Rethinking Religious Studies Programs

NOTE: This roundtable was originally submitted to the Teaching Religion Unit but is being redirected for consideration as a Special Session.

The place of Religious Studies programs, majors, and courses is in flux–we are asked to defend our curriculum in the face of budget cuts and to explain the value of our courses in the face of professionalized majors. Our classes need to fill and our course titles must sell the curriculum; our majors need to interact with professional programs and we need to attract students to the major. It falls on professors to reimagine our place in higher education. This lightning-round-style roundtable will focus on practical strategies used to successfully increase and retain enrollments. Our colleagues are changing department names, changing program goals, redesigning courses, and renaming classes. This proposed roundtable invites conversation among colleagues in the room–an opportunity to discuss and share strategies that have and are working in response to these challenges.

This proposal for Teaching Tactics/Teaching Gift Exchange centers the creative ways our colleagues are navigating them. This roundtable will share several innovative solutions. Panelists are situated in a range of types of institutions–public and private, large and small, and in different regions of the United States. The participants in this roundtable have diverse types of programs and majors that they reach in and also are in different positions in their careers. The members of this roundtable will focus on undergraduate education, but welcome an expanded conversation during the discussion.

The structure of this roundtable asks the panelists to respond to three questions from their context, for approximately seven minutes. First, explain a problem encountered in either recruiting students to our major/programs or enrolling students in our classes. Second, each panelist will share their creative responses to the problem. Third, each member of the roundtable will reflect on what has worked, why it has worked–and any other lessons learned.

One panelist from a mid-sized liberal arts college in an urban area will talk about the drop-off of majors and enrollment in all humanities and most social sciences around 2008–and then discuss how and why the renaming of the Religion major as Religion & Contemporary Issues changed things. They will also demonstrate how their faculty reoriented to a new emphasis on religious literacy for all careers. They also center religion as an aspect of diversity, equity, and inclusion that is pertinent to all careers. They will also explain how their innovative structure of major/minor allows them to create Religion & Contemporary Issues as a second or third major for students–keeping them relevant in the headcount for programs.

Another panelist at a small, private, liberal arts college in a rural part of the country will discuss how their Religious Studies faculty have responded to their major being cut and their department being dissolved. The faculty who remained had solid enrollments in their courses and could adapt to some of the needs of interdisciplinary programs and diversity, equity, and inclusion goals across campus. They renamed the minor “Religion in American Life” to reflect the expertise of the remaining faculty. These professors alternate teaching a popular course called Religion in American Life, which has long attracted students from History, Global Health, Political Science, Psychology, and many other areas, so they decided to draw on the strengths of this popular class. In the new minor curriculum, they emphasize interdisciplinarity, contributions to college general education requirements, and college diversity goals.
A third panelist will speak from their position at a large research institution in the midwest, where they experienced a significant drop off in majors after 2008. This member of the roundtable will explain how they re-envisioned the curriculum to maximize the institution’s interdisciplinary configuration, which allows students to take classes cross-listed with Religious Studies in many departments. Still, as a double major, the program found that having distribution requirements within the major was too big an obstacle for many students. This panelist will demonstrate how their department streamlined the major and began consciously teaching courses that paired well with popular first majors across campus–and soon found many students majoring in the sciences and double majoring in religion. Number of majors improved for a while but recently dropped off again. In the past year, numbers of majors have been growing again, as well as the number of faculty lines. The administration allowed two senior faculty to move their lines into Religious Studies, which speaks to the success of this strategy.

A fourth panelist will focus their comments on courses. Speaking from a hispanic-serving Catholic university in the Southwest, they explain how previous generations’ strategy for introducing students to the study of religion and theology was a poor fit for the changed twenty-first century student population. The required intro course offerings previously offered followed the traditional seminary model of divisions into Bible, Ethics, Systematic Theology, Church History, and World Religions. This panelist will demonstrate how their program developed a course rooted in the local geographical and cultural context. This new course, "The Word in the World," is much more student-centered and brings in students’ positionality.

Our fifth panelist serves on the faculty at a private, career-focused college in New England that does not have a traditional liberal arts framework. Still, it designs and provides a core studies program focused on interdisciplinary, place-based, and experiential learning. This panelist will describe her work to integrate the AAR Religious Literacy guidelines across this program, including classes on "Connecting Place and Identity" and "Culture and Meaning Making." They will explain how this has made religious literacy and part of the inquiry and community-engaged practices on campus–and its application to learning in careers such as game design, digital forensics, creative media, and education for social innovation.

Attuned to the Teaching Unit’s call for engaging presentations for the 2024 meeting, this roundtable will share re-envisioned course names, changes to majors, and reimagined programs. We also envision this as a collaborative session–the roundtable participants will share their ideas and creativity, but we will plan to have an opportunity for the audience to engage and share their own creative solutions to navigating the position of Religious Studies in higher education.