The classroom can be a space where students can encounter possibilities, confront challenges, and become persons engaging in creative, critical, and compassionate thought.
I approach teaching and learning in a way that centers students’ 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.
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.
Slow Pedagogy: 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 the material they’re given. One set of readings early in the week sets a foundation for reflection alongside film and TV media in the latter half, allowing students not to memorize what they read but instead to put it into practice. Students’ weekly written assignments are often of higher quality than what I have seen in the past. I ask much of them, but I also give them time.
Meta-Reflection: My classes are designed to place students and their own voices and ideas at the front of the class. I become a mentor, while they become the teachers. In my upper-division courses, students are responsible for designing and leading class lessons. We meet both beforehand to think through lesson plans, and then afterward for a meta-reflection on the experience of planning and teaching a course. As I continue to develop new writing assignments, meta-reflection on the task also becomes a central part of their work. 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 disciplinary norms.
Resonation & Resistance: Critical and creative thought begins in learning our own reactions to the ideas with which we’re confronted. Further, students do not always know what they should be “getting out of” assigned reading. What one student “gets out of” it will be different from what another does. I have designed templates for note-taking that moves beyond the tendency to think that we must understand what we read according to some pre-determined standard before having anything to say about it. Students have used these materials to prepare entire class lessons, with successful and meaningful lectures, discussions, and activities.
Scaffolding: I ask a lot of my students in their major assignments. 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 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 get them thinking 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, while also encouraging 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.
I have generated different unique assignments to fit a variety of courses and pedagogical goals that incorporate both written and experiential forms of engagement. Please contact me for access to these assignments.
Unit Assignments:
– Autobiography as History (Augustine of Hippo)
– Writing a Wrong Biography of Joan of Arc
– Writing Cosmology (with Robin Wall Kimmerer)
– Mapping the Systems of Our World (Socio-Political Critique)
– Theology as an Act of Wonder
– ‘Caminata’ (Noticing Your Surroundings)
Final Essays & Projects:
– Time Travelogue (Time Travel as History)
– Building an Imaginary World
– Essay: “What is theology? Is theology of value in your education?”
Zaccary A. Haney, PhD 