Guest Post: Elsa Kunz, History Department, The Webb School
This semester, I have the privilege of teaching a high school elective about lived religion in the contemporary United States. For many of my students, if not all, this course will be their first experience with the academic study of religion. However, their lack of academic experience in religion need not imply that they have no prior knowledge about religion. Rather, I am fairly certain that my students will enter the classroom with their own experiences and assumptions about religion itself: what it is (and what it’s not), where it belongs (and where it doesn’t), where it happens (and where it doesn’t), who can be religious (and who can’t), and for whom religion matters (and for whom it doesn’t).
As their teacher, I see my role as a provocateur who aims to create classroom conditions and experiences for students that disrupt their current views. At the very least, I want to provoke interrogation around their initial assumptions. In what follows, I share a draft activity designed to help students surface their own perspectives and assumptions about how religion interacts with society.
Once I complete this activity with my students, I’ll share a follow-up post.
Importance of Context
My training in religious literacy comes primarily from the Program for Religion and Public Life at Harvard Divinity School. One framework we explored was that all knowledge claims about religion are situational as opposed to universal. From this point of view, students should be able to do more than situate how religion manifests in a certain place, at a certain time, by certain people. They must also be able to identify how their own own positionalities, experiences, and theological suppositions impact their interpretations of religion as it appears in various cultural contexts.
On one level, this feels like a straightforward task. On another level, however, it can be quite difficult. As the saying goes, ‘it’s hard to know what you don’t know.’ I can attest, based on my own experience learning about religion, that I was not aware of the extent to which some of my deeply-seated assumptions about religion were particular to my own context. Moreover, my awareness surfaced only with the help of scaffolding.
This classroom activity is designed to help my students realize that their assumptions are not based on universal truths. Instead, their knowledge is situated. It will also serve as preparation for writing their own “Worldview Autobiographies.”
Identifying Points of Situated Knowledge
I first want my students to explore what background knowledge and assumptions they carry about the relationship between religion and society. Hopefully, this will also give them a point of entry to reflect on their own associations as points of situated knowledge. This particular activity makes use of their own selected images. In the past, I have found this approach to be an incredibly powerful way to talk about religion with students. (As one example, see my lesson plan about how religion often shows up in everyday images.)
Students will be tasked with finding 6-8 images online that they think represent the phrase “religion and society.” For each image, they will be asked to answer the following:
- What does the image depict? What are the elements of the image that give it meaning (people, objects, color, lighting, framing, etc.)?
- How is time represented in the image? Does the image seem ahistorical or timeless? Or, is the image representative of a specific moment in U.S. history? Or, is it both?
- If you can find it, list the creator of the image and see if you can find out anything about the creator. Can you draw any conclusions about what the creator’s intention might have been for this image?
- As an individual, how do you read the image? How is your “reading” of this image informed by your understanding of what religion is, who is religious, and where religion happens?
Students will then be asked to present 2-3 images to the group that they think are the most interesting or representative of “religion and society.” After everyone shares, we will debrief as a class and consider the following reflection questions:
- What is something you noticed about the presentations?
- What is something that surprised you?
- How did you observe your own ideas and conceptions about religion show up in the images that you selected? Who/what gets represented in your images and who/what doesn’t?
My Predictions
I anticipate that many students will show pictures of churches, religious authorities figures in the public sphere during protests, and perhaps photos of the January 6th U.S. Capitol attack. When I did this exercise for myself, I put in photos of Standing Rock, Bears Ears National Monument, a Sikh person in the military, a photo of an Oklahoma school with the 10 commandments, a picture of the March on Washington for Palestine, and an IVF clinic in Alabama.
As a teacher, it was interesting to reflect on what images first came to mind, to interrogate why I chose the photos I did, and to consider who and what I left out. In completing the exercise myself, it was slightly perturbing (and humbling) to realize that much of my own learning about non-Christian intersections of religion and society came from explicit instruction. More specifically, I was introduced to these ideas in undergraduate, graduate, and professional development courses and not as a result of my general news consumption. I want to offer something similar to my students.
Ultimately, I hope this exercise will allow students to surface their own ideas and assumptions around religion. In addition, I hope it will serve as an entry point into deeper questions around why certain narratives about religion and society take precedence over others. Stay tuned for the results!!
About the Author
Elsa currently teaches in the History Department at The Webb School in Bell Buckle, TN. She received her BA from St. Olaf College and a Masters in Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School. She enjoys thinking about ways to incorporate the academic studies of religion and philosophy into the humanities classroom. In addition, Elsa loves to spend time singing, hiking, and dancing with friends. Her previous Religion Matters posts include:
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