Abstract
The primary claim of my research is that students learn about religions most effectively through methods that are experience-based, context-situated, and practice-centric. However, my claim is not new. Forms of immersion learning, which are always experience-context-practice-centric, have been around for quite some time. Numerous scholars call attention to the importance of experience-based, context-situated, and practice-centric forms of immersion learning. For example, see Place-Based Education in the Global Age (Gruenewald and Smith 2008); Knowing and Doing: Learning Through Experience (Hutchings and Wutzdorff 1988); Estey, Ken, “The “Place” of Place-Based Pedagogy in Teaching Religion: Brooklyn and Its Religions” (Etsey 2014); Cowden, Stephen; and Singh, Gurnam, Acts of Knowing: Critical Pedagogy in, Against and Beyond the University (Cowden and Singh 2013); Knowledge, Pedagogy, and Postmulticulturalism: Shifting the Locus of Learning in Urban Teacher Education (Wilgus 2013); Yuskaev, Timur, “Staying Put: Local Context as Classroom for Multifaith Education” (Yuskaey 2013); “Experiential Learning: Theory and Challenges” (Hedin 2010); “Becoming Pilgrims: Engaging Theory Through Practice in the Introductory World Religions Course” (Hill 2004).
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Notes
I envision this additional credit component in the same way many universities structure biology, chemistry, or, physics courses. Three credits dedicated to the classroom component where time is spent attending to relevant theories while one credit is devoted to “hands-on experimentation” with religious practices in a contextually-situated worship space—the liturgical laboratory. For example, once a week students would go to an Ashram and be led through meditation for an hour, or, students would go to an Islamic mosque to observe and participate in religious rituals such as Wadu.
The only exception being a doctoral seminar at St. Thomas University in Miami Gardens, Florida. Dr. Bryan Froehle structured the class so that students travelled to various places of Christian worship throughout greater Miami.
Smith claims that such reifications in classrooms include, chairs, desks, textbooks, grades, syllabi, tests, and so on. However, the main problem Smith is concerned with is how Christian education has overemphasized the importance of ideas at the expense of embodied practices that are integral to religious and theological knowledge.
See the work of Dorothy Bass, Craig Dykstra, John Witvliet, Bonnie Miller-McLemore and Kathleen Cahalan, in For Life Abundant listed in the bibliography. The work of these authors have expanded the discussion of what counts as theological production by asking how theological pedagogy can be accountable not only for teachings of the faith, but also how they are concretely lived and practiced by believer.
“Travel seminars” is how Mikowski describes student excursions to places of worship.
Some of these pedagogical aims include: “providing an experiential base to accompany and enrich the theoretical perspectives encountered in the preparation phase of the course.” Additionally, travel seminars aim to provide students with: (1) a contextual understanding of a religious tradition(s) through encounters with key places, practices, and peoples; (2) development of students imagination about the life worlds of religious communities other than their own; (3) growth in self-knowledge through reflection upon the religious beliefs and practices of their fellow classmates.
At places of worship students would engage rituals appropriate for outsiders to engage, such as wearing a yarmulke or snorting water up the nose as in Wadu, the Islamic cleansing ritual and practice. Students would not be allowed to engage in particular practices reserved for insiders. For example, when I provided my high school honors world religions students with the opportunity to learn from the context of a liturgical laboratory one student, upon entering his chosen “laboratory,” learned that it was not permissible for him, an “outsider,” to engage in ritual practices endogenous to Vodou and Santeria.
The names of the students have been changed for purposes of confidentiality.
In a conversation at the 2013 Catholic Theological Society Academy meeting in Miami, Florida, Francis X. Clooney expressed to me why he personally favors this view. Clooney said that in his own intellectual formation he always preferred learning from books as opposed to hands on experimentation.
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Joseph Bracken S.J. introduced the idea of a theological “laboratory” to me at an earlier presentation of my research at the College Theology Society meeting at Creighton University, May 1, 2013. During the question and answer phase that followed my presentation Bracken asked me to clarify if I was arguing whether religion and theology classes should require some sort of hands on, experimental laboratory component as biology, chemistry, and physics require. His question caused me to think much more deeply about the implications of restructuring world religions and comparative theology courses so that hands-on experimentation with contextually-situated religious practices would shift the epistemological weight of learning away from an often over-emphasized textbook based approach to religious education.
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Pennington, R. Liturgical laboratories?. j. relig. educ. 62, 121–128 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40839-014-0013-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40839-014-0013-2