I entered graduate school with a determination to teach, but without a clear vision of what that would mean. At both the University of Colorado at Boulder and Emory University I benefited from workshops on a wide array of subjects related to teaching, but these prepared me for the classroom mainly in a negative sense, by making me aware of numerous potential pitfalls. I also had the opportunity to assist professors with a number of classes:
In retrospect these assistantships, like the teacher training programs, were useful primarily in a negative sense: I learned that good teaching does not just happen.
It was in the Emory Graduate Division of Religion’s semester-long seminar on teaching that I first began to articulate a positive personal vision of the nature of teaching, its relation to my scholarship, the values that should guide it, and the strategies that it might employ. This vision came alive when I was given the opportunity to teach two undergraduate courses in Emory College.
For my first solo teaching endeavor, I used materials encountered in my own research to construct an advanced undergraduate seminar on the nature and interpretation of revelation in Islamic thought. I sought above all to teach the skill of careful listening to unfamiliar voices through close reading and discussion of short, translated excerpts from primary texts. (See the syllabus.) In retrospect I think that the course fell short of this goal, although it was very productive in other respects for most of the participants. The seminar was much more successful with respect to the value of careful listening between teacher and students. By giving and receiving detailed evaluations at mid-term, I was able to help some students dramatically improve their participation, and also to improve my own approach to leading discussions. This resulted in some vibrant class discussions of difficult material. The atmosphere of attentive, critical, respectful listening that characterized the seminar fostered relationships with students that were for me a highlight of the course. See my detailed course analysis and self-evaluation, and summaries of the supervising professor's evaluation and students's evaluations.
Emory’s Department of Religion, seeking to combine comparative study with depth of engagement and a multiplicity of approaches, has traditionally limited its introductory courses to two religious traditions. When I was invited to design a course on Christianity and Islam, I set out to construct an experience that would fully embody my philosophy of teaching. My seminar on Islamic Theology had made me keenly aware of the need for a simple historical and conceptual framework for interpreting unfamiliar voices, so I began by selecting a basic list of important Christian and Muslim people, movements, and terms. I then wove this list into the course so that each name and term received attention at several points in the semester: in the series of historical lectures with which I began the course, in occasional topical lectures scattered throughout the term, and in our interpretations of a variety of unfamiliar voices. In order to help students assimilate this framework, and relate it to primary materials, I integrated every aspect of their studying into a web site in which they encountered each name and term (always linked to a brief definition or description) again and again: as they prepared for class by looking over advance copy of a lecture outline with embedded reading assignments; in class as they saw the outline and supporting materials again on screen and heard them fleshed out; as they reviewed my notes on each class as part of their preparation for the next; as they used the online guides for their primary text readings, debates, and field visits; and as they studied for tests using the online class notes, timeline, and lists of names and terms (which were much like those in the most recent class web site.)
This basic mental map was designed to provide historical and conceptual reference points that would specifically relate to the unfamiliar voices with which most of the course was occupied. In order to expose students to a variety of approaches to religious studies, and to engage a range of learning styles, we used three different class formats to construct understandings of Christian and Muslim texts, forms of interaction, and rituals. After an opening series of historical lectures, we discussed excerpts of writings by people we had just studied, dealing with concepts and practices from our list of key terms. Next students assumed Christian and Muslim voices in formal debates based on their research of historical and contemporary instances of Christian-Muslim interaction. Then small groups of students visited different mosques and churches, and made oral presentations in which they attempted to analyze the spatial, ritual, and verbal dimensions of their observations in terms of the historical and conceptual background already developed in the course. Finally, in some exam questions students were asked to use the mental map they had assimilated to analyze new samples of data. (See the schedule of classes in the original 2001 syllabus.)
