Liz Wilson, Miami University, Ohio

Liz Wilson is a professor of comparative religion at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in religion. She also teaches undergraduate classes in the Asian/Asian American studies program and the women’s, gender, and sexuality studies program. Holding degrees in religious studies from Davidson College and the University of Chicago Divinity School, Wilson is author of Charming Cadavers: Horrific Figurations of the Feminine in Indian Buddhist Hagiographic Literature (University of Chicago Press, 1996) and editor of The Living and the Dead: Social Dimensions of Death in South Asian Religion (State University of New York Press, 2003). Her research is in South Asian religious history, especially Buddhist and Hindu, with a focus on gender, sexuality, death and dying, and family structures.

The Potential Benefits of Split-level Classes

When two courses offering different levels of instruction (e.g., a 400- and 500-level course) are combined, the result is a split-level class. The graduate and undergraduate courses will typically have separate learning goals and requirements. At Miami University, Ohio, graduate students are given assignments that draw on more sophisticated skill-sets (such as the ability to work extensively with primary texts in original languages), require more nuanced analysis, and often demand more depth of coverage than what is typically required of undergraduate students.

Split-level classes offer a level of curricular flexibility in situations where there may not be adequate enrollments otherwise. Departments with few opportunities to offer graduate-only seminars can benefit from the relief from enrollment worries that comes with this curricular option. Split-level classes are also helpful for faculty recruitment and retention in that these classes provide faculty who enjoy working with graduate students the opportunity to include a graduate studies component along with an undergraduate component. Clearly, there are good pragmatic reasons to offer split-level classes; but there are also good pedagogical reasons for doing so.

Split-level classes offer undergraduates the chance to collaborate with graduate students as well as with faculty instructors. While the presence of graduate students can be intimidating for some less confident undergraduates, there are many benefits. Graduate students can model some of the skills and demonstrate the use of methods of inquiry that the typical undergraduate has yet to develop. Graduate students can provide a range of mentoring opportunities for the undergraduates in the class, especially when instructors plan assignments and orchestrate other opportunities that facilitate the mentoring process.

Religious studies as a multidisciplinary field can be daunting for any novice wishing to understand the contours of the field. How does one enter into ongoing academic conversations if one is not sure what disciplines are legitimately included, much less the scholarly conventions used by specialists in the different subdisciplines that make up religious studies? Those who are new to the major often need help learning to frame their research as contributions to the field. At a state school such as ours, where few students declare religion as a major in their first year as undergraduates and often come to the major as third- or even fourth-year students, even majors in their junior and senior years may feel uncertain about what the parameters of the field are and what constitutes a legitimate contribution. Instructors, of course, play a key role in fostering methodological awareness, but the added mentoring and modeling of skill sets by graduate students can make a difference for undergraduates.

Undergraduate methods courses are obviously designed to teach undergraduate students the contours of the field of religious studies and to facilitate methodological self-awareness. But it is often the case that these goals are achieved very gradually over the course of a term or a semester. Thus for many undergraduate students, it is only at the end of a methodology course that the student has a grasp of the parameters of the field that leads to a sense of basic research competency in the field of religious studies as a discipline. A split-level class that follows an undergraduate methods class is an ideal follow-up course. In our undergraduate program, we offer an undergraduate methods class at the 300-level and two split-level classes at the 400- and 500-level, which give undergraduates the opportunity to develop research projects that build on their growing competence as researchers within the discipline of religious studies.

Undergraduates in split-level classes can make greater strides in learning the contours of the field and their capacities for contributions to the field than undergraduate students in classes without a graduate student component. Ideally, graduate students can serve in split-level classes as models of methodological self-awareness. Graduate students generally come into our MA program with undergraduate training as religion majors. In addition, during their first semester on campus, graduate students enroll in a seminar on theory and methods in the study of religion. Those experiences tend to give our graduate students a sense of the various subdisciplines within religious studies, along with awareness of key categories and concepts in the field (such as ritual, myth, power, and the like). It is, of course, not always the case that graduate students are methodologically self-aware. Some our strongest undergraduate majors exceed the typical first-year MA student in academic abilities. But it is generally the case that graduate students who enroll in split-level classes with undergraduate students often have a self-awareness about what it means to make contributions to the field, which can help provide a sense of orientation for undergraduates who are wondering what they are working toward in their research and how to know when they have succeeded in saying something significant.

