[UPDATE: Paper posted here]

I’ve become more drawn to the pedagogy sections of the academic conferences I’ve attended in the past few years, especially the American Academy of Religion. This year, for the first time, I’ve decide to dip my toe into this new field of inquiry by proposing a paper for the Western Regional Conference of the AAR, submitting to the Pedagogy of Religious Studies Unit.

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed ruminating on the role of threshold knowledge in teaching, a concept that was first introduced to me through my training for the Writing Program at UCSB and largely by the (then) head of the department Linda Adler-Kassner. Her views convinced me of the importance of threshold concepts and their application in classroom environments.

Buoyed by the success of my recent summer course I was hoping to reflect further on how it can be developed thought this conference proposal. The theme this year was “kindness,” something that I felt I could incorporate into my proposal since I used morality and non-violence as threshold concepts in my course.

My proposal is posted below:

Rebuilding Religion: Threshold Knowledge and Its Value to Asian Survey Courses

How can we teach religious studies and yet deconstruct its central focus, religion? Is this possible in a survey course where theory is often overshadowed by content? The paper will examine how students can be granted agency and creative freedom through designing a survey course with the directed goal of rebuilding a definition of religion based solely on concepts developed through the study of non-Western traditions. This critical process is supported by the introduction of “threshold concepts,” defined by Jan Meyer and Ray Land as ideas crucial for the epistemological participation in academic disciplines. Threshold knowledge, conceived on the metaphor of passing through a portal, that is derived from these concepts is considered transformative and oftentimes irreversible.

Using a course I taught in the past year as a case study, I will explore how analyzing and evaluating common scholarly definitions of religion acts as a springboard for engaged student inquiry. By highlighting Western biases in these definitions, students are asked to reconstruct, through sound argumentation, a definition of religion with the new “raw materials” gathered from non-Western traditions.

Moreover, threshold concepts anchor student’s analysis and comparative endeavors by acting as lenses through which they can critically interrogate the course materials. For example, by foregrounding ideas that frequently remain underdeveloped or implicit, such as material culture, soteriology, and myth, as well as less-commonly covered concepts such as metaphor and humor, and framing them as threshold concepts, students are asked to think about how these ideas may –or may not – constitute the “core dimensions” of religion. I will end with a rumination on “kindness” as a valuable threshold concept for religious studies, aspects of which were introduced to my students through the ideas of morality and non-violence.