Laura Ammon, Appalachian State University, Boone

Laura Ammon is an assistant professor of religion at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. She holds degrees in religious studies from the University of Chicago and Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California. Her expertise lies in the area of history of Christianity, with specializations in early modern Catholicism and the relationship between Christianity and colonialism in the New World. She can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . 

Expanding Students’ Goals for Higher Education

Recent studies of the “millennial generation” have made some tantalizing suggestions about what kinds of expectations these young people have about their lives inside and outside of the classroom (Smith, 2009). Many of our students have an instrumental approach to education; they are focused on “ends” and define those ends in terms of earning potential. Encouraged by anxious parents, an increasing attempt to corporatize the university, and a burgeoning growth in the belief that there are things one must possess in order to have a happy life, our students pursue their education as a means to acquiring. Often students — and their parents — lose sight of other outcomes from higher education beyond a good job (i.e., immediately available and high-paying) and a secure economic future (Smith, 2009). What the student does with her or his life is often a secondary concern to the potential earning possibilities of a profession, even to the student’s perspective, in service of the first goal of economic security and prosperity. A recent article in Higher Education Today argues that humanities degrees are good for business and promise economic reward, further accentuating the emphasis on college as a means to an end of high earning (Jay and Graff, 2012). This narrow view obscures the value of humanities even as it seems to encourage students to take humanities courses. Within the humanities, religious studies courses are a place that can engage some of the other potentialities of living — meaning making, for example — that are part and parcel of life but are often neglected in the ways students and parents approach higher education. College can provide many tools for living, one of which is earning potential. But discovering how to learn and imagining different worlds are also tools that come from humanities courses and can be significant assets for life after college.

Religious studies courses, particularly as part of a liberal arts education, can help convince students that focusing on the ends is too narrow an approach to take as one looks at the entirety of one’s life. While I teach at a medium-sized state university, I earned my BA at a small liberal arts college, and that experience as an undergraduate continues to inform my praxis as a professor. I hope that while teaching about religion, I can help students cultivate a curiosity about how lives are lived in various cultures and with disparate religious worldviews, and also help them consider the “how” of living in conjunction with their desire for security. In the end, it does not matter what your occupation or your pay might be: everyone, even professors, want more from life than their jobs. My job is meaningful and very fulfilling, but I also find meaning in literature, art, and music. This is due in no small part to my liberal arts degree and the humanities professors who taught me disciplinary content while also encouraging in me a sense of reflection on the way I live my life through thinking about how others have lived theirs. These foundational educational experiences, designed by a music historian and an ethicist, continue to enrich my life and to challenge and encourage me to find and make meaning. They also inspire me to cultivate that kind of reflection in my students. Arum and Roksa point out the significance of what I experienced insofar as my desire to have a vocation that is meaningful and fulfilling arose out of much reflection modeled by my professors: “It is faculty, within classrooms and beyond, who shape not only students’ overall development but also their commitment to continuing their education” (2011). This is a challenge in a medium-sized state university, but is all the more important in an environment where students often feel like a number rather than a person to their professors.

One point that emerges from studies such as the ones presented in Academically Adrift (Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, University of Chicago Press, 2011) is that while many of our current students do not have a sense of where they are going in their post-college lives, they have a strong desire to connect their courses with their lives (Arum and Roksa; Walvoord). Addressing these issues is less about curricular development and general education and more about learning about and discovering oneself in a way that is particular to college life — what Barbara Walvoord has deemed “multidimensional growth.” The core of humanities is about exactly that kind of growth and self-discovery, though not necessarily in the ways that students initially envision. Throughout their college career, students discover and encounter others through literature, sociology, art, history, and religious studies. Directly or indirectly, these humanities courses address how people create meaning in their lives. One place that creation occurs is in the realm of religion. Religion is unique in the humanities in that it cultivates a set of abilities — to imagine the ways people see themselves in relation to history, art, music, science, the cosmos — and does so in particular cultural settings. Religious literacy “must involve not only a degree of mastery of basic information…but also some insight into how people use that basic information to orient themselves in the world, express their individual and communal self-understanding, and give their lives direction and meaning” (Gallagher, 2009). This is what we are teaching along with “religious literacy” — an ability to imagine the world from the perspective of another person, if only partially, and see how that may be meaningful for those persons.

What makes religious studies courses distinctive in the humanities curriculum is the role that imagination and self-reflection must play in the courses we teach. We teach our students various facets of the world’s religions to increase their religious literacy and encourage them to be engaged global citizens, asking them to consider, if only for the time in our class, what the world looks like from other religious perspectives. Much of the writing on religious literacy focuses on developing ideas of empathy in one way or another, and empathy requires acts of imagination. I ask my students to consider what the world looks like from frameworks that have been elucidated in class, to imagine others having religious values and practices as precious as my students’ values and practices are to them. Asking them to consider those beliefs and practices most dear to others usually leads them to think, at least a bit, about their own beliefs and practices. Frequently, I stop there, having opened the door, and leave students to decide the next steps.

