Religious Studies News

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.