E-seminar : Pastoral Theology

Description:

About 15% of the world’s population lives with some form of disability.  Many are not having their needs met because of barriers to participation in rituals, worship and faith community activities at their places of worship. To truly empower people with disabilities to become agents of positive change in their local communities, we recognize that everyone has a role to play. Our Doors Are Open seminar helps all faith communities to understand how to open their mind, hearts, and doors to people with all kinds of abilities. Traditionally, faith communities position people with disabilities as recipients of care and not as givers. Most faith communities do not have good representation of people with disabilities throughout their activities despite a desire to be open and inclusive. This disparity is often the result of lack of understanding of how to think about disability differently. In this seminar, students will learn the social model of disability which positions disability as a function of exclusively designed environments rather than a lack of ability. Our Doors Are Open Seminar will guide students in how to see their activities and environments through an inclusive lens as well as how to take actions to improve inclusion and achieve the welcoming goals of congregations.

Pedagogical procedure : 

• The seminar takes place on Moodle, Domuni's distance learning platform (moodle.domuni.eu). Each student logs in independently and works at his/her own pace, according to the established schedule. 
  
  
• Each of the four steps lasts two weeks. 
  
  
• During the first week of the step, each student is asked to write a structured contribution to the seminar, using the texts and the points of focus presented by the professor. The paper has to comply with the following requirements:

- Aprroximately 4,000 characters, including spaces.

- Written in a word-processing software (Word, Open Office, ...)

- The paper must be posted on Moodle via the available forum before the end of the week one.

• The second week of the step is dedicated to debates and discussions, supervised by the professor.
  
  
• The final mark takes into account the quality of the four contributions and the active participation in the debates. 
  
  
• Each requires minimum 7 hours of personal work.