Assigning Integration: A Framework for Intellectual, Personal, and Professional Development in Seminary Courses

Abstract

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. ARTICLES

Responses to “Sketching the Contours of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion”

“…While I think most of us in the profession today would resist any kind of naïve traditionalism, it is worth reflecting on whether past teaching and learning practice might emerge not only as an object of our teaching and learning, but also as a genuine subject (see Palmer , 99–106) – and one which makes a claim on our teaching practice. This is, for example, what we seem to witness in Marjorie Lehman's contribution to “Assigning Integration: A Framework for Intellectual, Personal, and Professional Development in Seminary Courses” (Kanarek and Lehman , 20–25). Searching for a means to help rabbinical students integrate the demands of academic study with pastoral formation, Lehman unlocks the potential of the sixteenth‐century Talmudic commentary En Yaaqov and its author, Rabbi Jacob ibn Habib, as “one model of a rabbi who could transform canonical texts, written well before his time, into relevant material containing spiritual messages” (22).…”

Contesting spiritual formation in theological education

“…One of these expectations on the side of the student, is that theological education implies spiritual formation (Glennon et al 2011:360). Spiritual formation is recognised in the literature as an important aspect of theological training (Kanarek and Lehman 2013;Keely 2003;Naidoo 2008Naidoo , 2010. However, should this necessarily be the case?…”