Unsure of how you can bring faith into the classroom?
Prayers
- See Resources page for specific prayers
- Open class with a prayer
- Have the class memorize a prayer (e.g., Salve Regina)
- Put prayers for knowledge, peace, etc. on the bottom of exam sheets
- Bring students and their needs into your personal prayer
- Have religious items in your office or lab such as crucifix, icon, etc.
- Offer prayer cards during exam/difficult weeks
- Outside of class, pray for your students by name (at home with family, at beginning of semester, in a chapel, etc.)
- Ask for the Holy Spirit’s guidance for each and every lecture, meeting, etc.
- Periodic email announcements whose purpose is to encourage and build up
- Lighting candles at Grotto, sending picture to students during finals saying that you are praying for them
- Asking if students want to lead prayers
- Can gauge individual interest at beginning of the semester using so as not to cold-call
Discussion
- Take time to talk about important matters, including relationships, discernment, responsibility, etc.
- Remind them of the true source of worth and value
- “You don’t have to be perfect”
- “Your worth is not dictated by your GPA”
- In science and technology classes, directly confront questions of “what is a human” when considering things like biology, robotics, AI, etc.
- Ask the students to reflect on what makes a Catholic [career/profession] different than others (e.g., what makes a Catholic engineer versus a secular engineer?)
- Students across all disciplines would benefit from re-emphasizing the need for silence, meditation, and prayer especially as a tool for discernment
- Remind/link content to nearby feast days (Saints’ feasts, other liturgical days)
- Use order/Logos/sense of wonder to point to God’s existence, especially in quantitative courses
- Compare the tempo of a Mozart symphony to the heartbeat during an ultrasound, use to discuss the principle of ratios
- Ethics centered on Catholic social teaching and/or Christian account of the Common Good
- Most students will have already taken a foundation theology course: Ask how these theological ideas manifest in your specific discipline
Relationship with Students
- Arrange one on one meetings with the students about discernment
- Not just career discernment, but marriage, family, religious life, etc. These are rarely mentioned in career centers
- Cast careers in your discipline as vocations or callings from God
- What are the ultimate goods in life? Strictly material? How to avoid seductions of money, power, etc?
- Meet the students where they are. There is no “typical situation”, even if you might start to think that way.
- Have a mechanism so that students can feel comfortable talking and you can listen
- Help the students, even temporarily, to be free from ambition and lean on God’s mercy
- Mental health is an opening: where is the source of your worth?
- Attend events of your students to get to know them and show you care (sports, plays/performances, etc)
- Provide students with opportunities to see your family/extracurricular life
- Graduate students have a very different experience from undergraduate
- Many resources are targeted towards undergrads
- Stage in life is different (families, job outlooks, etc)
- Many current/former ND graduate students recall being very isolated
- Advisor/advisee relationship is an opportunity for close discussion
- See remarks from 9/22/23
Outcomes
- In a theology class students were asked to write something that they wanted to professor to know.
- 14 out of 16 said that they were “scared” because they “know nothing about the Church/Faith”
- Zero instances of reported student discomfort, negative comments on CIFs, etc.
- Many anecdotes of students personally thanking instructors for bringing spiritual matters into classroom discussion