Sustained Experiential Learning: Modified Monasticism and Pilgrimage

Abstract

This article outlines a template for sustained experiential learning designed to provide a context for learning the affective and performative as well as intellectual power of religion. This approach was developed for a traditional academic framework, adapting pedagogies developed for experiential learning, aesthetic training, and study abroad, and draws on personal experiences of teaching East Asian religions. The approach integrates intellectual learning with out of class experience to stimulate and enrich the highly personal and often significant questions that may arise upon studying religion and encountering religious practices both in and out of the classroom.

Working through the Problems of Study Abroad Using the Methodologies of Religious Studies

“…Secular students may bridle at being referred to as pilgrims but exploring this category may lead to a more reflective experience. Religious studies professor Jennifer Oldstone‐Moore did this when she lead students on the traditional Buddhist pilgrimage circumnavigating the Japanese island of Shikoku (2009). John Barbour has reflected on how using the categories of pilgrim and tourist in his teaching abroad provoked ethical self‐reflection in his students (2010).…”

“…How can we act like students? As Oldstone‐Moore put it, “In the overseas experience, issues of identity and ethics arise as one must grapple with the tension between being a tourist and being a student” (2009, 114). Tourism, as a product of modernity, finds authenticity in the cultural other (the mystic east, the exotic, the primitive, the ancient, and so forth).…”

Analogous activities: Tools for thinking comparatively in religious studies courses

“…Previous scholarship on teaching and learning in religious studies has discussed the usefulness of incorporating experiential learning such as site visits (Burlein, ; Burkhalter Fluekiger, ; Carlson, ; Burford, ; Berger, ; Hussain, ; Carlson, ) and modified monasticism and pilgrimage (Oldstone‐Moore, ). Such studies illustrate that it requires extensive planning and forethought in order to facilitate this type of experience.…”

Teaching Islam in contemporary America: Digital ethnography and the affective challenges of Islamic studies pedagogy

“…As Jennifer Oldstone‐Moore has pointed out, religious studies teaching possesses a particularly strong affective dimension with respect to the learning process. This is because religion itself features a unique type and level of “affective power,” bound so tightly as it is to human emotions and personal experiences (Oldstone‐Moore, , 109). For this reason, the experience of learning about religious practices different from one's own or learning about one's own religious practices from a descriptive (rather than prescriptive) perspective can produce highly emotional situations in the classroom “that are manifest in a range of responses from earnest seeking to hostile repudiation” (Oldstone‐Moore, , 110).…”