North American Web Developers Conference, October 1998:

In- Service Instruction in Theological Foundations: Can it be Done Effectively without F2F Contact?

 Patricia Ann Fleming, Ph.D.
Creighton University

ABSTRACT

This paper reports on the results of a web-based distance education course in Theological Foundations offered by a mid-west Jesuit, Catholic University to Catholic elementary teachers of religion in a remote diocese. The paper tackles the question of whether theological understanding can occur in the learner without F2F contact with course instructors. The assessment of  success in theological instruction (as well as in instruction in certain other humanities courses) will not be achieved if emphasis is placed on the speech acts of the instructor. An apriori position that focusses on the difficulty of inscribing the perlocutionary speech act prevents the investigation of the aposteriori evidence found in the the learners' inscribable locutionary and illocutionary speech acts. The author argues that such a determination rests on an examination of those acts as they are captured in chat room discussions and self-reporting in survey instruments.
Keywords:    F2F, Theology, Speech Acts, Distance Education, WebCT 

Introduction: The Challenge

"Theology instruction over the web, without face to face (F2F) contact? Impossible! There are some courses of study, theology being a prime example, in which student appropriation of knowledge necessitates face-to-face interaction." Many of our colleagues in the humanities disciplines repeat this claim to us as we struggle to meet the numerous challenges of on-line instruction. Instructors in fields that claim personal/cognitive transformation as one of their explicit goals will argue that the instructor and learner must be physically co-present so that non-verbal behavior, subliminal clues, and other activities not viewable in on-line instruction can be assessed.. Only then can instructors properly evaluate knowledge appropriation and transformation. The "aha" experiences which clinch understanding cannot be achieved in on-line instruction.

Coupled with this claim is the view that the web does not achieve an ambiance or atmosphere that accurately portrays the classroom, much less the unique environment of the larger institution from which on-line courses may emanate. And, if that institution has a particular mission relevant to personal as well as cognitive transformation, it is often believed that it cannot be conveyed to the distant learner who has never been physically present on campus.

 

Meeting the Challenge

These are the challenges which instructors motivated to provide humanities instruction over the web face, both from colleagues and administrators. Theology and philosophy faculty at a Jesuit University located in mid-west United States grappled with these challenges as they sought to meet the in-service needs of Catholic school teachers, K-8, in a remote diocese in western United States.
 

The Project

These faculty beta-tested a 15 week, three-credit course in theological foundations with a teacher from each of the six elementary schools of the diocese. The course was divided into three 5-week segments in New Testament studies, Catholic Doctrine, and Sacramental Theology respectively. It was taught by three theologians (two Jesuit priests and one lay person) and coordinated by a philosophy professor proficient in the computer skills necessary for course implementation. A teacher from each school met together with the instructor at least once a week in a Chat Room (twice a week for the last segment) and used an asynchronous bulletin board to post responses to questions. The teachers (students of the course) were provided on-line instructional materials via webpages. They transmitted all homework assignments electronically and held private exchanges using an e-mail tool. All this transpired within the secure environment of WebCT. Additionally, students were given an 800 number to use to contact their instructor by phone. They also knew that the instructor had email outside the WebCT shell but they were not encouraged to use.

 
On-Site Administration

The faculty coordinator of this project (the author of this paper) was physically present in the remote diocese on a sabbatical leave from the philosophy department of the University. However, she met with the teachers only three times. Once, in the beginning of the semester, she instructed them in the use of a web browser and the WebCT program. The second meeting was held mid-semester to instruct them in the use of the Netscape Editor so they might complete assignments and post them into the course on the University server in html language, using a wysiwyg program. The last meeting was an optional social gathering. All other contact took place on the phone, except in the case of one teacher who needed to upgrade the memory, modem and ISP in order to proceed with the course. After three home-visits, this teacher was directed to an outside source to solve her technical problems. Hence, the tasks performed by this on-site faculty person could have been accomplished either remotely or by an instructional technology coordinator, had one been available in the diocese.

This faculty administrator (herein referred to as Coordinator) functioned also as a liaison between the diocese who offered the course to the teachers and the University that delivered it. She worked with the administering unit, University College (a division whose mission is to teach the non-traditional student) to properly register students. She contacted the campus bookstore to order and deliver books to the remote diocese. She arranged library borrowing privileges over distance for the teachers with the University library. Her primary function was in closely monitoring course webpages. Two of the three theological faculty were initiates in the use of instructional technology. She instructed them in the use of Frontpage and WebCT. She edited each instructional unit (for form, not content) prior to its posting to the student as webpages in WebCT. She helped develop evaluation instruments with a faculty member from the University’s Department of Education.

