Forum: Crafting the Introductory Course in Religious Studies
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| Title: | Forum: Crafting the Introductory Course in Religious Studies |
|---|---|
| Language: | English |
| Authors: | McCutcheon, Russell T., Hollander, Aaron T., Durdin, Andrew F., Gardner, Kelli A., Miller, Adam T., Crews, Emily D. |
| Source: | Teaching Theology & Religion. Jan 2016 19(1):78-98. |
| Availability: | Wiley-Blackwell. 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148. Tel: 800-835-6770; Tel: 781-388-8598; Fax: 781-388-8232; e-mail: cs-journals@wiley.com; Web site: http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA |
| Peer Reviewed: | Y |
| Page Count: | 21 |
| Publication Date: | 2016 |
| Document Type: | Journal Articles Collected Works - General Reports - Evaluative |
| Education Level: | Higher Education Postsecondary Education |
| Descriptors: | Religion Studies, Introductory Courses, Instructional Development, Skill Development, Higher Education, Educational Practices, Governance, Educational Assessment, Instructional Design, Decision Making |
| Geographic Terms: | Illinois |
| DOI: | 10.1111/teth.12323 |
| ISSN: | 1368-4868 |
| Abstract: | This series of short essays considers the complex choices and decision-making processes of instructors preparing to teach, and continuing to teach, introductory courses in religious studies. In a paper originally presented in the University of Chicago's "The Craft of Teaching in the Academic Study of Religion" series, Russell McCutcheon explores a "baker's dozen" of such choices and the larger pedagogical problems with which they are entwined, ranging from classic questions of skill development and content coverage to philosophical concerns around students' identification with their topics of study and institutional concerns around governance and assessment. Aaron Hollander provides a brief introduction and four doctoral students at the University of Chicago Divinity School respond to McCutcheon's essay, widening its scope, testing its applicability, and interrogating its undergirding suppositions from the perspective of early-career educators in the field. |
| Abstractor: | As Provided |
| Entry Date: | 2016 |
| Accession Number: | EJ1086173 |
| Database: | ERIC |
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| FullText | Links: – Type: pdflink Url: https://content.ebscohost.com/cds/retrieve?content=AQICAHj0k_4E0hTGH8RJwT4gCJyBsGNe_WN95AvKlDbXJGqwxwGHPdRSy0sLJu7z8AWcl3PnAAAA4zCB4AYJKoZIhvcNAQcGoIHSMIHPAgEAMIHJBgkqhkiG9w0BBwEwHgYJYIZIAWUDBAEuMBEEDD3zUc-_O7c-16VRxgIBEICBm0q5xtEXDcDQHw8iycf0Yqox3RTIpzHvKnXTuxuA3AW4H1oYay2T8kdi5B6-Ys1SrkgdNREqAwvv7x6mTKHZWqiQLqL9xoQ7CG60qAuZmGJIes4SvJX937DX_Y9NTKSGwHMai6WLeYTgdp2YIC0_2aMP0GMBIKMawf8mZUbsS7UnpiK5vubs1idDhGgCms0ed9V6b1kx43IfSQpl Text: Availability: 1 Value: <anid>AN0112065947;7qh01jan.16;2018Jul06.10:15;v2.2.500</anid> <title id="AN0112065947-1">Forum: Crafting the Introductory Course in Religious Studies. </title> <p>This series of short essays considers the complex choices and decision‐making processes of instructors preparing to teach, and continuing to teach, introductory courses in religious studies. In a paper originally presented in the University of Chicago's “The Craft of Teaching in the Academic Study of Religion” series, Russell McCutcheon explores a “baker's dozen” of such choices and the larger pedagogical problems with which they are entwined, ranging from classic questions of skill development and content coverage to philosophical concerns around students' identification with their topics of study and institutional concerns around governance and assessment. Aaron Hollander provides a brief introduction and four doctoral students at the University of Chicago Divinity School respond to McCutcheon's essay, widening its scope, testing its applicability, and interrogating its undergirding suppositions from the perspective of early‐career educators in the field.</p> <p>course design; classroom dynamics; craft of teaching; decision making; early‐career educators; introductory courses</p> <p>Aaron T. Hollander</p> <p>On April 6, 2015, roughly thirty graduate students and faculty members gathered in a classroom, in the University of Chicago Divinity School, for a workshop with Russell McCutcheon entitled “The Art of the Approach: Negotiating Hard Choices in Introductory Course Design.” Taking McCutcheon's paper and the diverse array of experience in the room as our starting point, the conversation ranged far and wide on matters of pedagogical decision‐making in a changing academic landscape. Eventually, the workshop spilled over the time allotted, through dinner, and subsequently to an arrangement in which a group of Divinity School graduate students were invited to engage with McCutcheon's contribution in writing, transmuting some of the conversation we had shared into another medium for an open‐ended audience.</p> <p>The occasion for the workshop, and so for this written exchange on introductory course design, is the Divinity School's program for the Craft of Teaching in the Academic Study of Religion. Inaugurated in 2011, the Craft of Teaching program seeks to uphold the Divinity School's commitment to preparing outstanding educators in the field of religious studies through a year‐round series of pedagogy workshops, faculty‐student colloquia, focused practice in teaching and course/assignment design, and an orbit of teaching resources available beyond the Divinity School: collected syllabi, a multimedia library, collaborations with the Chicago Center for Teaching, a blog devoted to pedagogical topics. By way of these offerings, graduate students may earn a Certificate in the Craft of Teaching, representing not a final achievement but an attuned beginning: an artfulness in their own approaches to teaching and to the teaching profession. In an important respect, the Craft of Teaching program's most meaningful asset is the conversation itself, which flows through and between the Divinity School's areas of study, interacts with the insights of invited guests from across the field, fuels the alumni community and contributes to their institutions, and finds new expression at every interface where Craft of Teaching participants engage in their work. It is this wide‐ranging and evolving conversation that is represented, in miniature, by the following exchange between Russell McCutcheon, an established educator and theorist of religious studies pedagogy, and four graduate students in the early stages of their own careers as educators.</p> <p>As the Program Coordinator for the Craft of Teaching, I am delighted to introduce this exchange and highlight its contribution to field‐wide concerns. McCutcheon's essay contextualizes and explores a “baker's dozen” of choices faced by educators tasked with introducing the study of religion to college students, especially but by no means exclusively in the setting of a public university. It constitutes an excellent example (fittingly, given McCutcheon's own attraction to ruminating on and applying “e.g.s” in the classroom) of Craft of Teaching resources, one tool among many with which the program seeks to equip graduate students. The essay is, in the classic metaphor, a fishing rod rather than a fish. By its author's own intent, it is not a triskaidecalogue to be obeyed but a resource to be critically engaged, developed, and adjusted according to the many institutional contexts in which educators find themselves, both within and beyond the university.</p> <p>The responses to McCutcheon's essay come from a selection of students, with varying levels of teaching experience, who have been ongoing participants in the Craft of Teaching program. Each of them receives, interrogates, and redeploys McCutcheon's considerations in a way germane to her or his own experience and pedagogical objectives. The responses expand McCutcheon's model, seeking to chart middle ground in the choices he presents or to highlight additional dimensions of the pedagogical preparation and execution he envisions; two of them identify situations in which one of McCutcheon's central claims, adopted from J. Z. Smith – “there is nothing that must be taught, there is nothing that cannot be left out” – may steer us into dangerous educational waters.</p> <p>In “The Spaces Between,” Andrew Durdin presses us to consider the choices presented by McCutcheon less as switches that can be toggled and more as terrain that can be traversed in multiple directions and with changing destinations. He embraces, cautiously, the ambiguity resulting from each new attempt to meet students where they are and ignite learning from the materials at hand.</p> <p>In “How Do We Teach Attitude?” Kelli Gardner redraws the classic pedagogical polarity of skills and content as a triangle, the third point of which she terms “attitude”: “the oxygen necessary to enable heat (skills) and fuel (content) to spark learning.” Taking as her test site the failed “Introduction to Bible” course imagined in a recent work of theater, The Good Book, Gardner poses as a dimension of the pedagogical event those prior attitudes towards religious materials that students and instructors alike bring to the classroom.</p> <p>In “When Something Cannot Be Left Out,” Adam Miller draws our attention to the challenge of teaching when the course design is not our own: the case of the inherited course. In such a case, the hard choices of the instructor are different than, though related to, those presented by McCutcheon. When and when not to assign additional materials? How to stoke the desired conversation with fuel that may not be best suited to it? Might course design decisions that have been made in advance require the adjustment of the skills with which an instructor intends to equip students?</p> <p>Finally, in “The Problem of Identity,” Emily Crews articulates another keen challenge to the notion that “there is nothing that cannot be left out.” Pointing to the demonstrable variance in how particular teachers are perceived and related to by students in light of their racial, sexual, or religious identities, Crews argues that the identities of the instructor and the students constitute an inescapable element of classroom climate, and so, of the actual power or limitation of any of the choices considered in McCutcheon's essay.