Your MA in Theology

A Study Skills Handbook

Bennett

• Publisher: SCM Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780334052067
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Institutions & Organizations

Your MA in Theology addresses a range of study skills, from the basic tools of reading, writing and reflection to the complex issues of handling tradition and experience and coping as an international student

1. What Does it Mean to Study at Taught Master’s Level?

Students on theology master’s programmes come with all kinds of previous educational histories. This one has just completed an undergraduate degree in theology or religious studies; that one has a minimal background in theology but a PhD in astrophysics; a third one studied to be an RE teacher so long ago he doesn’t like to remember. Then everyone has different professional and practical experience: from 20 years as an accountant to two years in parish ministry; from the young person who came to theological college last week and feels they have no pastoral experience, to the dentist at the local psychiatric hospital and the grandmother whose last adventure was to learn to fly and who celebrated her eightieth birthday in the first semester of the course. When I started my own postgraduate work in 1988, I had spent the last 14 years at home as a vicar’s wife and bringing up three daughters; the young man sitting next to me in my first lecture looked very young and frighteningly academic.

You may feel most nervous and at a disadvantage if it has been a long time since you studied, but others have their hurdles to overcome too. Those who have written brilliant essays at undergraduate level may find it hard to engage with the reflective and practice-orientated requirements of many master’s degrees in practical, pastoral, applied or contextual theology. It’s hard to be awarded 45 when you are used to achieving 70. Then others may feel disadvantaged by being in a minority tradition. I will say more about these issues in Chapters 4 and 6, but here I mention my student who regarded the set assignment on our core module as ‘frustratingly unsporting’ (Bennett and Porumb, 2011, p. 43), because it expected a type of pastoral experience to which he as an Orthodox lay Christian felt he had had no access. If you feel you might not make the grade, you can be sure others are feeling the same.

Master’s level

How do we define what it means to work at ‘master’s’ level? The very term is antiquated and masculine. Its origin is in the universities of medieval Europe, where Master, along with other titles like Scholar, Professor or Doctor, indicated how long you had studied, what if any teaching responsibilities you held and where you should walk in university processions – wearing what kind of academic dress. You became a ‘Master’ after you had been a ‘Bachelor’.

Master’s degrees today are earned in various ways. If you are reading this book, I expect you are earning yours by undertaking a one- or two-year course, full- or part-time, at some point subsequent to having taken a Bachelor’s degree or having an equivalent qualification or equivalent experience. In many universities in Scotland, however, a master’s is awarded as a first degree, and the universities of Cambridge and Oxford and Trinity College, Dublin award graduates master’s degrees after a period of time, but these are not academic qualifications as such.

The Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA), which produces frameworks for higher education qualifications in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and separately for Scotland, publishes on the web a document outlining master’s degree characteristics (QAA, 2010). This is a good place to start in asking what it means to work at master’s level as most universities in the UK take their level descriptors and their assessment criteria from here.

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Graduates of specialized/advanced study master’s degrees typically have:

i) subject-specific attributes

– an in-depth knowledge and understanding of the discipline informed by current scholarship and research, including a critical awareness of current issues and developments in the subject

– the ability to complete a research project in the subject, which may include a critical review of existing literature or other scholarly outputs.

ii) generic attributes (including skills relevant to an employment-setting) A range of generic abilities and skills that include the ability to:

– use initiative and take responsibility

– solve problems in creative and innovative ways

– make decisions in challenging situations

– continue to learn independently and to develop professionally

– communicate effectively, with colleagues and a wider audience, in a variety of media. (QAA, 2010, pp. 13–14)

Master’s degrees are awarded to students who have demonstrated:

• a systematic understanding of knowledge and a critical awareness of current problems and/or new insights, much of which is at, or informed by, the forefront of their academic discipline, field of study or area of professional practice
• a comprehensive understanding of techniques applicable to their own research or advanced scholarship
• originality in the application of knowledge, together with a practical understanding of how established techniques of research and enquiry are used to create and interpret knowledge in the discipline
• conceptual understanding that enables the student:

– to evaluate critically current research and advanced scholarship in the discipline

– to evaluate methodologies and develop critiques of them and, where appropriate, to propose new hypotheses.

