Religious Studies News

As we have developed a better assessment of our pedagogy program, we have come to realize that more student mentoring is needed. Going forward, we hope to provide a regular “best practices” meeting at which senior students, who are teaching as instructors of record, can meet with first-year students and faculty mentors. At these sessions, students will hear stories “from the trenches” about what lesson plans worked best, what types of media created the most discussion, and about how to handle the needs of underprepared students. In conjunction with this, we will also be building a searchable database of PowerPoint slides, exam questions, essay assignments, photos, and audio and film clips for use in class.

Another possible improvement to our stand-alone MA program is to offer instruction on how to teach religious studies online. Increasingly, our institution is promoting online learning, either as hybrid courses or completely online, and our undergraduates are responding enthusiastically to the shift, if our enrollments are any indication. Given the fact that most colleges and universities are headed in this direction, it makes sense that we prepare our graduate students to teach in the online environment. For anyone who has done it, one quickly learns that online teaching is vastly different from on-campus teaching, requiring specialized skills and approaches that must be mastered to make the online course successful. We can envision an elective that offers our MA students the opportunity to design an online version of the world religions course that they developed in REL 6150. This would thus afford our MAs a ready-made online course and a set of skills that will be valuable in their future careers, whether this be as PhDs in tenure-track positions or as adjuncts. We may decry the “adjuncting” of American colleges and universities and the move to online education in general, but both appear to be the inevitable wave of the future for all but the most elite institutions. Training in developing online courses is yet another way in which a stand-alone MA program in religious studies with an emphasis on teacher training can find a niche in the rapidly changing landscape of American higher education.

Students enter stand-alone MA programs in religious studies for a variety of reasons: some seek further grounding in the academic study of religion before applying to PhD programs while others come as enrichment students seeking to further their knowledge in an area of interest or to enhance their skill sets for an already established career. By providing training in how to teach successfully, the MA program can provide important skill sets for all students. And, by focusing on teacher training, the stand-alone MA can enhance traditional PhD programs by providing students with a skill set that to this day is assumed to be taught through osmosis during the PhD, but which clearly needs a structured creative approach to be done well.