Religious Studies News

Today’s integrative pedagogies will intellectually draw us into more contested territory where conflicting viewpoints and stakes will become necessary water and food. Rather than working the “sweet spot,” we will learn to pause and hang in between the lines of even multidisciplinary assumptions and methods. By lingering, we can attune ourselves to new and just emerging intellectual spaces beyond and/or through disciplinary norms. In these spaces, contemplation and adding perceptive judgment to rational inquiry draws in necessary creativity and imagination to work with global knots of issues and stakes (Arthur Zajonc; Mary Rose O’Reilley; Howard Thurman). If I felt anxious as students took increasing charge of their own learning, how much more might I feel as we press wider the gates and adapt together? Though my discomfort may rise, the possibilities and potential for new kinds of learning and engagement draw me to try this work again. How to become, as Kwame Appiah advocates, “rooted cosmopolitans” who can link theory and practice through engagement and commitment to ethics and thriving?

Some of the paths we will go down are obvious. We hear raucous demands from sustainability, economic recalibration, as well as insurgency politics and war. If we believe these global issues are not in our settings, we need to take time and look more closely. All local communities are struggling with waste dumping, including materials from other countries. As the numbers of prisoners increase, who now sits behind our walls? How does domestic and child violence intertwine with issues of refugee and immigrant rights? Following the threads from global to local, from interdisciplinary resources to transdisciplinary courage, we are facing a new crossroad that will energize our engaged teaching, learning, and scholarship. We can and cannot know what to expect. But the call is clear — for increased flexibility and imagination, building on the strong core of what was “then.”

To reconceptualize our civic, engaged, “knowing” teaching and learning as global civic engagement, I am musing on an evolutionary trajectory model, building tangentially on the work of Scott Atran and Douglas Medin. In their book The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction of Nature (MIT Press, 2010), they draw from cultural anthropology and cognitive science to envision how evolutionary causal trajectories unfold within cultures. Their model of development begins with “essentials” or core concepts, behaviors, and cultural perspectives that serve as original “place holders” for future growth and change. For engaged, civic education and scholarship, what might be those core “essentials” that could interweave with future factors, driving meaningful and relevant growth into the twenty-first century? What will we need to adapt from our core ideas about community participation and partnership, broad and local analysis, and action with assessment? What intellectual competencies must we cultivate to prepare our students for positions of decision-making beyond their comfort zones, to release control so that new spaces for knowing and learning can emerge? How might our insights and pedagogies morph and collapse, in order to evolve and meet the challenges of global proportions?

I think of a few possible strategies: 1) We could cultivate skills of structured and reflective pausing able to link existent knowledge with intuitive information; 2) Before testing hypotheses, we could practice listening longer and to more dissonance in order to discern gaps in understanding: 3) We could engage creative arts to work with analytical dilemmas and discover next steps.

A flood of questions arise. How might we explore for other skills and theories — linguistic, scientific — that would reach beyond personal, relational, and cultural ones we already know well? How might we re-aggregate relevant elements from existent pedagogical models? Could resistances become engines of positive change? What shifts in epistemologies, in senses of place re-placing the dominance of time, will put us in real world territories of participatory and engaged teaching, learning, and research?

Truthfully at this point, we can only say, “We shall see.” I look forward to sharing with you in the discoveries.

Syllabus - Religion Internship - Patterson