</p> <p>The Craft of Teaching in the Academic Study of Religion is a setting in which resistance to any narrow imagination of what it means to teach religion, to whom, how, and where, is backed up with the concrete resources to bring about meaningful alternatives. The exchange represented by the following essays hails the warning raised by McCutcheon in his own introduction – that the long‐term flourishing of a field of study is compromised by siloed and segregated approaches to questions of method, theory, and pedagogy. Across our disciplines we are called upon to communicate about shared problems: is there something distinctive about the study and teaching of religion, or of certain dimensions of religion, or of the work to define “religion” in the first place? Of what are such study, teaching, and theorization exemplary? To what bigger picture do they contribute? Such questions are consistent with the approach presented by Russell McCutcheon in “A Baker's Dozen of Choices in the Introductory Course,” and they are the lifeblood of a Craft of Teaching program that has made such rich and open‐ended conversations its priority.</p> <hd id="AN0112065947-2">A Baker's Dozen of Choices in the Introductory Class</hd> <p>Russell T. McCutcheon</p> <hd id="AN0112065947-3">Preamble</hd> <p>Taking seriously Jonathan Z. Smith's line from his contribution to Mark Juergesmeyer's unfortunately out‐of‐print Teaching the Introductory Course in Religious Studies: A Sourcebook, that “there is nothing that must be taught, there is nothing that cannot be left out” ([<reflink idref="bib25" id="ref1">25</reflink>] , 187; reprinted in Smith [<reflink idref="bib28" id="ref2">28</reflink>] , 11–19) – a conclusion he draws from the practical constraints of any class; for, as he writes there, “no course can do everything, no course can be complete” – I have decided to consider here some of the choices that the instructor of an introductory course likely has to make. More specifically, I have in mind people early in their careers: from ABDs teaching their own course for the first time to newly hired Assistant Professors confronting a full teaching load along with research and service expectations – for example, the person who, in hindsight, I imagine myself to have been when I now look over those syllabi, which I still have on my hard drive, for my own “World Religions in History” (Religious Studies 101) and “Comparative Religion: An Introduction” (Religious Studies 102), courses that I regularly taught, from 1993 to 1996, as an Instructor at the University of Tennessee (UT), where my own full‐time teaching career began. Moreover, with where I started my own career in mind (not to mention the other two universities where I have worked in the U.S.), I also direct these comments toward those teaching in the public university – the place where, I would wager, many end up working, at least at some point in their careers (if, that is, one is lucky enough to earn one's living by means of the skills and content we acquire in doctoral programs).</p> <p>What strikes me now about those two old syllabi is how overly ambitious they were, or, maybe I should say, how overly ambitious I was in designing them. When hired (which was about eighteen months before defending my dissertation at the University of Toronto) I was told I must use Huston Smith's The World's Religions ([<reflink idref="bib24" id="ref3">24</reflink>] ), the still‐in‐print and lightly revised version of his Cold War era textbook, The Religions of Man,[<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref4">2</reflink>] but I added to the list Ninian Smart and Richard Hecht's significantly subtitled primary source anthology, Sacred Texts of the World: A Universal Anthology ([<reflink idref="bib23" id="ref5">23</reflink>] ), as well as John Hinnells's A Dictionary of Religions ([<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref6">4</reflink>] ) (a book that I added to many of my textbook orders in those early years, inasmuch as I then made learning world religions vocabulary a key element of my courses – what is the difference between śhruti and smriti?). As for UT's other, more thematic but no less encyclopedic, introduction to the field – and in which I had a free hand in setting the book order – I opted for no less than five books, including works by Plato, Freud, and Jung, along with Bill Paden's ([<reflink idref="bib19" id="ref7">19</reflink>] ) thematic intro book Religious Worlds (whose chapters are on such topics as myth, ritual, gods, and purity), and John Lyden's ([<reflink idref="bib8" id="ref8">8</reflink>] ) edited anthology, Enduring Issues in Religion (a book of excerpts on a series of debates largely organized around the world religions model). But whether the material was divided in terms of the world's religions or arranged thematically, my goal in both courses was to fit it all in – for all I knew, my possible reappointment as an Instructor hung in the balance and so I seem to recall feeling that a demonstration of universal competence was directly linked to my job security as well as my sense of professional legitimacy (in both the eyes of my students, who I wasn't all that much older than, not to mention my new colleagues – scholars who, to me at least, seemed infinitely more knowledgeable, credible, and thus authoritative, than I).</p> <p>Today, twenty‐two years after first developing these courses, I no longer teach a world religions survey – I stopped doing that about fifteen years ago, when I became chair of a Department which, for some (at least to me) inexplicably good reason, was not even offering the course when I first arrived (though my colleague Steven Ramey now regularly teaches it, but as a way to invite students to consider problematizing that very way of naming and grouping people) – and when I do teach the introductory course (which is a large enrollment lecture, with between 100 and 150 students, that I offer at least once and sometimes, like this year, twice a year), I require students to purchase just one little book (though students also use a short online dialogue by Plato devoted to the problem of definition [the Euthyphro]). The book I use is my own ([<reflink idref="bib13" id="ref9">13</reflink>] );[<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref10">3</reflink>] if pressed, I would say it is not a textbook at all but a resource, useful in almost any class, that merely sets the table for an instructor who then needs to bring a considerable number of dishes to the meal. The book, which includes as an afterword a short essay of Smith's on teaching ([<reflink idref="bib27" id="ref11">27</reflink>] ), arose from years of developing and teaching the course; and so, despite my efforts to continually revise the class and to ensure it incorporates new examples drawn from current events my students might recognize (who could resist making reference to what's been going on first with Indiana's and then Arkansas's recent religious freedom legislation when discussing the political utility to naming something as religion?), if it sometimes seems to students that I am “teaching to the text” I would like to think that is because the text is mimicking me, and not the other way ‘round. As you might guess, I stopped reading lectures verbatim long ago, but I certainly did in those early years in Knoxville, especially when, right off the bat, teaching a course that was entirely new to me, entitled “Myth, Symbol, Ritual.” My new Chair (Charles Reynolds) had asked me whether I could teach it, in a phone call not long after I was hired for the year but prior to my departure from southern Ontario for east Tennessee. They'd had a retirement (the late Stan Lusby), so this popular upper‐level class (meaning it produced credit hours for the Department) needed an instructor. “Of course I can,” I recall answering and then scrambled to begin writing out full lectures – from, among other sources, Brian Morris's still important book, Anthropological Studies of Religion: An Introductory Text ([<reflink idref="bib18" id="ref12">18</reflink>] ). Luckily, the days of being just one class ahead of students and standing in front of them wedded to a text are long over.</p> <p>So, when I compare what I do now to what I did then, what immediately catches my eye is that nothing I do today has a grandiose, totalized intent, making my current classes much less ambitious. But, come to think of it, I don't think “unambitious” is the correct word; for I like to think that I have learned to make some of those choices that Smith talked about when drawing his readers' attention to the fact that one university course, at least as taught at my own school, amounts to just forty hours of instruction per semester (and that is not counting the days off for testing and the inevitable snow days that we now seem to have in Alabama). For unlike that “universal” anthology of sacred texts that I once used (which included chapters on not just ten of the expected world religions but also on ancient religions, small‐scale traditional religions, new religions, and, predictably, at least for anything Smart was involved in, secular worldviews), over the years my focus has narrowed considerably, making my current introductory course, the one for which I wrote that book, seem incredibly specialized – after all, it is concerned solely with the problem of defining religion. But, again, I would avoid that term, “specialization,” for, to my way of thinking, it is actually incredibly general – since, whether students start out knowing it or not, by the end they may come to realize that the course is not on religion at all; instead, we used the example of various attempts to identify something as religious as opportunities to examine how we, as scholars, signify and compare, two skills that are applicable to any activity that we undertake as human beings. And, to my way of thinking, that is what makes it a Core Curriculum course.</p> <p>Since I am on the topic of specialization, and because I presume I am addressing readers who either are or soon will be on the job market, let me digress just a little, to express a frustration that I have – speaking, now, as a Department chair who has seen his fair share of C.V.s and cover letters – with how poorly we train many of our graduate students for full‐time employment as professors whose jobs will require them to work in a Department with others as colleagues. Case in point: two years ago we searched for a position in what we termed Religion, Global Conflict, and Law. The ad's main text read as follows:</p> <p>Proficient in critical and social theory, the ideal candidate will analyze the roles played by legal and religious systems in cross‐cultural conflicts (whether physical, economic, racial, ethnic, or social). While the research specialty, region, and historical area are open, they should complement without reproducing the expertise of current faculty in the department.