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Point-Counterpoint: Providing Examples with Creative Prompts
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A few notes on your fantastic feedback
I hope you enjoyed my first dip into the play literature. Much more of that to come. But for today's post, I'd like to try to get a little feedback from y'all. I had a conversation with a subscriber earlier in the week whose
One of the things I appreciate about Brown's methodology is the qualitative, almost ethnographic nature of the play histories from which he often shares emblematic examples. He'll frequently tell the story of a famous scientist, or an anonymous patient or colleague, and the ways that their
Note: This is a reflection I wrote in 2019 about how God changed my life through surfing. Needless to say, the meaning of that experience has continued to open up for me as I've gotten more interested in the power of play as it relates to formation. Enjoy!
If you've studied education / formation, psychology, practical theology, or an untold number of other fields, there's a good chance you've encountered some stage theories. In my little corner of the church and academy, perhaps the most in/famous is James Fowler's Stages
This week will be a bit of a read-long week, and I think an important one. As I believe I've signaled, I called this project "A (Christian) Formation Playbook" in part because the importance of play is part of my (not-quite-yet-a) thesis. 💡I am convinced that
Even without the holiday, I wouldn't have been able to share all my favorite training spaces this week. What I decided to do was save for this final post several I recommend but that I'm also entangled with in various ways from past and present work.
The first thing I'll say about Priya Parker's website is that it's a joy to explore. Beautiful colors. Smart featured posts. A variety of ways to connect and learn from her work (free newsletter, book, online course, etc.). The second thing I'll
Another oldie but goodie today. This site was recommended to me by an experienced church comms pro when I started in this work twelve years ago. I recently re-activated my free subscription to Nonprofit Tech for Good, and I've found it to be as useful as ever. Don&
This week I'm going to keep things brief so I can skill up for a new format I'd like to try. I'm going to be sharing spaces / communities / repositories / publications where you can get strong, often free or low-cost ideas and training in formation,
I've got lots of ideas for where to take A Christian Formation Playbook in the coming weeks and months, both in this newsletter iteration and hopefully soon as a podcast and eventually a book. But I'm absolutely committed to the idea that this space will be
Yesterday I spoke about a kind of micro-responsiveness in my research: how a particular event (a participant recruitment meeting) led to several rapid-fire adjustments to the learning and research plan I brought to our digital storytelling experience at "St. Sebastian's" summer camp. The other example of
In the academic tradition I was formed in, would-be dissertation writers have to propose, implement, and analyze a pilot study before launching their full project. Sometimes this project ends up being very closely connected to what their dissertation eventually becomes. For me, the connection was fairly loose, partly because while
In addition to helping us track how our people are learning, care helps them and us make choices that further benefit their learning. As I said yesterday, we first "read the room." And then we do our best to make adjustments accordingly. In some sense, then, this learner-centered
Why is care paramount in formative spaces? There are a lot of reasons. In some ways, I worry that in Christian education spaces we sort of overlook the concrete dynamics of what care makes possible, because it's just kind of "in the water" that love, regard,
Of course, there are plenty of cross-cutting big ideas that don't fit neatly into the categories we've been looking at this week: cognitive, social, and cultural. By way of a preview of upcoming weeks, let me share some quotes about two such big ideas: care and
During the first year of our eFormation initiative in the Center for the Ministry of Teaching, Lisa Kimball and I decided to spread the word of what we were up to by presenting at the Religious Education Association conference. I asked her what I should be reading to prepare to
As I said earlier in the week, your advisor can't help but shape your academic formation in a doctoral program. Which is part of why I read so widely in New Literacy Studies (NLS) during my first year or two at Teachers College. (I also initially thought I
(Late start today. But I am delighted to report that my daughter is back in preschool today for the first time since her tonsillectomy last Monday. There was much rejoicing. Shout out to Grandma and Oma for helping us get to the finish line.) For me, cognitive perspectives on learning
Sometime during my freshman year of college, before I'd joined the Engineering Physics department, I got a helpful piece of advice from a visiting industry mentor at a meeting of our student chapter of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers: Decide whether you're a breadth person
Today's question isn't a "big" adaptive one. But I think it's an important follow-up to yesterday's question—and a fun way to end the week. I've been thinking about this question of making faith formation resilient to more
Even though I am all in for moving beyond a Sunday-school-centric model of Christian formation, I do have a significant reservation about one particular consequence of the shift. What's incredibly valuable about the Sunday school model is the ability to design in to an experience over time a
I was speaking with a bishop recently for my day job, and they talked a lot about the role partnerships play in making ministry sustainable—now and in the future. I think that's probably true quite generally from a ministry leadership perspective, but it feels especially important to
I have overseen exactly one online article that "went viral" in a reasonably rigorous understanding of that word. Stop me if you've heard this one. I was exhibiting on behalf of the CMT@VTS at the 2013 Forma Conference when our table got a visit from
A little more than twelve years ago, I was sitting in a conference room in Aspinwall Hall at Virginia Seminary. Lisa Kimball, who had just hired me to be the new digital missioner in the Center for the Ministry of Teaching at Virginia Theological Seminary, was convening a group of
I've been doing recommendation week over on Facebook. If you're interested in my favorite resources for Bible, prayer, visuals, and music, you've got two options: 1. join the conversation on Facebook; or 2. become a paying subscriber to this site. One of the benefits