Religious Studies News

When in the mid-1990s I joined the pedagogical cascade toward community-partnered or service engaged-learning classes, I never imagined the stakes of learning about religion and ethics would become this tactile. Finding spiritual and moral strength to take up hard questions drew up droughts of life fuller than most of us had ever swallowed. Tapping into the workshops, grants, and resources from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Campus Compact, and the National Society for Experiential Education (NSEE), teachers like me across the country tried to grow. We held to NSEE’s best practices for an engaged classroom: clear intentions and planning, reflection, monitoring and assessment, and evaluation. As a scholar of religious studies, practices as a form of learning felt natural. And NSEE’s steps rang true to the sequenced growth in insight and action that religious practitioners expected on their experience-driven paths. But the explicit goal in engaged education then was saving civic, participatory democracy through community-partnered social change. Led by Dewey’s, hook’s, and Frieire’s theories, teachers pledged to try, cheered on by Giles’s, Eyler’s, and Harkavay’s research confirming that well-structured engagement could make a positive difference in communities. 

At Emory University, we designed our own sequence for community-based learning, research, and scholarship. We recommended students begin with a structured volunteer experience followed by reflection. We hoped they would then take a course providing theories by which to analyze and critique their volunteer experiences. Next, we suggested taking a course with a unit or two devoted to community-based fieldwork. By then, we hoped, students would have enough maturity, intellectual flexibility, and communication skills, to serve and learn through a community-based internship. In our “Religion Internship” course, we emphasized working with organizations devoted to social service and civic justice. We continued to change our readings, trying to better relate our field to the specific placements of that year. But we continued to emphasize themes of community meaning-making and ethics. The sequencing prepared our students to seriously learn and contribute, as Jason and Jan demonstrated. We keep trying to improve, and now Emory University has a university-wide Office of Community Partnerships that offers training, community-coordination, and assessment.

Back in 2000, we emphasized participants more than procedures. Community-partners and I turned to readings by Dorothy Day, Howard Thurman, and Michael Harrington. I shared new pedagogical texts by Parks-Daloz, et. al., Howard Gardner, and David Kolb. I tried to draw in other relevant disciplines, including Pierre Bourdieu’s Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society (Stanford University Press, 2000), Lee Shulman’s new taxonomy of learning, and selections from Robert Kegan’s In Over our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life (Harvard University Press, 1998). In those days, we created a kind of Venn Diagram of disciplines looking for sweet spots of analytic and humane help in our asset-based approach. Valuing growth in cross-cultural and moral behaviors and attitudes, as much as well-informed analyses and critical thinking, we emphasized processes of reflective judgment. Students returned to earlier portfolio entries, asking themselves to take their first investigations a step further, initially trying to include others’ perspectives. Could they reframe their criteria for judging success, and why should they? Did they seriously question their moral and social assumptions, and even change them as a result of shared experiences in dialogue with theory? What were the systemic impacts? With midpoint and final evaluations in class and with supervisors, students received serious feedback about their academic development, moral reflection, and conceptual maturation. 

That was “then” and this is “now,” with our smart podiums, web-based shared sites with community partners, and students with international service experience. Most of our work was local then; now, every day in class we live the power of global reality. I took time off from the internship teaching and am now returning to it this fall (2010). Standing at today’s crossroads, I ask myself — on many levels — what has changed and why. Yesterday’s crossroads of pedagogical innovation drew on struggles of inequity across race and class predominantly in the United States. Challenges at today’s crossroads reach out to global proportions, demanding evolved pedagogies capable of work beyond interdisciplinarity. How savvy of the students writing the 2001 Wingspread Statement on Student Civic Engagement to predict that engaged learning and learners “are not inseparable from the global critique” (Long, 11). Their expectation for a multifaceted synthesis of analytics and action embedded in global questions of justice and thriving now draws religious studies into a wider and more complex arena.