</p> <p>I have written a little about the experience of this search in the Afterword to a recent essay collection (McCutcheon [<reflink idref="bib14" id="ref13">14</reflink>] ) so suffice it to say that I tend to think that because we did not use any of the accepted keywords in our field – you know, words like Buddhism, Judaism, or religion and politics, or religion in America, or myth and ritual – our ad was probably passed over by people whose expertise might have been directly relevant. We received around forty applications (whereas we usually get closer to a hundred, or more), and we met some wonderfully gifted young scholars in the process (who, I hope, find a place and have a career in the field), but only a small group of applicants took seriously that we were looking not for a content specialist, or someone working on so‐called peacebuilding, but for someone who could conceive of their work as being focused on a problematic, one applicable to any number of other situations, concerning how a variety of disputes and formal behavioral codes intersected with whatever it is that we mean by this designator “religion.” The words “critical and social theory,” were, after all, the first things one read in the ad. Sure, we hoped that they would be able to study this in detail at a specific site, ideally one that – as also stated in the ad – brought something new to a mid‐sized BA‐granting Department that currently only covers so much of the world and its history (though, recalling Smith, we will never cover it all), but that they would also recognize that the place where they do their work is but an instance of a wider thing that can also be seen elsewhere. For, in my experience, it is that ability that is at the heart of a Departmental identity – that is, the ability of faculty members to see themselves as not just happening to have an office next door to someone but as being in a common conversation with colleagues despite our widely divergent specialties and despite not always agreeing on the issue. While some may have the luxury of finding jobs in large Departments with highly specialized faculty positions, many will instead more than likely be interviewing in places where no one works on what they do, no one knows much about what they study, and therefore it will fall to them to try to make connections with other people, to communicate the wider questions their work investigates and to suggest its possible significance for the things others already know something about. (Come to think of it, perhaps this was not a digression after all, for isn't this precisely the situation we are all in with those introductory undergraduate students?) And when it is phrased in this way, when the content which you have no doubt worked so hard to master is seen as but one among many examples of things that we, as humans, cross‐culturally do or produce, then I tend to think that our ad was the most general one out there that hiring season; for I can think of very few people who could not have somehow creatively demonstrated their relevance for such a position. But because we did not phrase it in terms of how graduate programs, encyclopedias, professional societies, and publishers routinely divide up and thereby signify the content that often defines our field, but instead framed our needs in terms of skills we share and teach within our Department, our ad probably stumped many who read it, perhaps prompting some to see it, or dismiss it, as far too specialized (“I don't do religion and law”) – which is really quite lamentable, given how highly competitive the academic job market is. Thus my frustration for the specialized silos into which we are all slotted and how, because of that, we often fail to understand that the long term well‐being of a field of study, let alone that unit we call a Department in which many of us presumably hope to earn our daily bread, is directly related to the problems that we (plural pronoun intended) think worth tackling, is related to questions of method and theory, and not so much to the many different places where we do or do not each happen to tackle them. That so many early‐career people, understandably focused on their dissertation's suitably narrow topic (though, how is this any different from many mid‐career and senior people in the field?), fail to think about the field‐wide issues that their work exemplifies and are therefore unprepared to discuss how this one specialty might not only intersect with the work of their potential colleagues but also contribute to the larger life and curricular needs of a Department, is a problem that many graduate programs need to consider addressing head‐on if they wish their graduates to continue to be competitive and successful in joining the ranks of our profession.[<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref14">4</reflink>]</p> <p>But, to return to the topic at hand (though, as you can guess, I don't think we ever left it, making my digression merely a move to an analogous situation where I think the same problems are apparent), I would like to offer a few of the interconnected choices, in no particular order (though, I hope it is evident that it is all directly related to what I have been discussing so far), that I think faculty need to consider making in order to be effective in the introductory class. As is already evident, I cannot resist the temptation to elaborate, so I will deviate somewhat from Bruce Lincoln's enviable success with the genre of bold, pithy thesis statements ([<reflink idref="bib6" id="ref15">6</reflink>] ).[<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref16">5</reflink>]</p> <hd id="AN0112065947-4">Choices</hd> <p>And so, with that long, but hopefully relevant set‐up behind us, I present thirteen situations in which I think early‐career instructors will need to make a choice – whether a stark or modulated choice I leave to others to decide. But each choice concerns a particular classroom problem that, in my experience, the instructor of a successful lower‐level undergraduate course somehow has to negotiate.</p> <p>1. Will your course be about gaining command over content or will it be about the acquisition of skills that your students will find relevant in other courses, at other times? This I term the problem of applicability. For while knowing the name of the river crossed by whomever on such and such an occasion may come in handy in some future situation (for example, should they go on to earn graduate degrees or simply join a trivia night team at the local bar), being able to understand that “similar” does not necessitate that things are “the same” might have surprising relevance for all of your students.</p> <ulist> <item>2. If your course is primarily about command over content, then you are more than likely deferring to others to determine what your students ought to know – that is, how can a survey of Hinduism avoid talking about its Indus River Valley origins? For these details are all part of a well‐known story on which you will presumably be testing your students, much as others might quiz them on their grasp of tribal lore so as to determine the legitimacy of their membership. This I term the problem of orthodoxy. For, despite the now almost unheard freedom of not having a national credentialing organization that sets standards, compels course content, and assesses student performance, a surprising number of our field's classes conform to a very specific model, covering standardized and curiously self‐policed content. But if, instead, you opt to emphasize skills in your classes, making your course about, for example, description and comparison, then at what practical sites will they give these methods a spin? This I term the problem of the unorthodox “e.g.”; for there are times when, because the example you choose is alien to the student, so much of your time will be spent sufficiently describing the e.g. that you have no energy or time left to demonstrate how it serves as an instance of some wider issue you are trying to bring to their attention. Courses, like academic papers, can sometimes get lost in the details, prompting us to forget of what the e.g.s are an instance, leading us to sometimes seeing the objects we study as so self‐contained and self‐authenticating that they exhibit nothing but their own brilliance.</item> <item>3. Will your class have a thesis? Is there something at stake, of which you are trying to persuade your students, or is the information that you convey each class, each unit, merely a list that you have to get through just so that you can have the satisfaction of completion or, maybe, get to reuse last year's test? Or will there instead be an argumentative point that, day by day, steadily develops, just as each paragraph of an essay has a place within the overall structure? If so, then what will we do with those absent students who later come up and ask what they missed – for now it's as if they were reading an article with a page or two missing. I think here of some of the early career people I have worked with who report that they have teaching experience but who, it turns out, have never before taught (or taken?) a course where the goal was to persuade students of something and thus the difficulties such instructors have when given an opportunity to lecture in a way that moves away from a model of conveying discrete pieces of information and, instead, toward stringing together information into an argument that stretches over a semester. This I term the problem of persuasion.</item> <item>4. To return to the topic of e.g.s, will you approach your object of study as a precious item, unlike all else in nature, whose study is a specialty unto itself, or will you invite students to see it as but one among many arts de faire, as Michel de Certeau phrased it, and thus something that is comparable to different, yes, but now unexpectedly similar items from the all but limitless archive of human doings? In other words, will all the things that they study, read, or examine in your class be obviously religious or, perhaps, will they find themselves reading an 1883 U.S. Supreme Court decision on whether a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable (such as Nix v Hedden 149 U.S. 304) to help persuade them that disputes over definition and identity – no matter how ethereal they may seem – have practical motivations and effects. This I term the problem of analogies.</item> <item>5. Because few undergrad students will enroll in their first year with any knowledge of what the academic study of religion is, the vast majority of students therefore first take our courses simply to satisfy their university's Core Curriculum or General Education requirements – however, the irony is that it is from these very students that possible majors (the life blood of Departments such as my own[<reflink idref="bib6" id="ref17">6</reflink>] ) will eventually be recruited. Such classes are therefore both service courses to other Departments, thereby generating credit hour production for your own, as well as the place where your Department reproduces itself by creating potential majors and thus graduates.