NuDunkers: A vision for Brethren theological education

(Moocow image by Gordon Lockhart;
remix of ‘la vaca de los sinvaca‘
by José Bogado/Flickr)

Last week the NuDunkers held our second live discussion on Google+ Hangouts, on the topic of pneumatology. Here's the video, and the event page has a transcript of questions and discussion items that were raised by folks watching the video discussion. Unfortunately, I missed the whole event because of an internet outage. But I still benefitted greatly from the pre-hangout blogging exercise and the follow-up remarks from our guest (new NuDunker?) - Laura Stone. I think we're off to a great start.

Simultaneously, in my professional world of educational technology, I was busy participating in, thinking about, and writing critically (and humorously) about the MOOC - massively open online courses - a phenomenon that has the higher ed world all up in a tizzy.

And as often happens for people who wear multiple hats, my worlds happily collided. I thought to myself:

Is NuDunkers a MOOC?

It's my contention that the NuDunker project is almost a MOOC in some senses, and with a bit of tweaking and explicit thought around digital pedagogy, it could be more so. And not only that, but NuDunkers could be a vision for Brethren theological education. Stay tuned as I unpack this a bit...

Of course!

From the beginning last fall, NuDunkers has been framed as a conversation. It has been, though, a certain kind of conversation - namely a theological and somewhat academic one, but with the intent of doing theology from and for the church. We want to use our brains faithfully for the concrete work of God (discipleship, ministry, mission) through God's concrete people (the body of Christ). So in this way there is an educational dimension to our conversations and their intended impact.

For the foreseeable future, we will be holding these blogging/discussing exercises around particular theological topics (last week: pneumatology). Given that these topical, educational discussions have time dimensions put on them, we start moving toward something that could be considered "a course" - that is, a particular group of people engaged for a particular period of time in the work of teaching and learning around a particular set of topics. I want to say that theological education is already happening in NuDunkers.

Open season

One important mark of a MOOC is that it is open. NuDunkers, from the start, has been intended to be open in a number of ways very similar, if not exactly like a MOOC. We're open with respect to...

• Cost - If you have a device with an internet connection, you're in. No registrar, no admissions, no tuition.
• Participation - You only have to have an interest in the work we're doing and a willingness to engage in respectful dialogue. You're not required to have a bachelors or associates degree, or even a high school diploma, and you don't have to be a professional pastor or seminary professor (in fact, that would probably help overall).
• Media - We're carrying this out in an array of online media and networks that are open to the world: YouTube, for everyone to watch the discussions; Twitter, for everyone to see tweet-sized bits of information; blogs, for everyone to read the more substantive writings and discussions. We're not locking this stuff behind university or seminary systems.

True, the language will be a bit academic, but again this is an educational endeavor, and we're trying to build a bridge here between the academy and the church. Negotiating the language games is going to be tricky at times, but we're convinced that risking those negotiations is both necessary and worthwhile.

All in for online?

U.S. institutions of higher education, including theological education, are in big trouble these days. The cost of college and grad school is, like health care in this country, spiraling out of control, while at the same time the plight of the professional pastor is looking increasingly grim.  Many schools are turning to online programs to bolster enrollments in their flagging institutions. But these programs often foster very little in the way of substantive engagement between students and instructors, and provide food for the head only, starving the rest of our bodies and our relationships.

While NuDunkers is being carried out entirely online, we're trying to do so in ways that engage more than just our intellects; we tell stories, we laugh, we pray. We also share an emphasis on the importance of local bodies of worship and discipleship (i.e. congregations) - so our work online should inspire and propel us deeper into local and more embodied forms of mission and ministry.

Questions going ahead

• For NuDunkers: How can we take our pedagogical vision further?
• For Brethren institutions: Are you interested in NuDunkers? What if you somehow got involved? What if you granted credit for participation in NuDunkers?
• For Brethren in the pews: How can we better engage you for the renewing of our minds in the body of Christ?

Wringing Out Saturated Selves: Christian Education in a Secular Age

This morning I gave my senior capstone presentation at Eastern Mennonite Seminary, which was based on a paper I wrote with the same name as this post. I've embedded the paper below, but let me make a few comments about the concerns animating this paper/presentation, the paper's major flow and points, and where it leads from here. I take the upcoming #Occupy Empire conference I'm helping organize as one particular project within my broader process of ministerial-vocational discernment.

In some ways, this paper and presentation marks the "philosophical turn" in my graduate studies.  This turn was precipitated by the existential and intellectual angst of being the first dual degree student at EMU's seminary and its Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. Philosophy eventually became extremely helpful in trying to adjudicate - both in terms of overlap and difference - the distinct "embodied rationalities" in those two programs. This led me to the philosophy of Charles Taylor, James K.A. Smith, and most recently, Alasdair MacIntyre.

But I've also been compelled by the biblical hermeneutic of John Howard Yoder as a way to keep me grounded in the biblical narrative as the primary "script" for my life as a ministering Christian in the body of Christ.

In my ministerial-vocational discernment these past years at grad school, I've come sense the call to being an educator in/for the church, putting the intellectual gifts which God has imbued within me to work for the sake of God's reconciling mission in the world. In testing this, I've been able to teach the same class in two radically different cultural contexts. In this paper, I try to weave all these threads together in a very short space (12 pages, 20 minute presentation). No small task.

