Embodied Pedagogy In The Study of Religion (Round Table)

This round table panel engages the complex topic of embodied pedagogy in the academic study of religion. It is animated by a concern that one of the more basic goals of the academic study of religion, namely developing “informed understandings of belief systems and worldviews” other than students’ own, is not possible if that understanding is only engaged as the process of a disembodied subject. In response to this problem, this panel gathers a group of scholar-teachers who cultivate bodily experience in the classroom. While their approaches and personal pedagogical commitments differ, these scholar-teachers are committed to engaging bodily experience in the service of shaping more thoughtful and religiously literate students. Panelists will discuss their pedagogical practices, including the underlying assumptions and concerns that guide them, and will debate the benefits, challenges, and risks of engaging the body and bodily practices in the the classroom. The panel will challenge assumptions that teaching about religion requires a kind of distanced objectivity. It will attempt to chart a different territory that recognizes that very objectivity as a potentially dangerous fiction of its own, while remaining sensitive to concerns about blind and damaging appropriation and proselytization.
The first two panelists will discuss approaches to cultivating bodily experience designed to help students become aware of diverse cultural logics that exist primarily not as disembodied ideas but as perceptual and affective experience. The first will address how embodied practices can act as sites of translation, helping students make sense of differing and converging logics that inform religious traditions across cultures. Specifically, they will build on Shigehisa Kuriyama’s notion of the “expressiveness of the body” to examine the advantages and limitations of using embodied practices to access cultural logics. This panelist will address how leaning into the continuities and disjunctions in students’ bodies’ expression of a chosen practice might guide students through understanding the complexities of cross-cultural study. Ultimately, this panelist argues, when approached systematically, such a juxtaposition of theoretical and experiential learning opens pathways into unique insights about how bodies embody, shape, and express culture.
The second discussant will explore the practice of making students experientially aware of embodied dimensions of their intellectual positions through classroom exercises that surface the embedded nature of religion in students’ own fundamental commitments, assumptions, and orienting frameworks. The presenter will discuss two classroom exercises that consistently prompt students to become aware of ways in which religion is culturally embedded in ideas and objects students often assume to be “secular” and the way in which culturally embedded religion becomes invisible through the erasure of bodily experience in academic discussions of theory, including theories of embodiment. This panelist will draw on the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, 4-E cognitive science, and pedagogies of Dewey, Friere, hooks, Palmer, and Kay. They will do so to argue for an approach to classroom instruction that centers not simply on conversations about bodies, but exercises [thought experiments, dialogical exercises, and physical practices] that make accessible forms of bodily experience which help students become aware of bodily dimensions of knowing/knowledge. They will speak to how this awareness improves students’ abilities to intellectually engage religious traditions that presume ontologies and epistemologies alien to conventional western academic frameworks.
The third panelist will explore the possibilities and the limitations of the "site visit" as an example of embodied pedagogy. While site visits are often seen as superfluous, feel-good exercises in "religious appreciation," they have the potential to create deeply embodied pedagogical experiences and disrupt our notions of where the "classroom" begins and ends. They will highlight memorable examples from various trips with students and address why these kinds of site visits are potentially much more than fun, goofy outings; rather, they raise profound methodological and ethical questions at the heart of the academic study of religion. Drawing on the work of Robert Orsi, Leonard Primiano and discussions in the field of critical pedagogy by the likes of Friere, hooks, and Ira Shore, the panelist will address: how do we go about studying other cultures and religions in a productive, ethically responsible way? How do we navigate personal commitments while interacting with and even participating in others' religious rituals? How do we balance respectful understanding of other traditions with critical analysis of gender, race, class, and power? How can embodied pedagogical experiences transform ways we imagine the classroom and help students cultivate the skills of democratic citizenship in a pluralistic society?
The fourth and fifth panelists will discuss how they draw from pedagogical modalities centering the whole person. The fourth panelist will explore how a queer/crip pedagogy uses embodied experience to build strong, brave, engaged classroom communities that value multiple, conflicting epistemological perspectives. They will explore how they use queer and crip theories to teach the whole person, while actively questioning and disrupting normative, racialized, neoliberal concepts of embodiment, well-being, productivity, and spirituality. Reconceptualizing teaching and learning as ritual space/time with a queer/crip perspective, they will discuss how employing both secular and spiritual approaches to ritual and reflection through activities and assignments helps build a transformative culture of care, community, and connection in virtual classrooms and in-person spaces.
The fifth panelist will address practical contributions principles of Mexican traditional spirituality offer the academic classroom. It may be intuitive that there are certain benefits to having scholar-practitioners teaching in the classroom, but less clear that these traditions contain their own practices of teaching and knowledge formation. This panelist will address ways they have come to integrate embodied teaching practices learned through their training as a vernacular healer. They will discuss why the integration of embodied teaching and philosophies of care are worth pedagogical consideration and respectful integration in the academic classroom. This panelist will discuss the role of the instructor’s positionality as inseparable from this aim especially as it interacts with the positionality of the the student. Rather than concerning ourselves with colonial notions of objectivity, this speaker calls upon instructors in the field to consider how their perspectives color their instruction and argues for a disciplined process of co-creating knowledge with students.