[<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref18">7</reflink>] So will you aim the books that you select, the topics that you examine, and the tone of your lectures toward those students who will more than likely never again return to one of our classes or to the (sometimes painfully small) minority of budding specialists who may one day graduate from your Department? Or is such a binary choice misleading; instead, as you plan and teach this class, will you have in mind those non‐majors who, when many of them are disillusioned with whatever their high school selves, their parents, or their onetime guidance counsellors thought they ought to become, are reminded, a year or maybe two later, of that interesting and unexpected material they covered in your class, and of how it made them think about, I don't know, why they still set the table with the knife over there and the fork over here, and the cup to the top right of the plate, even when they eat alone – that is, those students (perhaps like each of us, so many years ago) who stop by a professor's office to chat long after the class is over and who then enroll in a second course in your Department, and maybe a third. … So to whom are you speaking as you plan a course and teach it? I term this the problem of audience.</item> <item>6. With that audience in mind, will you see your students as conversation partners, prompting them to read the cutting‐edge work that so excites you now, as scholars who are yourselves immersed knee‐deep in dissertation writing or first book revisions (or second, or third …), or will you see in them yourself, many years ago, long before you knew what the words “dialectical,” “diacritical,” and “dialogical” meant or whether “phenomenological” was yet another one of those dirty F‐words. This I term the problem of imagination: put simply, can you imagine yourself as nineteen years old, long before knowing what you now take for granted, or have you so naturalized (that is, dehistoricized) your current state that you have forgotten the more than likely bumpy and crooked road you traversed in order to get here? The interesting thing is that I think it takes great confidence to just say something simply, and also to recognize that while they may ideally inform each other there might always be a rather large gulf between one's teaching and one's research – one's students and one's colleagues.</item> <item>7. With that last choice in mind, will you be the sort of lecturer who teaches students what you have already come to know, thereby turning classes into monologues by which you transmit information by radiating it outward from its source behind the podium, or, instead, will you start from where the students themselves currently are, moving with them – even physically among them, as you teach, being brave enough to venture out from behind the protection of the lectern – going with them step‐by‐step, toward a position by the end of the semester when they will have acquired the information that, perhaps unbeknownst to them, you knew all along. This I term the problem of proclamation – for there is a difference, I would argue, between proclaiming what you know and teaching someone else how to know it as well. It's the old story of giving someone a fish versus a fishing rod.[<reflink idref="bib8" id="ref19">8</reflink>]</item> <item>8. With yet another nod to Smith's own efforts to tease out their distinction ([<reflink idref="bib26" id="ref20">26</reflink>] , 9), I suppose I should finally ask: will you teach a survey or an introduction? For whereas the first is a broad overview and summary of a content domain (think here of the promotional copies of the new Norton Anthology of World Religions that many were receiving in the mail last spring) the latter is, in its technical sense, a movement of something from outside in, or the entry of something foreign – think here of how a scientist “introduces” some species of critter into a new environment or how a “letter of introduction,” not unlike today's more professionalized “letter of recommendation,” once might have been your ticket to the best soirées and salons of the nineteenth century. For if a survey, then you must decide which mountain tops you will touch upon as you skip across them – and which you will just completely skip altogether – in your mere forty hours of contact time to teach the history of the world. But if an introduction, then your goal is not coverage but to devise ways to help novices acquire enough expertise to use the tools of our trade (an expertise that they may hone in subsequent classes where such skills as defining, describing, comparing, interpreting, and explaining are relevant). This I term the problem of initiation.</item> <item>9. Given the state of higher education today – in which state legislatures are annually cutting budgets, in which for‐profit corporations tell us the future lies outside of the bricks and mortar of the traditional university campus (perhaps in the MOOCs they own and hope to sell to universities, possibly replacing you), and in which publishers, in collaboration with some enterprising colleagues, aim to develop and deliver self‐contained and cloud‐based “courseware” that seems to require an administrator rather than a professor – will you build your course around any one of the many prefab textbooks/course readers that are now on the market (useful for an orthodox course based on “covering the material,” perhaps) or will you develop resources of your own, such as finding and making PDF readings, in order to accomplish goals that are specific to you, your sense of the field, and thus your syllabus and class? This I term the problem of governance.</item> <item>10. As a slight variation on the last: Given the state of higher education today – in which teaching loads are getting higher (case in point: North Carolina's state senate is currently debating the “Act to Improve the Quality of Instruction at Constituent Institutions of the University of North Carolina” [SB 593 (Mar. 26, 2015)], which would require a minimum 4/4 teaching load of professors), when class sizes are getting larger and larger[<reflink idref="bib9" id="ref21">9</reflink>] and when not only contingent but even tenure‐track or tenured faculty are sometimes asked to teach a surprisingly large number of different courses each semester (that is, each being a different “prep”) – as I say, given these conditions, will you opt to build your class around any one of the convenient prefabricated textbooks/course readers that are now on the market (thereby saving you considerable effort conceptualizing and organizing your own course – after all, why reinvent the wheel?) or will you be able to find and develop resources of your own, that achieve a point unique to your class? This I term the problem of time.</item> <item>11. Unless you have the luxury of being hired into the same sort of elite program that may have trained you as a doctoral student, given the number of (different) classes you may be teaching each semester, will your survey or introductory class provide students with an opportunity to write and rewrite papers in light of your comments or will you rely upon optically scanned bubbled‐in score sheets for multiple choice tests? And if the latter, how can a multiple choice test assess more than just memorization (can it also address reading comprehension or analytic skills?) and will you be able to devise other inventive ways to engage and then evaluate students who find themselves one among many others in your 100‐level course's lecture hall? This problem I term the double‐edged sword of engagement and assessment.</item> <item>12. Should you decide all of the above in a manner that does not adequately complement the way your Department's gatekeepers have made their decisions, then how will you either identify and then rethink those choices that are negotiable or, perhaps, strategically represent to your colleagues the results of your nonnegotiable decisions, doing so in a way that, ideally, helps you to acquire a secure, long term space in which to carry out the work that you desire to do despite the (perhaps inevitable) differences of opinion that can sometimes (dare I say often or perhaps usually?) characterize life in an academic unit? (As an aside, I should say that we are an odd breed, university professors: for while likely seeing ourselves as freelance or self‐employed, we work within massive institutions that, in many cases, are supported by taxpayers and which constitute but one wing of the modern nation‐state – making us more like ultra‐privileged versions of employees at the DMV than many of us would like to think.) This issue of negotiation and representation I simply term the problem of politics.</item> <item>13. And, finally, will the class constitute a group of curious observers intent on studying the alien and the exotic (separated from us whether in time or geography) or will you continually remind your students that, as human beings themselves, whatever it is that we find curious about others ought to be no less applicable to ourselves – whether we are scholars or not – thereby ensuring that the overall point of the course is to initiate a group of people who come to the class as already skilled users and navigators of a commonsense folk system (for instance, they are all expert enough participants within a culture to be able to decipher both Gilbert Ryle's [[<reflink idref="bib20" id="ref22">20</reflink>] ] and Clifford Geertz's [[<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref23">3</reflink>] ] “wink” without giving it too much thought) but who will hopefully leave as a different sort of expert, one able to make the transition to seeing their own mundane as no less interesting than, say, the things some rural Appalachian Pentecostals do with rattle snakes that seems impossible for us not to find so curious. (Come to think of it, it's no less curious that we all hurdle down interstate highways without a care in the world despite the National Safety Council's estimate of 35,200 people killed in U.S. traffic accidents in 2013 alone, no?) This I term the problem of identification.</item> </ulist> <hd id="AN0112065947-5">Afterword</hd> <p>I am sure there are many other choices an instructor needs to make; but these are at least a few of the issues and decisions that I know I and others had to navigate – correction, continue to navigate, making these choices hardly isolated to early‐career scholars as I might have suggested above – and so I put them before you here – applicability, orthodoxy, e.g.s, persuasion, analogies, audience, imagination, proclamation, initiation, governance, time management, engagement, assessment, politics, and identification – to invite readers, novices, and experienced “full bulls” (as some once called tenured, senior colleagues) to begin thinking a little more about their situation as a teacher in a university and thus what they choose to tackle or ignore in those few hours they have each semester with their introductory students.