LibLog

July 3, 2007

Practices and Pedagogy
By Sam Speers - Vassar College

In a course I recently co-taught with geographer Joseph Nevins on the U.S.-Mexico border, one of the themes was to help students gain a better understanding of the different commitments—including religious ones—informing present struggles over the border region. The course included a 12-day study trip to the states of Arizona and Sonora (Mexico), where we met with migrants, community leaders, church leaders, Border Patrol agents, Minutemen, maquiladora workers, artists, and activists. In their journals for the course, students from a considerable diversity of religious and secular backgrounds were encouraged to consider the sources for their own developing commitments about the issues we were studying—following scholars like Charles Taylor and Jeffrey Stout, we wanted our students to work at articulating reasons for the social and political goods they envisioned for the region. It was striking to read how much the study trip opened many of the students to want to learn more about the role of religion in public life, and particularly its (ambivalent) relation to movements for democratic change. For some students, seeing secular humanists’ admiration for religiously-inspired activists helped them think more complexly about the multiple forms religious commitments take in civic life. For others, hearing and seeing firsthand the dilemmas migrants face became an occasion for students to question their privilege and deepen their own commitments to spiritual or ethical practices. For many students, and perhaps especially for those with little religious background, the contact with others’ spiritual practices was critical, because in seeing how different people live out their beliefs, religion became more than an institutional authority, more than a question of intellectual assent to (outmoded) traditions.

Obviously a study trip component is more the exception than the norm for most courses. Yet if it’s true, as Robert Wuthnow and others indicate, that we’re in the midst of a far-reaching shift in the kinds of spiritualities students recognize as authentic, then exposing students to a range of religious practices becomes a way of examining religious engagements—and a pedagogy that can take many forms on or near campus. Seemingly accessible practices become an occasion for students to reflect critically on both the intellectual and affective dimensions that come together, implicitly and explicitly, in specific practices people carry out. Moreover, studying other people’s practices provides a way for students to consider their own commitments as they learn to examine others’.

I write about this experience co-teaching a course to respond directly to the question Bob Connor has asked us about classroom pedagogy; yet as the Director of my college’s Office of Religious and Spiritual Life, I have more experience outside the classroom than in it in helping students integrate their commitments into their learning. Thanks to the Teagle Foundation, I’m part of a faculty-chaplains Working Group on Secularity and the Liberal Arts that is directly taking up the question of the capacities and limits of the classroom for examining students’ commitments. We’re seeing, as Connor’s question understands, that student (and faculty) interest in religion is showing up in more than religion courses. Senior faculty members have helped our Working Group itself become a forum for faculty from a range of disciplines to consider difficult teaching situations—and the ways that these awkward moments reveal gaps needing more attention. Our faculty are asking questions about what commitments frame the relation between belief and inquiry. They wonder: how do faculty stimulate or stifle conversation by being explicit about their own points of view? What kind of community is needed for critical reflection on values—and is the classroom the place where this happens? William Connolly has observed how much democratic discourse requires discussants to acknowledge, without resentment, the “contestable character” of our deepest commitments. Connolly’s point highlights how much is at stake in helping students experience the liberal arts as a practice in critically engaging their beliefs.

Sam Speers is director of the Religious and Spiritual Life Office at Vassar College and leader of a Teagle Big Questions working group, On Secularity and Liberal Education.

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