Student Identity, Positionality, and Privilege in the Buddhist Classroom Abroad

How do student identity and positionality influence how we teach about Buddhism abroad? Likewise, what can this tell us about how we might make Buddhism courses taught in North America more accessible to students, especially at Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs)? In this paper, I discuss the challenges and successes associated with recruiting and then guiding a group of historically under-resourced college students on a four-week Study Abroad intensive course in Ladakh, India. From initial recruitment to final project presentations, there are pedagogical, cultural, and religious aspects that must be considered (and reconsidered) when teaching Buddhism in a classroom of students who are BIPOC, come from low-income homes, and are the first in their families to attend college. While this paper focuses on the Study Abroad context – that is, experiential learning where students are invited to engage with the tradition _in situ_, and intensively over a short period of time – my experience working with this cohort abroad also has implications for how we approach teaching Buddhism in the North American classroom. Much of higher education in small liberal arts colleges has been tailored for white students of privilege, and as institutions work to make their classrooms more universally inviting and accessible, some aspects of how we teach and think about teaching Buddhism need to shift as well. While some of what I report is contextually specific to the small liberal arts college where I teach, my experience raises universal questions about how we can most responsibly and thoughtfully engage our students so that they can affirm and consider their positionality while studying a tradition that might be new to some, and quite familiar to others.

The college where I teach (redacted here to maintain the anonymity that the AAR requests for paper proposals) has a May term, where students enroll in one intensive course for four weeks. I have found this to be a great time to take students to the Buddhist Himalaya. The first course (in 2018) brought 12 students to the region. For that trip, the applicant pool was overwhelmingly white, wealthy, and female. Troubled by this at the time, I resolved to work more thoughtfully in the future to make the course accessible to the BIPOC, first to college, and low-income students that our college proudly claims to support.

Among undergraduates, the arena of Study Abroad has long been perceived as a realm for privileged, wealthy, and predominantly white students. Even at well-endowed institutions, it can be challenging to recruit students for Study Abroad who identify as BIPOC, who receive extensive financial aid, and who are the first to attend college in their families. There is a general (and sadly, historically accurate) perception that such trips require a variety of types of privilege, among them the financial resources to travel internationally without the support of one’s institution, the time to leave campus life and family responsibilities to make the journey, and the positional awareness and space to oneself in a new religio-cultural context. There are also racial and cultural considerations to take into account that make such a trip seam feasible, or inaccessible. The same things that might act as markers of white privilege that allow white students in the US to take such trips, might act as stumbling blocks for BIPOC and first-generation students who might hope for such experiences, but perceive them as out of reach.

Since 2018, I have worked with my course co-leader to broaden the pool for students who perceive this opportunity as accessible to them, and thus shift the cohort of students who apply and are ultimately accepted for the trip. The 2024 cohort is 50% BIPOC, 100% in Financial Aid of some sort (and 30% Pell Grant eligible, which indicates significant financial need), and several are first in their family to attend college. For this group, there have been significantly different perceptions of international travel and cultural immersion. While some aspects have provided “stumbling blocks” (as mentioned above), others have well prepared these students for time spent learning about Buddhism within a Buddhist-dominant cultural context.

In this paper, I will discuss the pedagogical, resource, and cultural considerations that we as educators must take into account if we are to effectively support historically under-resourced college students in Buddhism-focused Study Abroad courses. Part of the paper will attend to the fact that taking students abroad who come from under-resourced communities requires a shift in how we think about 1) preparing students with appropriate materials for the trip, 2) discussing and processing immersion in a new cultural context, 3) and how we think about racial, cultural, and economic difference as students of a US institution abroad. Attending to how we think about these issues can result in a course that offers students the opportunity to draw from the strengths of their own positionality to learn about Buddhist societies in life-changing ways, while helping students develop the tools to better explore their own sense of cultural identity.

While these challenges – which I discuss at length in this paper – are most obvious in the context of Study Abroad, they also apply to how we think about teaching Buddhism (and indeed, Religious Studies) in the North American classroom. In considering the Study Abroad context, I also explore how an instructor’s approach to positionality, cultural understanding, and communicating across perceived divides can inform how we teach Buddhism in North American classrooms – both at predominantly white small liberal arts colleges, and across a range of higher educational institutions.