The process of articulating categories and concepts in the field can also be of benefit to the graduate students themselves, giving them opportunities to develop their thinking by instantiating with concrete examples what may previously have only been vague, inchoate abstractions. Another way that undergraduates can provide assistance to graduate students is in raising questions about the use of highly specialized terminology that may not be as effective as plain speech. In a split-level class, then, the mentoring process can go both ways, with undergraduates providing forms of guidance to graduate students even as graduate students assist undergraduates.

One of our most successful split-level classes is “Early Christian Literature and Religion: An Advanced Research Seminar for Undergraduates and Graduate Students” (REL 430/530, instructor James Hanges). The course is designed for students who have taken courses in biblical studies, especially those with some exposure to early Christianity. In addition, the class offers students with majors outside religious studies an opportunity to apply methodologies from other disciplines — such as sociology and anthropology — to the religious phenomena of the early Christian world. Students with backgrounds in classics often thrive in the class due to their familiarity with the histories and cultures of the ancient Mediterranean world.

The central learning goal of the class is the identification of a critical scholarly problem in early Christianity and the formulation of an appropriate historical hypothesis to respond to the problem. In order to help students achieve this central task, Hanges has designed assignments that teach students to navigate the various databases used in the study of religion, to ascertain the most relevant and high quality sources (primary and secondary) that will be useful for the student’s project, and to select the most compelling forms of primary evidence to be used in support of the writers’ hypothesis. Each student is required to meet individually with Hanges to discuss his or her background in the subject matter and to identify possible disciplinary and subdisciplinary approaches to the student’s potential research question. Students also discuss with the instructor any foreign languages that could be useful in conducting research.

Students collaborate at various points in the semester. For example, they complete peer-reviews of their fellow students’ research papers (second drafts) with the help of a guideline document that asks such questions as whether the writer has chosen sources adequate to the task, whether the writer has provided adequate support for the claims made, and the like. As they develop their drafts, students also master the appropriate format for the presentation of their research as a short, scholarly article. A crucial feature of the seminar is the research symposium, a public venue held at the end of the semester. Students present a distilled version of their findings in the form of a scholarly paper and respond to questions and critiques from an audience of faculty and students.

The class has served as an excellent capstone experience for many of our majors and minors, as well as graduate students from our department and cognate departments. The work produced in the class has been strong, and the research symposia have offered students opportunities for professional development that they might otherwise have had to travel off campus to obtain.

Some of my first attempts at teaching split-level classes were plagued by problems that I could have avoided had I been more deliberate in class design. For example, in my first split-level class I failed to manage enrollment so as to achieve a reasonable balance in numbers between graduate and undergraduate students. The graduate students outnumbered the undergraduate students by a ratio of over two-to-one. Most of the undergraduates were conspicuously silent in class discussions that semester and many reported feeling intimidated by the graduate students. Obviously if one is designing a split-level class, enrollment should be carefully managed.

Andrew Katayama (2001) writes of the benefits of training graduate students to help facilitate undergraduate learning in split-level classes. He offered two sections of a split-level educational psychology class and analyzed student course evaluations. Katayama structured the class to include a mentoring program in which graduate students helped undergraduates. He found that undergraduates reported greater learning as a result of the mentoring they received from graduate students in the class. But Katayama also found that many graduate students showed ambivalence about their mentoring roles in the class, stemming largely from uncertainty about what being a mentor entailed.

Teaching split-level classes has taught me to be aware of various possibilities for peer-level mentoring within the classroom and to try to be more deliberate in structuring my classes to take advantage of what students can teach each other as peers. One improvement that I will make the next time I teach a split-level class is to offer some formal training to graduate students on how to serve as in-class mentors for undergraduate students.

Peer mentoring in higher education can take many different forms. Literature on peer mentoring (Colvin and Ashman, 2010) indicates that clarity about the mentoring role is key to a successful peer-mentoring relationship. With a little advanced planning, we can take advantage of the teaching that naturally occurs among students on an informal basis, and channel the power of informal mentoring in ways that benefit both undergraduate and graduate students.