Contours of Religion,Scholarship and Higher Education : A Review Essay

Abstract

This article summarizes and comments on issues raised in Religion, Scholarship and Higher Education: Perspectives, Models and Future Prospects, a book which is the product of the Lilly Seminar on Religion and Higher Education. The first two sections of the book deal with faith in relation to the nature of the academy and to disciplinary inquiry. The article focuses mainly on the third section, entitled ‘Religious Perspectives on Teaching: Reflections on Practice’. The essays in this section, with one notable exception, fail to adequately tackle pedagogical questions concerning how students are taught and how their identities are shaped in schools and colleges. There is a noticeable drift in most of the essays in this section of the book away from the questions of teaching that provide the ostensible framework and back towards issues having primarily to do with disciplinary scholarship. This process appears to be aided and abetted by a tendency to think of teaching as basically a process of telling. These essays also fail to make reference to any existing work about pedagogy or from the discipline of education. Why this is important is because the relationship between religion and higher education cannot be adequately understood without more disciplined attention to distinctively pedagogical concerns. Reluctance to delve into pedagogy and questions of student formation is ultimately a reluctance to pursue the book's stated theme all the way to its conclusion.

Keywords

faith-learning integration pedagogy student formation disciplinary scholarship

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