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Teaching Buddhism, Teaching Otherness?: “Many Buddhisms” in Transnational Chicago - Transnational Buddhisms, Transnational Students PDF-NOTE: Internet Explorer Users, right click the PDF Icon and choose [save target as] if you are experiencing problems with clicking. Print

Someone, at some time, told me that higher education in the humanities and social sciences has two purposes — to make familiar things seem strange, and to make strange things seem familiar. This has always seemed intuitively right to me, although in my most recent teaching experience, this aphorism has turned out to be rather more complicated — not an “either/or” but a “both/and” proposition. In this course, I found myself teaching in a remarkable transnational context, where distances and divisions broke down or became more flexible, and the classroom became an experiment for the effects of a world of populations on the move. This offered me and my students an extraordinary opportunity for contact, and it allowed me to introduce students quite immediately to worlds, thought-ways, and traditions that only a decade ago would have remained abstractions on paper.

It also, though, presented a challenge in trying to calculate my pedagogy and anticipate the backgrounds and assumptions of my students. I found it difficult to figure out when and how my task was to problematize a familiar thing and when to familiarize a foreign thing, for my students did not share — with my imagined classroom or with each other — a consistent sense of what material conformed to which category. Perhaps it was always unwarranted to presume that classrooms were anything approaching homogenous, or that there was a standard American collegiate viewpoint against which material could be evaluated and an instructor could choose a single rhetorical stance. All I know is that the perspectives my students brought to my class were far more varied, rich, and interesting than I had anticipated. I went into “Many Buddhisms” expecting to introduce a largely Caucasian, middle-class, U.S.-born “us” to the Buddhist “others” I had spent the last several years learning about and getting to know. What I found instead was that a good number of Buddhist “others” were sitting there in my classroom, ready to learn new material — but equally ready to share with the class their experiences growing up in Buddhist households. In this transnational context, the geographical and intellectual divides between “us” and “others” broke down, and my class was much the better for it.

I believe there are several lessons to be learned here. First, it is salutary to remember that, even in an introductory course, the students in the class can be a resource for the instructor to learn from, just as the instructor is a resource from which the students can learn. It is beneficial to the students to see their instructors truly open to hearing their perspectives. Second, it is helpful to consider in advance the possibility of multiple — perhaps many wildly divergent — student perspectives on any class’s material, and to look for ways to enrich students from whichever perspective they begin. In my case, it was not necessarily difficult making room in the class for many perspectives; the non-Buddhist students in the class considered Buddhism to be “cool” and automatically granted respect to their Buddhist peers.

But what about teaching less “cool” subjects with more divisive potential, such as Islam or Evangelical Christianity? While I do believe it is possible to create meaningful intellectual exchanges over tendentious subjects, other classroom conversations may require more active, conscious intervention than did my “Many Buddhisms.” To my mind, though, the existence of student commitments and life experiences is not a difficulty or a liability, but rather one of the most exciting reasons to teach religious studies. Because students often come to our classrooms with strong opinions and commitments, the task is not to make students interested, but to take their prerational responses to religion and teach them how to think, talk, and write systematically about them.

This is a wonderful responsibility — all the more so as the world opens up and classrooms across America cease to be restricted to the classic “American” faith commitments. As practitioners of all the “world religions” become part of our direct conversations, there is no comfortable place to be a supposedly neutral, secure “us.” Our new, transnational moment is an exciting, if slightly unpredictable, time to be in the classroom.



 

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