone blessed to pursue such a calling. But in so doing they will also benefit from the numerous tips, tactics, perspectives, and proposals that enable classroom teaching to be engaging, hospitable, liberative, and empowering. Basically, in this book Rhoads does for actual or would-be teachers what Stephen King did for actual or would-be authors in his manual On Writing. Rhoads has always been regarded as a role-model pedagogue in his field and in this book, he offers 'best practices' that are eminently practical and achievable. Anyone who teaches professionally or occasionally in the fields of religion or the humanities will find this book immensely enjoyable and almost certainly useful."" --Mark Allan Powell, Professor of New Testament, Retired, Trinity Lutheran Seminary ""Rhoads shows us the purposes he pursues in education (to strive for more authentic humanity, among other things), the specific values that support those purposes, and the many creative strategies he employed in his decades presiding in the classroom. Rhoads offers wisdom on the macro and micro dimensions of pedagogy and everything in between. This book helps me to become a better, more thoughtful, congregational teacher, but also a more faithful pastor and human being."" --Phil Ruge-Jones, Pastor, Grace Lutheran, Eau Claire, Wisconsin ""This collection of reflections represents David Rhoads's remarkable testimony to his classroom teaching/learning with students. At the heart of it lies his deep commitment to education as personal and communal experiences of transformation for being human in a just society and a sustainable Earth. His practice of the diversity of texts, contexts, and people--which he models!--is extraordinary. Reading this book will likely be transformative and contagious."" --Jae Won Lee, Independent Scholar, Chicago ""Teachers will love this book! They might want to read it just for the sheer pleasure of receiving the affirmation Rhoads offers to anyone blessed to pursue such a calling. But in so doing they will also benefit from the numerous tips, tactics, perspectives, and proposals that enable classroom teaching to be engaging, hospitable, liberative, and empowering. Basically, in this book Rhoads does for actual or would-be teachers what Stephen King did for actual or would-be authors in his manual On Writing. Rhoads has always been regarded as a role-model pedagogue in his field and in this book, he offers 'best practices' that are eminently practical and achievable. Anyone who teaches professionally or occasionally in the fields of religion or the humanities will find this book immensely enjoyable and almost certainly useful."" --Mark Allan Powell, Professor of New Testament, Retired, Trinity Lutheran Seminary ""Rhoads shows us the purposes he pursues in education (to strive for more authentic humanity, among other things), the specific values that support those purposes, and the many creative strategies he employed in his decades presiding in the classroom. Rhoads offers wisdom on the macro and micro dimensions of pedagogy and everything in between. This book helps me to become a better, more thoughtful, congregational teacher, but also a more faithful pastor and human being."" --Phil Ruge-Jones, Pastor, Grace Lutheran, Eau Claire, Wisconsin ""This collection of reflections represents David Rhoads's remarkable testimony to his classroom teaching/learning with students. At the heart of it lies his deep commitment to education as personal and communal experiences of transformation for being human in a just society and a sustainable Earth. His practice of the diversity of texts, contexts, and people--which he models!--is extraordinary. Reading this book will likely be transformative and contagious."" --Jae Won Lee, Independent Scholar, Chicago

Author Information

David Rhoads is emeritus professor of New Testament at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. He is co-author of Mark as Story: An Introduction to the Narrative of a Gospel.

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