Dear R101 students: please remember that the information found here on the R101 web site is now obsolete, and you should rely entirely on the information posted within our Sakai platform.

Dear onlookers: using an external blog has not worked out as well as I hoped, and has produced some unhelpful maintenance overhead. Therefore, I’m consolidating resources into an on-campus “course management system” rather than continuing this experiment.

For the last several class periods, we’ve discussed (in broad, general terms) some of the typical processes by which the biblical books came into their present forms (what I’ve called their canonical forms), and some of the factors related to their collection into groups of sacred writings (or canons of scripture).

From the testimony of the writers themselves, we’ve seen that the formation of a biblical book could involve a lot of things, including oral traditions, quotations from noncanonical books, wholesale incorporation of protocanonical books, and so on. We’ve seen that the composition of a biblical book, or of smaller texts that later became parts of biblical books, could be triggered by a number of different types of life experiences, including a desire to remember important people from the past, expressing emotional reactions to life events, addressing questions or issues for a group of worshipers, reporting one’s own religious experiences (like visions) to others, or even obeying direct commands from God (so a few texts claim for some of the earlier texts embedded or quoted therein, though no biblical writer makes this claim for an entire book of the Bible in its final form).

We also gave considerable attention to the differences between the Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant biblical canons (not ignoring Orthodox Christianity and other groups completely, but focusing on the three most populous groups in Noth America).

Students, what do you make of all this? Is there anything about this discussion that excites you? Confuses you? Outrages you? Encourages you? Discourages you? Anything you want to talk about more?

Colleagues who might happen to be following this conversation, what do you consider the #1 thing students should know about the composition or canonization of the books in the Tanakh and the Septuagint?

A colleague recently asked me why I characterize the “lecture-and-test” paradigm as “old and tired,” and why I think it important to overhaul Religion 101 at this time. I recommend the essay “Learning to Learn” by Karl R. Wirth and Dexter Perkins as a starting point in answering this question.

For several reasons, I’ve been on “silent running” around here during most of August. However, since classes start today here at Pepperdine University’s Seaver College, you can expect to see a good bit more activity on the R101 blog.

During the last three weeks, some of the attention I’ve devoted to Religion 101 has focused on the system of student achievements. I’ve tweaked the achievements system a little bit since I originally posted details about it. The biggest changes are:

• “Papers” can now be papers, audio presentations (like one-off podcasts), or video presentations.
• Students can earn points from up to four achievements; each must be tied to a unique course objective (no double-dipping).

I’ll meet my Religion 101 students tomorrow (Tuesday, September 1). I eagerly await their responses to this new way of handling the class.

I spent a lot of time today drafting the grading system for R101 in Fall 2009. In the recent past, I’ve fallen back on the tired old model in which students read some preparatory material, we all come to class and I lecture for a while, then a few weeks later I give the students a test on what they remember. Now my lectures have been very casual and interactive, but they’ve still primarily been information-delivering lectures “broken up” with audience interaction and a few skill exercises that were not their own reward, but prepared students for skill-based exercises on tests.

Enough of that, I say.

I don’t intend to go as far as Cathy Davidson of Duke, who seems to have almost abandoned discretionary grading completely. I have moved a shorter distance in that direction, however. Instead of lecturing content at students, I will be delivering all basic content through readings, podcasts, and videos. Class sessions will always be active lab-type sessions (except for a couple of film sessions, in which it’s just more efficient to show everybody the same film before we apply various queries).

There will still be one content test at the end of the course, in the time slot assigned by the college for the final exam—but that exercise will test students’ abilities to find and use information, not to memorize it. That test will only account for about 14% of each student’s grade, down from 20%.

The rest of each student’s grade will come from six achievements that each student can individually choose from a menu of options tied to the seven course objectives. Each achievement can earn a student up to 6 points, so students can earn up to 42 points from their achievements. (Actually, they can go above this by taking on a few bonus achievements.) At the end of the course, each student’s grade is their point total divided by 10, and converted into a letter using the standard 4-point GPA scale the Seaver College registrar uses to decode the letter grades.

By the way, the various transformations of grades into different forms and scales pushes my “annoyed” button. Most professors grade students on a point scale that gets converted into a percentage, in which 60% or so is the effective floor. Then we convert the percentage into a letter, which the registrar converts into a number from 0.0 to 4.0, using a linear scale where the distance from zero to D– is equal to the distance from D+ to C–, differing greatly from most classroom scales. The math is easy, but the philosophical transformations are mind-boggling. My “minimalist” scale attempts to stay as close to the four-point GPA scale as it can get while remaining usefully granular.

For more details about the different student achievements, please see the appropriately-titled Student Achievements page. Feel free to offer feedback and suggestions as comments to this post, especially if you’re a student enrolled in R101 for Fall 2009.

Seaver College requires Religion 101: The History and Religion of Israel as part of its Christianity and culture general education requirement. As such, R101 “lives” within a series of concentric contexts ranging from Pepperdine University’s mission, through the mission statements of Seaver College and the Religion Division, and down to the catalog descriptions of the Christianity and culture requirement generally and Religion 101 specifically. Because the Religion Division has not formally adopted any core competencies or objectives more specific than the catalog description, Religion 101 professors bear individual responsibility for articulating objectives for the Religion 101 sections they teach. In my Religion 101 sections, I want students to:

• Participate actively in a community of learners gathered around Old Testament texts.
• Use multiple tools to identify and access Old Testament texts on various subjects.
• Analyze the literary, formal, and structural features of Old Testament texts and the Old Testament as a collection.
• Respond to Old Testament texts and topics via personal reflection and creative expression.
• Interact with portrayals of the Old Testament and its characters in various artistic media.
• Interact with historiographical uses of Old Testament texts and ancient Near Eastern artifacts.
• Interact with the uses of various Old Testament materials in modern religious, ethical, moral, and social debates.

To learn more about the various mission statements that shape these objectives, or for further discussion of my rationale for each objective, please visit the Course Objectives page. Please feel free to discuss these objectives in comments to this post.

Welcome to R101, the public face of Christopher Heard’s Religion 101: The History and Religion of Israel classes at Pepperdine University!

Although there’s not much here as I type this post, this website will quickly grow to house multiple resources for R101 students, and will provide a window onto the class for interested members of the general public. Whichever group embraces you, please feel free to visit often for a sense of what’s coming up, and what’s going on, in R101!