Religious Education Commons^™

Playing To Grow. Roundtable Interview On Games, Education, And Character, Owen Gottlieb, Matthew Farber, Paul Darvasi

Articles

In this roundtable interview moderated by Paul Darvasi, lecturer at the University of Toronto and co-founder of Gold Bug Interactive, Owen Gottlieb and Matthew Farber discuss research and practice at the intersection of religion, character education, and games in schools. Gottlieb is an associate professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, founder and lead faculty at the Initiative in Religion, Culture, and Policy at the MAGIC center, and founder and director of the Interaction, Media, and Learning Lab at RIT, where he specializes in interactive media, learning, religion, and culture. Farber is an associate professor of educational technology and coordinator …

"Read It Again!": Storytelling To Imitate The Great Teacher, Kate Whatley

Senior Honors Theses

The student’s mind is bent on stories, asking mothers around the world to ‘read it again’. These stories preserve information and emotions for centuries. In the classroom, stories enliven motivation and empathy in ways that result in higher academic achievement and social awareness. Learning to use stories as a key instructional strategy will allow for more equitable opportunities in classrooms, encourage mental health and truth telling for the teacher and the student collectively, and allow the academic community to imitate Christ by contributing to the bigger story taking place across time. In application of using stories as teachers, this thesis …

Shifting Paradigms: Using Action Research To Redefine Engagement In Faith Formation In Unitarian Universalism, Amy Huntereece

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

The issues that this research addressed were the changes related to engagement in religious education (RE) in the Unitarian Universalist (UU) church in the past several decades. To address this problem, the purpose of this research was to innovatively problem-solve with other religious professionals and consider how to redefine engagement to support families in their faith formation. The research aims to answer the question: How could UU RE professionals more effectively engage families in faith formation opportunities designed to meet the desired outcomes of RE parents/caregivers? To gather data, interviews with seven Millennial and Generation X parents/caregivers from the Baja …

Minecrafting Bar Mitzvah: Two Rabbis Negotiating And Cultivating Learner-Driven Inclusion Through New Media., Owen Gottlieb

Articles

In 2013, a boy with special needs used the video game Minecraft to deliver the sermon at his bar mitzvah at a Reform synagogue, an apparently unique ritual phenomenon to this day. Using a narrative inquiry approach, this article examines two rabbis’ negotiations with new media, leading up to, during, and upon reflection after the event. The article explores acceptance, innovation, and validation of new media in religious practice, drawing on Campbell’s (2010) framework for negotiation of new media in religious communities. Clergy biography, philosophy, and institutional context all impact the negotiations with new media. By providing context of a …

Designing Analog Learning Games: Genre Affordances, Limitations And Multi-Game Approaches, Owen Gottlieb, Ian Schreiber

Articles

This chapter explores what the authors discovered about analog games and game design during the many iterative processes that have led to the Lost & Found series, and how they found certain constraints and affordances (that which an artifact assists, promotes or allows) provided by the boardgame genre. Some findings were counter-intuitive. What choices would allow for the modeling of complex systems, such as legal and economic systems? What choices would allow for gameplay within the time of a class-period? What mechanics could promote discussions of tradeoff decisions? If players are expending too much cognition on arithmetic strategizing, could that …

Self-Efficacy Score Differences Between Supported, Unsupported, Departmentalized And Non-Departmentalized Classical Christian Elementary Mathematics Teachers, Cristina Marie Dube

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Classical Christian schools have increased exponentially over the past 20 years. The main mission of a classical Christian education is to produce a student who is better equipped to think and apply the Christian worldview to every situation. Classical schools are based on the Greek Trivium which focuses on the tools of learning: grammar school, logic school, and rhetoric school. Classical tenets include integration of content, memorization of basic facts, and reliance on the Socratic Method. Utilizing the Socratic Method requires teachers to be confident in their understanding of mathematics. Because of the lower mathematics self-efficacy of elementary school teachers, …

Interview Of Fred J. Foley, Jr., Ph.D., Fred J. Foley Ph.D., Jeanmarie Turner

All Oral Histories

Dr. Fred Foley, Jr. was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in December of 1946. His parents were Fred Joseph Foley and Doris Nelson Foley. He moved to the Philadelphia area with his family when he was four years old. He is married, has three children and four grandchildren. He lived in Delaware County growing up. Dr. Foley attended St. Andrew's Grade School and Monsignor Bonner High School for Boys. He attended St. Joseph’s College as an undergrad majoring in Politics. He graduated with a B.A. in Politics in 1968. He attended Princeton University for his Master’s and Ph.D. programs. He graduated …

Finding Aid For Elsie Green Dement Papers, (1928-1934), Elsie Beatrice Green Dement

Elsie Beatrice Green Dement Papers

Finding aid for the Elsie Green Dement Papers, (1928-1934).

Re-Playing Maimonides’ Codes: Designing Games To Teach Religious Legal Systems, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

Lost & Found is a game series, created at the Initiative for

Religion, Culture, and Policy at the Rochester Institute of

Technology MAGIC Center.1 The series teaches medieval

religious legal systems. This article uses the first two games

of the series as a case study to explore a particular set of

processes to conceive, design, and develop games for learning.

It includes the background leading to the author's work

in games and teaching religion, and the specific context for

the Lost & Found series. It discusses the rationale behind

working to teach religious legal systems more broadly, then

discuss the …

The Lost & Found Game Series: Teaching Medieval Religious Law In Context, Owen Gottlieb, Ian Schreiber

Presentations and other scholarship

Lost & Found is a strategy card-to-mobile game series that teaches medieval religious legal systems with attention to period accuracy and cultural and historical context. The Lost & Found project seeks to expand the discourse around religious legal systems, to enrich public conversations in a variety of communities, and to promote greater understanding of the religious traditions that build the fabric of the United States. Comparative religious literacy can build bridges between and within communities and prepare learners to be responsible citizens in our pluralist democracy. The first game in the series is a strategy game called Lost & Found …

Your Iphone Cannot Escape History, And Neither Can You: Self-Reflexive Design For A Mobile History Learning Game, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

This chapter focuses on the design approach used in the self-reflexive finale of the mobile augmented reality history game Jewish Time Jump: New York. In the finale, the iOS device itself and the player using it are implicated in the historical moment and theme of the game. The author-designer-researcher drew from self-reflexive traditions in theater, cinema, and nonmobile games to craft the reveal of the connection between the mobile device and the history that the learners were studying. Through centering on this particular design element, the author demonstrates how self-reflexivity can be deployed in a mobile learning experience to …

Selections From Elsie Green Dement's Scrapbook, Elsie Beatrice Green Dement

Elsie Beatrice Green Dement Papers

Selections from book I of Elsie Beatrice Green Dement's scrapbook compiled while she was a student at Abilene High School and Abilene Christian College. The title page of the scrapbook reads "Prepared by Elisa Hoffmaster, April 17, 1997." The scrapbook has been disassembled and placed in protective sleeves.