| Site Visits and Civic Engagement |
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Marianne Delaporte, Notre Dame de Namur University, and Hans Wiersma, Augsburg College
Encountering and Engaging a More Diverse Vision of “the Civic”This article concerns two different versions of a similar teaching strategy: that is, learning about religious communities by visiting them in their “natural setting.” Each of us, in different courses and our different educational institutions, sought to move students out of the comfort of the somewhat “secular” religious studies classroom and into sacred spaces of gathering and worship. Our hoped-for outcome was that students would, upon reflection, better understand and appreciate the religious diversity and complexity of their neighborhoods and, by extension, the world. The teaching strategy for Delaporte’s combined upper- and lower-division course, “Modern Christianity,” spanned an entire semester. Students were given the choice of five relatively new Christian organizations or movements: African Methodist Episcopalian (A.M.E.), Latter-Day Saints (Mormon), Pentecostal, Unitarian Universalist, and Seventh-Day Adventist. With a class size of twenty, each denomination had four students assigned to it. Students first individually researched and wrote two papers related to this assignment: one on the history of their selected denomination, and another on its theology. Next, as a group, they visited a church service in the area, and each group handed in a written report on their visit. Students then studied media representations of the group on the Internet, searching YouTube and Google to learn about the manner in which their denomination is portrayed in mainstream and other media. The assignment culminated in a group presentation for their classmates. The teaching strategy for Wiersma’s “Life and Work of the Church” course consisted of experiences at four different local religious and/or spiritual gathering places: 1) A tour of a Roman Catholic basilica; 2) An open house at an Islamic center and mosque; 3) A discussion — over herbal tea — with the owner of a shop featuring books, goods, and services pertaining to “alternative” religions and spiritualities; and 4) A “Holy Week” service at a Charismatic Lutheran Church. The thirteen students in this upper-division course visited each site as a group, along with Wiersma. In addition to debriefing and discussion at the conclusion of each visit, students submitted written reflection assignments in which they offered “in-depth” commentary on their experience. Specifically, students were asked to explain how the site visit informed their understanding of several concerns, including the relationship of Christian believers to the “Other” and the notion of hospitality as a theological and biblical category. Like any exercise in community engagement, our efforts required extra preparation on the part of the teacher before the start of the term as well as during it. Contacts at the various sites had to be established, transportation had to be organized, reminders about appropriate dress had to be sent, anxious students had to be heard and reassured, and so on. We prepared students in advance of their site visits by alerting them to matters concerning proper courtesy and conduct, as well as discussing with students what they might expect at the respective sites. After their visits, generally speaking, students reported that they were initially nervous about their visits but, in the end, were impressed by the welcome and hospitality they experienced at their host sites. In addition, students reflected favorably on “just how much” they learned through this type of contextual learning opportunity. For students, the experiences gained and shared served as ongoing reference points in and out of class. For example, in Delaporte’s class, students were able to refer back to their experiences during discussions of different theologies of the sacraments in a way that most of them could not have done before, precisely because they had witnessed and participated in unfamiliar liturgies. Wiersma’s students, for their part, continued to compare and contrast the different styles of hospitality and welcome exhibited at each of the sites, and to make connections to the possible theological and ethical underpinnings of the different styles of reception. It came as no surprise when we learned, via student course evaluations, that the site visits were considered by many students to be the highlight of their course. Delaporte and Wiersma were both participants in a Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion group that has received a continuation grant to study “Pedagogies for Civic Engagement.” As part of the “professional application” dimension of this working group, both of us were, independent of the other, inspired to add the site visit assignment to our respective courses. The main source of inspiration was, for each of us, the growing awareness that the standard textbook, lecture, and film approach was, in the end, inadequate to the task of motivating students to make connections between the world in which they live and the Christian histories and communities they were studying. For both us, therefore, the introduction of a significant community engagement experience arose out of particular frustrations with past incarnations of our courses. Delaporte had been teaching the “Modern Christianity” course since 2002; Wiersma had been teaching the “Life and Work of the Church” course since 2005. Delaporte felt that students were having a hard time associating the history they picked up through texts and lectures — and the occasional video documentary — with the real world and actual experience. She wanted her course to stress the “modern” and to allow her mostly Roman Catholic students to see and experience the Christianities that are all around them. Similarly, Wiersma sensed that although his students appeared to absorb much knowledge about Christian communities past, present, and emerging, they were not getting a handle on the significance that religious and spiritual pluralism holds for the “life and work” of today’s Christian churches. He wanted his mostly Lutheran students to