Resources
This paper discusses strategies I employed during seven years of teaching within a study abroad program focusing on religion. This year-long program traveled to four Asian countries and included immersion experiences in monasteries, ashrams, and other religious institutions. I identify four principles and discuss accompanying exercises that guided my teaching: (1) Accept and observe anxiety. Inability to understand is a sign that direct and deep contact is taking place. (2) Educate about education. Help students to see the aims, assumptions, and context of the teaching strategies religious practitioners employ. (3) Make it practical. Devise exercises that students can do and do well and that do not demand synthetic, systematic comprehension even as a goal. (4) Stop making sense. Build pauses and breaks into the train of reflection on the meaning of experience. These spaces give room for the shifts in the ways of learning that study abroad demands. This essay is published alongside of six other essays, including a response from John Barbour, comprising a special section of the journal (see Teaching Theology and Religion 18:1, January 2015).
The issue of comparison is a vexing one in religious and theological studies, not least for teachers of comparative religion in study abroad settings. We try to make familiar ideas fresh and strange, in settings where students may find it hard not to take “fresh” and “strange” as signs of existential threat. The author explores this delicate pedagogical situation, drawing on several years' experience directing a study abroad program and on the thought of figures from the Western existentialist tradition and Chinese Confucian philosophy. The article focuses particularly on “oh events” – defined as moments when one learns one has something to learn and something to unlearn. The author argues that the experience of shame that is typical of oh events can become a valuable resource for cross-cultural learning and personal transformation, if teachers assist students to reflect on the experience as a sign of differing, but potentially harmonizable, cultural expectations. This essay is published alongside of six other essays, including a response from John Barbour, comprising a special section of the journal (see Teaching Theology and Religion 18:1, January 2015).
After illustrating the joys of teaching religious studies abroad with an anecdote from my trip to China, I warn of some of its inherent pedagogical and ethical challenges. I argue that teaching some of the “new directions” in religious studies scholarship might address these challenges. These include a turning away from the abstract (texts, beliefs, theologies) and towards the concrete (bodies, places, rituals); moving away from teaching religions as unchanging, ancient verities and instead emphasizing the impact that colonialism, modernization, and secularism have had; moving from searching for authenticity to questioning it; and emphasizing methodological self-consciousness. Keeping these new directions in mind will help ensure the study abroad experience is educationally successful. This essay serves as an introduction to a series of six additional essays comprising a special section of the journal (see Teaching Theology and Religion 18:1, January 2015).
This essay analyzes student learning through place-based pedagogies in an American Religions course. In the course, students analyzed cultural meanings and practices of regional religious communities and participated in sensory awareness and ecological learning in a campus garden. Embodied learning increased student understanding and appreciation of land-based religious practices and epistemologies, and promoted multiple student literacies. In Religious Studies, place-based learning is vital to the examination of the rich dimensions and expressions of religious experience. Across disciplines, place-based pedagogies can expand and deepen text-based learning, cultivate recognition of various ways of knowing, foster affective connections to the local community, and develop critical skills for addressing patterns of displacement and ecological denigration.
Journal Issue.
This paper explores the possibilities and challenges inherent in employing community service-learning as a pedagogy for engaging undergraduates in theology and religious studies courses that contribute to racial reconciliation. The paper summarizes research from the scholarship of teaching and learning on best practices for structuring service-learning projects and processes that hold the possibility of students' genuine engagement with issues of race and the wisdom of the Catholic tradition.
“Metacognition” refers to helping students learn how to learn. This article provides suggestions for integrating student metacognition into a college course. It uses the example of a biology classroom, but the material is easily transferable. 
See the responses by Nancy Fuchs Kreimer, Yael Shy, and Yehuda Sarna directly following in the table of contents linked here. Rabbinical students gain important knowledge and become more reflective teachers by learning about other religions and with people who practice them. They can also learn how to help educate non-Jews about Judaism and serve as representatives of, and advocates for, our community.
Click Here for Book Review Abstract: Delineates Lacan’s theory of the four discourses as a practical framework through which faculty can reflect on where their students are, developmentally, and where they might go. University classrooms are increasingly in crisis—though popular demands for accountability grow more insistent, no one seems to know what our teaching should seek to achieve. This book traces how we arrived at our current impasse, and it uses Lacan’s theory of the four discourses to chart a path forward via an analysis of the freshman writing class. How did we forfeit a meaningful set of goals for our teaching? T. R. Johnson suggests that, by the 1960s, the work of Bergson and Piaget had led us to see student growth as a journey into more and more abstract thought, a journey that will happen naturally if the teacher knows how to stay out of the way. Since the 1960s, we’ve come to see development, in turn, only as a vague initiation into the academic community. This book, however, offers an alternative tradition, one rooted in Vygotsky and the feminist movement, that defines the developing student writer in terms of a complex, intersubjective ecology, and then, through these precedents, proposes a fully psychoanalytic model of student development. To illustrate his practical use of the four discourses, Johnson draws on a wide array of concepts and a colorful set of examples, including Franz Kafka, Keith Richards, David Foster Wallace, Hannah Arendt, and many others. “Graceful, provocative, thoughtful, and well researched, The Other Side of Pedagogy connects theory and teaching in compelling ways. This is a groundbreaking book that scholars of writing will want to read, reread, and teach.” — Joseph Harris, author of A Teaching Subject: Composition Since 1966 (From the Publisher)
Click Here for Book Review Abstract: The Culturally Inclusive Educator asks educators to consider what they can do differently to create a welcoming, inclusive, and exciting environment for the 21st century. Based on the author’s national research and consulting work, this book examines the discrepancy between the current educational cultural climate and the need for educators and their institutions to prepare for a growing multicultural population. It asks what constitutes effective preparation, and provides guidance on overcoming personal and institutional challenges to cultural inclusiveness (stereotype threats, microaggressions, colorblindness/identity-blindness, implicit bias, among others). Samuels begins with the challenges facing the higher education community and then offers 8 transformative steps to help build cultural inclusiveness that any educator teaching any subject can utilize to increase their effectiveness. Culturally inclusive leadership is highlighted as the model for educators and institutions to embrace for success in today’s world. Book Features: - Diversity training and inclusiveness strategies for transforming curricula. - Reflective practices that unearth personal biases and behaviors. - Insights about faculty preparedness drawn from an unprecedented national study. - Attention to specific issues and intersections of race, gender, sexual orientation, and disability. - A lens for understanding cultural inclusiveness as a fundamental leadership practice. (From the Publisher)