With powerpoint, canvas and zoom, Theorizing Religion is off to a good start! 10 of my 13 students were there - I meet the others, those in Asia, tomorrow - and I think we're already coming together as a group. I took a page from the TESOL course (crediting it, too), having us work together in groups before introducing ourselves to the group, and so having the chance of introducing ourselves in terms of our shared project rather than prior identities. (In fact, this was the maturation of one of my assignments for that class.) Here's what we did.
After some uninteresting logistical blabla from me, I asked them to call up this spread of images from our class canvas page and take 5 minutes to choose 3 that showed the range of their interest in religion. Then we had breakout groups of 3-4 for a dozen minutes, in which they shared their views and tried to agree on a short list of 4 for the group. Then we returned to the zoom gallery and each group shared their discussions, everyone speaking! All sorts of interesting observations and comparisons were made, convergent but also healthily different, so I meant it when I said I now had a sense of what interesting people were around our virtual table, and I trust they did too. The final part of the exercise, after we'd finished our zooming, was to post a video self-introduction based in one of the images. These are warm and thoughtful and gentle in a way in which self-introductions to people you don't know can never be. Thanks, Theresa, for teaching me how to think this way!
The discussion confirmed also that I'd done a good enough job in bringing these images together. (I actually spent a long time on this.) Nobody knew what all of them were, but that wasn't the point. I deliberately chose multivalent pictures which might be read in different ways and from different perspectives. Why don't you have a go?
I don't think anyone recognized the Islamic calligraphy at the center, only one person each knew Uluru or Pema Chödrön or the Kumbh Mela at recently renamed Allahabad, one recognized the Yi Jing trigrams from the Korean flag and another the black power fist in the Radical Dharma image, and it seemed nobody was aware of context of the chill-inducing photo at lower left, though everyone could see it had something to do with "weaponizing religion" and the challenges of church and state. But there was enough for everyone to articulate what gets them about religion, from the offputting to the beautiful, the collective to the personal, the otherwordly to the struggles of this world. I was pleased that many chose the image from the cathedral in Lima, though one student recognized it as covid-related without considering that these might all be images of the dead; he said it was like a zoom service! One remarked on the weirdness of rainbow flags on headgear from a presumably homophobic biblical tradition. One of those who recognized the Maya calendar spoke of 2012 doomsday prophecies, another of colonization. Though only one recognized the kind it was, many were attracted to the altar at bottom center.
The most remarked on, unsurprisingly, was the icon of George Floyd as a saint, though there were differing views about what might be intended. George Floyd should be alive now, I said, but has become an Ancestor.
I have yet to do this exercise with my international students, but I'm confident it'll be revealing, too. And they can meet their stateside classmates "in person" in the video self-introductions, and follow suit! Prep was stressful and time consuming but the synchronous and asynchronous seem to be working together pretty nicely so far...
The discussion confirmed also that I'd done a good enough job in bringing these images together. (I actually spent a long time on this.) Nobody knew what all of them were, but that wasn't the point. I deliberately chose multivalent pictures which might be read in different ways and from different perspectives. Why don't you have a go?
I don't think anyone recognized the Islamic calligraphy at the center, only one person each knew Uluru or Pema Chödrön or the Kumbh Mela at recently renamed Allahabad, one recognized the Yi Jing trigrams from the Korean flag and another the black power fist in the Radical Dharma image, and it seemed nobody was aware of context of the chill-inducing photo at lower left, though everyone could see it had something to do with "weaponizing religion" and the challenges of church and state. But there was enough for everyone to articulate what gets them about religion, from the offputting to the beautiful, the collective to the personal, the otherwordly to the struggles of this world. I was pleased that many chose the image from the cathedral in Lima, though one student recognized it as covid-related without considering that these might all be images of the dead; he said it was like a zoom service! One remarked on the weirdness of rainbow flags on headgear from a presumably homophobic biblical tradition. One of those who recognized the Maya calendar spoke of 2012 doomsday prophecies, another of colonization. Though only one recognized the kind it was, many were attracted to the altar at bottom center.
The most remarked on, unsurprisingly, was the icon of George Floyd as a saint, though there were differing views about what might be intended. George Floyd should be alive now, I said, but has become an Ancestor.
