There's a decent chance you've heard of Paulo Freire. Many believe he was the most influential educational thinker of the twentieth century. Certainly I've been assigned his principal work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, over the years more than any other. Freire contrasts two models
"He must increase, but I must decrease." – John the Baptist I wanna start with the important quote from today's learning theorist: The goal is to teach in such a way as to produce the most learning from the least teaching. This is the best encapsulation I
The third leg (really the first leg) of my little curatorial tripod is LEARNING. This week I wanna walk through a couple theories and resources that I think are most important for formation leaders to know. I definitely think anyone who guides others' learning needs to know about constructivism.
Editor's note: With this edition, I'm starting to think about how to incorporate wisdom from people who chime in on my Facebook posts. Let me know what you think! Let's talk about YouTube! There's a lot made of the fact that YouTube
OK, so what are faith leaders and community group leaders to do in light of the decline of social media? What is a new playbook for reaching, teaching, and engaging in online and hybrid spaces? I have a few thoughts: Focus your best efforts on methods that maximize your reach
Allow me to pour one out for Twitter. (But the issues are about more than Twitter.) What do I miss about this platform? PLAY! Hashtag games. One liners. Memes. Ease of sharing and commenting on all the above. Also CONVERSATION. Especially at live events. Maybe it's true that
OK, so what exactly is different about using social media now than it was 5 or 10 years ago? I think the best place to go for this is a piece from the Verge last fall by David Pierce. I'll put some things in bold for easy skimming:
I'm back! This week I want to talk about how social media has changed. Lots of us are aware of many of the effects, but I want to try to flesh out the picture a bit. Let's start with the classic portrait of what it looked
Since religious disaffiliation has turned out to be the theme of this week's resources, I thought we could look at Elizabeth Drescher's Choosing Our Religion, which is an important and relatively early treatment of these very explosive years of the phenomenon. Here are my main takeaways
There's a great piece recirculated this week in the ECF Ministry Tips newsletter. It's about a surf club ministry run by the Episcopal chaplain at UC Santa Barbara. Especially important bit: 💡Surfing & Spirituality is not a gimmick to trick people into coming to church. Yes,
Here's the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast episode that got the new PRRI data on my radar: I think they almost always do a good job breaking down religion numbers on this show. My biggest takeaway was the panel's sensitivity to the importance of moderate, politically mixed congregations
There's new data out (flew under my radar due to Holy Week & Easter) from PRRI about religious change in the U.S. A few notes on what jumped out to me: * The only group that grew from 2013 to 2023 was unaffiliated people (see graphic). * The most