Yesterday I was engaged in an "assessment" exercise with colleagues Jim Smith and Tony Clark. The project was to locate on a grid all the courses in the Religion and Philosophy major at Friends. The grid was set up by an assessment expert and had three rows, introduce, reinforce, and mastery. We were to stick small cards with the class name in the various rows and under certain columns. When we were done with our initial attempt, it was obvious that we did not place any courses in the Mastery row under the demonstrate responsible insights from Scripture column. That failure raises the initial question:
What does it mean for a student to develop "mastery" over "responsible insights"?
The followup question is:
Did you consider that you had developed "mastery" over "responsible insights" when you graduated?
Thanks for the responses.
"What does it mean for a student to develop 'mastery' over 'responsible insights'?" Well, that's a difficult question. The closest I could think that Responsible Insight could mean would be about knowledge (or perhaps, wisdom) and whether a person is ready or capable of living the sort of life that they want (instead of simply responding to lives peaks and troughs). It would mean a student both took responsibility for their actions, and acted to ensure that they could achieve what they wanted (and had the wisdom/knowledge to understand the steps along the way).
ReplyDeleteThat being said, I can claim mastery of very little from my Religion/Philosophy classes; the Masters-level preparedness test (thing we did) taught me that. But here's why that isn't necessarily a bad thing: I think that learning how little I knew made me realize how little I still know. Even you, Stan, who has far more experience than over the book of John: Can you claim mastery over it? Can you really say that you understand every nuance and caveat of the book? Mastery, to me, is a fickle word.
Did Friends U Religion/Philosophy courses do that to/for me at a comparable extent to other things I learned there? Not even close. Extracurricular teacher-visits certainly helped, and interaction with fellow students in my major gave me the largest gains in this area: dealing with responsible people and/or people that were *becoming* responsible gave me insight into my own life in such a way that I feel that this area of my education is far from deficient. But is that ensured for every student every year by a class or series of classes? No. "What Does it Mean to be Human" came the closest to examining it in a formal setting, but I think under my definition, it's a difficult thing to teach, and impossible if the student isn't internally motivated.
Radical, thanks for the lengthy comments. I'm not certain that the field of REL/PHIL can in less than four years of interaction move one from not thinking critically about Rel/Phil to thinking critically about them. I do think that we move along the zip line, but sometimes, as you note in your last sentence, the student never jumps off the platform!!!
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