In this issue, we do something a little bit different with the “In the Classroom” section of the journal. We've renamed it “(Not) In the Classroom” to signify its theme: the challenges and opportunities of teaching and learning online. This is the brave new world of theological education. It's celebrated by some for increasing access and updating learning environments to keep pace with our digital lives. Skeptics are concerned that they'll miss the “presence” of face-to-face instruction and wonder how formation for ministry can take place at a distance. Online learning is revolutionizing undergraduate education as well. Are MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) the wave of the future or a passing fad on the way to something else? Increasing percentages of general education courses are being offered online now, and the business plans of for-profit universities depend on the access and volume that can only be provided online. The (Not) In the Classroom section makes no attempt to survey the breadth of this phenomenon, nor to systematically assess it or resolve its pedagogical challenges. The questions are far too numerous and complicated. How many books are published each year on this topic? (This journal has reviewed more than thirty of them in the past year, although “only” four in the current issue.) The articles we publish here were not solicited to create a comprehensive statement. Instead, they represent a series of glimpses, snapshots, reactions, and debates that depict in a small way the messiness of the pedagogical revolution we are in the midst of. Melinda McGarrah Sharp and Mary Ann Morris's essay, “Virtual Empathy?,” wonders aloud whether it is possible to teach pastoral care online. The authors recount the pedagogical decisions they made to transform an on-campus pastoral care class into one of the first online courses offered at their seminary. Unwittingly, they became advocates of online teaching to their resistant faculty. They discovered that crucial skills of pastoral care – such as the ability to identify anxieties and practice empathy – can actually be taught better in certain online learning designs than in the face-to-face classroom. Their analysis of student learning in the online environment draws on the subject matter of the actual course, to construct an interesting self-reflective argument steeped in the authors' research knowledge of pastoral care (now transposed to the online classroom in interesting ways). Formation for pastoral care is at the heart of online-resistors' fears of what is bound to be lost as theological education takes place increasingly online. Lisa Hess describes herself as a “recalcitrant” and “begrudging” adopter of online teaching. Her cautious, moderate, and carefully nuanced analysis of all that is lost in the online environment contains a note of sadness, to be sure. And yet she finds herself arguing against the resisters and the alarmists. Her short essay helps acclimatize us to the inevitable changes we're facing in theological education. She provides more hope than resignation, and plenty of theological perspective. In contrast, in the first of three essays comprising this issue's Forum, Mary Hess provides a full-throated celebration of “the new culture of learning” that some learning theorists are finding in the spontaneously emerging world of online gaming. No one needs instruction to learn how to join and play in these virtual worlds (well, no one under twenty-five years old, perhaps). So what can we learn about how these games teach themselves? And what can we learn about learning if we look at the self-motivated, inquiry-driven, activities of online gaming? This is learner-centered, active-learning 2.0. We ought to embrace it and emulate it, she argues. But not so fast, responds Eugene V. Gallagher writing from a college liberal arts context. His contribution to the Forum identifies several characteristics of the face-to-face classroom that would be sorely missed in a careless adoption of online learning environments. And to complement these two opposing positions, Katherine Turpin's contribution provides a case study by describing a course redesign that quite consciously set out to adopt the pedagogical principles and strategies of this “new culture of learning.” There's no easy resolution in the tripartite rhythm created by the essays in this Forum. Over the past year or so we have been collecting Teaching Tactics for online environments, and we publish six of them here (two or three times our normal number). There are Tactics about teaching critical thinking, student final projects, using Twitter, and creating presence online. Many of these Tactics can be adopted for face-to-face classrooms or used in hybrid technology-infused teaching formats that are increasingly becoming the norm. Is it coincidental or ironic (or polemical) that the three articles in this issue focus on a radically contrasting pedagogical issue: embodied learning and the natural environment? Jennifer Ayres describes a civically engaged pedagogy of “learning on the ground” through earth-honoring social practices. Kevin J. O'Brien argues that an environmental ethics course can and should synthesize critical thinking with advocacy. And Forrest Clingerman masterfully weaves these two essays together to show how teachers must acknowledge the materiality and embodied nature of learning, the emotional and intellectual levels of student commitment, and the place of critical reflection in our everyday practices and actions. In the previous issue of Teaching Theology and Religion, we published several manuscripts relating to the single issue of teaching race and social justice to privileged college students. (See the manuscript by Karen Teel, “Getting Out of the Left Lane: The Possibility of White Antiracist Pedagogy” and Anna Floerke Scheid and Elisabeth T. Vasko, “Teaching Race: Pedagogical Challenges in Predominantly White Undergraduate Theology Classrooms” and responses by each of the authors to each other, in the April 2014 issue of TTR, 17:2). In the current issue we create a mini-theme focused on online learning in the “(Not) In the Classroom” section, and we continue this trend towards themed collections of essays in the Articles section's contrasting attention to embodied learning. So too, the October 2013 edition of TTR (16:4, two issues ago) was devoted entirely to inter-faith theological education. As the number of submissions grows, and the queue of essays awaiting publication increases, we are finding inventive ways to package articles together in thought-provoking ways. And, as always, we have a large number of book reviews to keep our readers abreast of developments in these and many other subfields of teaching and learning in higher education.
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Thomas Pearson (2014) studied this question.