Scholarship on Teaching

In this conversation, the Reverend Dr. Shanell Smith shares her strategies for incorporating politics into the classroom via an explicitly politicizing technique, “Keepin’ it Real.” She discusses the process of considering what to include and how to include it (and why we must!), and offers a window into how it might look in the classroom, using examples from a class on Mary that she teaches in an online seminary setting. Smith emphasizes the importance of modeling personalized scholarly inquiry for our students, including and especially the openness and vulnerability that make our scholarship matter both to us and to the world we share.

Shawkat M. Toorawa serves as Professor of Arabic Literature and Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Yale University. In this conversation he reflects on his decades-long experience as a teacher and administrator in the U.S. and abroad; the role of politics in classroom and curriculum; and the impact of race, religion, and international crisis on pedagogical engagement.

Once we acknowledge that we cannot escape politics in the classroom, it is imperative that we, as instructors, adapt our pedagogy accordingly, with the knowledge that our choices in the classroom will replicate, reinforce, or resist the political status quo. The political embeddedness of religion makes this all the more urgent for instructors of Religious Studies, as we attempt to guide students through explorations of communities, identities, histories, ideologies, and representations of human experience which all have political implications in the present. This article delineates several parameters for crafting our pedagogical initiatives, offering classroom climate considerations to keep in mind while we establish our own best practices. It then offers several suggestions—structural, instructor-focused, and student-focused—of best practices to implement in the Religious Studies classroom so as to achieve optimal learning outcomes for all of our students. Key among our conclusions is that inclusive pedagogy is effective pedagogy in Religious Studies.

Debate about whether the academy functions to indoctrinate students in a liberal agenda frequently presumes a conception of political identity as binary, discrete, or mappable along a single spectrum, and as doxastic, in that it is reducible to one’s professed beliefs. Such an assumption, however, ignores the ways in which power dynamics and hierarchies that exist outside the classroom also operate within it. We propose here that the critical examination of positionality within the classroom, and of how classroom activities can contest, reinforce, and reconfigure such power dynamics, offers an alternative way of conceiving the political. We argue that the methods and literature from the academic study of religion offers a particular contribution to make in such a project.

We argue that Civic Engagement is fundamental to the stated work of the university, the humanities, and the project of religious studies. We trace the historical connections between Civic Engagement and higher education in the American context to the present, highlighting a consistency of focus on Civic Engagement across diverse university contexts even as educational priorities and instantiations shift. We then explore the particular role of Civic Engagement in Religious Studies pedagogy. We contend that being explicit about integrating Civic Engagement in the religion classroom enhances our students’ ability to understand complex concepts in late antique religion and underscores for them how relevant the study of late ancient religion is to students’ lives today. We offer three ways that instructors in Religious Studies can incorporate Civic Engagement into their classes: cultivating naming practices, focusing pedagogical exercises on honing students’ Civic Engagement skills, and, where practicable, engaging in community-based learning.

The introductory essay serves to situate this special issue in its original context: a workshop on "Politics, Pedagogy, and the Profession," hosted in November 2017 at Harvard Divinity School's Center for the Study of World Religions for graduate students and teachers of pre-modernity. The workshop marked the beginning of a collaborative project, whose products thus far include, inter alia, a shared database of pedagogical resources, conference sessions to extend discussions of teaching politically-charged subjects to a wider audience, and the contributions to the issue at hand. The introductory essay provides readers with background information concerning the project's aims and initial findings, including a discussion of instructors' motivations for addressing contemporary political considerations; the risks and rewards teaching politically-charged topics; and the institutional and disciplinary resources available to instructors. The essay also provides an introductory preview of the articles gathered in this special issue.

How and why should scholars of pre-modern topics in Religious Studies responsibly incorporate politics into the classroom? This piece introduces the reader to these questions and our motivations for asking them as scholars of late antiquity. It orients readers to this Special Issue, framing the contributors’ motivations for wanting to engage politics in the classroom and for producing this special issue. It introduces “late antiquity” and addresses the question of how religious studies instructors, whether teaching late ancient topics or not, can responsibly address the political present.

For a denomination like Roman Catholicism that is canonically difficult to leave, many American Catholics are migrating beyond the institution’s immediate influence. The new religious patterns associated with this experience represent a somewhat cohesive movement influencing not just Catholicism, but the whole of North American religion. Careful examination of the lives of disaffiliating young adults reveals that their religious lives are complicated. For example, the assumption that leaving conventional religious communities necessarily results in a non-religious identity is simplistic and even, perhaps, misleading. Many maintain a religious worldview and practice. This book explores one “place” where the religiously-affiliated and religiously-disaffiliating regularly meet—Catholic secondary schools—and something interesting is happening. Through a series of ethnographic portraits of Catholic religious educators and their disaffiliating former students, the book explores the experience of disaffiliation and makes its complexity more comprehensible in order to advance the discourse of fields interested in this significant movement in religious history and practice. (From the Publisher)

This book presents a duoethnographic exploration and narrative account of what it means to be a teacher educator today. Adopting a narrative approach, the book presents different personal, political and institutional perspectives to interrogate common challenges facing teacher education and teacher educators today. In addition, the book compares and contrasts the teacher education landscapes in Australia and the UK and addresses a broad range of topics, including the autobiographical nature of teacher educators’ work, the value of learning from experience, the importance of collegiality and collaboration in learning to become a teacher educator, and the intersection of the personal, professional and political in the development of teacher educator pedagogies and research agendas. Each chapter combines personal narratives and research-based perspectives on the key dimensions of teacher educators’ work that can be found in the literature, including self-study research. Readers will gain a better understanding of the processes, influences and relationships that make being a teacher educator both a challenging and rewarding career. Accordingly, the book offers a valuable asset for university leaders, experienced and beginning teacher educators, and researchers interested in the professional learning and development of teacher educators. (From the Publisher)