I facilitate intellectual communities where all participate in the exploration of ideas and knowledge, and where no student’s voice is ignored or silenced.
I approach teaching and learning in a way that centers participants’ voices and provides them with an environment to develop their own ideas in relation to authors, texts, politics, and society. As an instructor, I am firstly a mentor, helping students navigate their way through often difficult tasks.
Importantly, each semester is an opportunity for me not to refine my teaching, as if to perfect it, but to reconsider and to re-craft my goals in response to students’ individual and collective needs. Some parts of my courses remain consistent across academic terms, while others change. I also tend to leave certain details in my course designs open so that I can adjust them alongside my shifting goals for teaching and students’ goals for learning. This method is what I have come to call contemplative pedagogy, which is an attentiveness and responsiveness to the needs and interests of students as the semester progresses.
Students who leave my classes often express appreciation for the depth of learning that we’ve done. Many reflect on how they discovered that theology and history can be more than what they previously thought, while others comment on how they’ve made new connections between theology and political issues. As the instructor, I witness a change in the classroom dynamics from quiet students who seemed isolated from one another to stronger bonds, readiness to have conversations on important topics, and willingness to share from their own perspectives.
Below, you’ll find four principles that I use to develop my courses. At the bottom of this page, I’ve included a short list of assignments that I’ve developed.
When we focus less on student consumption of content and information, we foster space to think creatively, critically, and compassionately. My classes focus less on rote memorization and more on what students do with and how they think about the material they’re given.
I set up the semester with two weeks on teaching and learning, introducing students to the concept of slow pedagogy and depth learning. Each week then proceeds with a set of readings in the first half as a foundation for further reflection alongside (in the second half) alternative forms of media, such as film and TV, podcasts, audiobooks, or experiential learning. Students not only memorize by consumption, but they create meaningful connections between both written ideas and socio-political issues.
I have seen an increase in the quality of assignments across all of my classes, especially where students begin to develop these connections and research questions of their own. In part, as I will discuss below, this is also due to how slow pedagogy gives me the time as the instructor to think more deeply and extensively about assignment structure and scaffolding. When we slow down, I become a more attentive instructor.
Deep learning is made possible through reflection on what students think that they are doing and on how students think different tasks relate to larger educational norms. In all of my classes, I have noticed that these methods have led to many students making connections across material without prompting.
In my course introduction, we spend two weeks examining the process (and problems) of learning and teaching. I assign podcast episodes that propose new ways of thinking about how it is that we learn and unpacks common assumptions about what learning entails. We use these to build discussions around critical and creative thinking and we develop critical approaches to the university itself. This is an especially important part of my introductory level classes, where I ask students to consider (1) what theology is at all and (2) what role it ought to have in a university education.
Every assignment includes an opportunity for students to reflect on the task itself. This, of course, may take the form of critiquing the assignment (something I welcome as constructive feedback), but it also intends to get students thinking more deeply, alongside other course content, about what it is they think they’re doing and how they’re doing it. In my Faith and Science course, for example, students are tasked with building their own imaginary world (think fantasy, scifi, etc.). The purpose is to encourage students to consider the kinds of knowledge that they themselves value and how they think knowledge ought to be present within and alongside other socio-political structures. They design central elements of this world, and then they use course texts to unpack further how this design reflects their own assumptions about knowledge, religion, and politics in society.
Students and their own voices and ideas take a central focus in my classrooms. They are designing lesson plans and leading classes in groups. In effect, as they become the teachers of the class I in turn become their mentor. Each group meets with me beforehand to think through lesson plans and to respond to any questions or anxieties about teaching. We then meet after the course for a reflection on the experience of planning and teaching where we discuss (1) what they thought went well; (2) what they thought could have gone better and what they might have done differently; (3) how future groups might incorporate alternative methods.
My courses invite students to develop habits of critical interpretation and reflective judgment, encouraging them to connect historical and theological traditions to contemporary questions and through their own lived experience. These are beginning points to thinking through our own ideas and our own assumptions, which are necessary not only for critical engagement with ourselves but with others.
Students often share that they do not know what they should be “getting out of” assigned reading. What one student “gets out of” it, after all, will be different from what another does. Resonance and resistance styles of note-taking have helped students develop become comfortable with how they themselves are thinking through a text, especially when the text is not immediately applicable to a project. This has led to student leaders asking not only comprehension questions about texts, but they begin to draw on their own experiences to dig deeper underneath what the text says on the surface or beyond the questions that I might also prepare.
I ask a lot of my students in their major assignments. I also do not assign tasks that I either would not do or have not already done myself. Weekly journals help build toward larger, more complex tasks, often pointing them in the direction of unit assignments and final projects. Course content can operate similarly.
For example, in my Spring 2026 Christianity Through Time I asked students to think critically about traveling through time as a framework for doing history. Students engaged in popular media content like Assassin’s Creed (2016) and Back to the Future (1985) to engage about different modes, problems, and possibilities of time travel. Journals provided opportunities to think about primary source texts and problems of the ‘mechanics’ of historical work, such as gaps in the historical record and how we might deal with them.
Unit assignments include a full scaffold or set of expectations, which makes assignments accessible and encourages students to think outside the box and take intellectual risks. It is as if to say, so long as you include these essential elements, any other narrative framework or details for your project are fair game. The risk taking that I encourage becomes possible when the fundamental parameters are made clear.
These scaffolds have been successful in encouraging students to think not only within the instructions of the assignments, but I have seen many move creatively beyond what has been asked of them. They add details that I would not have expected, offer reflections, for example, on what it might mean to be a woman time traveling to a different place and culture. Some have even used the time travel assignment to interrogate their own past, and the culture and contexts in which their families were born.
Zaccary A. Haney, PhD 