Resources

The class is Religion and 20th Century Fantasy Literature, affectionately known around campus as “The Harry Potter Class.” One of the larger classes the Religion department offers, there are two main classrooms where this course lands every semester. One is the giant lecture hall in HCB (huge classroom building, of course), with room for 335 students. It’s boring, but efficient. The other room was made for this class, and its maximum capacity is a cozier group of 225 students. Renovated to reflect its original look from the 1800s when the university was first built, the room is grand. Carved oak decorates with detail, and the painted ceramic ceiling tiles, gorgeous, were reconstructed from one half-tile that remained from the hundred years prior. The floor-to-ceiling windows welcome into the room the Florida sun. And despite the fact that seagulls are more likely to fly past than owls, the room tricks you to believing that all manner of magic is possible.The professor who teaches in this room must master the domain or do the room injustice. Moreover, in the case of the “Harry Potter Class” a certain electricity is present. The Harry Potter professor wishes to deliver, and so the familiar tune, the recognizable theme song to the films, fills the room. The students come into the room already knowing the material – primary text, film adaptations, fanfiction, memes, and all content in all directions, related to this world of literature. The expectations are high. That these students are in the room, filling 20-30% of their schedule with this class says all. It is not a required course – they spend one of their precious electives to come into this space and simply learn, learn more about a topic that they know well. In fact, for some, they know this material like religious texts, and they know it authoritatively. They surely know the details of Harry Potter more than any of the other material in any of the other courses in their schedule. And so long as the primary text steers the course, the professor cannot go wrong… or can they?In such a course, the professor walks into the room at a disadvantage. They are not the “smartest” or most knowledgeable person in the room. In fact, were a bar to suddenly come up out of the floor, and a bartender begin asking those familiar questions that mark a Harry Potter trivia night, the professor would lose, hands down. The individual and collective knowledge in the room, the way that hiding in one’s bed with a flashlight long after bedtime, night after night for years, imparts knowledge and expertise is only lost on the professor once. The lesson of who knows more is revealed fast. If the professor’s ego rests on the false identity of “Harry Potter Expert” in this crowd, the identity and ego is sure to crumble fast.But a sixteen-week course on Harry Potter would bore even this crowd fast if all it did was go through the plot details, character analysis, and talk about what everyone in the room already knows. What this course on Harry Potter covers are the Christian/religious/irreligious elements of the story. The course explores the Joseph Campbell mythic elements of the story, the Augustinian elements of the story, the clash between the supernatural and the detective (Sherlock-Holmesian). It reaches into 20th century history and considers the impact of World War II on Britain, the Battle of Dunkirk, and how all those things affected the world of HP. And the course compares the three major British Fantasy works that live in community with each other: Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, and The Chronicles of Narnia. The course weaves all these elements in and serves up a platter of complexity that offers the expert reader not only enough to keep their attention for sixteen weeks, but the skills to ask the right questions and explore influence into their beloved texts, long after they leave the classroom.So when a student catches the professor off guard, and perhaps even in a mistake that comes from recounting episodes from the source material off the cuff; when the student, enamored until this point realizes that the professor is a “muggle,” and relies not on magic to know all, but their sheer skill in teaching; when the student learns that—in some areas of Harry Potter expertise—they know more than their professor, it is not a cause for despair for the educator.  When the student comes in and knows the minutiae, details of things like what color curse was used with “this spell” in “this episode” in book, the professor can safely and honestly relent without harm and say, “You know these details better than me. No question. But wait until the end of the term, and tell me you didn’t learn something.” You can know all the facts, the data points, and still get authenticity all wrong. And you can miss a date or a detail here and there and still be authentic. Teaching is not about the year Caesar crossed the Rubicon, but what his crossing meant. The professor does not need to know it all. In fact, it can be far more powerful when they concede that they don’t know items and simply move on. The things they do know will rest powerfully on the eager students’ ears by means of honestly and authentic engagement.