For Teachers & Educators
ICJS Fellowship for Teachers
ICJS offers a one-year cohort for Baltimore-area teachers to gain knowledge and confidence in religious literacy, to develop and share lesson plans for their own classroom, and to think deeply about pedagogy with a network of experienced educators and scholars.
Interreligious Studies and Secondary Education
New book featuring contributions by ICJS staff and fellowship alumni
Edited by Christine Gallagher (ICJS), Lucinda Mosher, and Axel Takacs
Interreligious Studies and Secondary Education: Pedagogies and Practices for Living and Learning in a Religiously Plural World is a groundbreaking collection of essays exploring the role of interreligious studies in public, private, and parochial secondary education.
Contributors—including several alumni of the ICJS Fellowship for Teachers and the Fellowship for Nonprofit and Civic Professionals—offer insights into religious literacy, the impact of Christian privilege, and the transformative power of interfaith dialogue and experiential learning.
Each chapter ends with a list of discussion questions. Our hope is that administrators, professional learning communities, teacher educators, and more can use these essays as a way to begin conversations in their own schools.
Founder Story: Donna Lee Frisch
ICJS teacher programming has always been teacher-led. Donna Lee Frisch (1940-2020), a founding ICJS trustee and a former teacher at Bryn Mawr School, knew that students need to learn about religion to be informed local and global citizens, yet teaching about religion was tough. With generous support from the Frisch family, since 2015 ICJS has offered essential professional development opportunities for teachers and educators.
Teacher Voices
Chalk and Dry Erase: Finding God in the classroom
Spelled phonetically and carefully underscored with an undulating white chalk line: yaweh. Strategically placed by the anonymous penman amongst decades of permanent signatures, a place was made for God, in the classroom. I stood for several minutes, attempting to absorb every drop of the spirit that the message contained. My colleagues and I mused about the…
A Doubting Questioning Mind Arises from Dialogue not Debate
At the beginning of the year, I assigned an essay entitled “This I Believe” to my speech class. The assignment is modeled on the radio program of the same name. The very first essay produced on the program is entitled “A Doubting Questioning Mind.” In it, the 16-year-old author Elizabeth Deutsch writes, “I have visited…
From Being Right to Being in Relationship
At our first meeting of the ICJS Fellowship for Teachers, we were given guidelines for cultivating dialogue over debate. I took these to heart; they felt like a message from a higher power about how to improve all of my relationships. The conversations that we were able to have under these norms were challenging for…
Flour and Water/Body and Soul: Making challah as a metaphor for being human
Throughout the Teachers Fellowship, I’ve come to understand how important it is to teach about religion in schools—especially minority religions. It’s essential for majority communities to respect, support, and uplift minorities. The goal isn’t always to compare religious practices or try to make sense of them from our own perspectives, but rather to learn, listen,…