William R. Lindsey, University of Kansas

William R. Lindsey is associate professor and director of graduate studies in the department of religious studies at the University of Kansas. The department offers both bachelor’s and master’s degrees. Lindsey is the author of Fertility and Pleasure: Ritual and Sexual Values in Tokugawa Japan (University of Hawai’i Press, 2006). Over the last several semesters, his teaching duties have come to include a gateway course to the graduate study of religion required of all first-semester MA students, a large survey course introducing undergraduates to South and East Asian religious traditions (a university service course), split-level courses on religion in Japan and Korea, and occasional undergraduate and graduate seminars.

Multiplicity as an Alternative to Singularity

This essay describes my and my colleagues’ experiences in thinking through and acting to create an alternative to a capstone-style course within the specific context of a small religious studies department offering a stand-alone MA program. In short, rather than a single capstone course tasked to a single faculty member into which all MA students must enroll, my colleagues and I have decided to move away from singularity and toward multiplicity — multiple courses are taught by many faculty members stressing several methodological and theoretical approaches specific to each faculty member’s training and interest in the study of religion. Although these steps separate us from a pedagogical consensus tied to the notion of singularity and the capstone as measured through the frequency of such phrases as “single course” and “single opportunity” in the literature, we want to try multiplicity as the best fit for our department.

Our original capstone offered that vaunted “single opportunity” for students to engage numerous methodological perspectives and theoretical models to expand skill sets and apply them critically through the production of research papers. This engagement, however, was of a rapid-fire sort, challenging students to a new, selectively limited genealogy of methodological literature almost weekly. Their tenuous grasp on these fleeting perspectives showed in their research projects. Our exploratory model seeks to diffuse this opportunity by employing a number of “critical issues seminars” (currently three) that each student must complete. Each seminar, as taught by a faculty member in accordance with his or her training and research interest, shares three characteristics. First, it is front-loaded in its opening sessions with readings that methodologically define and drive the seminar, introducing students to a specific and lengthy genealogy of scholarly literature significant to the study of religion (e.g., ritual theory, textual hermeneutics, visual culture, the body, critical feminist theory). Second, it is fortified with “case studies” or readings particular to the research area specialization of the instructor in which various issues and theoretical models proposed and critiqued in the earlier genealogical literature may be tested and challenged within the specific cultural, historical, and/or literary context of the seminar. Third, it is meant to encourage students, now steeped deeply in a particular genealogy of scholarship and with multiple theoretical models at hand, to apply this knowledge to their own research foci by writing original papers.

We have offered three such seminars so far using this exploratory model — ritual (specifically rites of passage), biblical hermeneutics, and religious orthodoxy/heterodoxy in Chinese history. As the instructor in the ritual course, I dedicated the first sessions to introducing the students to classic and contemporary ritual theorists. From there, the focus of the sessions moved to case studies describing and analyzing rites of passage in East Asian cultures. In both the first and second sets of sessions, students were required in advance of each class to produce weekly journal entries that they shared with colleagues. Journal entries were meant to create better in-class discussions by prompting all students to take responsibility for the readings week after week. Sharing entries in the classroom also produced a self-policing situation among the students that created an environment for higher achievement (and for some, I am sure, to save face among their peers). Finally, students wrote papers of approximately twenty-five pages and gave public presentations to their colleagues. I encouraged students to use the paper to focus on their own research interests rather than requiring they write on East Asian phenomena of the sort we read about in the second set of sessions. By introducing students to culturally and historically specific materials (the second characteristic), these seminars added a breadth of religious traditions and cultural areas to the students’ knowledge base. Through the first and especially third characteristics, however, they primarily functioned in the spirit of a capstone. They provided students with opportunities for sustained mentorships with faculty to master select methodological approaches and theoretical models, to make them applicable to their own research, and by so doing, to establish their own identities as scholars of religion.

Rethinking the capstone began for me as an exercise in metaphor and departmental realities rather than pedagogical theory. The architectural metaphor of the capstone describes well the advantages of a traditional capstone course. The metaphor imagines a program as vertical architecture, typically with a required first-semester course acting as a “cornerstone” supporting the above structure of lecture-based and seminar courses that students “climb,” gaining intellectual altitude as they move upward. Reaching the top, the capstone of the structure, students survey their ascent by producing projects that have critically integrated the descriptive data and analytical skill sets learned along the climb.

The metaphor suggests positive qualities — the necessity of foundational knowledge, intellectual mentoring, sharing in a disciplinary discourse, and growing intellectual independence. The capstone, as the pedagogical literature agrees, is also a better gauge for learning assessment than the exam model, which typically can measure only the retention and organization of information. When this metaphor meets the reality of a small religious studies department, however, potential problems inherent within the traditional capstone are exposed. Thinking through metaphor and departmental realities has convinced me, in ways I have not seen addressed in the literature, that no one size capstone model can fit all, and that any capstone must develop out of the strengths and unique composition of a department’s faculty.

