Publisher’s Note: With this issue we begin a new chapter in the editorial history ofTeaching Theology & Religion. Patricia O’Connell Killen has served in an edito-rial capacity for the Wabash Center since 2006 (as Editor since 2007), and duringthat time, she has led the journal with clarity and wisdom. We have benefited fromher careful work with the rubrics of writing about teaching and learning, and fromher keen eye as she has read many manuscripts, considering them for publication.In January 2012, Thomas Pearson, Associate Director of the Wabash Center,assumed the role of Editor of the journal. He will be working with a team of two:Martha E. Stortz (Augsburg College) and Eugene V. Gallagher (ConnecticutCollege) who will aid him in considering the manuscripts and setting the editorialvision of Teaching Theology & Religion. We are pleased to have all three, and areassured of being in very competent editorial hands as we move forward.

Nadine S. Pence, DirectorWabash Center for Teaching & Learning in Theology & Religion

Thomas Pearson, EditorResearch and writing on teaching is an entire academic field in itself. Scholars of educa-tion have developed rigorous methods for gathering and analyzing data, synthesizingtheories, developing new teaching techniques, and assessing student learning. Of course,as professors of religion and theology we already have a research field (in biblicalstudies, say, or Hinduism). Are we called to master educational research too? Thisjournal is dedicated to the proposition that even though we are not trained experts in thefield of educational research, we can still be reflective practioners of our teaching andtherefore can contribute to the scholarship of teaching – to the benefit of ourselves, ourcolleagues, and our students.

The “scholarship of teaching” has been a growing movement within higher educationat least since Ernest Boyer’s seminal 1990 book, Scholarship Reconsidered (Jossey-Bass). I will not analyze here the relationship between our practitioner-based writingand the discourses of professionally trained researchers. But I will point out one acces-sible and productive model for this genre exemplified in Elizabeth Agnew’s articlepublished in this issue.

Professor Agnew’s PhD is in ethics and social theory. Her essay uses insights fromher academic research field to make an argument concerning her teaching practice andhow her students learn. This is not an argument about how her academic research fieldshould be taught (and it is emphatically not simply an overview of her course, summa-rizing the content and arguments she offers to her students). Those sorts of essays arenot appropriate for this journal because they concern the field of religion and theologyrather than the challenges of teaching. Instead, what Professor Agnew has done is toapply ethical analysis to her ethics classroom. She examines the dynamics of her stu-dents’ classroom participation using the resources and expertise of her academic field.She considers the implications of the classroom conceived as a public square; she notesthat what distinguishes the classroom from the public square is that fundamental com-mitments and sources of identity are at stake in the topics under discussion; hence, sheargues, there should be special concern for students’ vulnerability and their need for

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safety, respect, and belonging; and therefore, she adapts the processes recommended bythe ethical theory of nonviolent communication – which she describes and analyzes forus as a classroom teaching technique.

My point is that contributing to the scholarship of teaching and learning does notrequire mastering a whole new field of learning theory. Elizabeth Agnew’s essay hasentered into and extended a conversation in ethics and social theory – drawing on inter-view comments made by Rebecca Chopp, developed through Marshall Rosenberg’stheory of Nonviolent Communication, and extended to Alasdair MacIntyre’s and JeffreyStout’s ideas of community – in order to analyze her classroom teaching practice andhow her students learn. Her extension of this social theory conversation thus contributesto the conversation on the scholarship of teaching.

Perhaps this is an easy example. Elizabeth Agnew’s essay suddenly renders the fieldof ethics as perhaps uncommonly relevant to our classroom practices. Could a similarintellectual move be made by, say, Bible or Hindu scholars? I would argue, yes. Exper-tise in our academic fields can be a launching point and source of insight into ourteaching practice in any number of ways.

Consider Bret Lewis’s essay also included in this issue of the journal. He uses thecategories and concerns of his research field (comparative world religions, broadly con-ceived) to raise questions about the degree to which the academic study of religion canbe independent of the religious (not to mention the political) milieu in which it is con-ducted and taught. The epistemologies of the secular and the academic study of religionhave become a prominent topic of religious studies scholars in the past decade. Lewis’scase study of this Indonesian institutional context is particularly apt for our journal,situated as a venue for the cross-cultural comparison of pedagogies of religion andtheology.

In contrast, Reverend Patrick Lynch (a Jesuit theologian) relies on the social scien-tific research methods provided by his co-author, Pat Mizak (the director of theirschool’s Office of Institutional Research), to analyze how well students in the first yearcore religion course absorb Catholic and Jesuit values. Their analysis is not informed atall by Lynch’s Jesuit theological training. Contributions to the scholarship of teachingcan be made in a variety of ways.

Consider, finally, the extended discussion of student learning outcomes in liberal artsbiblical studies courses presented in the Forum published in this issue. The contributors’expertise in the content and methods of biblical studies would not seem to explicitlyinform the ways they approach and analyze the teaching questions at hand. In contrast,one could imagine how a panel of historians might have raised questions about thehistorical emergence of the student learning outcomes phenomenon. And theologianswould almost certainly have made very different intellectual moves in a discussion suchas this. So perhaps this absence of these other disciplines’ signature styles is a sign thatthere is a disciplinary temperament of some sort at work in their analyses. It is remark-able, for example, the degree to which they are all willing and able to radically rethinkbiblical studies through the goals and purposes of liberal arts education – and this ques-tioning of the discipline is an expression of a particular trend within biblical studies thatwill be recognized by those who keep up with the field.

Included as well in this issue are fourteen book reviews, two Teaching Tactics (brief,accessible, four hundred word descriptions and analyses of concrete teaching strategies)and a one thousand word response to our call for papers on the wider contexts of aspecific course. Allezo Nevel Owens, of Florida A&M University, does a masterful job

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of succinctly presenting the context of his school’s broad goals for the liberal arts cur-riculum, and the cultural context of his African-American students in the Bible Belt, inorder to analyze some of the teaching choices he makes and one specific assignment inhis religion and sexuality course.

This is my first issue as Editor of TTR. For the past five years I have been apprentic-ing as Associate Editor under Patricia Killen’s rigorous and dedicated editor’s hand.Patricia has improved – indeed, transformed – the journal in too many ways to recounthere. She has left us in a much stronger position than when she joined us – with moreand better manuscripts in the pipeline, and (more importantly) with a more clearlyarticulated self-understanding of the criteria by which we evaluate manuscripts and thusan enhanced ability to help authors shape essays for our journal. My thinking and judg-ments on the scholarship of teaching have been formed and sharpened through our yearsworking together. I look forward now to working with two new Associate Editors – myfriends and colleagues, Gene Gallagher and Marty Stortz. We have already formed atight and productive working team, as I knew we would. I look forward to our worktogether. And I thank Patricia for her years of service and dedication to the journal.

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