Brian C. Wilson, Western Michigan University, and Stephen G. Covell, Western Michigan University

Stephen G. Covell is chair of the department of comparative religion and the Mary Meader (Associate) Professor of Comparative Religion at Western Michigan University. From 2006–2011, Covell served as the founding director of Western Michigan University’s Soga Japan Center. His teaching responsibilities include religions of Japan, world religions pedagogy, death and dying, and religion and state. Covell has published widely on various aspects of Japanese religions and is currently working on a book on the contemporary teachings of Japanese Buddhism.

Brian C. Wilson is professor of American religious history and past chair of the department of comparative religion at Western Michigan University. His areas of interest include nineteenth century new religious movements, religion in the Midwest, theory and method in the academic study of religion, and comparative philosophy of religion. Among Wilson’s publications are Christianity (Routledge, 1999); Reappraising Durkheim for the Study and Teaching of Religion Today (co-editor with Thomas A. Idinopulos, Brill, 2001); and Religion as a Human Capacity: A Frestschrift in Honor of E. Thomas Lawson (Brill, 2004). His most recent book, Yankees in Michigan (2008), is part of the Discovering the Peoples of Michigan Series published by Michigan State University Press. Wilson is currently working on a new book, The Rise and Fall of the Temple of Health: Religion, Medicine, and the Battle Creek Sanitarium.

Why Teach Teaching?

Over the twenty-two years it has been in operation, the MA program in comparative religion at Western Michigan University has developed a unique focus: graduate pedagogical training in religious studies. Part of this development, of course, was due to the pragmatic issue that our graduate student funding has always been tied to graduate students teaching introductory courses as instructors of record, and thus to our consequent desire to maintain the overall quality of teaching in our department. However, we also realized that one of the greatest problems of graduate education in this country is that most students never receive any systematic pedagogical training throughout their graduate careers. Graduate students may spend years honing their research skills in PhD programs only to be confronted with the fact that they are completely unprepared for what will be a fundamental aspect of their professional lives at most colleges and universities: teaching undergraduates. Both authors remember their struggles as newly minted professors when they first tried to confect courses on the fly during their first semesters at Western Michigan University. Both remember coming to the realization that good teaching wasn’t as easy as it looked after all, and then spending countless panicked hours individually reinventing the pedagogical wheel. With this in mind, and cognizant of the reality that most PhD programs will never give teacher training the emphasis it deserves, we decided that our stand-alone MA was the ideal place to focus on the pedagogy of religious studies and to prepare our graduate students as teachers.

As we developed the pedagogical focus of our program, we discovered something we hadn’t expected: far from being resistant to such training, our MA students relished it. Indeed, some of our students — perhaps naïve to the realities of graduate education and attracted to the academic life as much for the classroom as the study — simply expected such teacher training would necessarily form a part of any MA program. Others did not have such expectations, but they, too, have been thrilled to get pedagogical training in such a cogent manner and from faculty who value it so highly. New applicants to the program now tell us that our emphasis on religious studies pedagogy is one of the reasons they choose Western Michigan University over other programs; and in exit interviews, our outgoing MAs now consistently cite the pedagogical component as one of the most useful aspects of the program. We have also heard from our graduates who go on to complete doctoral work and are lucky enough to land academic jobs that their background in teaching helped make them competitive in the job market, allowing them to stand out against other candidates who can only demonstrate research competence. Even for those of our MAs who do not go on for doctoral training, their ability to teach well has been an inestimable advantage to them in careers outside of academia or as contingent faculty within academia. The ability to teach well, after all, is a skill that easily translates into the corporate or government worlds, where the ability to parse Sanskrit or an intimate knowledge of all 2,097 pages of the Urantia Book does not. Moreover, as the job market tightens and PhD programs necessarily adjust the numbers they accept in response, the stand-alone MA will take on even greater importance as a supplier of the contingent faculty needed to staff the growing number of religious studies programs that are no longer hiring tenure-track instructors.

Graduate students who enter the MA program in comparative religion at Western Michigan University are expected to teach, either as TAs or as instructors of record, for every semester they receive funding. However, we never place graduate students in their own classes during their first year. Rather, we put them through an intensive training process designed to teach them how to teach a world religions course for freshmen. This consists of two elements. First-year students are automatically assigned as TAs to our large (225-seat) section of “REL 1000: Introduction to the Religions of the World.” This course is team-taught by four of our faculty in rotation, each of whom does an overview of his or her area of specialty (for example, Chinese religions, Christianity, Islam, New Religious Movements, etc.). While there is perforce a certain amount of standardization across the four sections, especially in terms of exam format, faculty are otherwise free to shape their sections as they wish. In fact, each section functions as an advertisement for each professor’s full semester upper division course focusing on his or her specialty. Graduate students are thus exposed to four different teaching styles and approaches to the study of religion, and they are asked to reflect critically on the kinds of choices and methods of presentation employed by the faculty. Over the course of the semester, a coordinator follows up with the TAs through guided group discussions about pedagogical technique, thus facilitating the TAs’ engagement not only with the content being taught, but also — crucially — with the way it is being taught.

First-year students are also each assigned a faculty mentor and are expected to attend the mentor’s undergraduate course. Under the close supervision of their faculty mentors, the Masters’ students are asked to help design and grade certain assignments and often to give a lecture. In this way, first-year students are given the opportunity to learn more about a specific field while closely observing their mentors’ teaching styles. They are to be critical of the mentors and to think how they might be able to better help undergraduates learn the same material. Despite the fact that our MA students have already sat through countless hours of lectures during their undergraduate years, few have actually thought about their professors’ teaching styles beyond summary judgments of good or bad teaching. By inviting TAs to be critically aware of their professors’ teaching in REL 1000 and the mentors’ classes, and by providing a forum where they can discuss and candidly critique them, we aim to get our graduate students, even at this early stage, thinking about all the nuts and bolts that go into the making of a successful undergraduate course in religious studies. Once this awareness is raised, we expect our MA students to bring this critical awareness to all the courses they subsequently enroll in during their graduate careers, thus making each course serve double-duty as vehicles of content and models of pedagogy.

The second element of the pedagogical training of our MA students consists of a semester-long, three-credit-hour seminar, “REL 6150: Pedagogy: Teaching Religions of the World.” The course description reads as follows: “This course is designed to prepare graduate students to teach world religions. Students will be introduced to basic concerns regarding teaching the study of religion at public universities, issues in the academic study of religion, and basic pedagogy (including syllabus design, lecture and discussion formats, use of PowerPoint and other media, and e-learning).” We have found over the years that students need hours of training in how to prepare and deliver a successful lesson plan. Many are surprised the first time they try to lead a twenty-minute miniclass and find that they have far too much or far too little planned, that their classmates cannot follow them, that they are unable to clearly communicate basic ideas, or that they say “um” to the point of distraction. Therefore, we spend most of the course preparing, delivering, and critiquing sample lessons. As the students grow in confidence in front of the class, we also discuss issues such as workload (for the instructor and the students), grading, assignment types and strategies, and course planning (for example, is world religions best taught historically or thematically?).

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.