Jaime Waters, associate professor of Old Testament
At the CSTM, faculty and students interact in a variety of settings which allows us to build strong relationships and foster collegiality. In the classroom, faculty and students collaborate to create fun and enriching learning environments. In my Core Narrative course, for instance, students frequently lead discussions, create activities, and shape the direction of the course. I provide opportunities for students to share their perspectives, concerns, and approaches to studying Scripture. Beyond the classroom, faculty and students gather for weekly liturgy at St. Ignatius Church and daily liturgy at the CSTM chapel. We also break bread together during weekly breakfasts and lunches. These are great opportunities for prayer and fellowship that strengthen the community. There are also social and volunteer opportunities, such as barbecues, holiday parties, and Eschaton Week, a week-long celebration with events on and off campus. I have come to know students on more personal levels by attending CSTM programs and meetings. For example, I traveled with a group of students, faculty, and staff to volunteer with adults with disabilities. I also shared my experiences in the academy at a Women’s Group meeting and spoke at a community meeting on racial justice. These experiences outside of the traditional classroom setting add more depth and dimension to my life at the CSTM and help to support and strengthen relationships throughout the CSTM community.
Stephen J. Molvarec, S.J., assistant professor, history of Christianity
One of the things I value most about teaching at CSTM is the opportunity to work closely with students who bring such a remarkable range of experiences, intellectual interests, and ministerial commitments to their studies. Our relatively small community makes possible a kind of sustained engagement between faculty and students that I think is especially valuable. Conversations that begin in the classroom often continue in office hours, where there is time to explore questions in greater depth, and students have opportunities to pursue particular interests through directed studies, theses, and other forms of individual academic work. During several academic years, I've also had the experience of having a student as a research assistant, which is an opportunity for mentorship, for deeper conversation on topics related to my own work, writing, and publishing.
For me, these encounters are important because teaching involves considerably more than communicating a particular body of knowledge, even if we often start there in a foundational sense. It means taking students seriously as intellectual partners, meeting them where they are, and helping them develop the habits of inquiry and reflection that will inform their scholarship, their ministry, and their lives beyond CSTM. This is not, moreover, a relationship in which learning proceeds in only one direction. My students regularly introduce me to perspectives I might otherwise have overlooked, challenge my assumptions, and invite me to reconsider familiar questions in new ways. Even sometimes, something that poses as a simple question, voiced by a student in class, has led to deeper reconsideration on my part as to how I explain fundamentals of the history of Christianity. I find this reciprocal character of teaching and learning especially rewarding. At its best, theological education is a shared, communal undertaking, one in which faculty and students learn from one another as they deepen their understanding of the Catholic Christian tradition, engage critically with the world around them, and consider how their studies might inform the lives they are called to lead.