Given religious studies’ theological origins and interdisciplinary nature, a department of religious studies that possesses faculty trained in various fields is more the rule than the exception. Rarely are religious studies scholars the sole inhabitants of their departments, despite the eponymous term. In addition to those with degrees in religious studies, biblical scholars trained in divinity schools or departments of theology and area studies — specialists with deep historical knowledge of select cultural regions (and where religion is just one focus to which they are attentive) — typically fill out the faculty roster, though specialists from other disciplines may also be on the faculty. Such hybridity fits awkwardly with the capstone experience as the above metaphor evokes it. If the course is to cap a career of disciplinary-specific study, then this becomes, shall we say, a difficult climb given the multiplicity of disciplines that may mark faculty training. This is most apparent in tasking the capstone’s instructor with fulfilling the objectives of the course. A biblicist or a regionalist, while possessing research and teaching strength in textual analysis or area history, may not have broad familiarity with classical and contemporary issues of theory and methodology that have come to comprise much of the discourse of disciplinary identity within religious studies.

In a small department, consequently, the number of instructors available to head such a capstone course may be limited. That number may be further squeezed given, on the one hand, the demands of undergraduate teaching, and on the other hand, reluctance of some faculty members to sacrifice part of their teaching repertoire for a capstone. This can lead to a double-sided situation of course inequity and course monopolization. Course inequity — where some faculty members accept the burden of the capstone while others remain free of it — may lead to course monopolization — where sometimes one “burdened” instructor for years effectively becomes gatekeeper to the course, placing his or her sole imprimatur on what it means to be a scholar of religion.

An alternative to the traditional capstone needs to be created within such realities, so that the hybridity of faculty strengthens rather than complicates the task, and that more, rather than fewer, instructors participate and offer their unique fields of training to the students in sustained projects. This suggests a different metaphor that moves away from the capstone’s stress on verticality and singularity and toward horizontality and multiplicity. More to the metaphorical point, rather than the imagery of a fixed single building, the contrasting imagery of a rhizome offers an alternative to thinking about the capstone. Rather than ascending to the top of a pyramid to cap one’s education through a single course, the rhizome metaphor encourages a different type of intellectual movement. Students do not climb up but dig down, root around to harvest from one plant multiple tubers, and, as this metaphor implies, expand and deepen their methodological and interpretative skill sets through multiple, similarly structured courses and mentorships with faculty.

Capstone literature is fairly uniform in stressing certain keys to the experience, such as the integration of knowledge and research skills, faculty acting as mentors rather than as founts of knowledge bestowing information, cultivation of intellectual confidence and professional identity, and the course acting as a real-time learning assessment tool. Our “rhizome” model of critical issues seminars is geared to fulfilling these same keys. The last learning assessment (writing skills, knowledge of genealogies of formative scholarly literature, compelling application and critique of theoretical models, etc.) will arguably improve because, as the rhizome metaphor suggests, assessment now will be measured within a similar course structure, but over time, incorporating multiple (three) courses with differing methodological content, and with the mentorship of multiple faculty members. Although the overall number of genealogical perspectives to which a student is formally introduced during his or her tenure with us is reduced in comparison to our original capstone-style course, the upside of the rhizome model is that depth of engagement with a few methods replaces the introductory and rapid-fire quality of the original capstone.

The literature also, though with less uniformity, points to a number of weaknesses from which a capstone, depending on its composition, may suffer. Beyond what I have described above as a weakness with our original capstone and its relation to the specific context of a religious studies department, another potential problem is that the capstone often does not account for differences in motivation and abilities among students for self-initiated work. In my experience this is doubly exacerbated with the focus on a single course near the end of a student’s tenure in the MA program that tends, due to its terminal status, to enroll students with a number of different backgrounds, goals, and abilities. Although not a perfect answer, the rhizome model attempts to address this by offering multiple opportunities during the student’s career while using the seminar venue to provide a modicum of structure (many students need it). This structure stresses mentorship and dialogue over simply bestowing information from above as it encourages students to engage their own research foci, rather than that of the lead professor, while utilizing the skills they have cultivated in the seminar.

The last point above is the key, at least in theory, to the rhizome model for both students and faculty. For our MA students, few of whom opt to write a thesis, using the three critical issues seminars to create three original pieces of research along the same topic of focus, each incorporating and dialoging with a distinct genealogy of methodological scholarship, is the closest they will come to something approximating the thesis experience to craft scholarly identity. One of our students with a focus on new religions in the United States, for example, used two of the seminars (biblical hermeneutics and orthodoxy/heterodoxy) to analyze, in the first project, the link between interpretation of the Bible and communal authority among a group known as the Twelve Tribes and, in the other project, Falun Gong’s use of media in the United States to counter China’s narrative of the group as heterodox. One of her colleagues focused on globalization and Christianity. She explored in two seminars (orthodoxy/heterodoxy and rites of passage) the House Church movement in China as a heterodox movement and ritual conflict in sub-Saharan Africa between traditional and Christian groups.

For faculty, the rhizome model encourages greater participation and affirms each member’s training, and thus value to the department. At the same time, such participation can be humbling in that it requires we no longer narrowly gear seminars to fit snuggly inside our own intellectual comfort zones nor do we hem students into projects that are “mini-me” versions of our own research. In the end, we need to remember, particularly in undergraduate and stand-alone MA programs, that we are preparing students not to be students, but rather critical, independent thinkers with skill sets at the ready to understand and contribute to a complicated world.