Women and the LDS Church Conference report, Part II

Continuing discussion of Women and the LDS Church: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives
Aug 24-25, 2012 Tanner Humanities Center, University of Utah and the LDS Church History Library
Organizers ? Kate Holbrook and Matt Bowman

The perfect cap to my summer, which included more writing about Mormon women and their history than was usual for me, was attending both days of the ?Women and the LDS Church Conference.? On a personal note, it gathered many scholars I either knew or wanted to know, including nearly a quorum of the JI permabloggers, and I was thirsty to be part of the conversation and soak up some Western sunshine. The conference featured incredibly high-quality presentations and honest but never rancorous audience participation, and a warm Salt Lake welcome both at the gorgeous City Library and in the sandstone brick building of the Fort Douglas Officers Club on the University of Utah campus. Like a pilgrim to Lourdes, I came away with a vial of sustaining water. I hope we will be talking and thinking about what happened at this conference for a very long time.

Continue Reading

Mormons Got Talent: the Choir Library Wayback Machine

My new calling as ward choir director came with the keys, so to speak, to the closet of old music. I cleaned it out, took it all home, and spread it all over the floor of our library to organize. I didn?t intend for this to be an archival research moment, but as I sorted and tossed I became drawn into the experience and starting reading slower and slower? it was, in a sense, a historical archive dating back at least to the late 1970s.

Continue Reading

Climbing Up the Child’s Ladder: Catechism for Little Saints

I stumbled on this little gem while looking for something else in the Internet Archive?s collection of Mormon publications [1] and was both charmed and intrigued by it. The pamphlet is a 16-page tract, titled ?The Latter-day Saints? Catechism: Or, Child?s Ladder,? by Elder David Moffat. Subtitle: ?Being a Series of Questions Adapted for the Use of the Children of Latter-day Saints.?

Continue Reading

Our Modest Proposal for BYU Women’s Conference: A Mo-TED Talk on Female Ritual Healing

This post co-authored by JI contributors Tona H and J. Stapley

We’ve been thinking…

Each spring, more than 14,000 women converge on the BYU campus for Women?s Conference. The annual 2-day event is cosponsored by BYU and the Relief Society, and it has a remarkable influence among its physical attendees, amplified by the larger sessions being broadcast on BYU-TV and because Deseret Book issues a ?greatest hits? compilation volume of talks from the conference each year. Given its quasi-official status, alongside Deseret Book’s touring production of regional women?s retreats, ?Time Out for Women,? BYU Women?s Conference provides an important venue for devotional talks by and about women?s experiences in the Church. Many LDS women see both as ?approved? forums and use them as a spiritual retreat.

However, BYU Women?s Conference is more like a business conference/trade show than an academic conference. Which got us wondering…

Continue Reading

The Sacred Parking Garage Effect

I get dibs on this clunky coining, but I wanted to articulate something that I’ve noticed in the way many non-academy-trained Mormons approach history. You probably have recognized the same phenomenon under a different name (and I’d love to know what you call it).

Continue Reading

A Weekend Poll

I’ll be teaching a seminar this fall on American religious pluralism and I need to submit my book adoptions soon. What’s hip, new and suitable for upper-level undergrads? Or, alternatively, what are the go-to classics? It will be a general course, not specifically on Mormonism, but I know this crowd would have good ideas, so I’m just throwing it open for suggestions.

Just to reminisce… when I took my undergrad American religion course from Steve Marini at Wellesley College (using the cross-registration bus provided by MIT), we used Stephen Allstrom’s Religious History. Good times.

Suggest away.

Oz Behind the Curtain, Part 4: The Syllabus

Here’s the premise of this post: a syllabus should be more than a boring, text-laden legal contract. If you let it, it can also be 1) a thing of beauty, and 2) a tool to think with about your teaching and your students’ learning.

At this point I hope you can see why this post comes late in my series about course and syllabus design (you can read part 1, part 2 and part 3 plus a part 3a if you care about the nitty-gritty of governance and assessment). Actually putting the stuff into a document necessitates having stuff to put, and all the course planning should happen long before you decide what font to use and what color paper to print it on.

Continue Reading

Religious History Classes Come With Instructions

This is Part 3 in my series on course & syllabus design (“Oz Behind the Curtain”); here are Part 1 and Part 2. I’ve also posted a Part 3a on governance and alignment, but since it’s kind of technical it’s only on my blog; see here if you want to get into those nitty-gritty details.

All my syllabi have some generalized instructions. I include some boilerplate stuff on every syllabus: use of phone and laptops in class, something about attendance and participation to the effect that just showing up is necessary but not sufficient, something about disability accommodations, and so on.

But for a course that studies religion, somehow, I feel there needs to be something more along the lines of ground rules.

Continue Reading

Oz Behind the Curtain, Part 2

This is Part 2 in a series on course & syllabus design; Part 1 is here.

I last taught “Religions in America” in the fall of 2009 as a special topics course in history, which meant I didn’t have to jump through any approval hoops. Since that time, I’ve put the course through our university and General Education governance so it could be listed with a course number in the regular catalog. Now that I’m planning to teach it again in 2012-2013, it’s time to revisit the course from the inside out and update its learning outcomes and course expectations (and give it a revamped web presence). All of this can be done without altering its catalog description or governance approvals–which is an important point if you are inheriting an existing course and are looking to redesign it or reinvent its pedagogy.

My 2009 syllabus enumerated course objectives (old-style, professor-centered).

Continue Reading

Oz Behind the Curtain, Part 1

This will be a series of posts about the process of course creation, using my “Religions in America” course as a case study. I’m thinking about it this week because this is my university’s faculty “Winter Institute” and as part of it, there’s a two-day syllabus development workshop.

Course creation and syllabus design were not something that was covered in any great depth during my graduate education. I used syllabi I like as a model and tried to imitate the teachers I thought were exemplary, but as a general rule: pedagogy was a taboo topic. I don’t know if it seemed beneath us, or too self-evident to merit comment, or irrelevant to the research-and-dissertation-writing process… but you know, when I write those out that way, it seems so obvious that in real life it is NONE of those things, and that it is not only a worthwhile topic for us to talk about, but in fact a NECESSARY one.

Continue Reading