Resources

The article discusses two versions of a complex role‚Äêplaying exercise in undergraduate courses on Buddhism. The pedagogical exercise demonstrated how imagination cultivated through creative writing could be used to enhance learning about history, culture, and religion. Students were also challenged to generate an understanding of religious practice that arose from both cognitive and sensory learning. The project showed that by interacting with a form of engaged pedagogy that worked with the imagination, without leaving the classroom students developed a deep care for and active engagement with communities located spatially and temporally far from home. With empathy and critical reflection, they came to see how religious meaning is constructed at a communal level through embodied action and emotional sensibility.

This article considers the “create your own religion” or “fictive religion” assignment as a pedagogical tool, contextualizing it within the scholarship of teaching and learning, and positioning it as a tool for broad adoption in a variety of courses. I argue that we ought to conceptualize the fictive religion assignment as an instructional game, and make use of scholarship on teaching through games as a foundation for my analysis. While I offer the example of my own fictive religion assignment as a case study, the overall argument is a theoretical one, namely that the assignment works because of the nature of games.

This essay provides a brief overview of an educational board game developed by the author for use in upper division Old Testament classes. The game, extending in stages across the semester, heightens student learning by requiring strategic thinking about various historical, political, and geographical relationships. Appendices and links to online material provide full details necessary to adapt the game in local classrooms.

The issue is richly augmented by a set of teaching tactics (Allen, Ghosh, and Woodard and Mabry) across a range of religious traditions which briefly describe further practices that can be productive in the classroom.

The issue is richly augmented by a set of teaching tactics (Allen, Ghosh, and Woodard and Mabry) across a range of religious traditions which briefly describe further practices that can be productive in the classroom.

The issue is richly augmented by a set of teaching tactics (Allen, Ghosh, and Woodard and Mabry) across a range of religious traditions which briefly describe further practices that can be productive in the classroom.