Religious Studies News

In teaching many Buddhisms and focusing on lived practice, I was not entirely satisfied with traditional classroom methods. I also decided to look for ways to get the students to go to actual centers of worship, to develop a more robust, lived sense of this “other” religion. In part, I wanted to include an experiential learning component to my course because I had aimed to introduce students to Buddhist culture and practice, not just Buddhist ideas. I remembered how my own understanding of Buddhism was revolutionized, in a seminar entitled “Buddhism in the Modern World,” by a weekend-long field trip in college to Washington, D.C. — the next best experience to actually traveling to Asia. Fortunately, in the present transnational context, there are increasing numbers of Buddhist centers in the United States that are staffed and attended by immigrant Asian communities, offering an experience not identical to, but certainly inspired by and contiguous with, cultural traditions “back home.” In the Chicago area alone there are more than a dozen Buddhist centers from various traditions, including Chinese, Thai, Burmese, Japanese, and Vietnamese worship spaces and communities.

Having decided on a temple trip (or trips) as a key goal for my course, I sat down with the department head supervising my course to discuss logistics. I fairly immediately discounted the notion of organizing a required field trip, based on logistical difficulties with both the timing and the possibilities for transporting the whole class. Instead, I decided to make temple visits an optional but highly recommended part of the course. I would organize three field trips on weekends over the course of the semester and provide students a list of area Buddhist centers that they could visit on their own. Students would be required to submit three papers over the course of the quarter, and would have the option to write one, two, or all of their papers based on field visits (rather than the preselected texts I offered for students who did not wish or were not able to make special scheduling arrangements). In this way, I hoped that I would give students the flexibility to explore Buddhist sites and practices in Chicago without being overburdened by out-of-class requirements.

This scheme worked quite well — and in fact between a third and one half of the students in the class visited at least one Buddhist site during the semester — but the dynamics of the assignment and indeed the course as a whole were impacted in ways I had not anticipated by the demographics and lived realities of the students who actually showed up for my course. Where I had been expecting an overwhelmingly Anglo-Protestant class, I actually got a class that was exactly half Asian, many of whom had either themselves grown up in Asia or whose parents had done so. This meant that many of the traditions I had assumed would be “foreign” and “other” to my students were in fact “familiar” to a significant number of them — whether through routine practices of their own or through family legacies. This also meant that I was not the only expert in the room; instead, many of the Asian students added their own perspectives during class discussions, talked with me about aspects of their heritage they had never understood before, and were not shy about comparing my lectures against the dharma-talks they heard at temple. I found this a wonderful — and wonderfully challenging — situation.

Regarding the field-trip scheme, the unexpected dynamics of my class forced me to promptly evaluate and clarify the purpose of the assignment. I had been assuming that the purpose of field trips would be to expose students to a thoroughly novel experience, but suddenly I encountered students asking if they could write papers based on the temples they already went to on a routine basis. I decided to allow this form of self-study, on the grounds that everyday experiences may look different through an academic lens, and I ended up scheduling two of the organized group trips to temples attended by students in the class. I did succeed in persuading students to stretch themselves, though, and several students who do have a Buddhist heritage did end up going to a temple outside their family’s tradition.

The class did not turn entirely into a course of Asian students studying Asian subjects, for many in the class were not Asian; because the course fulfilled a general education requirement, many were entering the class with no knowledge of Buddhism whatsoever. This meant that for many students in the class, every reading, lecture, or class discussion was novel, sometimes even revelatory, and many students were indeed engaged in familiarizing themselves with something radically new. When it came time for the field trips to Buddhist worship centers, several of the Catholic students in the course opted to attend, and these students uniformly reported that it was the first time any of them had ever entered a non-Catholic worship space. This meant that the same information, discussion, or experience was encountered quite differently by the different students in the class — a fact that is probably always true to some degree in any classroom (particularly a religious studies classroom), but was particularly prominent and important to the dynamics of this course.

In fact, though, it was not always possible to break the class down into students who already were “experts” or “insiders” and students who were not. Even for students who might have recognized and participated in some of the traditions covered in the course material, other aspects of the course tended to prove surprising, for Buddhist practices stretch so widely and variably across Asia that the students who grew up in Vietnamese families hardly recognized Sri Lankan practices, while the student who grew up in Thailand was profoundly challenged by Chinese and Japanese Pure Land traditions. Thus, there was no simple way for me to present course material as either familiar or foreign to my students, no simple “us” I could presume as my audience, even from class meeting to class meeting. Almost invariably, material for the course was familiar to some and foreign to others, tedious, startling, or novel to various degrees, and challenging as a mix to all — including to me.