</p> <hd id="AN0112065947-6">The Spaces Between, or When the Choices are Hard</hd> <p>Andrew F. Durdin</p> <p>Russell McCutcheon's “baker's dozen” seem intended to provoke readers, in this case early‐career academics, to further thought as they consider issues of designing, modifying, and teaching (introductory) courses in the study of religion. For each problem X (for example, applicability, orthodoxy, persuasion, and so forth), McCutcheon asks essentially, “Will you do this or this?” or “Will your course be about this or this?” One manner of charting these thought experiments might be as simple binaries, choices in the strictest sense. For example, to the “problem of initiation,” will one teach a survey or an introduction? But perhaps it is more useful to see these choices as offering two ends of a heuristic spectrum on which a whole range of teaching experiences and contexts might be imaginatively and practically assessed. Thus, to negotiate these problems would be to critically engage in the spaces in between the options given, whether survey or introduction, content or skills, or lecture or discussion. The potential value in each of McCutcheon's choices becomes apparent when each is broken down into the particulars of one's own institutional context. Will you do this or this? Well, it depends. To my mind none of these choices in principle implies mutually exclusive options; they are modulated, not stark.</p> <p>To this end, I want to focus on when these choices are at issue. For I would emphasize that they are never faits accomplis, or problems definitively dealt with and dispensed with at a certain moment in the process of preparing and teaching a course. Rather, on any given day or week and within any given session of a course, these choices are potentially always raised and answered anew amidst the constant interaction of the students, the instructor(s), and the material, which inevitably (whether one is conscious of it or not) causes a chain reaction as to how one conceives of the shape and objectives of the overall course. These choices are perhaps most acute in the planning stages of writing a syllabus, deciding on readings and assignments, and so forth. Yet the decisions made during planning are provisional, are something of a working hypothesis that will be (and should be) continually tested, gauged, and adjusted as the course progresses and as one gets to the know the students and a rapport is established in the classroom.</p> <p>By way of example, in the winter quarter of 2015 I taught a course for the Undergraduate Program in Religious Studies at the University of Chicago. The course was of my own design, entitled “The Ancient Romans and their Religion.” It was a new course and one for which I had found little precedent; I had neither taken such a course myself nor taught anything like it before. In preparing the class, I intended ancient Rome and its public rituals to serve as my “e.g.” for highlighting issues of classification, signification, and comparison with regards to the term religion. In addition to the content, at the level of theory and method, the course had an argument: I insisted that calling something religious was an interested act and sometimes one with higher stakes than might be initially clear. This was the case no matter how close a resemblance our word (religion) seemed to bear – both in form and meaning – to the Romans' word (religio).</p> <p>However, making this argument proved a challenge, and the choices I made in producing the course raised themselves again and again as I confronted the realities of transmitting the content to my students in the classroom each week. Of primary difficulty was the issue of gauging precisely where my students were in their presuppositions and interests. The course was listed under Religious Studies and I had written the syllabus with an eye to this area – but no religion majors took the class. Instead, I had a significant number of Classics majors. For them, the Romans were not an e.g. of broader issues but instead constituted, along with the Greeks, a discrete and stable object of study of inherent interest for which my course offered to provide some quirky, obscure, albeit unsurprising information. Thus, my “bigger questions” were not theirs – and in fact, they barely registered as problems at all. For my students, religion was simply an unsurprising part of a checklist of features, along with law, economy, and so forth, that every human society has and that might be isolated and studied. However eccentric or strange their traditions, the Romans, like all other human societies, had a religion.</p> <p>I needed to defamiliarize them with the content, and this meant destabilizing and reframing a number of their assumptions in order guide them step‐by‐step from their concerns to what I considered my own set of (more important) concerns (which I was confident, when recognized, would reframe their own interest in Greco‐Roman antiquity in a much more useful light). To do this, I not only had to cue up religious studies theory in the first few weeks, but also had to raise and creatively apply these bigger questions to the material from week to week, class to class. Thus the course became inverted: where I thought we would begin instead became the conclusion to a quarter‐long argument.</p> <p>If I might idealize a certain equilibrium that the course eventually reached, it was that each session attempted to take a select set of readings as a case of a broader issue and highlight the stakes involved in calling this or that “religious.” Most days, I opened the class with reflections and framing remarks and then facilitated a discussion in which students could actively engage their reading of the materials. This dynamic mode of managing the eighty‐minute session twice a week challenged over and over again and in different registers choices that had seemed so clear and obvious as I was planning the course. Indeed, equilibrium is the wrong word; rather, each class was an attempt to achieve momentary synchronicity amidst the shifting dynamics of my own interests and objectives for the course, the manner in which they appeared on the syllabus, and, most importantly, the students' questions and interpretations of the material.</p> <p>Teaching the class again might clarify the subject matter and objectives – the trail might be better blazed. Yet, insofar as the audience is always changing and so too their interests and points of reference, it seems to me that my course(s) will always be fuzzy around the edges, certain choices always undecidable, or provisionally decided prior to entering the classroom. Teaching thus involves imagining and playing across this gap between instructor and audience. To my mind, it is this inherent ambiguity that can enliven the art of teaching and facilitates a context conducive to critical thought.</p> <hd id="AN0112065947-7">How Do We Teach Attitude?</hd> <p>Kelli A. Gardner</p> <p>The Good Book, a recent play about the Bible – its transmission and transformation – produced at Chicago's Court Theatre, features Miriam, a scholar and teacher of biblical studies, as one of its main characters. The play opens with Miriam teaching the first class of her Bible 101 course. Miriam is an experienced teacher – passionate about her topic but jaded by her years of introducing the Bible in a large lecture course with unengaged students or worse, in her view, “misengaged” students who are more concerned with finding evidence to support their conservative religious beliefs than learning about the history of these texts as texts. She is aggressive in her own non‐religious stance toward the Bible, shattering her students' Sunday School assumptions: The Exodus never happened! Moses never existed! Unsurprisingly, the teacher's aggression is met by aggressive reactions from her students. One student (whom she later describes as a “fundie”) challenges her – “How can you tell me what to believe about this book?” The two go head to head – the teacher becomes exasperated, the student indignant – and each only becomes further entrenched in the rightness of her own position.</p> <p>This play is fiction but it dramatizes well, I think, the challenges of teaching the Bible in an American college classroom today. Due to the Bible's pervasive role in our culture as not only a source of divergent religious beliefs but also a powerful political tool, it is both an especially complex and profoundly important classroom topic. As an aspiring teacher of the Bible, I am sensitive to the issues manifest in the play, and found Russell McCutcheon's discussion to be particularly helpful in thinking through the difficulties of teaching an “Introduction to Bible” course in light of the Bible's historical and literary context.</p> <p>McCutcheon's choices, inspired in part by Jonathan Z. Smith's provocative aphorism (“there is nothing that must be taught, there is nothing that cannot be left out”), are anchored by the often‐discussed debate in higher education: teaching skills versus teaching content. Smith's statement pushes us to realize the flexibility of course content, emphasizing that it should come in the form of examples (“e.g.'s”) that serve the larger goal of the course: teaching the comparative method, critical thinking, responsible use of sources, and so on. McCutcheon's choices get at some of the challenges associated with balancing skills and content: How and in what ways do you want your course to be applicable for students? How will you negotiate content choice when trying to cover field expectations (orthodoxy) or when attempting to use the unfamiliar (the “unorthodox e.g.”) to give students a new perspective on an old problem? Each choice only brings more choices for the instructor. McCutcheon's essay suggests that there is no right or wrong approach as long as you carefully consider the choices you are making and think through the impact they will have in your classroom.</p> <p>But what was the problem in Miriam's classroom? Like many “Introductions to Bible,” this was a content‐driven survey course covering the “orthodox” texts and theories of the field. This is a traditional approach and one that can be successful. And yet, Miriam's class was not successful – teacher and students were frustrated, classroom discussions were unproductive, even hostile. McCutcheon's piece can help us point to a few problems that Miriam was not negotiating: The problem of audience – Miriam did not anticipate the kind of students in her class and what their needs and sensitivities would be in order for them to best learn (let alone become majors!). The problem of imagination – Miriam was unable to put herself in the place of her students and see the material and her presentation of this material from their perspective. The problem of proclamation – Miriam did not meet her students where they were when they entered her class and help them progress in their learning. Not only did she proclaim but she also accused, daring students to disagree. There was no trust and therefore there could be no communication and learning.