Religious Studies News

Teaching Religion and Ecology: In the Classroom

Interestingly, each article in this issue of Spotlight approaches the teaching of religion and ecology with a unique pedagogical practice. Isabel Mukonyora, Willis Jenkins, and Whitney Bauman focus more on in-class possibilities, while Carol S. Robb, Bobbi Patterson, and Laura Stivers insist on moving students outside of the classroom space. Nevertheless, each technique offers its own pathway toward a destabilizing experience that can make room for a process of transformational learning (Mezirow 2000). For Mukonyora, it becomes important to lead students away from a Western anthropocentric viewpoint by introducing concepts from cultures lesser known to American students. She challenges students to “widen their horizons” through the Shona concept of Mai Vedu, a more biocentric than anthropocentric understanding of religion. One general goal of environmental pedagogy is to move students from an anthropocentric to biocentric understanding of life (see Orr 2004), and Mukonyora begins this process through her definition of the fundamental category “religion” itself. As she says, “students [learn to] recognize something found in religious traditions from cultures far away from their own. That ‘something’ is the teaching that humans belong to a biotic community whose ‘intelligences’ need to be taken seriously on the terms that different religions use to articulate them.”

Additional goals of ecoliteracy include a move from neat answers to complex questions, and Bauman does just that, using an inquiry-based exercise to compel his students to look beyond the notion of technology as the answer to the environmental crisis and to investigate the ecological footprint of technological devices themselves. This, too, presents a destabilizing experience, as Bauman challenges students to see technology in new ways — most importantly, as a part of nature and a mediator of culture. By focusing on one personal item and by seeing its lifecycle, environmental issues are made personal and students are encouraged to make personal choices that involve what he calls, quoting Nancy Bedford (2002), “little moves” against destructiveness.

In Jenkins’s course, divinity and forestry students each encounter different kinds of destabilizing experiences as they are pressed to see the variety of Christian theologies as they relate to the environment, moving them away from the idea that there is one normative position on Christian environmental theology. Jenkins’s teaching strategy serves a dual purpose of understanding the pluralism within Christianity and moving towards the practical and political application of constructive environmental theology. Ultimately, the students are asked, “How could this strategy use the challenge of climate change to make its theological tradition more capable of generating meaningful responses to the problem?” Though the question is articulated in a way specific to the divinity school context and this particular cross-listed course, it also resonates with questions posed in all of the courses profiled here.