In responding to my presentation this morning, my advisor, Mark Thiessen Nation, quipped: "What you've really done here, Brian, is lay out a research agenda for yourself." Likewise, my district executive in the Church of the Brethren described this as the start of a life-long journey. I think those assessments exactly right. There are hints in this paper to most of the influential work I've picked up and how I've been starting to assemble that toward a constructive vision for my developing vocation as a ministerial educator.

[Cross-post]: Elicitive Pedagogy in the Digital Age

Mirrored digital Koru
(Adapated from J. Colman via Flickr)

One of the joys of being a tech and web nerd in my part-time job at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding has been getting in on the planning and implementation of the first-ever online class offered by the center, which just started on the first of this month but has been a year in the making. So I just posted this piece over at the Peacebuilder Online blog, telling the story of how it all came together and the challenges we had to overcome...

Elicitive Pedagogy in the Digital Age

The shape of a conflict transformation course

Tonight will be the first session of my "Intro to Conflict Transformation" course at Bridgewater College. I just put the finishing touches on the syllabus and sent it off to have photocopies made for the students. At this early stage of my becoming a teacher, I thought it would be good for later reflection to post some of the particulars of this course. So here's a bit of what the course is looking like right now. Who knows what it will look like on May 1st when it concludes, or what I'll think of all this if/when I come back to it down the road to see how my thinking about teaching has shifted. Here goes...

SOC/PHIL 319: Introduction to Conflict Transformation

Bridgewater College, Spring 2012

Course description: This course starts with the assumption that conflict is neither good nor bad. Rather, conflict is an opportunity. How one responds to that opportunity is the focus of this course, because conflict transformation seeks to respond constructively to the natural experience of conflict. Course concepts and activities will progress through four levels of conflict, from personal to interpersonal (micro) to organizational to societal (macro). Analysis tools and intervention strategies will vary from level to level but a nested-systems view of conflict will help illuminate the connections between all four. While the weight the course will be practical in nature, offering students tools for use in their daily lives, various interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks will also be introduced throughout the course.

It's the final countdown!

Notice: This post related to the above in name only

After coming back from Ethiopia last summer, high on my first major teaching experience, I began my penultimate semester at Eastern Mennonite University in a funk. Having just been a teacher, here I was again in the classroom...but as a student. It took me a few weeks to process what was going on with my bad attitude and moping around, but once I figured it out, I quickly began working to address the problem.

After some conversations last fall with seminary faculty and administrators, combined with a coincidental adjunct teaching position opening up at a nearby college, I arranged my final semester at EMU to consist of just one class, with the rest of my hours taken up by a teaching practicum. So for one semester only, I will be Assistant Professor of Sociology at Bridgewater College in nearby Bridgewater, Virginia, teaching "Intro to Conflict Transformation" to college undergrad students.

My class doesn't start for another two weeks, so I'm in the process of finalizing the curriculum and syllabus. As it relates to my practicum, though, I'm approaching it with the following goals:

1. Discern the call to educational ministry by the practice of teaching
2. Explore pedagogical approaches engaging various learning styles with mixed delivery/media
3. Reflect critically on secularity in Christian institutions of higher education, explore alternatives

Theodoodling?

In early June of this year, I had the pleasure of speaking about blogging to a later manifestation of the same class which helped birth this very blog, "Research as Art and Transformation," with Howard Zehr and Paulette Moore. This time around, the class was being held during the Summer Peacebuilding Institute (shameless ad: I just finished the website today and registration for SPI 2012 is open!). SPI draws a significantly more diverse crowd from around the world than the already-widely diverse crowd in the masters program during the normal academic year. The students in this class were some serious artists, so it was a blast to talk about artsy stuff in relation to my theological blogging here.

One of the students, Delia, is a doodler. Her way of processing information in a classroom or in other settings is to listen and draw, listen and draw. She showed me her doodles from my session back in June, and I asked her if she would be willing to send me pictures of the doodles at some point. Well, she and I both forgot about it for a few months, but she just contacted me on Facebook and sent me the doodles and a link to her blog post about "blogoodling".

Cross-post: An Iowa boy teaching (and learning) peacebuilding in Ethiopia

"Intro to Conflict Transformation" class, 2011
MK College, Debre Zeit, Ethiopia

As co-editor of the Peacebuilder Online blog for EMU's Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, it's sometimes a little too easy for me to take advantage of being a professional blogger. For instance, after posting here this morning on a really old book, I wrote up a reflection on the experience of teaching for my "work" blog:

An Iowa boy teaching (and learning) peacebuilding in Ethiopia

Adrift in a raft of firsts

Talking with my hands,
which I learned from my dad.
(Photo by Paulette Moore)

In the run-up to my family's trip to Ethiopia - which begins in two short days - it has struck me that much of this trip constitutes a number of firsts in our lives. Geographically-speaking, I've never been off the North American continent. The handful of times I've been to Canada and Mexico were in the days before you needed a passport, so we had to figure that out a few months ago. We had to decipher the fear-mongering going on the CDC website and other literature when figuring out what immunizations to get (and upon getting them, being reminded that my body does not like needles thrust into it). And while I've had a handful of Ethiopian friends here in the EMU community these past three years, this will be my first immersion in the Ethiopian landscape and its rich culture(s).

And most pressing on my mind is this: This is the first time I've taught a college course!

While it's true that my syllabus is done (see below) and I'm fairly happy and confident about it, I still have this nagging sensation in my gut and a whisper in my ear: "You don't know what you're doing."