This article explores assignments as a core teaching practice essential to integrating the cognitive, personal, and professional identities of seminary students. These core practices emerge in seminary curricula where there is a strong focus on the teaching of canonical texts and a goal of achieving textual mastery. We propose that carefully chosen and constructive assignments achieve the kind of integration necessary for building content knowledge and the professional, spiritual, and religious identities of our students. While the difference between the educational goals of clergy-training in a seminary and training graduate students in the academy can be sharp, we argue here for ways to make that contrast both productive and generative.One of the most challenging issues that professors in seminaries face in training clergy is how to build useful contexts for students to integrate their learning with their faith lives. 1 Increasingly, professors trained in the academy have come to realize that successful teaching must foster the whole spectrum of the development of the student. Educating Clergy: Teaching Practices and Pastoral Imagination correctly speaks of the need to integrate the cognitive with the religious identity formation of the student in order to foster professional development (Foster, Dahill, Goleman, and Tolentino 2006, 329-354). Through its research within Christian and Jewish seminaries across the denominational spectrums, Educating Clergy identifies a shared notion of preferred teaching 1 We are indebted to the commitment and contributions of Rabbi Mychal Springer, . Each of them encouraged us to think about the core practices that we implement in the courses that we teach and offered insights into their own teaching that were instructive and insightful. We encourage faculty to meet together to discuss their best practices as a way of furthering their commitments to integration in seminary education.
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