In early June, Marcelle Martin and Steve Chase launched the pilot project for Pendle Hill’s new Quaker Studies Online program—a class with 14 students focused on “Exploring the Quaker Way.” Now, close to eight weeks into this first all-online Pendle Hill class, both students and faculty have learned the ropes of our Moodlerooms online learning management system, figured out how to use our Zoom video webinar software, and begun reading and discussing Marcelle’s and Steve’s books and ten Pendle Hill pamphlets—as well as webinar discussions with guest webinar presenters such as Angela Hopkins, Eileen Flanagan, and Sa’ed Atshan.
The discussion have been deep, the perspectives varied, and the geographic diversity amazing. We have students from Tasmania and Canada, as well as from the US west coast, the Midwest, and the east coast. The learning community includes people very new to the Quaker movement, long-time members, and several attenders considering membership. Marcelle and Steve are already evaluating what is working well, what could be improved, and what could be left out of the course when Pendle Hill offers the course again from January 9 through April 2, 2017. This January version of the course will take up to 30 students.
Quaker studies teacher and author Doug Gwyn is also hard at work learning the technology and preparing for his upcoming Fall course, which focuses on deepening Quaker faith and practice in a brittle and unsustainable world of climate crisis, resource depletion, mass extinction, war, and growing inequality. This course runs from September 5 through November 20 and is built around Gwyn’s book A Sustainable Life: Quaker Faith and Practice in the Renewal of Creation and will also include several relevant Pendle Hill pamphlets as readings. The course will also offer real-time webinar conversations with thoughtful Quakers engaged in sustainability work, including Brian Drayton, Pamela Boyce Simms, Eileen Flanagan, and Ruah Swennerfelt.
>>> Click here for more information on these two courses <<<
Discounts? Based on requests from local Quaker meetings, we will also be offering group discounts on individual tuition fees when more than one participant from a single meeting registers for a course. For more information on this, contact Steve Chase, Director of Education, at 610-566-4507, ext. 123.
