Religious Studies News

Graduate students who enter the MA program in comparative religion at Western Michigan University are expected to teach, either as TAs or as instructors of record, for every semester they receive funding. However, we never place graduate students in their own classes during their first year. Rather, we put them through an intensive training process designed to teach them how to teach a world religions course for freshmen. This consists of two elements. First-year students are automatically assigned as TAs to our large (225-seat) section of “REL 1000: Introduction to the Religions of the World.” This course is team-taught by four of our faculty in rotation, each of whom does an overview of his or her area of specialty (for example, Chinese religions, Christianity, Islam, New Religious Movements, etc.). While there is perforce a certain amount of standardization across the four sections, especially in terms of exam format, faculty are otherwise free to shape their sections as they wish. In fact, each section functions as an advertisement for each professor’s full semester upper division course focusing on his or her specialty. Graduate students are thus exposed to four different teaching styles and approaches to the study of religion, and they are asked to reflect critically on the kinds of choices and methods of presentation employed by the faculty. Over the course of the semester, a coordinator follows up with the TAs through guided group discussions about pedagogical technique, thus facilitating the TAs’ engagement not only with the content being taught, but also — crucially — with the way it is being taught.

First-year students are also each assigned a faculty mentor and are expected to attend the mentor’s undergraduate course. Under the close supervision of their faculty mentors, the Masters’ students are asked to help design and grade certain assignments and often to give a lecture. In this way, first-year students are given the opportunity to learn more about a specific field while closely observing their mentors’ teaching styles. They are to be critical of the mentors and to think how they might be able to better help undergraduates learn the same material. Despite the fact that our MA students have already sat through countless hours of lectures during their undergraduate years, few have actually thought about their professors’ teaching styles beyond summary judgments of good or bad teaching. By inviting TAs to be critically aware of their professors’ teaching in REL 1000 and the mentors’ classes, and by providing a forum where they can discuss and candidly critique them, we aim to get our graduate students, even at this early stage, thinking about all the nuts and bolts that go into the making of a successful undergraduate course in religious studies. Once this awareness is raised, we expect our MA students to bring this critical awareness to all the courses they subsequently enroll in during their graduate careers, thus making each course serve double-duty as vehicles of content and models of pedagogy.

The second element of the pedagogical training of our MA students consists of a semester-long, three-credit-hour seminar, “REL 6150: Pedagogy: Teaching Religions of the World.” The course description reads as follows: “This course is designed to prepare graduate students to teach world religions. Students will be introduced to basic concerns regarding teaching the study of religion at public universities, issues in the academic study of religion, and basic pedagogy (including syllabus design, lecture and discussion formats, use of PowerPoint and other media, and e-learning).” We have found over the years that students need hours of training in how to prepare and deliver a successful lesson plan. Many are surprised the first time they try to lead a twenty-minute miniclass and find that they have far too much or far too little planned, that their classmates cannot follow them, that they are unable to clearly communicate basic ideas, or that they say “um” to the point of distraction. Therefore, we spend most of the course preparing, delivering, and critiquing sample lessons. As the students grow in confidence in front of the class, we also discuss issues such as workload (for the instructor and the students), grading, assignment types and strategies, and course planning (for example, is world religions best taught historically or thematically?).