 
The Course Objectives

The course was developed for teachers of religion who may need to refresh and renew their knowledge in the Catholic theological tradition. With a view to helping the teacher enrich their classroom teaching of religion, the instructors designed units that they hoped would deepen the teachers’ awareness of the range and depth of Roman Catholic thought.

To this end, they assigned papers which were meant to reflect this deepened awareness, including one which asked the teacher to synthesis the three aspects of the course (New Testament, Catholic Doctrine, Sacraments) around a theme of their choosing.

The course was explicitly created to provide theological, not pedagogical, foundations in the teaching of religion. It was believed that while Catholic school religion teachers were provided ample pedagogical resources through teaching manuals, they might not have the foundational understanding of their faith to convey the same to their students. So, except in the case of Sacramental theology, all course assignments emphasized the teachers’ understanding, not student appropriation through innovative pedagogy.

Theological understanding is a cognitive act and, one could argue, can easily be tested through means that do not necessarily require face to face contact. In fact, the course began with a self-quiz in the New Testament that could be activated by the student without contact with the instructor. Reasons for wrong answers were automatically communicated to the student through the self-quiz tool. Similarly, cognitive understanding could be evaluated in written assignments transmitted either via the asynchronous bulletin board or section papers.

Yet, theology is one of those disciplines, which defines cognitive understanding to include the act of appropriation of instruction by the student. Appropriation requires not only accuracy of information acquired, but also application of that information to one’s thinking, feeling, and acting. The distinction between explanation and understanding (erklaren and verstehen) and the literature, which discusses the nature of verstehen as an act of appropriation, may be helpful here. This act of understanding is often compared to the cognitive-emotional act in clinical psychology. In this discipline appeal is made to the "aha" experience. No matter how well-communicated an explanation of behavior is, it is not believed to be understood unless the hearer engages in an act described as the "aha" experience.

How does one assess the presence of this deepening understanding in the learner? In order to do so, one must access intentional states. Those states may be described variously as believing, thinking, questioning, wondering, promising, ordering, or asserting. Some will claim that experience of the learner in toto is required for this evaluation. Non-verbal behavior is read by the instructor, presumably the hunching forward of the body, the brightening of the eyes, the deep sighing of the breast, signaling to the observer that some sort of transformative intentional state is present in the student. Broadening the definition of such appropriation to that of transformation, stronger evidence is required, such as the change of actions or lifestyle.

 Prima facie, none of this bodes very well for web-based distance education; at least not until the bandwidth widens and telecommunication tools become more viable for use. Yet, can't intention be captured in a speech act; can it be made public? And, in turn, can intention be inscribed?

 J. L. Austin’s work on speech acts is a helpful here. Austin tells us that utterances not only carry propositional content. In How to Do Things with Words, Austin reminds us that any utterance comprises at least two, and in some instances, three acts, the locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary speech act. The locutionary act "includes the utterance of certain noises, the utterance of certain words in a certain construction, and the utterance of them with certain meaning." (Austin, 94). The illocutionary action is that which we do in uttering a sentence. Take the following sentences:
 

 All of these sentences not only have locutionary aspects but illocutionary ones as well. In uttering (1), I promise; in uttering (2), I order or request – depending on the context; in uttering (3) I plead; and in uttering (4) I assert. I am doing something in uttering.

 My utterances can also evoke responses i.e. they have a perlocutionary function. As Austin puts it:

Saying something will often, or even normally, produce certain consequential effect upon the feelings, thoughts, or actions of the audiences or of the speaker, or of other persons…we shall call the performance of an act of this kind the..(a) perlocution." (Austin, 101)   By uttering (1) I may put you at your ease; by uttering (2) I may frighten you or seduce you, depending on context.

 The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur claims that the illocutionary speech act represents intentionality in human action. It is vested with a semantic existence in the grammar of the language. He says here:

…In each case a specific "grammar" corresponds to a certain intention for which the illocutionary act expresses the distinctive " force." What can be expressed in psychological terms such as believing, wanting, or desiring, is invested with a semantic existence thanks to the correlation between these grammatical devices and the illocutionary act. (Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, 14). The intentionality expressed in language is the subjective side of meaning. What the utterer means is what the utterer intends. This subjective side of meaning, so crucial to the theological act of understanding, cannot be fully understood outside of interaction aptly labeled interlocution. Interlocution is an enigma of human action. This is because "what is experienced by one person cannot be transferred whole as such and such experience to someone else. My experience cannot directly become your experience. An event belonging to one stream of consciousness cannot be transferred as such into another stream of consciousness. Yet, nevertheless, something passes from me to you. Something is transferred from one sphere of life to another." (Ricoeur, 15-16) The interactive, dialogical phenomenon of discourse, wherein the hearer recognizes the intention of the speaker, makes intentionality meaningful.

