For me, teaching is
the most rewarding part of being an academic. As a graduate
student, was fortunate enough to lecture, run discussions,
and design and implement multimedia courseware for graduate
and undergraduate students at both the University of California,
Santa Barbara and the University of Colorado, Boulder. This
experience has given me the opportunity to understand my
own strengths as a teacher and to formulate some of my teaching
goals. My teaching has four interrelated components: focus
on critical readings of primary materials, collegiality,
the importance of multimedia and attention to using course
material as a critique of the present.
Teachers of Religious
Studies, like many in the Humanities, face an intractable
dilemma. Given the immense historical and geographic variability
of religions such as Buddhism or Islam, how is it possible
to convey all the details of these traditions while simultaneously
asking students to think critically about specific texts?
Finding the right balance between content and analysis
is a difficult process. However, in my experience as a
student and a teacher, the solution I prefer is depth over
breadth. This choice accords not only with my approach to
research, but also with my vision of liberal education.
As a teacher, I strive to give students the tools to critically,
creatively, and enthusiastically engage their worlds. These
three skills are invaluable gifts that far exceed the value
of accumulated minutia. They serve students well beyond
the fading memories of dynastic histories or technical vocabularies.
For example, I recently heard from a student I had as a
junior in a class on Western Religious traditions. Working
through the epic of Gilgamesh and the writings of the Augustine
and Origen, I helped him to cultivate his abiding curiosity
in religion. After the course together, I encouraged him
to participate in a semester abroad program in Nepal where I have done fieldwork. He is now doing important
development work in the rural regions of this war-torn country.
I consider this student such a success because when I met
him, he was bored with his courses; coming from an uneducated
working-class family he saw few options in his future. By
helping him to think carefully and critically about his
present and his future, he was able to envision opportunities
previously unimaginable.
Teaching is not a cut
and paste operation; it is more than reading skills and
grammar lessons. In my experience, students learn best
when they are personally engaged with the material and the
learning environment. My courses emphasizes conversation
and exchange rather than dissemination and replication.
For example, in many courses, I have required students to
prepare critical questions before class. This pushes students
not only to read assigned texts, but also to prepare them
to engage one another. Moreover, I have found that my teaching
is most successful when the students feel I understand them.
I make a point to be consistently available to my students
and to help them navigate not only my course, but their
changing lives.
We inhabit increasingly
visually saturated worlds. Film, television, advertisements
and the Internet are definitive parts of our lives. Helping
students to examine these materials critically and creatively
is one of the most important challenges facing academics
today. My teaching engages visual media on three important
fronts: I use films, public performances and images as part
of the content of my courses; I use photographs and video
to illustrate ideas; and finally, I design assignments that
ask students to begin to use these media as way of
representing their own ideas. I have taught many students,
undergraduates, graduates and senior professors alike to
use technology, from cameras to animation and video editing
programs.
Teaching is always teaching
about the present. Whether I am teaching about the anthropological
context of early Vedic culture more than 3,000 years ago
or the rapid growth of Hindu fundamentalism in the past
decade, it is imperative to make those lessons relevant
to the present. Cultivating critical awareness of the past
in students need not be a painful conversion experience.
Most students are curious. Show them a connection between
the Peloponnesian Wars and current developments in Afghanistan and Iraq and they create their own fertile links. Fostering
these connections not only helps students to think critically
about the present, it also facilitates a personal and immediate
investment in the past.
Increasingly, there is
no more important subject than the history of religion in
the present. I have created a course I look forward to
teaching in the future, which is designed to be an introduction
to religion and could even, at more progressive universities,
stand in for a class on World Religions. The course gives
students the critical and intellectual tools to evaluate
religion in our globalizing world. It pairs theoretical
and historical readings with issues of immediate public
concern: American foreign policy, religion in schools, terrorism.
Engaging the present has one immediate consequence: enthusiasm.
Deep and abiding interest on the part of both the student
and the teacher is arguably the most important part of a
successful teaching environment. In many ways, all of the
strategies outlined above can be understood as my approaches
to cultivating engagement.
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