</p> <p>However, beneath these problems that we find in Miriam's classroom with the help of McCutcheon's rubric, I would identify an underlying issue that is inherent in all these difficulties and, I think, implied by many of McCutcheon's choices: attitude. In order to communicate, both student and teacher need to be willing to share some common values, to see things from alternative perspectives, and to disagree productively. This certainly involves skills (respectful debate, active listening, creative thinking, and so on) that we can and should teach in any college classroom, but we also have to teach the attitude of an engaged, flexible, and generous learner. Attitude is the third connecting point between skills and content, it is the oxygen necessary to enable heat (skills) and fuel (content) to spark learning.</p> <p>So how do we teach attitude? How do we cultivate will? In some ways it is analogous to how we cultivate skills: we model it, we create opportunities for practice, we demonstrate its effectiveness, we respectfully but critically point out examples of right and wrong approaches. However, unlike teaching a skill, students cannot simply borrow ours until they develop their own; they come into the conversation with an already variably developed and influential attitude towards learning, their own education, authority figures, the classroom environment, and whatever material the class is claiming to cover. This is where the roadblocks to learning and teaching most often reside – especially in classrooms where the content is upheld as authoritative by participants in the conversation. The breakdown in Miriam's classroom was not the result of insufficient instruction on the content of the Book of Exodus or an inadequate demonstration of the historical‐critical method but rather the incompatible agendas of teacher and student that prevented them from reaching common ground where learning could take place. This attitudinal dimension is implicit in McCutcheon's thoughtful essay, but dilating on it explicitly serves to pose additional productive questions for those crafting introductory courses in the study of religion.</p> <hd id="AN0112065947-8">When Something Cannot Be Left Out: The Case of the Inherited Course</hd> <p>Adam T. Miller</p> <p>Building on Jonathan Z. Smith's insight that “no course can be complete,” and therefore “there is nothing that cannot be left out” ([<reflink idref="bib25" id="ref24">25</reflink>] , 187), Russell McCutcheon lays out a series of choices that early‐career educators will have to make in teaching introductory level courses in religious studies. Constituting his target audience are “ABDs teaching their own course for the first time [and] newly hired Assistant Professors confronting a full teaching load along with research and service expectations.” As a doctoral student entering my second year of coursework, I do not fit squarely into this group. But I do teach an online introductory course on a regular basis, and this experience sheds light on an additional dimension of the problems that McCutcheon articulates in his essay. Though on the whole the piece provided much to think through and wrestle with, some of the choices outlined therein are not live options for me. For in my situation, “there is [something] that cannot be left out.”</p> <p>Offered widely through a small, private university in central Missouri, the course I teach is an accelerated online introduction to religion. Unlike the hypothetical courses created by Smith and McCutcheon's audiences, this course is not strictly speaking mine. That is, it is an inherited course.[<reflink idref="bib10" id="ref25">10</reflink>] What this means in my case is (<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref26">1</reflink>) I do not choose which textbook to use, (<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref27">2</reflink>) I do not design the bulk of the syllabus, and (<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref28">3</reflink>) I cannot remove readings from the inherited textbook or modify the order in which they are to be read. For me, then, the problems of applicability and orthodoxy take on a slightly different form.</p> <p>As designed, the course focuses primarily on the mastery of content. The content comes prearranged from Gary E. Kessler's Studying Religion: An Introduction Through Cases ([<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref29">5</reflink>] ). Over eight weeks, Kessler introduces my students to an impressive array of information. Rather than being sorted by tradition, as is typically the case for introductory textbooks, the information is arranged in a comparative framework to illustrate phenomenological categories like the sacred (for example, sacred power, sacred space, sacred story, sacred action, and so on). This layout is in some sense a great strength – indeed, comparison is one of the tools scholars of religion have at their disposal, and such an arrangement surely results in the acquisition of knowledge about certain aspects of human cultures. But as an educator I am not particularly interested in getting my students to apprehend religions as the result of experiences of the Sacred and, therefore, something to be tolerated (at worst) or celebrated (at best).[<reflink idref="bib11" id="ref30">11</reflink>] Instead, I want to help my students develop a certain set of transferable analytical skills – namely, the ability to think critically about the social world, in which the phenomena we often group together under the umbrella term religion play a role.</p> <p>The question for me, therefore, is not whether I want to teach content or skill, and if I want to teach content to whom I should defer. Rather, the questions become: How do I work with what have? How do I teach what I have been given in a way that is in line with my pedagogical aims? How can I use this predetermined content to impart the set of skills mentioned above to my students? Different instructors will likely come to different conclusions. My solution to this problem, for better or worse, has been to assign additional readings, most of which come from Craig Martin's A Critical Introduction to the Study of Religion ([<reflink idref="bib10" id="ref31">10</reflink>] ). There are pros and cons to this decision. First, there is the fear that I am overburdening my students, most of whom are working full‐time jobs, raising children, or are otherwise non‐traditional students. Second, due in part to the predetermined order of my syllabus as well as time constraints put in place by my other responsibilities, it has sometimes been difficult to put Martin and Kessler into conversation, that is, to use content from the latter as an illustration of a larger issue detailed by the former. I have proceeded on this front by trial and error, and many times I have found it easier to provide examples of my own. On the plus side, however, I feel as though I have had incredible success with this particular experiment.[<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref32">12</reflink>] By the end of the term, most of my students seem fairly comfortable using sociological categories like naturalization, legitimation, authority, and projection to discuss the kinds of things we commonly take to be religious.</p> <p>For those of us who have inherited courses, online or otherwise, a new set of questions arises to which we must respond. How we respond will vary, of course, depending on the nature of the materials inherited, the order and time frame in which we have to teach them, the degree of freedom we have to modify the specifics, our pedagogical goals, the assumptions and prior training of our students, and so on. But in the end, one thing we all ought to do often is reflect critically on our craft as educators, and the choices McCutcheon outlines are a good place to start.</p> <hd id="AN0112065947-9">The Problem of Identity</hd> <p>Emily D. Crews</p> <p>In his “A Baker's Dozen of Choices in the Introductory Class,” Russell McCutcheon guides readers through a thicket of problems and possibilities that might be faced by early‐career teachers of undergraduate introductory courses. Drawing on experiences from his own first years of teaching, especially as they are now understood from a more seasoned perspective, McCutcheon addresses some of the most significant choices new teachers will have to make. Among them are whether to lecture or teach interactively (“the problem of proclamation”), whether to assign papers or multiple choice tests (“the problem of engagement”), and whether to teach for future majors or students who are only fulfilling requirements (“the problem of audience”).</p> <p>In reading McCutcheon's article I was struck by how many answers to the questions he put forward imply one uniform type of instructor; the choices are the same for all of us, regardless of who we might be. I wonder, though, how those choices might actually change in light of instructors' identities, whether of gender, race, sexuality, or religion (to name only a few).[<reflink idref="bib13" id="ref33">13</reflink>] For instance, under “the problem of time” (#10), McCutcheon asks, “will you build your course around any one of the many prefab textbooks/course readers that are now on the market (useful for an orthodox course based on “covering the material,” perhaps) or will you develop resources of your own, such as finding and making PDF readings, in order to accomplish goals that are specific to you, your sense of the field, and thus your syllabus and class?” (<reflink idref="bib86" id="ref34">86</reflink>). I am instinctively inclined toward the latter option; searching out interesting sources and sharing them with my students seems far preferable to choosing a cookie‐cutter textbook. I am not, however, a working mother. In most heterosexual, middle‐class American households, women continue to do the bulk of childcare and household tasks, meaning that in some cases, “the problem of time” might prevent female instructors with children from experimenting with readings and assignments even if it is of interest to them (see Bureau of Labor Statistics [<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref35">2</reflink>] ).