Resources

One-page Teaching Tactic that adopts and adapts a technique of classical theological education, secularizing it for an undergraduate context.

One-page Teaching Tactic that taps into students' interest in and knowledge of Facebook to help them read the Bible's four Gospels with fresh eyes.

One-page Teaching Tactic that describes ways that to enhance a class field trip to an academic conference.

This article discusses an experiential teaching method that uses secular activities that are simple, accessible, and analogous to religious practice in order to facilitate comparative religious study. These “analogous activities” – for example, social rituals, stillness, yoga, a social media fast, singing, nonviolent communication, and mindfulness meditation – provide a third point of reference that allows students to pivot between their understanding of religion and those of practitioners and scholars of religion. Experiential learning can be quite successful if deliberately sequenced to allow students to encounter a series of interpretive frameworks and structured with prompts and parameters that encourage reflection and critical analysis of their experience. In my course engaging in analogous activities not only impacted students' understanding of Asian religions, but also led them to question two previous assumptions: first, that religious beliefs were more important than religious practices, which is particularly problematic in regards to Asian religious traditions that place more emphasis on orthopraxy than orthodoxy, and second, that religion was something separate from one's everyday or lived reality.

One-page Teaching Tactic with information on how to get more out of in class quizzes.