LEARNING FROM THE FIELD

Six Themes from Interfaith/Interreligious Studies Curricula

Kristi Del Vecchio and Noah J. Silverman

In 2013, coeditor Eboo Patel published an article arguing for the development of the academic field of interfaith studies and theorized how curricula in this field might take shape in undergraduate contexts.¹ At the time, Patel noted that scholars have long been interested in interactions between people who orient around religion differently—and have produced academic works accordingly—but have not seen themselves as contributors to this distinct academic field. Seeking to clarify and develop this area of research, study, and practice, Patel offered the following preliminary definition for interfaith/interreligious studies: “As an [interdisciplinary] academic field, interfaith studies would examine the multiple dimensions of how individuals and groups who orient around religion differently interact with one another, along with the implications of these interactions for communities, civil society, and global politics.”² Throughout the remainder of the article, Patel provided a list of hypothetical courses that might contribute to an undergraduate academic program in interfaith/interreligious studies.

Five years later, these academic courses and programs—including minors, concentrations, certificates, and even majors—are no longer hypothetical. As stated in the introduction to this volume, Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC) estimates that at least one hundred interfaith-focused courses and about twenty interfaith-focused programs have taken shape at undergraduate institutions in the US, and more are in development. This vast and rapid accumulation of curricular engagement with interfaith/interreligious studies provides tremendous data from which to analyze and draw preliminary conclusions about this field in its nascent development. In this chapter, we seek to identify and analyze themes found across undergraduate interfaith curricula that have developed since the writing of Patel’s article.

As an organization that collaborates with colleges and universities in the US to advance interfaith initiatives, IFYC is uniquely well situated to conduct this analysis. Although not itself an academic institution, IFYC has partnered with higher education funders for the past five years to offer grants that support the development of interfaith-focused courses and curricular programs.³ Through these collaborative partnerships with campuses across the country, we have gathered significant data from these grant projects—primarily in the form of syllabi, program models, and grant reports from dozens of undergraduate institutions—to perform this analysis.

As such, this chapter will discuss six principal themes that we have seen emerge across interfaith curricula thus far: (1) experiential and engaged learning, (2) interdisciplinarity, (3) intersectionality, (4) professional relevance, (5) personal reflection, and (6) religious literacy. These themes speak to the content seen within interfaith courses and programs, as well as the methodologies and pedagogies employed by scholars in the field. It is important to note that these six themes are not completely distinct. For example, components of religious literacy are involved in experiential and engaged learning, and interdisciplinarity tends to intersect with professional relevance. While not mutually exclusive, each theme contains unique qualities that will be described in the following sections, using examples from courses and programs that illustrate the theme particularly well.

EXPERIENTIAL AND ENGAGED LEARNING

Interfaith educators have long prioritized direct encounter, or, as Patel would say, interaction, between people who orient around religion differently.⁴ Simply stated, putting students in interactive situations often drives home interfaith learning outcomes more effectively than traditional texts or lectures. While professors may use academic texts to introduce and analyze interreligious encounter, learning through engagement can bring to life some of the concepts that students learn in the classroom. This recognition has driven educators to create and experiment with a wide range of experiential or engaged learning activities both within and outside of the classroom.⁵

One successful method of experiential learning in the classroom entails case studies, wherein students are asked to consider the perspectives of different religious or nonreligious actors in a given scenario or to role-play exercises that require students to fully inhabit one such actor.⁶ Outside of the classroom, experiential learning often comes in the form of site visits to houses of worship and faith-based civic organizations, short- or long-term service learning, and internship programs.⁷ The following examples, all from faculty with whom IFYC has worked, illustrate the range of experiential and engaged learning practices within interfaith courses or across academic programs.⁸

Role-Play Activity

Rose Aslan of California Lutheran University often includes role-playing exercises in her courses to give students a better understanding of how moments of interfaith tension or cooperation might manifest. One such example is Aslan’s “Park 51 Role Playing Activity,” wherein students research stakeholders involved in—or opposed to—the development of Park 51 (the “Ground Zero mosque”) in New York City shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.⁹ After conducting research on their assigned characters, students defend their respective positions in front of one of Manhattan’s community boards and “Mayor Michael Bloomberg” (also assigned roles in the activity), who then decide if Park 51 can be built.

Service Learning

As part of his Interreligious Encounter course at the University of St. Thomas, Hans Gustafson asks students to complete fifteen or more hours of service with a chosen community partner.¹⁰ Service opportunities include volunteering at a local Jewish senior and assisted living center, tutoring elementary students at a Muslim after-school program, and working with teens at a local interfaith organization. When their service requirement is complete, students write reflection papers that integrate classroom readings with their experiences in the community.