</p> <p>The same type of recalibration of options applies to many of McCutcheon's other questions, and to teaching in general. As a female‐bodied person, I am often, without my consent or my control and even at times my knowledge, assigned by my students characteristics or positions that make some kinds of teaching difficult and predetermine others. This is likewise the case with instructors of, for instance, some races, sexualities, or religious perspectives. Markers of my identity as they are perceived by my students can have a dramatic impact on the success of certain lessons or pedagogical techniques and can play a significant role in the climate of the classroom. In a recent study on online classrooms students regularly gave higher ratings to professors they assumed to be male than to those they assumed to be female (MacNeil, Driscoll, and Hunt [<reflink idref="bib9" id="ref36">9</reflink>] ). Female professors are more often said to employ favoritism and scorn than their male colleagues. Students accord male professors greater intellect, but consider female professors to be better role models.[<reflink idref="bib14" id="ref37">14</reflink>] Many students expect certain kinds of dispositions of female professors – positive, nurturing, gentle – that are not expected of male professors.[<reflink idref="bib15" id="ref38">15</reflink>] Violation of those expectations can result in negative assumptions about the instructor or in students' disappointment or alienation.</p> <p>In Autumn 2015 I will teach my first course as a primary instructor. When I designed the course some months ago and later, as I planned the outline of each session and fine‐tuned the assignments, I considered many of the questions McCutcheon raises (proof, I think, of his deep understanding of teaching in its early stages). I debated with myself about whether I wanted to focus on the acquisition of content or skills (what McCutcheon calls “the problem of applicability”) and what the best means were of accomplishing each. I weighed the merits of lecturing versus discussion‐based teaching and the value of a broad survey versus a more focused unveiling of material (“the problem of initiation”). Underlying all of these ruminations was a concern about how the fact that I am an embodied, gendered, sexualized, racialized, many‐other‐things‐ized being might affect the success of my course and impact my students, who are likewise inseparable from their own and others' understandings of their identities.</p> <p>Thus, in addition to, or perhaps even before, asking the questions McCutcheon so artfully lays out, I (and so many more teachers besides) must also ask: how will I negotiate issues of identity as they relate to the constitution of my authority in the classroom? Will I reveal and/or discuss those aspects of myself with my students? Will I be entirely open about the subject positions that animate my own scholarship and the choices I have made for the course? I suspect I will not know the answers to these questions or the many others that will arise until well after the end of my first course, if even then, but I am certain that I must ask them until I do.</p> <p>These types of questions are not exclusive to the teaching profession; wondering how our genders, races, styles of dress, or modes of speech will be evaluated and judged by others is a reality of most, if not all, humans' personal and professional lives, be they pedagogues or podiatrists, teachers or trash collectors. In this way I think of teaching, to use McCutcheon's formulation, “as but one among many examples of things that we, as humans, cross‐culturally do or produce.” Teaching is “an e.g.” of being in the world, and thus part of mastering the art of teaching young students to critically engage an incredibly complex subject like religion is acknowledging and considering how to navigate our own incredibly complex selves, especially as they are constituted and contested in the classroom.</p> <p>This focus on issues of identity does not suggest that McCutcheon's questions or the range of answers he proposes are invalid. On the contrary, they enliven a critical discussion of teaching and pedagogy that, like conversation about race and gender in the United States, is sometimes silenced by the assumption that the problems have already been solved (despite remarkable evidence to the contrary in both cases). The addition of issues of identity does, however, press on McCutcheon's assertion (pace Smith) that “there is nothing that must be taught, there is nothing that cannot be left out.” What cannot be left out, I would argue, is a consideration of the choices professors of introductory courses (or of any course at any level) must make vis à vis factors of identity.</p> <ref id="AN0112065947-10"> <title>Footnotes</title> <blist> <bibl id="bib1" idref="ref26" type="bt">1</bibl> <bibtext>Thanks to my colleagues Steven Ramey and Vaia Touna for comments on an earlier draft of this paper and also to Brandon Cline and Aaron Hollander for arranging my visit to Chicago as well as Dean Margaret Mitchell for her kind invitation to come speak at the Divinity School. Because this paper was written for and delivered at the Craft of Teaching workshop, I feel I should add here that, as it makes evident (implicitly throughout and, at times, explicitly), my classroom habits are deeply indebted to Jonathan Z. Smith's many thoughtful writings on teaching. Thus, I see his contributions to the classroom rather differently from what I read in parts of Lofton (7). </bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib2" idref="ref4" type="bt">2</bibl> <bibtext>If memory serves, that is how references to that troublesome book later made their way into my dissertation and, eventually, into my first book (McCutcheon 11) – being just one example of the intimate relationship teaching and research have had in my own career. </bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib3" idref="ref10" type="bt">3</bibl> <bibtext>This requires me to make an annual transparency disclosure to the university, and thus the state of Alabama, concerning what I do with those royalties (assuming students buy new copies of the book). </bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib4" idref="ref6" type="bt">4</bibl> <bibtext>For blog posts that were written after returning from my visit to the University of Chicago, where this paper was originally presented, and for elaborations on some of these points see McCutcheon (2015b; 2015c). </bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib5" idref="ref16" type="bt">5</bibl> <bibtext>See the opening few minutes of Brad Stoddard's interview with Lincoln for the backstory to his “Theses on Method” (Stoddard 29). </bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib6" idref="ref15" type="bt">6</bibl> <bibtext>While overall credit hour production, publications, and external grants are certainly among other measures of a unit's productivity (especially relevant to Deans and Vice Presidents for Academic Affairs/Provosts), in my state the number of graduates (and thus majors, not minors) is the coin of the realm from the point of view of the state credentialing body, the Alabama Commission on Higher Education. Also see note 7. </bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib7" idref="ref18" type="bt">7</bibl> <bibtext>An aside: I was hired in 2001, as an outside chair, to help revive the University of Alabama's Department since it was then graduating so few students that it had been judged “nonviable” by the state credentialing board (the above‐mentioned Alabama Commission on Higher Education) and, because of that, it risked losing its major (that is, being demoted to a service Department, and thus offering 100‐level Core courses only, or, an even worse possibility, being closed entirely); I am happy to say that our reinvention (led also by Ted Trost, who chaired the unit for four of the years since then), has been quite successful. We have more than quadrupled the number of students taught annually and have gone from 4.25 faculty in the Fall of 2001 to 9.5 tenure‐track or tenured in the Fall of 2016. For more details on this reinvention see McCutcheon (15). </bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib8" idref="ref8" type="bt">8</bibl> <bibtext>A brief word of advice: carry a mug of coffee as you roam the class; it's far smaller than a podium, yes, but you can still hide behind it just enough, when necessary, and you can nurse a long sip to buy yourself a little time to think about the curve you were just thrown when students ask you an unanticipated question. </bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib9" idref="ref21" type="bt">9</bibl> <bibtext>Among the courses we teach, every faculty member in our Department teaches one large enrollment 100‐level course each semester (with up to 150 students per section), ideally but not always with TA assistance (we have only two TA lines in our Department); large enrollment courses in our Department were unheard of prior to my own arrival as Chair. </bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib10" idref="ref25" type="bt">10</bibl> <bibtext>I know at least one other person who has taught an inherited course, namely Matt Sheedy. See Sheedy (22) to read about his experience. </bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib11" idref="ref30" type="bt">11</bibl> <bibtext>This is something Kessler promotes toward the end of his book: “Perhaps we cannot do much better than to adopt the principle that all religions have a partial grasp on truth. … It seems that the only justification for adopting the notion that all religions contain some of the truth is pragmatic. The view encourages religious toleration, explains why religions may disagree, and promotes interreligious dialogue” (5, 316). </bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib12" idref="ref32" type="bt">12</bibl> <bibtext>There have been failures, of course. One time, I had my students close the term by reading McCutcheon's “Redescribing ‘Religion’ as Social Formation: Toward a Social Theory of Religion” (12) in the hopes that their previous readings and online discussions prepared them adequately enough to get the gist. This proved to be a foolhardy decision – to use McCutcheon's term, it was one I made out of a lack of imagination. </bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib13" idref="ref9" type="bt">13</bibl> <bibtext>I acknowledge the problematic nature of using a term like “identity” without proper explanation and complication. For the sake of brevity, I have used it here to encompass the many actions, qualities, and assumptions that are knitted together to create a sense of self by variously situated social actors. I do not mean to imply any kind of substance that is fixed, natural, or inherent to any one person or group of people (see, for instance, Bayart [1]). </bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib14" idref="ref13" type="bt">14</bibl> <bibtext>See the interactive study, “Gendered Language in Teacher Reviews” (Schmidt 21). Search terms “genius” and “role model.” Interestingly, in student evaluations female professors in the field of education were labeled “role models” more far more often (ten million more times) than male or female professors in any other field. </bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib15" idref="ref38" type="bt">15</bibl> <bibtext>For instance, some cases, female professors who exhibited stereotypically male traits like assertiveness and directness were perceived as bossy or mean (Schmidt 21). </bibtext> </blist> </ref> <hd id="AN0112065947-11">Bibliography</hd> <p>1 Bayart, Jean‐Francois. 