Steven C. Bauman

Coming this Fall: 

• American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, Chicago

November 1-4, 2008

A3-110 Teaching Religion Section

• James A. Donahue, Graduate Theological Union, Presiding

In 2007, the Graduate Theological Union undertook a two-part project to mentor doctoral students as future faculty who could practice pedagogies which would engage “big questions;” questions of meaning and value provoked by the content of their courses, which students bring to the undergraduate classroom, and which they face in the world outside the university. Our research interest was to determine how faculty charged with developing future faculty can best mentor toward vocations of teaching scholarship in which “big questions” are central in practical approaches to classroom teaching. In this panel, project team members present findings and conclusions, while a project Mentor and two project Fellows offer inside perspectives on the mentoring process and on collegial relationships as they developed in the project. This will be concluded by Alexander and Helen Astin, who respond on the basis of their research on spirituality and higher education (the HERI report).

• Maureen Maloney, Graduate Theological Union: Engaging the Institution: Mentoring Future Faculty, Big Questions of Vocation, and the Reality of Assessment

• Elizabeth Drescher, Graduate Theological Union: Reengineering the Teaching Machine: Big Questions from the Inside Out and the Outside In

• Martha Ellen Stortz, Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary: The Stakes Involved in "Going Spiritual": Mentoring Future Faculty toward Meaning and Value

• Steven C. Bauman & Melissa James: Big Questions of Vocation, Professional Identity, and Classroom Practice: A Conversation Between Colleagues

Using words like “anguish,” struggle, and “isolation,” René Arcilla suggests that for today’s students “disorientation is a central feature” of their postmodern education (Arcilla, 2007: 19). As James Donahue notes, such “confusion and alienation” instigate “an intense search for security and definition” (Donahue, 1988: 326), which both writers observe ends in premature resolution of the “big questions.” This is highly problematic, as the premature closing off of possible futures restricts the scope of a student’s world, and consequently, inhibits engagement with bigger questions. In this paper, two Preparing Future Faculty Project Fellows, Steven C. Bauman and Melissa James,  draw from work in their respective disciplines, their shared participation in this two-year project, and subsequent combined interdisciplinary efforts, to offer their own unique insights into this problem and provide suggestions for possible remedies which take seriously the Astins’ challenge that ‘there is much more faculty and colleges can do to facilitate students’ spiritual development.’ (HERI, 2005)

• Responding:
  

• Helen Astin, University of California, Los Angeles
• Alexander Astin, University of California, Los Angeles

• Also this fall:
  

My Dissertation Proposal

--please check back in November for more information!