For more than twenty years, I have enjoyed teaching a variety of ages and stages from pre-school to college.Read more…
Teaching Tips: My Top 3 Tips
Here are my top three reminders I would do well to apply [to teaching] more regularly.Read more…
Teaching Tips: Listening
Really listening to my students also challenges me to see course material with new eyes—their eyes. It forces me to approach the familiar grounds of knowledge using unfamiliar pathways. At its best moments, listening to my students equalizes us as we become collaborators in the project of learning.Read more…
Teaching Tips: Yearning and Practicalities
When I first started teaching, I would obsessively replay my mistakes, wracking my brain for ways to make up for them next time. I still do. But I also try to remember the advice I received from my first pedagogical mentors: It’s just as important to focus on what you did well so that you can keep doing it.Read more…
Teaching As Relationship (Teaching Tips)
Last summer I was given the opportunity to teach my first college-level class: a senior-level lecture course on the history of the American Civil War and Reconstruction. I frankly wasn’t that nervous and I went into the course thinking that my job consisted of a simple two-step process where I simply downloaded information into my students’ brains and then challenged them to think critically about the past and its connection to the present. Read more…
Teaching Tips: Grace and Identity
As an undergraduate, I found it very difficult to contribute to class discussions—sometimes I was too shy to speak up, other times I simply couldn’t think of anything to say. The struggle persisted into graduate school, where I pushed myself to participate, but was still frustrated and disappointed in my performance. I suspected that my professors were too.Read more…
Summer Snapshot: Research, Teaching, Missions
While many picture summer as a time of beaches, pools and binge watching the latest drama, God’s plans for me this summer involve a juggle of research, teaching, and coordinating mission teams coming to New Orleans.Read more…
Processing your PhD: on teaching
Almost by their nature, large research universities don’t necessarily prime their PhD students and candidates for a teaching-oriented academic career. Read more…
Summer Snapshot: A Historian in Graduate School
Going into the Summer of 2016, I expected to be working my regular low-pressure desk job back home. Instead, God had other plans.Read more…
Scholar’s Call: The Student Who Walked Away
I do not claim to be a great teacher today, though I’d like to think I am getting better. When I first started teaching I was woefully inadequate to the task. Research and writing came naturally to me. Standing in front of a room full of people and commanding respect did not.Read more…
Scholar’s Call: The Joy of Becoming a Generalist
The first day of the fall semester of my senior undergraduate year, I ran into a friend of mine, a fellow history major, outside of the student union building at the research university we attended. We stopped and talked for a bit, updating each other on our lives and comparing our fall schedules. My friend had just been to the university bookstore, and he showed me a textbook he had just bought for a History of the Old South class that the history department was offering that fall.Read more…
The Missional Professor in Universities Outside North America
Keith challenges us, saying that evangelicals should be commended for ministering well at the periphery of the University; however, now is the time to move to the heart of the university – the podium. There has been a clarion cry to do this in the United States and now there should be a cry to do this globally.Read more…
Journalism Notes: Students go Gonzo for relativism
Journalists traffic in the currency of credibility. What are we to make of this if even the most basic news reports are cast off as irreconcilably subjective, biased and untrustworthy?Read more…
Journalism Notes: Spiritual Growth Through Reading and Writing News
The story isn’t about me; it’s about others. It’s about serving others. If I have any gift or talent to do this job, it’s only because of God’s glory and generosity.Read more…
Urbana Preview: Cross-Cultural Teaching—One Story and a Few Tips for North American Scholars
Personally I had the opportunity to serve on a law faculty in Uganda for seven years. It was an incredible experience and I got involved in some very meaningful work. However, there was definitely a learning curve. To explain I need to tell a quick story . . Read more…
Book Review: Abusing Scripture
In “Abusing Scripture,” the author explores the different ways we misread the Bible and consequently interpret and apply it in ways that abuse both the intent of the text, and sadly, in some cases the people with whom we apply these texts.Read more…
Book Review: Exiles From Eden
Schwehn chronicles a shift in the academic vocation from one of formation of the mind and character of students to one of making knowledge, reflecting a change from religiously shaped values to a valuing of formal and procedural rationality, and from an integral sense of self to a multiplicity of “selves.”Read more…
Learning to wait on God in North Korea (Scholar’s Compass)
I recently had another opportunity to teach a class at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST), in North Korea. Each of the times I have taught at PUST, there has been challenge and reward. Read more…
Teaching with authority to the glory of God, Part 3 (Scholar’s Compass)
In imitation of Jesus, the teacher must teach, not for her own glory in order to advance her career or to gain acceptance or to win approval, but for the glory of God and for the benefit of her students.Read more…
Teaching with loving authority, Part 2 (Scholar’s Compass)
Those who attended the synagogue at Capernaum were used to hearing the scribes preach. However, the scribes focused on legalism, on external observances and on teaching man-made traditions. They did not seek the needy out as Jesus did, to love, heal and teach them.Read more…
Teaching with authority, Part 1 (Scholar’s Compass)
Jesus spoke in a way that his audience had never heard before. Read more…
Scholar’s Compass: Making God’s Glory Known
It is an abdication of scholarship when Christians do academic work with little reference to God. If all the universe and everything in it exist by the design of an infinite, personal God, to make his manifold glory known andRead more…
Bible-Believing Biblical Scholar, Part 2: Integrating Christian Faith and Biblical Scholarship (Scholar’s Compass)
Teachers have significant influence through what they say. There are at least two spheres in which this warning from James is important to me: the church and the classroom.Read more…
Faculty Interview: Jay McGhee, Natural Sciences
At The Ends and Goals of Higher Education in Twenty-First-Century America: Change and the Calling of the Christian Educator, I had the privilege of getting to know a number of Christians who serve Christ in higher education. One such faculty was Dr. JayRead more…