Religious Studies News

Community or civic engagement assignments can take many forms. The strategies we have outlined revolved around the “field trip”-style of community engagement, rather than, say, a service-project effort. We discovered that taking students out of the classroom environment can have a salutary effect as long as the experience is then reintegrated into the in-class teaching and evaluated together with the students. The site visits in which our students participated would likely have been of little consequence had they not been continuously reintegrated into lectures and discussions.

In The Skillful Teacher (2006), Stephen Brookfield contends that effective teaching requires that the professor listen to and learn from students as they describe not only what they are learning, but also how they are learning in the classroom. While not disagreeing with Brookfield on the fundamental importance of such self-reflection and evaluation, our experiences in making site visits a central feature of a college course necessitates a profound reevaluation of what is meant by “classroom.” Because our teaching strategies were heavily dependent upon transgressing the boundary of the traditional classroom, notions of technique, trust, and student responsiveness had to be reimagined and renegotiated. 

We learned that when students are engaged in learning activities while they are “out and about,” great care must be taken in the creation of suitable student-teacher feedback loops. Students must be given ample opportunity to reflect upon and report upon their site visit experiences, so that the teacher may provide relevant responses and guide students into deeper reflection. For example, Delaporte made the project a semester-long assignment: students went on their site visit about halfway through the semester, but discussions pertaining to the visits occurred regularly for the second half of the semester. Students had time to compare their own experiences to those of others and were able to bring up sensitive issues of discomfort, stereotypes, and expectations within the context of the history of America.

The planning and implementation of site visits — the good ol’ field trip — may require forethought and logistical exertion, which may not come naturally to or be welcome by all who teach religion in college and university settings. However, our experiences suggest that site visits are an effective, and therefore worthwhile, strategy for exposing students to new and different religious communities and their beliefs. Students who take courses in religion and/or spirituality arrive with diverse beliefs and biases, many of them strongly held. Reading, hearing lectures, and watching videos about the beliefs (and biases) of other groups may or may not inspire students to see things from a religious point of view other than their own. On the other hand, visiting another’s place of worship does challenge students to move out of the relative comfort of the religious studies classroom and into the somewhat disorienting space of a strange, new sacred place. It becomes the task of the skillful religious studies teacher to engage and to guide resulting student disorientation in a way that is compassionate and creative, so that the outcome is a student reorientation that reflects enlightenment, thoughtfulness, and “the voice of experience.”

Syllabus - Modern Christianity - Delaporte

Syllabus - Life and Work of the Church - Wiersma