Abstract

Higher education in North America increasingly implores teachers to adopt frameworks of values education, pre-professional student-learning, and assessment backed by the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). Teacher-scholars in religious studies have reason to question whether such initiatives put a critical understanding of our data at odds with the ideological state apparatuses within which our institutions are situated. Thinking with the work of Louis Althusser, this chapter historicizes classroom tensions and outlines an alternative way for theoretically-minded scholars to negotiate the task of pedagogy.

Related Media 

This document proposes a basic level of cultural competency that every graduate of a two- or four-year college should develop. It argues that some critical understanding about the ways in which religion shapes and is shaped by human behavior should be part of the general education of every person who receives an undergraduate degree.

The American Academy of Religion’s Religious Literacy Guidelines: What U.S. College Graduates Need to Understand About Religion.
If I went back to college today, I think I would probably major in comparative religion, because that's how integrated it is in everything that we are working on and deciding and thinking about today." United States Secretary of State, John Kerry, August 7, 2013
Episode of The Religious Studies Project features a roundtable discussion about the religious literacy guidelines of the American Academy of Religion. Newton talks about his research in conversation with colleagues Drs. Rebekka King, Jenna Gray- Hildebrand, Kevin Minister, Bradley Onishi, Chris Jones, and David McConeghy. Download the episode here.

Bibliography

Richard Newton, “Teaching: Teaching in the Ideological State of Religious Studies: Notes Towards a Pedagogical Future,” Constructing Data in Religious Studies – Examining the Architecture of the Academy, ed. Leslie Dorrough Smith (Sheffield, UK: Equinox), 235-245.