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On Teaching Religion collects the best of Jonathan Z. Smith's essays and lectures into one volume.
In a culture increasingly focused on visual media, students have learned not only to embrace multimedia presentations in the classroom, but to expect them. Such expectations are perhaps more prevalent in a field as dynamic and cross-disciplinary as religious studies, but the practice nevertheless poses some difficult educational issues -- the use of movies in academic coursework has far outpaced the scholarship on teaching religion and film. What does it mean to utilize film in religious studies, and what are the best ways to do it? In Teaching Religion and Film, an interdisciplinary team of scholars thinks about the theoretical and pedagogical concerns involved with the intersection of film and religion in the classroom. They examine the use of film to teach specific religious traditions, religious theories, and perspectives on fundamental human values. Some instructors already teach some version of a film-and-religion course, and many have integrated film as an ancillary to achieving central course goals. This collection of essays helps them understand the field better and draws the sharp distinction between merely "watching movies" in the classroom and comprehending film in an informed and critical way.
Teaching Religion and Violence is designed to help instructors to equip students to think critically about religious violence, particularly in the multicultural classroom.
Samuel Fleischacker defends what the Enlightenment called 'revealed religion': religions that regard a certain text or oral teaching as sacred, as wholly authoritative over one's life. At the same time, he maintains that revealed religions stand in danger of corruption or fanaticism unless they are combined with secular scientific practices and a secular morality. The first two parts of Divine Teaching and the Way of the World argue that the cognitive and moral practices of a society should prescind from religious commitments — they constitute a secular 'way of the world', to adapt a phrase from the Jewish tradition, allowing human beings to work together regardless of their religious differences. But the way of the world breaks down when it comes to the question of what we live for, and it is this that revealed religions can illumine. Fleischacker first suggests that secular conceptions of why life is worth living are often poorly grounded, before going on to explore what revelation is, how it can answer the question of worth better than secular worldviews do, and how the revealed and way-of-the-world elements of a religious tradition can be brought together.
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An intimate cross-country look at the new debate over religion in the public schools A suburban Boston school unwittingly started a firestorm of controversy over a sixth-grade field trip. The class was visiting a mosque to learn about world religions when a handful of boys, unnoticed by their teachers, joined the line of worshippers and acted out the motions of the Muslim call to prayer. A video of the prayer went viral with the title “Wellesley, Massachusetts Public School Students Learn to Pray to Allah.” Charges flew that the school exposed the children to Muslims who intended to convert American schoolchildren. Wellesley school officials defended the course, but also acknowledged the delicate dance teachers must perform when dealing with religion in the classroom. Courts long ago banned public school teachers from preaching of any kind. But the question remains: How much should schools teach about the world’s religions? Answering that question in recent decades has pitted schools against their communities. Veteran education journalist Linda K. Wertheimer spent months with that class, and traveled to other communities around the nation, listening to voices on all sides of the controversy, including those of clergy, teachers, children, and parents who are Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Sikh, or atheist. In Lumberton, Texas, nearly a hundred people filled a school-board meeting to protest a teacher’s dress-up exercise that allowed freshman girls to try on a burka as part of a lesson on Islam. In Wichita, Kansas, a Messianic Jewish family’s opposition to a bulletin-board display about Islam in an elementary school led to such upheaval that the school had to hire extra security. Across the country, parents have requested that their children be excused from lessons on Hinduism and Judaism out of fear they will shy away from their own faiths. But in Modesto, a city in the heart of California’s Bible Belt, teachers have avoided problems since 2000, when the school system began requiring all high school freshmen to take a world religions course. Students receive comprehensive lessons on the three major world religions, as well as on Sikhism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and often Shintoism, Taoism, and Confucianism. One Pentecostal Christian girl, terrified by “idols,” including a six-inch gold Buddha, learned to be comfortable with other students’ beliefs. Wertheimer’s fascinating investigation, which includes a return to her rural Ohio school, which once ran weekly Christian Bible classes, reveals a public education system struggling to find the right path forward and offers a promising roadmap for raising a new generation of religiously literate Americans.
Dilemmas surrounding the role for religious beliefs and experiences permeate the school lives of teachers and teacher educators. Inspired by the need for teachers and students to more fully understand such dilemmas, this book examines the relationship between religion and teaching/learning in a democratic society. Written for pre-service and in-service teachers, it will engage readers in thinking about how their own religious backgrounds affect their teaching; how students’ religious backgrounds influence their learning; how common experiences of school and classroom life privilege some religions at the expense of others; and how students can better understand diverse religious beliefs and interact with people from other backgrounds. The focus is specifically on classroom issues related to religious understandings and experiences of teachers and students, and the implications of those for developing democratic citizens. Grounded in both research and personal experience, each chapter provides thought-provoking evidence related to the role of religion in schools and society and asks readers to consider the consequences of varied ways of responding to the dilemmas posed.
Eugene V. Gallagher and Patricia O'Connell have influenced a generation of religious studies professors through their leadership in Wabash Center teaching workshops. In this book, contributors pay tribute to their influence and build on their insights in short essays focused on three perennial themes: Place, Plan, and Persona. Firstly, the book considers how negotiating your institutional context is essential to effective teaching. Reflections include essays on places of learning, the interaction between person and place, and the online teaching environment. Secondly, the contributors explore how effective teaching requires intentional self-critical design of students' intellectual experience, from the arc of the course, to the scope and purpose of the curriculum. Topics include planning for playfulness, teaching 'strangeness', and strengthening student engagement. In the final section on persona, topics include humour in the classroom, authenticity in the teaching profession, team teaching, and ungrading. This book contributes to the scholarship of teaching and learning in religious studies and higher education by engaging Gallagher and Killen's insights, and by exploring a range of perspectives on core and enduring pedagogical concepts and questions.