IST2235-4OL-SP14 - Master's Recital

Faculty Conveners: Katherine Turpin, Amy Erickson, and Sophia Shafi
E-mail for questions: kturpin@iliff.edu

Now the three activities that comprise the masters recital have been posted and are ready to engage. Completion of these activities will not require preparation or external reading, simply response from your education while you have been at Iliff. They should not take more than 2.5 hours to complete, the amount of time your colleagues are spending in the "live" recitals here on campus.  You will be able to complete them at your own pace, but be sure to give yourself a little cushion in case you experience technical difficulties. They will need to be completed by Sunday, May 18th in order to receive the okay for graduation. We look forward to seeing what you can do with these activities!

Dear Prospective Graduates,

First of all, congratulations!  You have made it near the end of your program.  This represents a great deal of effort and learning on your part, and we're so glad you have made it thus far.

As part of our accreditation requirements, we must collect data to demonstrate that what we set out to teach you at the beginning of the program has some relationship to what you know and are able to do here at the end.  We use this data to refine how and what we teach and to improve the Iliff educational experience for students to come.

In many places, this data is an extensive written portfolio of each students' work from throughout their degree program that they discuss with a committee at the end, or a final thesis or senior capstone project.  However, we believe that for a professional degree program, a more performed kind of knowledge is important to demonstrate integration and the capacity to take your theological education into your future working contexts.

For that reason, we created the masters' recital.  This is the first year we are doing the recital in an online format, and we find ourselves struggling a bit to translate the live performance experience into the online environment in a way that accommodates the busy schedules of twenty seniors.  So, we are using the written word a bit more in this recital than we had initially hoped. However, you should be able to complete this writing without research or preparation.  We are really interested in what you are able to do spontaneously at this point.  Remember, you other colleagues are engaging these same activities live and off the top of their heads.  So, we invite you to dive in and just complete the activity without a lot of mulling or preparation. We will not be grading or responding to individual papers....the group will be coded as qualitative data for themes, as our task is to see what trends occur across students rather than what individual students can achieve.

There are three activities to engage:  a news clip regarding an event in Arizona in February, analysis of a theological response to that event from the Arizona Dioceses of the Episcopal Church, and a case study related to your vocational situation.  Each one asks you to post first before reading your colleagues' response, and then to respond to one of your colleagues' pieces to build on it or engage it from a different perspective. We have found that hearing the responses of your colleagues helps you to see what has been learned, and stimulates your own thinking about a case or situation.

Because this data has a serious role in our ongoing curricular revision, we hope that you will do your best so we can see what you can really do.  But, do your best in a spontaneous (although readable to your colleagues) way, so we can see what you can do on your feet, so to speak.

If you have any questions, please feel free to email me (kturpin@iliff.edu) so that I can do my best to answer them.  Thanks for helping us continue to make an Iliff education relevant and quality for generations of students to come.

Peace,

Katherine 

You'll want to start with the Current Event Analysis below.