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Channeling Realities: Religion, Ecology, and Technology in the Classroom - Background and Theory PDF-NOTE: Internet Explorer Users, right click the PDF Icon and choose [save target as] if you are experiencing problems with clicking. Print

Though I grew up to appreciate much about “rural life” and grew up hunting, fishing, etc., I am a lover of urban life…and an environmentalist. Perhaps because my primary understanding of nature as a child was through technological mediations (agriculture, hunting, fishing, and waterskiing), I understand technology as an important part of a concept of nature. Furthermore, because my formative “religious” experience as a youth was through Episcopal Church camps that were very much environmentally focused, I have long included the rest of the natural world in my understandings of religion. Not putting it all together until many student loans later, the design of the course stems ultimately from this idiosyncratic background. 

At a more reflective level, research on the millennial generation and all subsequent generations all but requires us as educators to begin to think and teach differently, given the “wireless” and connected generations that will fill our classrooms from now until retirement. Second, since I teach in a department of religious studies in an urban institution, Florida International University, in a city that only exists through technological transformations, Miami — it occurred to me that most of the students taking my courses have had little to no unmediated experience with “nature.” In other words, “wilderness” or “pure nature” makes little to no sense in their daily lives. As such, so I wondered, how could I help students embody their daily realities within the rest of the natural world? Whereas some exercises I use in other courses ask students to reflect on a place or a specific animal or tree, this one asks students to begin reflecting on how a constantly moving world connected through communication, transportation, and other technologies affects (for better and worse) their own understanding of “nature,” their own understanding of what it means to be human, and the viability of the future of the planetary community.

Thus, to a certain degree, I am asking students in this exercise to channel the various realities that are affected by their everyday use of something as taken for granted as a smart phone. Most of the “goods” resulting from such technologies (such as information at one’s fingertips, which leads me to call these new devices the modern-day oracles) are rattled off quite easily, but it takes a bit longer to come up with the more problematic aspects of these technologies. In any event, the exercise becomes a way of focusing attention on how ethical, philosophical, and religious ways of thinking relate to movement and change. Though place and the destruction thereof is important to the “religion and ecology” dialogue, movement and change — which is essential to all life, since equilibrium or staticity is death — is equally important. Such movement is not served well by an ethic of preservation or conservation of “nature.” Following theorists of a more dynamic understanding of religion, such as Thomas Tweed, throughout the course I try to tie this exercise in with “technological shifts” in the past and the subsequent shifts in meaning-making practices that occur along the way. 

As we progress through the course, the goal is that students will begin to see how “technology” is not just something that “is,” but rather is a part of humanity that drastically affects our meaning-making practices and thus our relationship to the rest of the natural world. If they can understand how an iPhone changes us in the same way that the telescope or the printing press radically revolutionized meaning and practices, then they can begin to ask the question of what future these technologies are transitioning us toward. In other words, rather than an iPhone being a mere given of everyday reality, the choice to use one becomes something for which an individual can take responsibility. It thus also becomes a daily point of reflection for how our own practices and technologies are affecting other people and the rest of the natural world around us. 



 

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