I encourage my students towards self-reflection, and my course invites students to take a step through that door. My course is designed to deepen their religious literacy, to help them see in more ways how the strange is familiar and the familiar can be strange (McCutcheon, 2007).  I endeavor to bring that to my classroom in a variety of ways through a course on “Religion and Auto/Biography.” In this course, students read a variety of autobiographies, including Simon Wiesenthal, Marjane Satrapi, and the Dalai Lama. In reading these works, I help students apply the religious literacy we cultivate in the classroom (the what and wherefore of religious studies) and reflect on the ways these different authors from various traditions talk about their lived religions, their faith or lack thereof, the ways in which they lived up to or failed to live up to their religious convictions, and the ways religion enriched or damaged their lives. These questions are particularly distinctive to teaching religious studies. We discuss the constructed nature of the texts, how authors imagined their audience, what is revealed about the individual, and what is elided. In addition to learning “facts” about religions, autobiographies also lead students to see the ways in which lives are lived. Religious studies invites students to imagine the world through another lens. And by reading these life stories, and seeing the ways individuals have reflected on their religious lives, students have an opportunity to see the tensions that can arise when there is a conflict of values or clash between cultures, or how people wrestle with gender and sexuality, war and peace, inter- and intra-familial conflict, international politics, natural disaster, the human capacity to believe, disbelieve, regret, and forgive, and all the ways that people have resolved or failed to resolve those conflicts. This cultivates empathy and imagination.

In important ways, these autobiographical works invite self-reflection and are very personal works for students to read. During the course of the semester, in addition to reading autobiographies, I ask students to write a biography of someone and focus on the ways in which religion factors into that person’s life. Finally, as a significant segment of our class meetings, I have students keep a guided journal. This journal, I think, gets at the heart of religious studies in the humanities curriculum. Students are forced to take time to reflect on their lives and beliefs in a structured environment that is safe, as I do not read their journals. The questions come primarily from Harry Cargas’s Exploring Inner Space (Saint Anthony Messenger Press, 1991). I have modified some of the questions to better connect to current issues in the world or the readings.

Whatever money students make in their lives and whatever work they find to fill their time, taking time to reflect on one’s ideas, beliefs, and concepts enhances a person’s quality of life. At a state institution where students are often focused on how to get through their studies in as few semesters as possible, this kind of self-reflection is a luxury and one we in religious studies can help them enjoy as part of their college learning experience. In many respects, this is an undervalued aspect of our culture and of college education. Taking the time to sit and just ruminate on the decisions one has made, beliefs one holds, and one’s core values is something that is rarely modeled in our culture and even more rarely in state schools with larger class sizes. However, this is an important part of the life of the mind, the experience of the whole person throughout her or his life, whatever their occupation. There is an element of risk both in thinking about others’ religious worlds and honestly and carefully examining our own values and beliefs. This is poignantly brought to light by Robert Orsi’s recent discussion of participant observer practice in the study of religion (Orsi, 2006). Awareness of one’s beliefs and values is very significant in identifying and valuing the beliefs of others, and as a crucial part of empathizing with others, imagining their world, and knowing oneself.

A course such as “Religious Auto/Biography” combines religious studies and religious literacy. Frequently it is a general education class for students meeting a requirement for a “cultural diversity” or “writing-intensive” credit, and many of those students will not darken the door of a religious studies class again; yet it can be a course that opens doors for students to the world and helps them make their place in that world. The connection to the reader, through the direct and personal tone of an autobiography, opens a door for imagining a life lived, a space where one can ask, “Would I do the same?” or “How does it feel to have had that experience?,” sparking that imagination in a personal, intimate way that is not often part of the state university experience. I hope students can take away three things central to religious studies from this kind of course: 1) Knowledge of other religious traditions; 2) Ideas about the ways those religious traditions can be lived; and 3) A sense of their own developing ideas about life, the universe, and everything.

Humanities professors educate students, teaching them the data and analytical skills that are important in their fields; but in addition, our religious studies classes provide a distinctive opportunity because our data and analytical skills reach far beyond the classroom. We can, through the careful exploration of religious data, inculcate in our students a desire to better know their world and themselves in that world. This seems to be part of the private college and university ethos but is (often necessarily) sadly neglected at state schools. As a professor, I endeavor to take seriously a call to keep my teaching student-centered but also engaged in the world, engaged in my students’ lives — even as they believe they are pursuing a degree for its material promises for the future. It is challenging in the state school world where class sizes are ballooning and publishing demands are increasing, but it can be a rewarding part of our teaching lives, in no small part because our students are eager for this kind of engagement (Walvoord, 2008).