This was an ambitious program. Judging by exams and evaluations, it appears that the students assimilated the basic historical and conceptual framework rather well, thanks especially to a timeline with links to notes on all the people and movements we studied. The 2001 class had more difficulty, however, in explicitly applying that framework to the interpretation of primary texts and field observations. I therefore made two important modifications to the course for the fall of 2003: from the very beginning of the course we took some time during each historical lecture to use the history we were studying to analyze together a piece of visual or textual data; and I asked the students to submit written reports on their field visits so that they could receive some feedback on their analysis before giving their oral presentations. These changes appear to have been effective; students’ analyses of their field visits at the end of the 2003 class were much richer than in 2001. I continue to search for ways to model and foster the interpretive process of analyzing texts and field observations in terms of a learned framework. For example, in 2004 I created online questions, with immediate feedback, to help students focus their reading of primary texts. Some of the questions proved frustrating for some students, and were successfully revised for spring 2005. Overall these questions seem to have helped students to begin the process of analyzing a text at home, before attempting to discuss it in class. Also for the first time in 2004 I asked students to conduct initial field visits at the beginning of the course, so that we could work at interpreting their observations throughout the historical lectures and the discussions of doctrines and rituals. I still was not satisfied with the level of analysis in the 2004 field reports, however, so in spring 2005 I required that a first draft be submitted early in the term. Detailed feedback on these drafts was helped some students significantly, but overall the final essays were still not sufficiently analytical. For fall 2005, therefore, I have reorganized the class schedule so that the discussion of doctrines and rituals is completely integrated with the historical survey. This will allow us to do even more analysis of students’ field observations in class beginning early in the term, so that students can apply the history and concepts they learn to the interpretation of their field observations throughout our discussion of each historical stage. I have also added some explicitly theoretical readings on the nature and function of sacred narratives, doctrines, and rituals, and some examples of performance analysis, which I hope will help students to see connections between their field observations and the narratives, doctrines, and rituals we study in class. (See the new integrated schedule in the most recent class web site.)
Student evaluations of this course have improved steadily over the years, suggesting that the pedagogical development I have undergone has been responsive to students' needs. Still, although students say my teaching has improved, I feel their learning (especially their analysis of field observations in terms of the historical and conceptual background provided by the class) has not improved sufficiently.
In the fall of 2003 I added a new kind of teaching to my repertoire: language instruction. I have been privileged not only to study Arabic, but also to teach it, under two of the nation’s preeminent teachers of Arabic, Mahmoud al-Batal and Kristen Brustad. My fall 2003 Intermediate Arabic class was a deeply rewarding experience, both for me and for several of my small group of students (see the student evaluations). I discovered not only that I love to teach language, but also that teaching religion is in many ways a similar enterprise. The process of guiding students in honing their own skills of listening, understanding, and expressing, which is the bread and butter of language instruction, is also central to teaching religion. Ever since this class I have striven to incorporate the interactive, collaborative, and partly spontaneous quality of language instruction into my religion classes, with stimulating results.
My visiting appointment in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of South Carolina has given me the opportunity to build from scratch a set of courses on Islam. This curriculum consists of an Introduction to Islam, and more focused classes on the Qur'an, Islamic theology, and Islamic law. I plan to round out these core offerings in 2006-2007 with a class on Hadith, and then begin to introduce occasional topics courses in areas related to my research. At the graduate level, I am developing a course of foundational readings in the discipline of Islamic studies, which I am pursuing this fall with an M.A. student.
In my first term at U.S.C., I launched an Introduction to Islam that takes students through the task of interpreting twelve different types of writings and other voices representing Islam: the Qur’an, a biography of the Prophet Muhammad, Hadith, legal and theological and mystical writings, ritual practices, responses to the Christian West, Islamist and modernist critiques, American Muslim voices, and representations of Muslims in news media.