 Hence, what passes between the speaker and the hearer in F2F communication is meaning which is public, not experience as "experienced" which is lived and private. There is little disagreement that the propositional content of discourse passes from one to another, carried in the locutionary speech act. The illocutionary act is also communicable precisely because it is meaningful—it carries the subjective side of meaning
or intention. The least communicable aspect of discourse for Ricoeur is the perloctionary act – what we do by speaking because it is the least discursive. It is carried less by the public devices of language and more by the nonlinguistic devices, which are subject so easily to misinterpretation (gesture, intonation, and physiognomy). Additionally, the perlocutionary act is less interested in intentionality than in a behavioral response to a stimulus. It does not require the reciprocity between speaker and hearer, embodied in the recognition of the intention by the hearer. "It acts not by my interlocutor’s recognition of my intention, but sort of energetically, by direct influence upon the emotions and affective dispositions." (Ricoeur, The Hermeneutical Function of Distantiation, p. 134)

Two Questions to Answer First

We have at least two questions to answer before we turn to the evidence that could establish the occurrence of theological understanding without F2F communication through distance education. What kind of speech act conveys theological understanding? And, is that speech act inscribable?

 Clearly the Chat Room "fixes" discourse. In dialogical writing, what is fixed in writing is discourse that could have been said, but which is written precisely because it is not said. "Fixation by writing takes the very place of speech, occurring at the site where speech could have emerged. This suggests that a text is really a text only when it is not restricted to transcribing an anterior speech, when instead it inscribes directly in written letters what the discourse means." (Ricoeur, "What is a Text: Explanation and Interpretation," Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 147). In other words, the Chat Room should not be viewed as the lowly substitute for F2F interaction. It has integrity of its own. There are no guarantees that the same discourse would have occurred in some purer form had their been F2F contact.

 The locutionary speech act, thought by to be the most inscribable in the Chat Room, is insufficient for fully conveying the intentional dimension of this understanding Yet, it would function as a sine qua non. If a student could not correctly convey the "objective" meaning of articles of faith, she would fail the test of the locutionary speech act.

 It’s the illocutionary speech, the act that carries the speaker’s intentional state, which bears closer examination. The intentional state of the learner is what the instructor observes but so also is it "heard" by the instructor. Is this intentional act, what we do in speaking, inscribable in a Chat Room and therefore "readable" as well?

In so far as the grammatical paradigms (indicative, imperative and subjunctive modes) allow for the material fixation of what we do in speaking, the writer’s intention is inscribable. But, the fixation of intention is also aided, in this emerging form of writing, by the fact of its interlocutory character. Synchronic writing wherein the writers are co-present, made possible by digital technology, permits a degree of responsiveness and the concomitant possibility of recognition of intention that other genres of writing disallow or delay. And, explicit description are introduced by the dialogical writer to display some of these intentional states, such as "hmm" or "heh, heh" or "???" or "!!!!" This implicitly suggests, on the other hand, that the Bulletin Board’s asynchronous form of communication transforms the conveyance of intention as time passes or as no response is forthcoming. We have every reason, then, to examine records of Chat Room discussions for evidence of theological understanding, defined as an intentional state of believing, wondering, questioning, etc.

 The perlocutionary act is considered least inscribable. This is when discourse operates in the energetic mode, when its purpose is to act as stimulus, leaving an effect on the emotions and attitudes of the interlocutor. Yet, this may indeed be what underlies the disbelief that theological understanding cannot occur without F2F interaction. One might hold that the instructor must use the energetic mode to convey theological beliefs for the objective of such teaching is to reap a response in the learner to the stimulus provided by the teacher. Much more needs to be examined if this is the position taken by the theology, or indeed, the humanities instructor. This is beyond the purview of this paper but such a position raises huge questions about the role of autonomy in personal transformation, the reliability of one’s judgment that nonlinguistic devices have long-range effects, etc. Nevertheless, we may want to allow that the perlocutionary act is to some degree inscribable, once again by inventions of the writer such as capitalization, italicizing, exclamation points, and well-crafted sentences evoking emotional responses.

 But the degree of theological understanding in the learner must be measured by the locutionary and illocutionary acts. To assume such understanding cannot take place because engendering such requires a perlocutionary act is either to ignore or to completely distrust the written statements of our students. To use the perlocutionary act as the measure of our effectiveness in teaching is to place emphasis in the wrong place.