Internship Course

To complete the new Certificate in Interreligious and Intercultural Studies at California State University, Chico, students are required to complete an internship course. Developed by Sarah Gagnebin, this internship course partners students with a local interfaith organization—such as the Chico Area Interfaith Council, the Center for the Public Understanding of Religion, and the California Pluralism Project—for a full semester. Students typically spend about nine hours per week conducting fieldwork, meeting with an internship coordinator, and completing assigned readings and writing. At the end of the semester, student interns develop and execute a plan that focuses on improved interreligious competency for the organization or its constituents or both. These final projects range from training modules to workshops, web resources, and community dialogue events.

INTERDISCIPLINARITY

As other authors in this volume articulate, interdisciplinarity is inherent to the goals of interfaith/interreligious studies in ways both theoretical and practical. Theoretically, interdisciplinarity leads to a more holistic, accurate study of interfaith interaction.¹¹ Practically, viewing interfaith/interreligious studies through an interdisciplinary lens better trains leaders who will work within a wide range of professional sectors.¹²

With both theoretical and practical implications in mind, most interfaith/interreligious studies curricula are developed with interdisciplinary learning goals. In the context of a course, interdisciplinarity often manifests as readings and assignments that integrate research, methodologies, and theories from other academic disciplines, such as sociology or business ethics. Given the time and content restraints of a single course, however, it is more common to see interdisciplinarity in the context of interfaith/interreligious studies programs, where courses from a wide range of academic departments are integrated.

Much of IFYC’s learning around interdisciplinarity manifested throughout a grant project funded by the Teagle Foundation, in which IFYC partnered with more than a dozen colleges and universities from 2014 to 2015 to support the development of interfaith-focused programs. While most of these programs now are formally housed within religion, theology, or philosophy departments, some are situated more broadly within an academic center or a college of arts and sciences. In one case, at Saint Mary’s College of California, faculty and administrators building the college’s Interfaith Leadership Studies minor determined that it would be best situated within the School of Economics and Business Administration.

It is worth noting that, even if the interfaith/interreligious studies programs built through this grant project were placed within a religion or theology department, students were always required to take at least one course—but usually more—outside of these disciplines. The range of courses that fulfill program requirements span the humanities, social sciences, and occasionally hard sciences, including communications, biology, business, history, journalism, literature, management, marketing, pre-health professions, psychology, and social work.

From this grant project, we learned from our campus partners that interdisciplinarity was a key trait in designing interfaith programs. Building on this first project’s success, an extended partnership with the Teagle Foundation allowed IFYC to offer a second set of grants to fourteen campuses from 2016 to 2017 to support the development of interdisciplinary interfaith programs within pre-professional contexts. At the time of this writing, most of these curricular programs have yet to launch. But programs currently under development include minors, certificates, and concentrations in interfaith studies or interfaith leadership designed specifically for students entering the fields of business, health, hard sciences (such as engineering), social work, criminal justice, and education. Many of these programs also feature courses in the core curriculum, allowing a greater breadth of students to encounter interfaith themes through their required or elective general education courses.

INTERSECTIONALITY

Religious and worldview identities do not exist in a vacuum. As authors in this volume have discussed, identity is intersectional. Worldview identity is influenced, complicated, and given nuance by other human characteristics such as race, gender, sexual orientation, political ideology, and ability.¹³ To capture this nuance, scholars in the field are increasingly and intentionally focusing on these intersections in their research, which is also affecting the development of interfaith/interreligious courses and programs.

In the context of a course, readings and assignments about the diversity within a particular tradition or life stance often illuminate the importance of intersectionality. For example, Reform Jews in Ethiopia are likely to practice Judaism differently than Reform Jews in the Bronx; majority-black Baptist congregations are likely to worship differently than majority-white Baptist congregations; and atheists in the US differ vastly along political lines, as some claim libertarian values while others align themselves with American liberalism.

In some cases, entire courses focus directly on intersectionality. One such example is Matthew Cressler’s Interfaith Atlanta Across the Color Line course at the College of Charleston, which examines the intersections of racial justice and interfaith cooperation in a fifteen-day summer seminar. After one week of course work, students spend a week in Atlanta visiting centers and organizations that have historically approached activism across racial and religious lines (such as Habitat for Humanity, Interfaith Community Initiatives, Koinonia Farm, the Center for Civil and Human Rights, and the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change). The course concludes with a final essay about the possibilities and/or tensions between racial justice and interfaith cooperation, as informed by the students’ visits in Atlanta.