2005. The Illusion of Cultural Identity. Chicago, Ill. : University of Chicago Press.</p> <ulist> <item>2 Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2014. “ 2014 American Time Use Survey.” http://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.nr0.htm (accessed May 20, 2015).</item> <item>3 Geertz, Clifford. 1973. “ Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.” In The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, 3 – 30. New York, N.Y. : Basic Books.</item> <item>4 Hinnells, John. 1984. A Dictionary of Religions. New York, N.Y. : Viking Penguin.</item> <item>5 Kessler, Gary E. 2008. Studying Religion: An Introduction Through Cases. New York, N.Y. : McGraw‐Hill Higher Education.</item> <item>6 Lincoln, Bruce. 2012. “ Theses on Method” and “Theses on Comparison.” In Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars: Critical Explorations in the History of Religions. Chicago, Ill. : The University of Chicago Press.</item> <item>7 Lofton, Kathryn. 2014. Review essay on Jonathan Z. Smith, On Teaching Religion. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 82, no. 2 : 531 – 542.</item> <item>8 Lyden, John. 1994. Enduring Issues in Religion. San Diego, Calif. : Greenhaven Press.</item> <item>9 MacNeil, Lillian, Adam Driscoll, and Andrea Hunt. 2014. “ What's in a Name? Exposing Gender Bias in Student Rating of Teaching.” Innovative Higher Education, December 5. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10755‐014‐9313‐4 (accessed May 20, 2015).</item> <item>10 Martin, Craig. 2012. A Critical Introduction to the Study of Religion. Sheffield, U.K. : Equinox Publishing.</item> <item>11 McCutcheon, Russell T. 1997. Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia. New York, N.Y. : Oxford University Press.</item> <item>12 McCutcheon, Russell T. 2001. “ Redescribing ‘Religion’ as Social Formation: Toward a Social Theory of Religion.” In Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion. Albany, N.Y. : State University of New York Press.</item> <item>13 McCutcheon, Russell T. 2007. Studying Religion: An Introduction. New York, N.Y. : Routledge.</item> <item>14 McCutcheon, Russell T. 2014. A Modest Proposal on Method: Essaying the Study of Religion. Leiden, The Netherlands : Brill.</item> <item>15 McCutcheon, Russell T. 2015a. “ Afterword: The Reinvention of the Study of Religion at Alabama.” In Writing Religion: The Case for the Critical Study of Religion, edited by Steven Ramey. Tuscaloosa, Al. : The University of Alabama Press.</item> <item>16 McCutcheon, Russell T. 2015b. “ Scholars or Colleagues?” Studying Religion in Culture (blog), April 9. http://religion.ua.edu/blog/2015/04/scholars‐or‐colleagues/ (accessed 17 October 2015).</item> <item>17 McCutcheon, Russell T. 2015c. “ Why Do I Blog? ” Studying Religion in Culture (blog), April 10. http://religion.ua.edu/blog/2015/04/why‐do‐i‐blog/ (accessed 17 October 2015).</item> <item>18 Morris, Brian. 1988. Anthropological Studies of Religion: An Introductory Text. New York, N.Y. : Cambridge University Press.</item> <item>19 Paden, William E. 1994. Religious Worlds: The Comparative Study of Religion. Boston, Mass. : Beacon Press.</item> <item>20 Ryle, Gilbert. 2009. “ The Thinking of Thoughts: What is le Penseur Doing? ” In Collected Papers, 1929–1968, 494 – 510. London, U.K. : Routledge.</item> <item>21 Schmidt, Benjamin. 2015. “ Gendered Language in Teacher Reviews.” http://benschmidt.org/profGender/# (accessed May 20, 2015).</item> <item>22 Sheedy, Matt. 2014. “ Teaching Ethics and/in the World Religions Paradigm.” Bulletin for the Study of Religion, August 13. http://www.equinoxpub.com/blog/2014/08/teaching‐ethics‐andin‐the‐world‐religions‐paradigm/ (accessed 17 October 2015).</item> <item>23 Smart, Ninian, and Richard Hecht, eds. 1982. Sacred Texts of the World: A Universal Anthology. New York, N.Y. : Crossroad.</item> <item>24 Smith, Huston. [1958] 1991. The World's Religions. Completely Revised and Updated Edition of The Religions of Man. San Francisco, Calif. : HarperSanFrancisco.</item> <item>25 Smith, Jonathan Z. 1991. “ The Introductory Course: Less is Better.” In Teaching the Introductory Course in Religious Studies: A Sourcebook, ed. Mark Juergesmeyer, 185 – 192. Atlanta, Ga. : Scholars Press.</item> <item>26 Smith, Jonathan Z. 2005. “ Religion in the Liberal Arts: Reflections on Teaching.” In The Place of Religious Studies in the Liberal Arts, 6 – 14. The Chicago Forum on Pedagogy and the Study of Religion. Chicago, Ill. : Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago.</item> <item>27 Smith, Jonathan Z. 2007. “ The Necessary Lie: Duplicity in the Disciplines.” In Studying Religion: An Introduction, ed. Russell T. McCutcheon, 73 – 80. New York, N.Y. : Routledge.</item> <item>28 Smith, Jonathan Z. 2013. On Teaching Religion: Essays by Jonathan Z. Smith. Christopher Lehrich, ed. New York, N.Y. : Oxford University Press.</item> <item>29 Stoddard, Brad. 2015. “ The Critical Study of Religion.” Podcast audio, April 13. http://www.religiousstudiesproject.com/podcast/the‐critical‐study‐of‐religion/ (accessed 17 October 2015).</item> </ulist> <aug> <p>By Russell T. McCutcheon; Aaron T. Hollander; Andrew F. Durdin; Kelli A. Gardner; Adam T. Miller and Emily D. Crews</p> </aug> <nolink nlid="nl1" bibid="bib25" firstref="ref1"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl2" bibid="bib28" firstref="ref2"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl3" bibid="bib24" firstref="ref3"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl4" bibid="bib23" firstref="ref5"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl5" bibid="bib19" firstref="ref7"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl6" bibid="bib27" firstref="ref11"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl7" bibid="bib18" firstref="ref12"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl8" bibid="bib26" firstref="ref20"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl9" bibid="bib20" firstref="ref22"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl10" bibid="bib86" firstref="ref34"></nolink> |
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| Items | – Name: Title Label: Title Group: Ti Data: Forum: Crafting the Introductory Course in Religious Studies – Name: Language Label: Language Group: Lang Data: English – Name: Author Label: Authors Group: Au Data: <searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22McCutcheon%2C+Russell+T%2E%22">McCutcheon, Russell T.</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Hollander%2C+Aaron+T%2E%22">Hollander, Aaron T.</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Durdin%2C+Andrew+F%2E%22">Durdin, Andrew F.</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Gardner%2C+Kelli+A%2E%22">Gardner, Kelli A.</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Miller%2C+Adam+T%2E%22">Miller, Adam T.</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Crews%2C+Emily+D%2E%22">Crews, Emily D.</searchLink> – Name: TitleSource Label: Source Group: Src Data: <searchLink fieldCode="SO" term="%22Teaching+Theology+%26+Religion%22"><i>Teaching Theology & Religion</i></searchLink>. Jan 2016 19(1):78-98. – Name: Avail Label: Availability Group: Avail Data: Wiley-Blackwell. 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148. Tel: 800-835-6770; Tel: 781-388-8598; Fax: 781-388-8232; e-mail: cs-journals@wiley.com; Web site: http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA – Name: PeerReviewed Label: Peer Reviewed Group: SrcInfo Data: Y – Name: Pages Label: Page Count Group: Src Data: 21 – Name: DatePubCY Label: Publication Date Group: Date Data: 2016 – Name: TypeDocument Label: Document Type Group: TypDoc Data: Journal Articles<br />Collected Works - General<br />Reports - Evaluative – Name: Audience Label: Education Level Group: Audnce Data: <searchLink fieldCode="EL" term="%22Higher+Education%22">Higher Education</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="EL" term="%22Postsecondary+Education%22">Postsecondary Education</searchLink> – Name: Subject Label: Descriptors Group: Su Data: <searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Religion+Studies%22">Religion Studies</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Introductory+Courses%22">Introductory Courses</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Instructional+Development%22">Instructional Development</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Skill+Development%22">Skill Development</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Higher+Education%22">Higher Education</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Educational+Practices%22">Educational Practices</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Governance%22">Governance</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Educational+Assessment%22">Educational Assessment</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Instructional+Design%22">Instructional Design</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Decision+Making%22">Decision Making</searchLink> – Name: Subject Label: Geographic Terms Group: Su Data: <searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Illinois%22">Illinois</searchLink> – Name: DOI Label: DOI Group: ID Data: 10.1111/teth.12323 – Name: ISSN Label: ISSN Group: ISSN Data: 1368-4868 – Name: Abstract Label: Abstract Group: Ab Data: This series of short essays considers the complex choices and decision-making processes of instructors preparing to teach, and continuing to teach, introductory courses in religious studies. In a paper originally presented in the University of Chicago's "The Craft of Teaching in the Academic Study of Religion" series, Russell McCutcheon explores a "baker's dozen" of such choices and the larger pedagogical problems with which they are entwined, ranging from classic questions of skill development and content coverage to philosophical concerns around students' identification with their topics of study and institutional concerns around governance and assessment. Aaron Hollander provides a brief introduction and four doctoral students at the University of Chicago Divinity School respond to McCutcheon's essay, widening its scope, testing its applicability, and interrogating its undergirding suppositions from the perspective of early-career educators in the field. – Name: AbstractInfo Label: Abstractor Group: Ab Data: As Provided – Name: DateEntry Label: Entry Date Group: Date Data: 2016 – Name: AN Label: Accession Number Group: ID Data: EJ1086173 |
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