experience this diversity firsthand. Above all, we were inspired to make the kinds of significant course changes described above as a result of simple engagement and conversation with experienced colleagues. Delaporte was influenced in the shaping of the strategy by meeting with Philip Boo Riley at Santa Clara University and by his work with the Local Religions Project in the Silicon Valley area. Boo Riley’s contributions are detailed and dependent on much fieldwork with undergraduates. The aspect of Delaporte’s strategy that involved the evaluation of media imagery of the respective Christian groups was inspired by Erin Runions of Pomona College. This exercise pushed students past their first impressions of a religion and focused on questions about the media’s portrayal of religion. Most students began by being surprisingly uncritical of media portrayals, but after viewing a variety of them and contrasting them with portrayals by the religious denomination itself, they were able to discuss how outsiders perceive and portray the denomination. Wiersma was, in turn, influenced by a fortuitous meeting with Eboo Patel and subsequent familiarization with his work leading the Interfaith Youth Core. Patel’s contention that college-level religious dialogue is best honed in the honest appreciation and discussion of differences, rather than a smoothing over of differences, was supported by the experience and feedback of the students in this course. In addition, the guidance and encouragement of Mary Laurel True, associate director and coordinator of community service-learning at Augsburg College, Minneapolis, proved invaluable. Community or civic engagement assignments can take many forms. The strategies we have outlined revolved around the “field trip”-style of community engagement, rather than, say, a service-project effort. We discovered that taking students out of the classroom environment can have a salutary effect as long as the experience is then reintegrated into the in-class teaching and evaluated together with the students. The site visits in which our students participated would likely have been of little consequence had they not been continuously reintegrated into lectures and discussions. In The Skillful Teacher (2006), Stephen Brookfield contends that effective teaching requires that the professor listen to and learn from students as they describe not only what they are learning, but also how they are learning in the classroom. While not disagreeing with Brookfield on the fundamental importance of such self-reflection and evaluation, our experiences in making site visits a central feature of a college course necessitates a profound reevaluation of what is meant by “classroom.” Because our teaching strategies were heavily dependent upon transgressing the boundary of the traditional classroom, notions of technique, trust, and student responsiveness had to be reimagined and renegotiated. We learned that when students are engaged in learning activities while they are “out and about,” great care must be taken in the creation of suitable student-teacher feedback loops. Students must be given ample opportunity to reflect upon and report upon their site visit experiences, so that the teacher may provide relevant responses and guide students into deeper reflection. For example, Delaporte made the project a semester-long assignment: students went on their site visit about halfway through the semester, but discussions pertaining to the visits occurred regularly for the second half of the semester. Students had time to compare their own experiences to those of others and were able to bring up sensitive issues of discomfort, stereotypes, and expectations within the context of the history of America. The planning and implementation of site visits — the good ol’ field trip — may require forethought and logistical exertion, which may not come naturally to or be welcome by all who teach religion in college and university settings. However, our experiences suggest that site visits are an effective, and therefore worthwhile, strategy for exposing students to new and different religious communities and their beliefs. Students who take courses in religion and/or spirituality arrive with diverse beliefs and biases, many of them strongly held. Reading, hearing lectures, and watching videos about the beliefs (and biases) of other groups may or may not inspire students to see things from a religious point of view other than their own. On the other hand, visiting another’s place of worship does challenge students to move out of the relative comfort of the religious studies classroom and into the somewhat disorienting space of a strange, new sacred place. It becomes the task of the skillful religious studies teacher to engage and to guide resulting student disorientation in a way that is compassionate and creative, so that the outcome is a student reorientation that reflects enlightenment, thoughtfulness, and “the voice of experience.” |
Marianne Delaporte is chair of the philosophy and religious studies department at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, California. She received her PhD in Church History from Princeton Theological Seminary. Her focus has been on Merovingian and Carolingian hagiographies and the political and theological implications of these vitae. Delaporte is currently working on a book on embodied theology and examining women’s experiences of childbirth, both historically and in the present. She met Wiersma at the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion, which she still considers one of the greatest vacations ever.
Hans Wiersma is assistant professor of religion at Augsburg College, Minneapolis, where he teaches courses in theology, biblical studies, church history, ministry, and religion and culture. He is coauthor of Crazy Talk: A Not-So-Stuffy Dictionary of Theological Terms (Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 2008) and Crazy Book: A Not-So-Stuffy Dictionary of Biblical Terms (Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 2009). Wiersma has developed and written various curricula for Augsburg Fortress publishers and is a participant in the Wabash Center’s “Pedagogies of Civic Engagement” workgroup.