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Three professors from around the country talk with RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY about using the news to teach religious traditions.
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Darla Schumm
Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Hollins University |
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Lori Pearson
Assistant Professor of Religion at Carleton College |
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Susan Hill
Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Northern Iowa |
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Darla Schumm, an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Hollins University, a liberal arts school for women in Roanoke, Virginia, added a media assignment last fall to her 200-level Islamic traditions class. The first book students read and discussed was HOW TO WATCH TV NEWS by Neil Postman and Steve Powers (Penguin Books, 1992). During the first half of the term, they could either choose a major national network or cable television news program and watch it three times a week with an eye for how Islam and Muslims were represented, or do the same assignment reading any domestic or foreign newspaper and gathering from it three articles a week related to the course. THE NEW YORK TIMES, WASHINGTON POST, and LOS ANGELES TIMES were the domestic papers of choice, and students who decided to read foreign papers chose the TIMES OF LONDON, the JERUSALEM POST, or English-language papers from Beirut and Jordan. Early on, the class also had an orientation session with the university librarian to learn how to access newspapers online.
Students were required to keep a media journal, downloading or clipping articles or logging the television news shows and commenting on what they were reading and watching in a reflection paper in the journal. Class discussion included comparisons of print versus television media "constructions" of Islam and domestic versus foreign coverage.
"It was a pretty successful assignment," says Schumm. The biggest problem, she notes, was that massive television news coverage of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita meant there were fewer stories related to Islam at the time the course was offered. "That's a risk you run," she said of making the news of the day a part of the curriculum, but it also gave the students an opportunity to write in their journals about what was not being covered by the media and to reflect on what makes news and what doesn't.
In addition to the media assignments, print texts for the course were THE VISION OF ISLAM by Sachiko Murata and William Chittick (Paragon, 1995) and PROGRESSIVE MUSLIMS edited by Omid Safi (Oneworld, 2003). The books and the news went well together, says Schumm, and student observations about the media made their way easily into classroom discussions. "In the news they don't get this at all; it's more complicated," Schumm says the students would frequently remark, referring to concepts such as portrayals of women in Islam. They also read the news against what they were learning simultaneously in the course about theological or philosophical concepts in Islam, and they noticed the gaps. The main thing they came to see, says Schumm, was that "this religious tradition is so much more complex than its media portrayal."
As for lessons learned for future teaching, Schumm says she would consider making the media assignment a semester-long project rather than using it only during the first half of the course. She would also provide students with explicit instructions on how to write their reflection papers. "I always try to make connections between religion and the contemporary world," says Schumm. "Classes in historical development and its theological underpinnings can get dry. The media assignments kept students in tune with the fact that Islam is a lived, practiced religion today. They could draw connections between history and contemporary realities, between underlying theological ideas and what is happening now. They were more engaged in understanding the tradition because they were reading about it in the news. And the media assignment moved them more in the direction of learning how to read and think critically. I hadn't thought of that ahead of time, but it was a happy result. For once I wasn't trying to figure out how to make that happen. The media assignment just lent itself to that."
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At Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, the challenge of teaching the introduction to Christianity course is to get students to see Christianity as a global phenomenon, says Assistant Professor of Religion Lori Pearson. "I want to complexify their understanding of Christianity," she explains. During a concentrated nine-and-a-half-week term, students learn to view the Christian tradition as dynamic, diverse, and related to cultural, political, social, and economic issues. They also recognize what Pearson calls "interesting continuities" in the history of the tradition.
This year Pearson gave students the option to do an independent paper project on Christianity in the news. They had to choose three newspapers from three different continents (one of the papers had to be THE NEW YORK TIMES) and read articles about Christianity at least four times a week for five weeks of the term. Three weeks into the project, they were to begin printing out and organizing sample articles they had read either by topic (culture, politics, globalization, evangelicalism, etc.) or by region of the world, and from those they chose what they thought to be the five richest, most interesting pieces. To assure some quality control over student news choices, Pearson prepared for the project last summer with the help of a student research assistant who gathered articles from both THE NEW YORK TIMES and the BBC that were placed on reserve in the library. Students also had to include in their project three additional articles selected from those on reserve and analyze their own chosen articles "in conversation with" the ones Pearson had selected.
Based on the news articles they chose, students wrote papers on topics such as how Christianity is defined as a tradition, the boundaries and tensions between Christianity and culture, and the intersection of Christianity and politics.
The next time Pearson teaches the course, she plans to make using the news a week-long unit for the entire class and to require those students who choose the paper-writing option to make a short presentation each week on the news they are reading. "That should help integrate the substance of the news into the class sessions and frame it more intentionally" as part of what goes on in class, she says. Another possibility is to organize additional out-of-class discussions on news about religion. She says she hopes, too, to better hone the questions she distributes that are meant to help guide the students' writing assignment, so they approach the task less as a "report" and more as a thoughtful piece of reflection that wrestles with abstract ideas.
"The research assistant who helped gather news articles was amazed at how practical, popular, and malleable Christian practices are on the ground," says Pearson. "And now, at least once in every class someone usually asks me if I saw a certain story in THE NEW YORK TIMES that relates to what we are discussing."
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When Susan Hill, Associate Professor of religion at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls, teaches Max Weber's THE PROTESTANT ETHIC AND THE SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM, she says her allusions to the story of Enron's bankruptcy and epic collapse are met with blank stares by her students. "They have no idea what is going on in the world. They work full-time jobs and take full-time classes. They are overburdened. It's no surprise," she admits. She draws on news of the day to try to provide them with some sense of "what's going on" in the wider world and how it might relate to the study of religion.
Students who study medieval devotion to the Virgin Mary regard it as scandalous and strange, says Hill, until they also see a story on MSNBC.com about a woman who says her grilled cheese sandwich bore the image of the Virgin Mary and who sold it on eBay. Then they are scandalized and shocked by contemporary news coverage that points to the same impulse they are studying as history -- religious devotion and its excesses. "It helps explain Marian apparitions and religious excitement lived out again in our lives," says Hill. "The principal reason the news is so helpful is that it shows that today we are not so different from religious history. The news makes a good comparison point. It allows for developing nuanced critical thinking and skills at comparison to see clearly how things today are the same or different from the past. History is not all that interesting to many students, but the news can make it so."
"The news for me is a touchstone for thinking about other religions," says Hill. When she comes across a dramatic photograph of the hajj in a paper or magazine, she says she can say to students, "Look. Here it is. It's important." They feel more like participants and are better able to see the relevance of the past and how we got to where we are with our beliefs, she notes.
Hill also makes use of editorials and advertising to teach the relevance of historical debates that might have started as far back as the ancient Near East and also to demonstrate to students "how ideas play out" -- the historical connections between women and sex, sin and death, and the contemporary images that support or undermine those connections, for example. Using the news, even about difficult current issues such as the war in Iraq, plays a role, she says -- showing students studying the history of religion that arguments about the war are not new.
"The news gives perspective, another voice. Not hard news only, but popular culture, television, a Dear Abby column. Religion is everywhere, and things relevant to its study are everywhere. We can say, 'Here are examples we can see in our culture that have to do with how people think religiously.' That is a good thing for people to see at a state institution."
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