JFTF Spotlight

Posted by brandea1 on Tuesday, January 24, 2023 in News.

Each year, the CFT highlights the work of our Junior Faculty Teaching Fellows. This month, Stephanie Budwey from the Vanderbilt Divinity School talks about her journey so far as a Fellow.    

I am the Luce Dean’s Faculty Fellow Assistant Professor of the History and Practice of Christian Worship and the Arts and Director of the Religion in the Arts and Contemporary Culture Program at Vanderbilt Divinity School. My teaching and research focus on the relationships between social justice issues, liturgy, and the arts. The classes I teach include Introduction to Christian Worship, Images of Mary in Christian Thought and Practice, Christian Congregational Song, Readings in Liturgical Theology, and Episcopal Liturgy: The Book of Common Prayer and its Resources.

This is my fifth year at Vanderbilt, and I applied to the Junior Faculty Teaching Fellowship to learn new insights and strategies on how to become a more effective teacher. Additionally, I was excited to have the opportunity to work with the Center for Teaching faculty as I design a new course that is based on my new book, Religion and Intersex: Perspectives from Science, Law, Culture, and Theology. It has felt like a challenge to design a course with a book as a starting point, rather than thinking of a course and then deciding which books to use. Our weekly discussions with Stacey Johnson and my cohort have given me great insights as I consider what the course goals, objectives, and assessments will be and how they should relate to each other. The one-on-one meetings I have had with Julaine Fowlin have given me further opportunity to fine tune these aspects of the course as well as how to lay out the topics of the course. One important suggestion from Julaine was not to simply lay out the course in the same order of the chapters of my book, but rather to structure the course around the goals and how they build off each other. It has been incredibly helpful to have all of this input as I prepare to teach this course for the first time in the spring of 2024.

As I work on preparing my tenure application materials, I have also appreciated the insights on how to document my teaching and prepare the teaching part of my application. I am so grateful to have had this opportunity to grow as a teacher, build a new course, and learn from my colleagues across disciplines.