For the first day of each week students were asked to read a primary text; secondary background readings were reserved for the following day. This was designed to force us to learn inductively by encountering puzzles in the primary texts, and it allowed us to spend most of our class time interpreting those texts. As the term progressed, and students began to accumulate background knowledge about Islam, I began to require short written commentaries on primary texts, asking students to interpret them by reference to ideas encountered in previous texts, on the class web site, and in the secondary readings. Most students found this approach difficult; some found it very rewarding; many of them suggested that next time I should reverse the sequence of assignments each week, so that they could read secondary background material before tackling the primary texts. (See the summary of student evaluations.) I may experiment with this occasionally, but on the whole I will seek ways to resist this very natural desire. Outside the classroom we rarely get to do background reading before encountering a new person or text or idea, and I want to keep my pedagogy true to what it is: preparation and training for the vital task of forming human relationships characterized by integrity and by an ongoing process of coming to understand through sacrificial listening.
The fall 2004 course was a small topics course, added to the schedule at the last minute. Enrollment for fall 2005 is much higher (around 40), and I look forward to improving the class web site and refining my online and in-class interpretive exercises as the term progresses, in order to meet the requirements of a larger class.
This seminar was designed to work sequentially through a number of major topics and types of Qur'anic material, roughly in the traditional chronological order of revelation: signs of nature and language, stories of prophets, the Prophet Muhammad's life, theology, law, and the Qur'an as a book. With each topic, new approaches to the text were introduced: form, performance, and inner texture; structural analysis; comparison with other scriptures; orientalist scholarship; traditional, theological, and mystical exegesis; and classical and modern legal interpretation. (See the spring 2005 class web site.) Students appreciated the range of topics and perspectives, and rated the class very highly (see the student evaluations and course improvement survey), but I feel the class lacked a clear pedagogical direction. I expect to offer the course again in 2006-2007, retaining the same outline but focusing throughout on a short list of recurring concepts (e.g. literary structure, internal and external comparison, and interpretive ideologies).
This seminar proved to be my most satisfying and intellectually fruitful teaching experience to date. It was a completely new course, covering a much wider range of topics than the seminar on Islamic theories of revelation and interpretation with which I began my teaching career at Emory. The four major topics (salvation, God, revelation, and religious pluralism) were selected to allow students to start from theological categories that are already familiar to many of them. Each topic began with relatively accessible material in the Qur’an and in creeds, before delving into the technical arguments of classical theologians, and then moving on to modern and postmodern thinkers. I found that this approach – beginning with familiar categories and accessible material and then moving to more difficult texts that force students to reconsider those familiar categories – was very effective in drawing students into a serious engagement with a foreign discourse. Perhaps this success was due more to the intellectual caliber of the students than to any particular pedagogical technique; but the result was remarkable. Students entered fully into some very difficult technical disputes about attributes and language, and discovered ways to relate those questions to the larger conversations about theological discourse, truth, and pluralism that emerged over the course of the term. Sustaining such conversations appears to have been facilitated by my practice of posting analytical summaries of our discussions on the class web site after each class. This practice proved so helpful in building a clear sense of the seminar's intellectual progress that I plan to try it out in my lower-level classes. Most students found the seminar very challenging and intellectually productive, and expressed special appreciation for my detailed written feedback on their in-class contributions. See the summary of student evaluations and the detailed course improvement survey.
I have completed the initial design of a course on Islamic Law for spring 2006. The course is designed to take students successively through four "layers" of Islamic legal discourse: the "sources" of law, early and classical legal doctrines and theories, modern reformulations, and the role of Islamic law in modern life (using an anthropological study of family law as negotiated in court disputes). (See the class web site, which is under development.) At one point, while studying a classical law manual, we will get an overview of all the major topics of Islamic law, but the course will focus, each time it is offered, on one particular analytical topos. Initially the focus will be on gender issues, but in the future I hope to attempt themes such as authority, violence, and equity - concepts that are significant for many different areas of Islamic law, and are of critical contemporary importance.
I am very grateful for the opportunity to develop this curriculum at U.S.C., and participate in the launching of a new program in the study of Islamic cultures, with considerable freedom to implement my own pedagogical vision for Religious and Islamic Studies. Even as I have wrestled with the practical requirements of larger lecture classes and a wide range of student abilities, I have been finding ways to continue to implement and expand my vision for teaching Islam as part of a broader humanistic project of intercultural communication characterized by attentive listening.