 I will not belabor this point further. I will turn now to those inscribed speech acts made by the students (teachers themselves) which provide some measure of evidence for or against the claim that F2F contact is required for theological understanding of the nature described above.
 

The Evidence

 The teachers completed a final evaluation at the end of the course, prior to receiving their course grade. This evaluation asks them to agree or disagree, in varying strengths, with statements about the course experience. It also gives them the option to respond "Do Not Know." The results of some of the statements relevant to the subject of this paper will be shared below. In addition, the evaluation asks open-ended questions requiring the teachers to write out narrative answers. These answers, constituting more than a mark on a page, will also be examined.

The WebCT program records the Chat Room discussions that take place in the course. These discussion lie between speech and inscription. Like speech, they are very immediate and dialogical in nature. Like inscription, their content is fixed for later examination. In these Chat Room records we find attempts by teachers at inscribing the locutionary and illocutionary speech acts. Relevant excerpts from these records will be shared here
 

The Chat Room Records

Each section of the course offered a Chat Room discussion at least once a week, lasting one hour. The third section of the course (Sacraments) offered a Chat Room discussion twice a week.

Reflecting on discourse inscribed
Early in the course the students’ awareness of the advantages and limitations of the Chat Room tool as a means of communication to a faith community became apparent in the following excerpts of a Chat Room discussion:
 

 
The Illocutionary Speech Act Inscribed
Despite the fact that the students initially believed that inscribed discourse could not place emphasis or convey character, both of these attributes began to emerge as the course progressed. The three instructors gleaned similar characteristics about their students on line as evidenced in the questions these faculty put to the course Coordinator (author of this paper who had met each student in person) about their students. Each student took on a character or personality for the instructor. Students and instructors alike began to report on their intentional states as they learned to place emphasis, portray amazement, share disappointment, convey confusion through the mechanisms of language. The illocutionary speech act became inscribed with the use of exclamation points, ellipsis, even explicit descriptions of mental states. Some of this is seen in the excerpt below from the second section of the course (Catholic Doctrine):
  Application to the classroom
Evidence of the application of newly emerging understanding to one’s classroom is found throughout the recorded chat room discussion. Early in the course, this application was explicitly stated:
 
  • One another occasion, the same teacher reveals:
    • Appropriation in one’s own life
    Toward the end of the course, when the teachers were exposed to a new understanding of Christian sacramentality, they began to report on what they understood this to mean for their lives, not only as teachers of the Catholic sacraments, but as practicing Catholics:
      And, then the Instructor dislodges these students from these new but comfortable realizations: In summary, the recorded Chat Room discussions does contain evidence of the intentional states of the students, as expressed in the inscribed locutionary and illocutionary speech acts. So, too, do we see evidence of the perlocutionary speech act, wherein both instructor and student are attempting to "discourse" in the energetic mode. This is seen, if only minimally, in the effectiveness of stimulating the students to respond to questions and in keeping them on the track of the discussion…behaviors we effect in the physical classroom with both the spoken word ("Let’s get back on track") and the physical gesture (ignoring a raised hand, curtailing a lengthy unrelated discussion, etc.)

    Have we evidence that on-line theology teaching incurs long-lasting cognitive-emotional results? When viewing only the Chat Room discussion records, we would have to conclude probably not or no more so than what we can observe in a one-semester F2F contact with our students. However, when we examined the results of our final evaluation we get some corroborating evidence that the course we taught has at least played a significant role in the teachers’ understanding of theological foundations.

     
    The Final Survey Results

    The survey included 35 questions to which the student was asked to Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Agree, Strongly Agree or indication Do Not Know. The survey number is small—five teachers; one teacher dropped out of the course. In an exit interview with that teacher, he indicated his decision to drop the course was not because of any disappointment with the course. He was overwhelmed by his new teaching responsibilities as a first-year teacher.

    The questions varied from the generic to the specific, from the use of the technology to the content of theology. The intent of the course was to teach theological foundations simultaneous with introducing teachers to computer technology and Internet resources.Some of the questions in the final evaluation concerned the teaching of technology. For the purposes of this paper, we will concentrate on the questions which query the teachers about the theological content of the course.

    All the teachers agreed (Agree-2; Strongly Agree –3) that their experience as a student in the course was positive and that the teaching was strong (Agree-3; Strongly Agree-2). All but one student agreed that the contact with the course instructors was sufficient but all agreed that the access they had to the instructors was sufficient; all the students thought the contact with other students was important; they continued to meet with each other in the Private Mail when a Chat Room was not in session and all but one had contact with each other outside the computer environment, i.e. F2F.