PROFESSIONAL RELEVANCE

Amid well-circulated critiques of the liberal arts when it comes to preparing students for the workforce, scholars and educators are creating interfaith programs with an eye toward professional applicability.¹⁴ Indeed, Mark Hanshaw and Usra Ghazi’s chapter in this volume, “Interfaith Studies and the Professions,” focuses exclusively on the applied dimensions of interfaith education, particularly as it relates to career and vocation discernment. Within courses and academic programs in interfaith/interreligious studies, professional applicability is addressed in a few different ways. More robust opportunities include internships, capstone projects, and volunteerism in professional settings wherein students are required to analyze how religious diversity is relevant within a given workplace or professional context. Less time-intensive projects include interview assignments in which students interview professionals in their future fields to better understand how issues of religious diversity manifest.

The importance of professional relevance is exemplified in Miriam Rosalyn Diamond’s Understanding and Valuing Spiritual and Religious Diversity at Work for Professional Success course at Simmons College. In this course, students consider how to be effective professionals—across a diverse range of fields—in cooperating and connecting with colleagues, patients, or clients whose worldviews, beliefs, and customs may differ vastly from their own. To investigate the importance of interfaith competencies in their future fields, students interview at least two professionals to learn how an organization or company engages issues of spiritual or religious diversity. Combining these interviews with official company resources (annual reports, websites, policies and procedures manuals, etc.), students write an integrated report, including recommendations for how the organization can enhance its religio-spiritual inclusivity or effectiveness.

PERSONAL REFLECTION

While IFYC’s work tends to focus on the civic value of interfaith cooperation and leadership, students and faculty alike are attracted to this field because of the relationship-building and personal growth that it affords. Many interfaith/interreligious courses or programs deliberately create opportunities for students to reflect upon their own religious or spiritual journeys, as well as their own capacities for interfaith leadership. Common approaches to fostering personal reflection in courses include journaling throughout the semester, writing a spiritual autobiography, and designing classroom activities that prompt ongoing, personal conversation among students.¹⁵

One course that exemplifies personal reflection is Spiritual Autobiographies: Many Paths, One World, created and taught by Nancy Klancher at Bridgewater College. In this course, students read autobiographical texts written by practitioners and adherents of multiple traditions, including Native American religions, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, secular humanism, and Creation Spirituality. One of the course’s main learning goals is for students to develop “perspective-taking”—a practice described by Klancher as taking seriously the ideas of others, reframing them by restating what was heard, and exploring their implications from multiple, often contradictory points of view.¹⁶ The final assignment for the course is a ten-page autobiography, wherein students reflect upon the development of their own personal, intellectual, and ethical perspectives within the context of their own spiritual journeys.

RELIGIOUS LITERACY

The question of how much students need to know about a religious tradition before engaging with its adherents is still widely discussed among scholars teaching interfaith/interreligious courses. Undoubtedly, religious literacy continues to be an important learning goal in interfaith/interreligious courses.¹⁷ Most professors agree, however, that students do not need to be experts in Buddhism, for example, before visiting a Buddhist temple. In this way, the need for religious literacy often emerges in the context of real-world examples or assignments, such as during a site visit or when workshopping a case study. This challenge has led to innovative solutions, mostly in the form of course assignments and projects, by professors teaching interfaith/interreligious courses.

One such example is Caryn Riswold’s Interfaith Studies course at Illinois College, which requires students to attend worship services at a nearby synagogue, mosque, and church. Before visiting each, students complete a “Religious Literacy Report” about Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, respectively, to ensure that they have some level of familiarity—and know how to present themselves respectfully—before entering each sacred space. Together, these site visits and Religious Literacy Reports achieve the goal of integrating classroom knowledge about interfaith cooperation with concrete experiences in the local community.

CONCLUSION

While the field of interfaith/interreligious studies is still relatively young and continues to be theorized and articulated by scholars in the field, institutions of higher education are nonetheless moving forward with the development of robust curricula for their students. In examining and analyzing syllabi, program descriptions, and grant reports from IFYC’s curricular grant projects, we have observed that these courses and programs share six major themes: engaged and experiential learning, interdisciplinarity, intersectionality, professional relevance, personal reflection, and religious literacy.

We acknowledge that these themes are not exclusive to interfaith/interreligious studies. They are in fact larger trends within academia, especially as the academy increasingly values interdisciplinary approaches, lived experience, and intersectionality as legitimate “ways of knowing” or sources of information. Furthermore, we recognize that these themes are also found in spaces of social advocacy and activism. Because interfaith/interreligious studies centers fundamentally around human relationships, the field is also (appropriately) impacted by the public discourse around issues of identity.

Thus, as the contours of interfaith/interreligious studies continue to develop and evolve—amid the ever-changing landscapes of academia and social advocacy work—we expect curricula to adapt accordingly. We anticipate revisiting and refining these six themes as even more courses and programs develop in the years to come.