This session centers around innovation and risk taking in relation to the teaching of religion today. How do we, as educators in fields like religious studies, advance conversations about sustainability, decolonization, and using the arts to facilitate the learning of students with divergent lived experiences? The first presentation analyzes efforts to increase religious literacy on a campus that was already committed to an environmentally-aware ethos, broaching questions about how to frame conversations and engagement at the intersections of religion and sustainability concerns. The second presentation weaves together conceptual research, a case study, and reflexive methods to explore tools for decolonizing assessment. While questions about how to "decolonize the classroom" have been popular in recent years, assessment itself has received little attention in existing scholarship on teaching and learning. The third and final paper offers an innovative tactic for teaching religion, known as Reflective Artistic Visualization, that is supported by pedagogical theories of bell hooks, Laura Rendón, and others. All three presentations are grounded in case studies or data from different institutional contexts.
As an award-winning green campus, my Liberal Arts college leads the way in undergraduate efforts toward sustainability. An environmentally-aware ethos infuses our campus culture, from the classroom curriculum, to the landscaping, to the wide alumni network. What we do less effectively is talk about and engage with religion. The project began with this question: can we leverage the shared interest in sustainability on campus to both increase religious literacy, and encourage meaningful engagement with religion as an essential dimension of human experience? The results are resoundingly positive—there is demand for conversations that engage religion at the intersection of sustainability concerns. In this presentation, I analyze data from three years of teaching a course on Religion, Nature, and the Environment, as well as various campus events and initiatives. I will outline best practices, and provide resources and recommendations for faculty wishing to develop similar programs on their own campuses.
Reflective Artistic Visualization is a teaching tactic that divides students into groups of three or four for timed discussion and reflective listening utilizing artistic representation. The purpose of the tactic is to encourage learners to synthesize varieties of their knowledge and intelligence in artistic reflection and integrate their whole person into group conversation. In this activity, students take turns answering a discussion prompt in timed intervals. Presenting students speak for five minutes, listening students do not respond, interrupt, or ask questions during that time. While one student presents, the listening students are invited to artistically represent their own intellectual or embodied response to the presentation. This tactic has been demonstrated to produce divergent but effective learning experiences for students, and it is undergirded by the pedagogical theories of bell hooks, Laura Rendón, and Hongyu Wang, among others.