Thoughts About Teaching

Debra Mubashshir Majeed

Reflective learning plays a central role in my development as a scholar teacher. My utmost desire is to bring students into a new relationship with the study of religion and the religious by facilitating the research and exchange of information about individuals, movements, ideas, expressions, and events that have shaped this phenomenon or have been overlooked in conventional critiques. I endeavor to equip students with tools to evaluate the varied ways in which religion and the religious have been conceptualized, interpreted, and given a human face.

Teaching has become for me a marketplace where my students and I can be challenged to honor our deepest values and take risks that afford us opportunities to define and revise assumptions as well as our systems of meaning, thinking, and action. As we are successful, we experience the gift of "encounter and exchange" and the interdependency that mutuality affords.

My philosophy of teaching reflects my personal sense of morality. Discernment is continual. I value the evaluative process - my students and I access each other - as one that offers "guidelines for learning rather than terminal judgments." I teach departmental, interdisciplinary and global engagement courses. I have team-taught and partnered courses with colleagues in political science and anthropology. I enter the classroom as a reflective learner - obviously one who retains a bit more "power" due to my charge to issue grades -- who encourages students to share responsibility for their own, active learning. I value critical thinking skills, creativity, good writing, scholarly dialogue and collaborative engagement.

Over the years, I have come to realize that college courses often reflect the personality of the instructor as well as the students. I began my academic career as an enthusiastic and passionate church historian and Christian scholar/pastor. I came to the academy initially to enable two young men in my Congregational church college group to confront more healthily questions about their sexual orientation. Admittedly, I am a recovering homophobe whose intellectual journey coincided with my own spiritual odyssey through which I eventually made a transition to Islam from Christianity. Understandably, I have experienced the joys and challenges of being an "insider" as well as an "outsider." My experience of religion has greatly influenced my study of religion. Thus, my approach to the academic study of religion is to focus largely on people and their lived experiences, rather than concentrate primarily upon systems of meaning/value, doctrine, the transcendent, mysterious, or discursive markers.

Today, as a social historian of religion (primarily traditions visible within the North American context), I am deeply interested in the component of culture and human nature often referred to as ''religious" -- especially as manifested through sentiments and structures and shaped as much by race, gender, class and sexualities as by belief, practice, and power. My intellectual and personal journeys have taken me beyond religious diversity to religious pluralism in a landscape from which Tocqueville spoke of religion as "the first of political institutions." My musings in this regard echo the sentiments of Richard John Neuhaus when he wrote,

Pluralism, for instance, is much more than diversity. Religious and moral pluralism means that there exist in the same space plural ways of understanding reality and rules for living drawn from those ways of understanding. These ways are not only divergent but are frequently in conflict. The result is an ongoing contestation that . . . need not destroy but can actually strengthen the bond of civility.

Understandably then, like Wilfred Cantwell Smith, and Diana Eck (to name only two), I advocate for dialogue and personal encounter with adherents of varying faith traditions whenever possible. I realize that many students come to a religious studies class with a tendency to essentialize religion and what they may perceive to be exotic cultures. I hope for my students the experience of encountering followers of faith traditions as people not just members of a particular system known only through distant stereotypes and misconceptions. Being encouraged - perhaps I mean compelled - to challenge their notions of "self" and "other" through dialogue and engagement with the people and movements we study is not always an opportunity students easily welcome. This reality serves as a motivation for me to work diligently to inform/remind students that each course - each journey of knowledge, reflection, and ethical action - is as much about us as it is what and whom we have gathered to study.

One of my primary objectives in teaching religious studies is to confront two types of essentialism: phenomenal and historical/geographical. In addressing phenomenal essentialism, I draw students' attention to assumptions we make that an intrinsic form of a particular religion exists, transcends time and place, and is represented by "stable essences." I question attitudes that lock a religion or its rituals and adherents within a monolithic and unchanging turf. And, I promote the academic study of religion as an exercise in historical origins, disclosure, description and comparison.

In challenging the notion of historical/geographical essentialism, I encourage students to analyze critically the idea that only a specific "period" of a religion is reflective of the true essence of the faith as well as the practice of privileging adherents based upon their birthplace. Here, my womanist sensibilities are most evident as I demonstrate concern for histories that are commonly marginalized, neglected or overlooked corners. In both cases, I attempt to bring students to reflect on ritual, belief and identity as well as the moral seriousness of our endeavor, and to an appreciation of what draws adherents to a belief system and the influence of that religion and its believers on our society and world. I want to help students understand that reading and writing happens in specific social, political, cultural, sexual, and intellectual milieus and is influenced by them. Finally, I want students to recognize that many discourses about religion and the religious are discourses of power.

That's why I situate my pedagogy within a rhetorical paradigm - a model that views teaching as "a dialogical, local, and practical art." I structure my courses in a way that enables students to discover themselves, to view themselves as critical thinkers who can express and challenge ideas thoughtfully, inquiry about matters of importance, and even thrive in the midst of discussions that cut to the core of the human experience. I strive to help them to:

• realize that we each speak from a particular place and a particular time informed by a number of factors, including environment, privilege and global forces (though the latter are rarely recognized);
  
• understand that each of us brings to class a distinct experience, a journey with which we have something to teach to and learn from each other; and
  
• experience what goes on in the classroom and within related spaces of learning as an environment designed to "energize knowledge," affectively engage them, and impart "habits of mind that will be useful" in their every day lives, even as they come to appreciate the absence of any "position-less positions."

Ultimately, my hope is that my students recognize their moral agency and obligation to engage intentionally in the contemporary world of action as aware global citizens mindful of the currency of intercultural competency. I attempt to accomplish this goal by respecting the poignant guidance of poet Evelyn Underhill and the research of Houston Smith as I approach religion and the religious as a phenomenon whose business is to introduce students to "another world to live in."

In-class approaches to active learning
To help them engage in this world, my pedagogy builds upon a number of considerations ranging from the seating arrangement to offsite learning opportunities. Whenever possible, we arrange the desk/chairs in the classroom in a U or horseshoe-shaped arrangement or a circle, allowing students to face each other as we interact, rather than the back of each other's head. This arrangement also enables me to shift my position to co-learner from central figure.

I am also intentional about encouraging students to take and share responsibility for their learning. Time is set aside for community building, for us to get to know each other and our stakes in the course. A percentage of their grade is devoted to class membership, and students take turns leading classroom discussions and as small group facilitators. This approach to active learning also includes collaborative projects, enabling individual learners to contribute to the communal inquiry and providing an opportunity for less vocal students to more visibly add their gifts to the learning process. In all classes at least one assignment provides sufficient flexibility for students to choose their own topic or focus as well as the methodology they will employ to present their research. In some 200- and 300-level courses, students are given the opportunity to provide input in the development of the course syllabus or affect the direction of course. In RLST 230/IDST 238 "Religious Diversity & Marital Practice," for example, I arrived on the first day of class with a single page skeleton of an outline. Students chose the themes, their order, as well as areas of evaluation.

Finally, field trips and interaction with guest speakers/presenters builds upon this community and wields its own "pedagogical power." Students gain the opportunity to test their theories and learning as the classroom extends to the neighborhoods of the movements, figures, and communities we study. With both in-class and out-of-class learning as research, students are better equipped to produce. Often, we invite our "subjects" to hear and see what we have learned about them. As each semester concludes, I realize that students may experience "creative doubt," and leave with more questions than answers. I am comfortable with the idea that learning continues beyond a single class and that as students continue to raise issues that are important to them or trouble them, they gain a deeper understanding of the meaning of things, they learn to value - ideas, themselves, others - and they nurture reflective minds.