Using a Rural Place to Localize a Curriculum: The Red Cloud Project

A preservice teacher education program takes small teams of preservice teachers and their students into a rural Nebraska community to foster an appreciation of the local community, localize the curriculum, and give future teachers experience in planning and conducting field trips. Experiences from the field trips are shared and expanded upon in elementary and middle school classrooms

Bringing Eyes of Faith to Film: Using Popular Movies to Cultivate a Sacramental Imagination and Improve Media Literacy in Adolescents

Adolescents are bombarded during most of their waking hours by images on various screens: computer, television, and film. As so-called digital natives, they are aware that these images are manufactured and manipulated to elicit certain responses. But while they acknowledge the artificiality of those images, they allow the same mediated messages virtually unfettered access to their hearts and minds with sad or even chilling results. Catholic educators and pastoral workers are charged with helping young people navigate the terrain created by popular media for at least two reasons: to nurture a more sophisticated approach to reading media, and to leverage Catholicism’s long history of employing art to illuminate aspects of God and the transcendent. The endeavor described in this article posits that the Great Commandment (Matthew 12:28-31), to love God and love one’s neighbor as oneself, provides an intellectual and pastoral framework for using recent popular films to sharpen media literacy skills on the one hand and to cultivate a sacramental imagination on the other, using tools that are portable to multiple disciplines and to most new films

Enacting Social Justice to Teach Social Justice: The Pedagogy of Bridge Builders

This article describes a particular endeavor, the Bridge Builders Academic Mentoring Program (BAMP), a partnership between a school of education in a Catholic university in the Northwest and a community-based rites of passage program for adolescent African American males. The partnership exemplifies tenets of Catholic social teaching, in that it is community-based, justice-oriented and in many ways countercultural. The pedagogy aligns with the goals of service learning; that is, the service extended by university students satisfies a genuine community need, and at the same time affords those engaged in service an opportunity to acquire crucial knowledge, skills, and dispositions to which they would not otherwise have access. Implications for translating this program to other contexts are provided

Toward Realistic Altruism: A Community-Based Field Experience

This is a study of the perceptions of preservice teachers engaged in a human services field experience and the college instructors responsible for teaching the Human Development course attached to the field experience. Student data came from semistructured focus group interviews and student journals maintained throughout the experience, faculty data from onc-onone semi-structured interviews. Using the constant comparative method, data for students and faculty were grouped as follows: a) what students do during their placements, b) benefits and challenges of the experience, c) connections built between their experiences in the field and in the classroom. Analysis indicated that while the experience is generally perceived as valuable, there are gaps between what students actually do and faculty perceptions. Also, certain types of placements are much more powerful than others in yielding desired results of empathy, awareness of diversity and teaching skills. Recommendations for increasing the benefits and minimizing knowledge gaps are discussed

Increasing Engagement in Materials Laboratory with Backward Design and Quadcopters

This paper describes a laboratory experiment that was designed to increase student engagement and enhance student development in a materials laboratory. The laboratory module described is part of a broader effort to enhance the mechanical engineering laboratory curriculum to incorporate modern pedagogical methods and to improve student outcomes using backward design. The new laboratory modules encourage students to work in small groups, develop team skills, and learn about basic measurement methods. The first module is a simple cantilever beam mounted with a strain gage. Students develop an understanding of the correlation between bending stress and strain. While doing so, they also determine a calibration factor for the beam in order to use the beam as a load cell to measure the weight of an object. For the second module, students are provided an instrumented beam with a known calibration factor and are asked to determine the amount of lift produced by a small quadcopter. To assess the effectiveness of the laboratory experiment, a student survey was designed and the experiments were observed by an education expert. The results indicate the new laboratory modules have been successful in increasing student engagement and meeting learning objectives

Bringing Eyes of Faith to Film: Using Popular Movies to Cultivate a Sacramental Imagination and Improve Media Literacy in Adolescents

Adolescents are bombarded during most of their waking hours by images on various screens: computer, television, and film. As so-called digital natives, they are aware that these images are manufactured and manipulated to elicit certain responses. But while they acknowledge the artificiality of those images, they allow the same mediated messages virtually unfettered access to their hearts and minds with sad or even chilling results. Catholic educators and pastoral workers are charged with helping young people navigate the terrain created by popular media for at least two reasons: to nurture a more sophisticated approach to reading media, and to leverage Catholicism’s long history of employing art to illuminate aspects of God and the transcendent. The endeavor described in this article posits that the Great Commandment (Matthew 12:28-31), to love God and love one’s neighbor as oneself, provides an intellectual and pastoral framework for using recent popular films to sharpen media literacy skills on the one hand and to cultivate a sacramental imagination on the other, using tools that are portable to multiple disciplines and to most new films

Enacting Social Justice to Teach Social Justice: The Pedagogy of Bridge Builders

This article describes a particular endeavor, the Bridge Builders Academic Mentoring Program (BAMP), a partnership between a school of education in a Catholic university in the Northwest and a community-based rites of passage program for adolescent African American males. The partnership exemplifies tenets of Catholic social teaching, in that it is community-based, justice-oriented and in many ways countercultural. The pedagogy aligns with the goals of service learning; that is, the service extended by university students satisfies a genuine community need, and at the same time affords those engaged in service an opportunity to acquire crucial knowledge, skills, and dispositions to which they would not otherwise have access. Implications for translating this program to other contexts are provided

Becoming Beholders: Cultivating Sacramental Imagination and Actions in College Classrooms

Angela Kim Harkins is a contributing author, Cultivating Empathy and Mindfulness: Religious Praxis , pp. 275-288. Michael Pagano is a contributing author, Exorcizing taboos: teaching end-of-life communication , pp. 176-191. Book description: Catholic colleges and universities have long engaged in conversation about how to fulfill their mission in creative ways across the curriculum. The sacramental vision of Catholic higher education posits that God is made manifest in the study of all disciplines. Becoming Beholders is the first book to share pedagogical strategies about how to do that. Twenty faculty—from many religious backgrounds and teaching in fields as varied as chemistry, economics, English, history, mathematics, sociology, and theology—discuss ways that their teaching nourishes students\u27 ability to find the transcendent in their studies. -- Publisher descriptionhttps://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/religiousstudies-books/1047/thumbnail.jp