Typically, holders of the qualification will be able to:

• deal with complex issues both systematically and creatively, make sound judgements in the absence of complete data, and communicate their conclusions clearly to specialist and non-specialist audiences
• demonstrate self-direction and originality in tackling and solving problems, and act autonomously in planning and implementing tasks at a professional or equivalent level
• continue to advance their knowledge and understanding, and to develop new skills to a high level.

And holders will have:

• the qualities and transferable skills necessary for employment requiring:

– the exercise of initiative and personal responsibility

– decision-making in complex and unpredictable situations

– the independent learning ability required for continuing professional development. (QAA, 2010, p. 16)

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This is quite daunting so I will pick out the key areas on which you should focus. All of these areas will be treated in more depth later in this book – this is a preliminary sketch of the territory.

Independence

As a master’s student, you will need to work independently. This is related to the question explored below of what it means to study on a ‘taught’ masters. You are expected to take initiative and responsibility, to plan your own studies and to think for yourself. ‘You are your own boss’, a student of mine said recently. As the criteria above make plain, this is related to the connections between master’s studies and professional work. You may be taking a master’s degree as a preparation for employment or as preparation for a doctoral degree, or you may be taking it as continuing professional development. A small number of people take master’s degrees in theology just for the fun of it or for personal spiritual or intellectual development, but for most of us the academic work is connected to present or future practice, whether that is paid or voluntary, academic or professional. So it is not surprising that independence of thinking and working, self-direction, decision-making and problem-solving feature in the QAA criteria. These skills may be second nature to you after years of professional practice (and for these purposes I counted my 14 years bringing up my daughters very much as ‘professional practice’). It is important to remember that we bring transferable skills into a master’s degree as well as taking them from a master’s degree.

On the other hand, this independence may be unnerving. You may have come straight from a highly directed undergraduate degree; you may have arrived from a country and an educational system that gives precise directions about what to read and tests you regularly in this. Whoever you are, you may feel that you are at sea in academia, that your thoughts are not worth much compared with those of your teachers and the writers you engage with, and that you have minimal skills in planning your academic work. I hope this book will help you, but nothing will help you as much as the painful step-by-step taking of risks and trying things out. We learn by doing, by acting, by making mistakes: solvitur ambulando –‘it is solved by walking’ – as Diogenes the Cynic said. The best master’s students are those who have the courage to try something out independently, even if they get it wrong, and to learn from their mistakes.

Critical engagement with current scholarship

The QAA criteria emphasize two aspects of engagement with published work in your field of study – first that it be current and second that it be critical. Gone are the days when you could get away with setting out only the classic positions on your topic, however worthily and excitingly they were laid out in the 1940s or the 1960s in books that appear on all undergraduate bibliographies. Master’s study means finding out what the latest word on a subject is; what the current state of the argument and debate is. You should aim to have several serious items on your reference list published in the last five years. You do not, of course, have to agree with the ‘latest word’ – this is not about being trendy but about showing that you are working ‘at the forefront of [your] academic discipline’. In our doctoral programme we call this having a conversation with ‘key voices’ in the subject area.

But ‘current’ is not enough; critical is also vital. The word ‘critical’ comes from the word for judgement – being critical is about being willing to exercise your own judgement. There is an element of this which is about your ‘disposition’ – about having enough confidence and trusting your own voice (about which there is more in Chapters 2 and 5) – but there is an element that can be learned through techniques.

Think of the matter as attempting to find a ‘critical space’. Archimedes said, ‘give me a place to stand on and I will move the world’. He was referring to the principle of leverage, but what he said is a good image for much more than physical leverage. To get a critical purchase we need to stand back. Please note that this is not the same as being ‘objective’ rather than ‘subjective’. Making judgements is inevitably a subjective activity, but it is about finding a perspective from which we can see more than our immediate prejudices, learn more than we know already. John Ruskin described this as walking round and round the matter as if it were a polygon and seeing it from all angles. ‘Mostly, matters of any consequence are three-sided, or four-sided, or polygonal; and the trotting round a polygon is severe work for people any way stiff in their opinions’ (Ruskin, Works 16, p. 187). Here are some practical tips about how to do that ‘trotting round a polygon’, which may help in gaining a critical perspective.

• Take a historical perspective. Tell the story of how this view or practice came about, what it develope...