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 & Impact Stories
There Are No Stupid Questions Across Difference
Some people balk at the idea of “no stupid questions.” I have had students cringe or call out their friends when a classmate brashly asks a question that seems insensitive or reveals cultural ignorance. Like when a student asked me this year around the winter holidays how it was possible that I had Christian and…
What Public Schools Miss When We Flatten Difference
There was a moment during the ICJS Fellowship for Teachers when something finally clicked for me. For years, I had understood the role of public schools as firmly secular spaces. Religion, I believed, was something to be handled carefully, and many of my colleagues would often avoid it altogether. I would teach some Bible stories…
Four Lessons from the ICJS Fellowship for Teachers
For years, ICJS has worked with middle and high school teachers from public, independent, and religious schools navigating one of the most complicated realities of American education: Religion is present in the classroom, even when no one names it. Students bring religious identities, assumptions, histories, holidays, and inherited narratives with them every day. Teachers do…