Teaching with World Religions – Introduction

I have taught religion in an academic setting in some form or another for over 20 years.

But this is not a series about how to do that.

Instead, this blog series explores what it might look like to use insights or practices from major world religions as approaches to or guidelines for teaching.

Let me stress at the outset that this is purely practical. Adopting the principles or activities as teaching strategies no more means that you have to adopt them in any other part of your life than a football team embracing “West Coast offense” means they have to physically relocate to California. I am not advocating for (or against) the “truth” of any of these things; I am advocating for their usefulness, as spurs to pedagogical reflection, if nothing else.

One way to study religion, in fact, is to look at how useful it is – what it does (and asking for guesses at that is a common first-day activity when I do teach religion classes). One of the things religion does, or at the very least claims to do, is foster transformation. This is also something education does, or at the very least claims to do. So it could be productive to look at how approaches to transformation in both areas can overlap.

Take, for example, a common baseline example of something religions do: posit the existence of a special dimension called the sacred, which is “wholly other” than everyday, mundane reality. In religious practice, belief in the sacred, among other things, leads to marking boundaries. Certain places and times are sacred; others are not. Thus, behavior in or at these times and places is different. Conditions are different. Experience is more meaningful, or perhaps differently meaningful (consider sacred spaces, such as the interior of a cathedral or temple, or sacred times, such as the month of Ramadan).

Now, without going so far as to say they reveal ultimate reality as the sacred does, what might it mean to intentionally mark boundaries around educational spaces and times in a similar way? We already talk about classrooms being “safe spaces” for tossing around and critically examining ideas. Are there other ways we could mark our teaching times and spaces as set apart from the rest of day-to-day life? Are roles different there? Are outside rules suspended there? Do we use different vocabularies? What practices might mark or reinforce these boundaries? Or is such difference even desirable? What are the positives and negatives of marking off times and spaces from others? What messages does that send? How do we look at the world and ourselves differently if we do or don’t do that?

These are the kinds of questions I want to raise in these posts. To that end, each post will end with a series of reflection questions. I do not claim to have the answers. In fact, my answers and your answers might vary. I kind of hope they do.

A last note: this is in no way meant to be a comprehensive series. There are many, many more insights and aspects of the world’s religions than I can go into here. And each of the religions I turn to is much bigger and more complicated than the particular insight I will examine. The ensuing posts are only a starting place. I encourage you to go further on your own.

Reflection questions:

• What does it mean to you to think of education as fostering transformation?
• Do you find it useful to consider educational times and places (class sessions, lectures, classrooms, labs) as somehow different from other times and places?
• How do you create boundaries between areas of your life? Would any of those practices translate to teaching? Would you want them to?
• Do you mark the beginning and end of class time or of educational activities in certain ways? Why? What does this help you do?
• What might happen if you reframed class rules in terms of personal transformation (e.g., “a fast from technology” rather than “no cell phone use in class!)?
• Religions often use journey metaphors to describe their community’s experience. Have you ever used those terms to describe a lesson or a semester? Do you think it would be useful to do so?

To Go a Little Deeper:

• The classic study of the sacred is Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy, though any religion textbook worth the name should give you a good overview of the concept.
• The best place to encounter sacred spaces is in the myths and stories of the religions themselves, from Moses and the Burning Bush to Muhammad’s Night Journey to Odysseus and Orpheus taking trips to the Underworld to the “world centers” of indigenous mythologies, and so on. Read around a little, even online.
  • An example start site: https://csus.libguides.com/c.php?g=768332&p=5510593