The Outrageous Idea of Christian Teaching
Perry Glanzer and Nathan Alleman
Abstract
There are thousands of Christian professors, many of whom claim “Christian” as their primary identity and teaching as their primary responsibility. Much of the current literature about the integration of faith and learning focuses on the differences between Christian scholarship and Christian teaching. As a result, few books explore how Christian identity, or a particular Christian identity (e.g., Baptist, Anglican), shapes teaching. In addition, few works examine what identity-influenced teaching outside of one’s professional identity looks like in the contemporary university. One distinguish ... More
There are thousands of Christian professors, many of whom claim “Christian” as their primary identity and teaching as their primary responsibility. Much of the current literature about the integration of faith and learning focuses on the differences between Christian scholarship and Christian teaching. As a result, few books explore how Christian identity, or a particular Christian identity (e.g., Baptist, Anglican), shapes teaching. In addition, few works examine what identity-influenced teaching outside of one’s professional identity looks like in the contemporary university. One distinguishing feature of this book is that it addresses both those subjects by exploring responses of Christian professors to questions about how them. By drawing upon a mixed-methods survey of over 2,300 Christian professors, this book reveals the wide range of wisdom that contemporary professors offer about how they practice faith-informed teaching. The second unique quality of this book is that it situates the findings of this study within the wider scholarly conversation about the role of identity-informed teaching. It describes the tensions within this conversation between those who advocate for restraining the influence of one’s extraprofessional identities and those who, in the name of authenticity, promote the full integration of one’s primary identities into the classroom. It then sets forth an original position that draws from empirical research to provide a nuanced approach to this issue. Overall, the book charts new ground regarding how professors think about Christian teaching in particular, as well as how professors should approach identity-informed teaching in general.
Keywords:
professional identity,
identity-informed teaching,
integration of faith and learning,
Christian teaching,
Christian identity,
empirical research,
mixed-methods survey
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2019 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780190056483 |
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2019 |
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780190056483.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Perry Glanzer, author
Professor of Educational Foundations, Resident Scholar, Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion
Nathan Alleman, author
Associate Professor of Higher Education Studies, Baylor University
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