Inherit the earth

Had fun in "Theorizing Religion" today, making nice use of our online possibilities. We're most of the way through a section on 'world religions,' for which students are now three-fourths of the way through one of the Harvard Divinity School "World Religions Through Their Scriptures" MOOCs (half the class doing Buddhism, the other half Islam). They've also read Tomoko Masuzawa's critique of the very idea of 'world religions' and the "intellectual irresponsibility" of teaching them, and written lovely reflective pieces on how someone who lives where they do might go to learn about religions they didn't know. 

A lot of balls in the air! But the experience of knowingly juggling them all is really satisfying, especially when a ball you haven't seen for a while returns for a second throw: nothing is lost. So we began with a theoretical discussion of problems with teaching 'world religions,' especially in the familiar founder+foundational text+geographical spread+current adherents+X religion in America (optional) formula, then moved to considering ways one might do a better job. Once we were thinking in this more generative way, we turned to work together on a google.doc outline for a class on a 'world religion' which might face some of the challenges we'd identified. It felt good to be moving beyond mere critique, and to be doing this work collaboratively,

After a break, it was time for students to put their money where their mouths were. (I'll get my chance next semester!) In breakout rooms they had to use our class-generated generic outline to plot out a class on the religion they're learning about in the MOOC. There wasn't enough time to more than sketch this out - but enough to see the limitations of our outline, as well as the different strategic aims of the MOOCs. I called it a MEEK: Miniature Experiment in Expanding Knowledge - a pleasantly modest moniker compared to the Massive Open Online Classes, and one perhaps a little more likely to inherit the earth!