Religious Studies News

Teaching Religion and Ecology: In the World

Moving out of the classroom can also be a useful method for approaching the teaching of ecology and religion. A focus on experiential education and community projects can connect students emotionally to the environment and help to move them from feelings of despair to empowerment (Kaza 1999). So it comes as no surprise that a number of the authors here attempt to foster experiential learning in different ways.

Bobbi Patterson perhaps takes the most holistic perspective on such experiential learning, requiring that students engage themselves in a particular place outside the classroom, to develop a relationship with that place, and to utilize “performative learning” in combination with “reflective, contemplative pedagogies” (Zajonc, 2006). In this way, she encourages students to understand the environment in a lived, emotionally engaged, and thoroughly embodied way. Carol S. Robb’s strategy, on the other hand, focuses students’ attention on a project that they participate in as a community, mitigating despair by working together, improving the campus environment, and experiencing physical labor. This kinesthetic learning, in turn, raises still further issues related to international student populations and their home cultures’ notions regarding manual labor.

Like Isabel Mukonyora, Robb thus goes beyond environmental literacy and even ecological justice to also include general learning about society and structural inequality. The close connection between ecological justice and economic injustice comes into particularly sharp focus in Laura Stivers’s environmental philosophy and ethics course at Pfeiffer University. Relying on literature about the educational benefits of service-learning (e.g., Devine, Favazza, and McLain 2002; Ward 1999; O’Grady 2002), Stivers involves her students in a service-learning project in West Virginia that introduces them to the environmental and economic complexities of mountaintop removal, allows them to act in a community, and empowers them to avoid despair. Stivers sums up the gist of the teaching strategies here as she notes, “Students can get a bit overwhelmed both by the philosophical theory, the interdisciplinary nature, and the amount of expertise needed to comprehend different environmental issues. Finding concrete and experiential ways to motivate passion on the issues and to instill a thirst for learning more and connecting to theoretical resources is crucial.”

Each of these strategies seeks to provide an opportunity for transformational learning by disrupting students’ everyday consciousness but then providing an opportunity to move from a sense of overwhelming despair at the ecological crisis to a sense of hope, and an opportunity to make a personal, communal, or political change through a change in consciousness and more intentional choices. The variety of possibilities detailed in this issue amply demonstrate that “religion and ecology” is not the exclusive responsibility of a particular subdiscipline of the field or a particular course: it can be introduced through a variety of strategies — large and small — in a range of courses across the disciplines of religious studies and theology.

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