    The teachers reported that assignments, books, and course content webpages were all helpful in both their learning theology and their teaching, with the latter getting the highest marks. In fact, all but one student disagreed with the statement that "I would have preferred to have all of my assignments be classroom-oriented, eg. construction of lesson-plans, activities."

    Time was of key concern for the teachers. At least two said they did not have enough time to complete their assignments; two also told us they did not received their grades in a reasonable amount of time; three disagreed that the amount of time spent on the course was consistent with the credit earned.

    There was a degree of ambivalence among the teachers about the use of the Internet and web-based vehicle for instruction over the traditional classroom presentation of material. One disagreed, two agreed but two did not know if they preferred the Internet and a web-based vehicle for instruction over traditional classroom presentation of material. Similar response was found among the teacher when asked if they preferred the integration of instruction in technology with Theology.

    Despite their ambivalence, all teachers agreed they would take another web-based course from our University; they also agreed they would recommend their friends and colleagues take our University web-based course and all would be interested in a Theology certification program through our University taught over the Internet. But, at the same time, four of the five teachers did not know if such a program should include a campus component (e.g. a summer workshop). Four of the five teachers strongly agreed that the course they took from us was superior to any catechetical training that they had previously received.

    Clearly, the teachers had a very positive experience with this course. This positive response is consistent with the successes we began to see in the Chat Room discussions as teachers revealed the ways in which their beliefs were modified or changed. We included questions requiring narrative responses from the teachers. Their answers to these questions shed more light on the question of whether this course brought about theological understanding as described above. These answers need to be recognized as self-reports with the limitations inherent in this type of response. Whether the teacher met the sine qua non of theological understanding, i.e. being able to articulate true statement about Catholic Doctrine, Sacramental Theology or The New Testament would require matching this self-reporting with the essay assignments they completed for their grades. While this is beyond the scope of this paper, suffice it to say that, as a group, this class did slightly above average in terms of their correct cognitive understanding of the material presented to them.

    When asked to describe the strengths of the course in terms of their teaching in a Catholic School, every teacher wrote about how the course affected their understanding of their faith. All but one teacher described how the course has changed their teaching of religion in some way, e.g. in discussing topics with students, in believing they taught out of a deepened awareness of what it was to be Catholic, or a deepened awareness of the New Testament when teaching Bible stories.

    We asked the teachers to tell us how they would like the course changed. Every teachers’ response requested we lengthening our exposure to them in some fashion, either by turning the course into two or three courses, or by lengthening the present course. They asked for more, not less, of us. When we asked for specific suggestions about what we might next offer the Catholic teachers of the diocese the teachers were very clear; they wanted courses in ethics, Church History, and Old Testament.

    Finally when asked to describe the most meaningful aspect of the course, all the teachers described an intentional state, i.e. learning about their ignorance, being empowered by the instructors and coordinator, desiring to know more, getting in touch with their faith, applying their new found knowledge to their classroom.

    Conclusion

    We are cautious but optimistic about the ability to teach theological foundations without F2F contact. By no means do we think that this experiment tells us that we can replace traditional classroom instruction of theology with on-line education. Nor, as an institution, are we interested in doing so.

    However, if our institution were to engage in a program of on-line, distance education, the one we experimented with could not be more consistent with our mission as a Jesuit, Catholic University. Perhaps we need to realize that our objections to teaching theology without F2F contact comes from a judgment that places the emphasis in the wrong place, i.e. on the instructor and his or her perlocutionary speech acts, i.e.the least inscribable act. When viewed from the student’s perspective, the inscribed illocutionary speech act is the appropriate means to access theological understanding. And, the inscribed locutionary speech act, while not sufficient, is the sine qua non of any judgment that theological understanding has occurred. Often in the traditional classroom this act, "fixed" in written exams or term papers is all we rely on. Information technology encourages increased  inscription of the illocutionary act. We are able to see from these speech acts that, indeed, such on-line teaching without F2F contact can be successful.

    Patricia Ann Fleming, Ph.D.
    Associate Professor of Philosophy
    Creighton University
    2500 California Plaza, Omaha, Ne. 68178
    paflem@creighton.edu
     

     © 1998. The author, Patricia Ann Fleming,  assigns to the University of New Brunswick and other educational and non-profit institutions a non-exclusive license to use this document for personal use and in courses of instruction provided that the article is used in full and this copyright statement is reproduced. The author also grant a non-exclusive license to the University of New Brunswick to publish this document in full on the World Wide Web and on CD-ROM and in printed form with the conference papers, and for the document to be published on mirrors on the World Wide Web. Any other usage is prohibited without the express permission of the author.